SpaceX has just achieved an incredible milestone with its Starship rocket, marking what could be the greatest advancement in science and engineering since humans first set foot on the Moon. However, what we’ve witnessed so far is just the beginning.
If Starship is going to deliver on Elon Musk’s grand vision—an interplanetary transport system that will build a city on Mars—there’s still a lot of work to do. And, as usual, Elon is not exactly forthcoming with all the details about what’s required to make this dream a reality.
Starship’s Historic Milestones: A Step Toward Mars
Every time SpaceX has launched Starship, it has been a historic achievement. Even when a launch didn’t go as planned, such as the time a giant crater was blasted into the Earth, it was still the most powerful rocket ever to lift off. But in order to move forward toward Elon’s ultimate goal of interplanetary travel, SpaceX needs many more unprecedented, improbable successes. The path to making Starship fully functional can be broken down into three major milestones:
- Orbit
- Moon
- Mars
While SpaceX has conducted orbital test flights with Starship, the rocket has yet to complete a true orbit. This may sound confusing, but let’s break it down.
Orbit: The Key to Starship’s Success
Achieving orbital velocity is a crucial step for Starship. In simple terms, when you reach orbit, you’re in a constant state of freefall, but because you’re moving so fast forward, the ground is curving away from you, and you keep falling around the planet. However, getting Starship to orbit is tricky because it is so massive—it’s the largest object ever put into space.
SpaceX has purposefully kept Starship’s speed low enough during tests that if anything goes wrong, the rocket will fall back into a safe area, like the Indian Ocean, ensuring minimal risk. But the goal is to eventually get Starship to reach orbital velocity, which means the rocket stays in orbit, barring system failures. This is still a long way off.
The Payload Challenge: Starship’s Pez Dispenser for Satellites
Once Starship can achieve orbit, the next milestone is deploying a payload into space. This is where Starship’s design becomes complicated. Unlike traditional rockets that use a disposable fairing to release a payload, Starship will use a “Pez dispenser” method to deploy Starlink satellites.
Starlink satellites are thin, long, and wide, so SpaceX designed Starship’s payload slot to dispense them one by one, much like candies from a Pez dispenser. This simple mechanism is enough for the job at hand—at least until Starship starts deploying larger payloads, which will require more sophisticated solutions like cargo bay doors or other mechanisms for release.
Orbital Propellant Transfer: A Groundbreaking Milestone
Perhaps the most ambitious milestone for Starship is orbital propellant transfer—fueling one Starship with another in space. Musk has downplayed the difficulty of this, but in reality, it’s never been done before.
Two Starships will need to dock in orbit—one carrying liquid oxygen and liquid methane and the other ready to receive the fuel. The goal is to transfer the propellant from one ship to the other, allowing the second ship to continue its journey into deeper space, potentially toward Mars.
This will be a major challenge, as docking spacecraft in orbit is complex, and the technology is still evolving. SpaceX has successfully done this with smaller spacecraft, like the Dragon capsule, but docking two massive Starships with precise fuel lines could be a whole new level of difficulty.
The Moon: A Stepping Stone for Mars
Once Starship has completed these tasks in low Earth orbit, the next step is to get to the Moon. SpaceX has made a historic commitment to NASA to use Starship as the first vehicle to carry astronauts to the lunar surface in over five decades.
However, this is where things get interesting. While Starship’s design works well for landing on Earth, it won’t work on the Moon due to the lack of atmosphere. On Earth, Starship uses its wings and heat shields to slow down and perform a controlled landing. The Moon has no atmosphere, so there’s no drag to slow the vehicle down.
For Starship to land on the Moon, SpaceX will have to design a new system that can make a precise landing in a low-gravity environment. This could take a few years to perfect, and the first moon landing will likely be uncrewed. SpaceX has to master this before the Artemis 3 mission, NASA’s planned crewed return to the Moon, which is currently slated for 2026 (though that’s likely to be delayed).
Mars: The Ultimate Test for Starship
All of this—getting to orbit, landing on the Moon—is just a prelude to Starship’s ultimate goal: Mars. Elon Musk’s vision is to send large quantities of people and supplies to Mars and establish a permanent, self-sustaining outpost. This is the point where all of Starship’s previous milestones will come into play.
SpaceX has already indicated that Starship for Mars will not be all that different from the Starship for the Moon. The most significant change will be adding landing legs to help the vehicle land safely, as there will be no Mechazilla tower on Mars to catch it. But landing Starship on Mars is still a daunting task, especially since this is uncharted territory for any spacecraft.
In SpaceX’s typical fashion, failure is expected—and even welcomed—because failure leads to learning. But if SpaceX can pull it off, we could see the first Starship mission to Mars within the next few years.
The Path Forward: Failures, Successes, and Mars
It’s essential to remember that SpaceX’s development process is built on rapid iteration—test, fail, learn, and repeat. Starship has already experienced several failures, from early SN prototypes to booster explosions, but it has also seen incredible successes, like the first tower catch of the Super Heavy booster.
If we are going to reach Mars, SpaceX will need to continue this cycle of learning and refining. Whether or not Starship succeeds in reaching Mars on its first attempt, the ultimate goal remains clear: to create a fully reusable spacecraft capable of transporting humans and cargo across the solar system. But as ambitious as Elon Musk’s vision is, there’s still a long road ahead.
The next few years will be crucial in determining whether or not we are truly ready for Mars. SpaceX will need to continue hitting major milestones—orbital testing, fueling in space, lunar landings—and continue to adapt quickly if they want to meet Elon Musk’s goal of a human colony on Mars.
Conclusion: The Long Road to Mars
While Elon Musk’s vision of a self-sustaining city on Mars sounds bold and exciting, the path to get there is fraught with technical challenges, failures, and hard-earned lessons. SpaceX’s Starship is on a journey that will define the future of space exploration, but there’s a lot more to be done before we can send humans to Mars. The question is: how long will it take, and how many more milestones will SpaceX need to achieve before the first Starship mission to Mars becomes a reality?
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