ZZ25027 SpaceX Starship Rocket Success V01 300825

Next image › ‘‘December 23, 2045, and disaster strikes. You suddenly remember you have forgotten to send off the beautiful baby outfit you and your partner carefully selected for your new grandchild in Sydney. This will be held against you for the rest of your life, and it is too late to do anything about it. Unless … you call up the SpaceX urgent cargo service, spend £200, and a few hours later the precious clothing touches down in Australia. That will probably never happen, but it is one of the possibilities opened up by SpaceX’s progress towards bringing its Starship rocket into service. It passed a big milestone on Tuesday with a nearly trouble-free tenth test flight. Most people know that Starship is big, but outside the space community not many have appreciated just how big and how novel, and what it will do to the cost of putting stuff into orbit. This week investors around the world hung on a quarterly update from Nvidia, one US company with a stranglehold on an important market. They should probably spare some of that attention for SpaceX, which is building an untouchable monopoly on the vital transport route of tomorrow. In the 1960s it cost about $150,000 to put one kilogram of payload into low-earth orbit, according to research from the American think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Space Shuttle, Nasa’s reusable spaceplane, was still quite expensive — about $64,500. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, its biggest current rocket, is $2,000. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, says Starship will cost $1,000 when it starts operations, and eventually get to $100. Maureen Haverty, investment principal at Seraphim Space, the UK-listed investment trust that has spacerelated investments round the world, says independent studies suggest it could be as low as $83, with some of the more enthusiastic ones thinking it will be $10 once the big rocket service is up and running at high frequency. You should probably take that final figure with a big pinch of salt, but $100 would be an astonishing step down in cost. It sounds like another wild Musk promise, but when it comes to rockets he and SpaceX have a habit of making those who write them off look foolish. Thanks to YouTube, you can still see the famous clip of Richard Bowles, a senior executive at the European rocket company Arianespace, dismissing an earlier set of Musk’s projections in 2013, saying SpaceX was in the business of “selling a dream”. The dream has become reality because the company cracked a technical problem that defeated established players. It worked out how to make the booster stages of its rockets reusable, bringing them softly back to earth — and to sea, with landings on converted barges. The boosters on the workhorse Falcon rocket fly multiple times, with one, B1067, having now performed 29 flights. With reusability came drastically reduced cost, and the ability to operate to a much more rapid timetable than previously thought possible. SpaceX flew 138 times last year, three more flights than the Space Shuttle managed in 30 years of operation. This year it is aiming for 180 (106 completed so far). SpaceX also got its timing right. It was set up in 2002, as the US space industry began to contract and consolidate. Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the kings of the Apollo era, merged their launch operations in 2006, and Nasa stopped doing its own manned launches in 2011. But the boom in telecoms technology meant there was a surge in demand, and in an era of near-zero interest rates there was money available for new entrants. SpaceX has emerged as the dominant player. Bryce Tech, the analytics and engineering firm that focuses on the space industry, says that of the 2,200-odd tonnes lifted into orbit last year, Musk’s company carried 1,850 tonnes. The next biggest player was China’s state space organisation, which managed 164. Starship, if it runs reliably, will cement that dominance. It is the biggest rocket ever built, 120 metres tall and with about twice as much thrust as the Saturn V, which took the US astronauts to the Moon. Version 3, which Musk said last weekend would be ready by the end of the year, will carry 100 tonnes into orbit. Version 4, scheduled for 2027, will be 142 metres tall, and, with more powerful engines, will carry 200 tonnes. It’s not just size that will make it a cheap ride. Starship takes reusability a step forward with the booster and space vehicle both able to come back to earth. And SpaceX has astonishingly ambitious plans to make it in big numbers, with a new factory in Texas capable eventually of making one a day. This might all be years off, but it is having a big effect now. Satellite designers, who have always laboured to make their creations smaller and more efficient, now have a different canvas on which to work. Money is flooding into start-ups with plans for big, powerful pieces of kit. The California-based K2 Space Corporation, which raised $110 million in February, is designing 15-tonne “giga” satellites (the weight of a doubledecker bus) to take advantage of Starship’s capabilities. Haverty says lower launch costs will mean companies will focus on performance rather than weight, or on low-cost satellites; it won’t matter much if they fail or become obsolete because it will be cheap to throw up another set. Ultra-rapid cargo flights across the world will also become possible, like the baby outfit delivery on Christmas Eve. SpaceX already has a contract with the US Air Force Research Laboratory to develop plans for the speedy delivery of military supplies. Companies with such commanding positions in their market normally don’t get long to enjoy them. Competitors copy what they do, or a usurping new technology comes along. While there are rivals creeping up on SpaceX — Jeff Bezos is behind another big launcher, New Glenn, which will start commercial launches soon — none looks likely to offer the same low cost and ubiquity. Short of government intervention, Musk is likely to dominate access to space for the foreseeable future.