Credit: Steve Jurvetson
On August 4th, 2020, smoke erupted from the base of what appeared to be a grain silo on the southern Texas coast, and the structure then slowly rose a few hundred feet into the sky. It hovered momentarily, then lowered itself again to its point of departure, gently setting down and safely shutting down its single rocket engine It was the first flight test of SpaceX’s Starship, a large, fully reusable prototype spaceship. On December 9th of last year, a larger, three-engine prototype, NS8, flew to eight miles (12.9 kilometers) altitude. It performed several tests, shutting down and restarting engines and flying various maneuvers, meeting almost all of its test goals other than a successful landing. If Starship is as successful as Elon Musk hopes, what will this mean to the launch market and spaceflight in general?
Four decades ago, the United States was on the verge of the first space shuttle flight, an event filled with promise and hope. The shuttle was to dramatically lower the cost of access to orbit, enabling entirely new kinds of space activities beyond just putting satellites into space. It would fly weekly, at the cost of a few tens of millions per flight, in contrast to the roughly 200 million dollars of the Saturn V. There was talk in the L5 Society, a predecessor of the National Space Society, about how we would soon have bases on the Moon mining the minerals discovered during Apollo, from which the ore would be flung into orbit with mass accelerators. Structures would be assembled in space; NASA had even developed a “beam builder” that could extrude stiff trusses from rolled sheets of aluminum. There would be solar power satellites beaming clean, abundant energy back to Earth and space colonies in which the people building the facilities and maintaining these activities would live, work, and play.