The reason the Starship rocket can help SpaceX beat NASA

On October 13, 2024, Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful launch system, flew into space from the launch pad in Texas. Starship’s booster rocket called Super Heavy reaches an altitude of more than 65 km, manufactured by SpaceX company. It was able to re-ignite its engines and fly slowly until hovering above the launch tower 7 minutes after takeoff. The pair of chopsticks caught the booster and held it firmly, ready for refurbishment and relaunch. Science magazine assessed that this achievement opens a new era of cheap heavy-lift rockets that can reduce the cost of space exploration.

Musk’s company has reduced the cost of sending goods into orbit around the Earth by 1/10. When Starship, a system designed for complete and rapid reuse, goes into operation later this year, costs will drop even further. Many space engineers believe that Starship will make an important leap with a launch schedule every 2-3 weeks. SpaceX’s engineering team found a way to recover and reuse the booster rocket and will do the same with the upper stage in 2025.

SpaceX plans a total of 25 flights this year, an ambitious program, according to astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. For scientists, the benefits of Starship are clear. The cost of missions carried out using reusable vehicles could be greatly reduced from current levels, allowing new research to be carried out in space.

In the past, a space flight was too expensive to risk failure, so parts on NASA missions were tested repeatedly, causing costs to skyrocket. But with Starship’s regular flight operations, scientists can take advantage of more opportunities, build devices with cheaply available components and launch regularly. An entire fleet of rovers could be transported to Mars instead of just one vehicle. The mirrors can also be launched en masse to create giant, self-assembling telescopes in space.

It is likely that Starship can defeat NASA’s own rocket, SLS – an expensive space launch system with many problems that was planned to be built decades ago. Each SLS launch is expected to cost billions of dollars compared to the $10 million fee Musk set for his system. Many scientists predict Starship will make SLS redundant in the next few years.

Last September, Musk announced SpaceX would launch the first unmanned Starship mission to Mars within two years. If successful, manned flights will follow within 4 years. Ultimately, Musk envisions a colony of one million people living on Mars within the next 30 years. The American billionaire’s controversial plan attracted a lot of attention. Carrying people on a 225 million km journey to the red planet, overcoming dangerous cosmic radiation, finding a way to grow food in an arid world with an atmosphere with an average pressure less than 1% of Earth’s water level. sea, is an unprecedented challenge.