Space fans are gearing up for what is sure to be an awe-inspiring event — the maiden orbital flight of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket. All eyes are on the South Texas launch site from which Starship, and its Superheavy booster, will attempt to launch in the coming weeks.

The Starship program has its roots back in 2012, when SpaceX introduced a concept they dubbed “Mars Colonial Transporter.” In the years since, the program has gone through many changes in both technical details and complete design overhauls. One major change was a shift from building the rocket out of carbon fiber to using stainless steel. The vehicle also went through some name changes, but settled on Starship in 2018.

At its most simple, Starship and its booster are effectively 15-story tall tubes of stainless steel. This appearance has led some fans to nicknaming the various prototypes “giant grain silos.” Despite the similarities, as Nicki Minaj has remarked, “Starships are meant to fly.”

Contingent on an FAA launch license which has yet to be granted, that’s precisely what Starship is meant to do. The rocket —which takes lessons from SpaceX’s current workhorse, Falcon 9 — is reportedly capable of launching 150 metric tons into Earth’s orbit. This is comparable to the Saturn V rocket on which the Apollo missions to the moon launched.

But Starship has a distinct advantage — it is fully reusable. Like its Falcon 9 predecessor, SpaceX hopes to perform propulsive landings of both Starship and the Superheavy booster, allowing the vehicles to be re-stacked, refueled, and launched again. This reusability is a massive cost-saving measure, which will allow SpaceX to launch a large amount of mass for effectively only the cost of the propellant.

Those advantages in mass-to-orbit, cost, and turnaround time have the potential to be game-changing for the space industry and space science. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is due to be retired in the coming decade, which will leave NASA, its international partners, and scientists around the world without an appropriate space station to operate on.

The interior volume of the ISS is roughly 1,000 m3, comparable to Starship’s payload volume. The ISS’s size was heavily limited by the cargo capacity of the Space Shuttle that launched its modules — a problem that Starship doesn’t have. Thanks to its size and reusability, Starship could lift modules larger and more massive than those of the ISS, for a fraction of the price.

The same logic applies to satellites. The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been providing scientists with unmatched data and the public with stellar views of the cosmos, fits comfortably in Starship’s payload bay. While Hubble’s technology is more than 30 years old, imagine what scientists could do with a fleet of dozens of similar telescopes.

While it has huge potential, there are also risks. One huge threat to Starship’s success is SpaceX’s own CEO, Elon Musk. Musk has been in the news often lately, rarely for positive reasons. Musk’s well-established penchant for controversy jeopardizes SpaceX’s prospects, and in turn Starship. While some of his antics are inconsequential — his naming of a previous Starship design as “BFR” (Big F***ing Rocket), for example — other actions have had genuinely harmful effects on the program.

The December 2020 launch of Starship Serial Number 8 (SN8) was found to have violated the terms of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launch license. Many have attributed this violation to SpaceX’s policy of rapid testing and iteration, a part of their corporate culture spearheaded by Musk. The FAA investigation that followed the launch — and explosion upon attempted landing — delayed the testing campaign of the subsequent prototype, SN9. Musk’s insistence on speed and iteration above all else threatens Starship’s chances of making it through regulatory approvals.

Despite its CEO’s endangerment, SpaceX is pushing forward with the Starship program. The current testing article is labeled Ship 24, which will be paired with Superheavy Booster 7 for the orbital flight test planned for later this month. Assuming the FAA grants the launch license, spectators should be in for a treat as the rocket launches from SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas (nicknamed ‘Starbase’).

Details have yet to be publicly finalized, but current understanding points toward Booster 7 attempting either a landing back at the launch site or a soft-landing at sea to simulate such a landing. Ship 24 will then attempt its own soft landing off the coast of Hawaii, after circling the Earth at near-orbital speed.

Whether everything goes as planned, or we see one or more fantastical explosions, the event is expected to be a crowd-pleaser. Only time will tell, but Starship’s orbital flight test may be the first step in Starship’s revolutionary impact on how we interact with the cosmos.

Share