Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary

If SpaceX can land and reuse the most powerful rocket ever made what can’t it do?

Oct 13, 2024, The Economist

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The launch was remarkable: a booster rocket with twice the power of the Apollo programme’s Saturn V lancing into the early-morning sky on a tight, bright column of blue-tinged flame. But that wonder has been seen four times before. It was the landing of the booster stage of SpaceX’s fifth Starship test flight which was truly extraordinary.

Just a kilometre or so above the surface of the Earth, having fallen back from the edge of space, and still travelling at roughly the speed of sound, the 71m-long steel cylinder, bigger than the fuselage of a Boeing 747, relit 13 of its 33 engines. Seconds later, having cut its speed to a couple of hundred kilometres per hour, it turned most of them off, leaving it balanced on the thrust of just three engines like a broom handle on a finger.

Those engines guided it to the 146-metre-tall gantry tower from which, just seven minutes earlier, it had taken off. As the booster slid down past the tower, still at what seemed a slightly worrying angle, the tower’s massive arms closed on it. And so it came to rest, hanging high in the Texas sky, sporadic flames still licking around its base: stranded, a little ungainly and incredible in almost every sense of the word.

The landing was a triumph for the engineers of SpaceX, a company founded and run by Elon Musk. It strongly suggests that the company’s plans to use a huge reusable booster to launch a huge reusable spacecraft, the Starship proper, on a regular basis are achievable. That means that the amount of cargo that SpaceX can put into orbit for itself and its customers, including the American government, is set to grow spectacularly in the second half of this decade.

And the cost per tonne of putting that stuff up there should be reduced dramatically. According to an estimate by Citigroup, a bank, SpaceX’s semi-reusable and frequently flown Falcon 9s have already brought down the price of launch by a factor of ten. A much bigger and fully reusable Starship should do at least as much again and possibly much more. It is potentially the biggest leap forward in spaceflight seen since the 1960s.

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