IN ANY NORMAL week, the biggest-ever interplanetary probe blasting off to look for signs of life in the depths of an occult ocean would hog the headlines about space. But the launch of Europa Clipper on October 14th was eclipsed, spectacularly, by the test flight the previous day of the Starship being developed by SpaceX, a launch provider, satellite-communications supplier and Mars-settlement enabler founded and run by Elon Musk. Seven minutes after take-off a thin, waggling finger of rocket-fire guided the launcher’s huge first stage back to its launchpad in Texas, there to be grasped like the quarry of a giant praying mantis.

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It is tempting to see such success as a culmination. Mr. Musk sees it as a start. The Starship system is designed to provide about eight times as much mass to orbit per flight as a Falcon 9, the SpaceX workhorse, and to fly even more often. The company talks about reaching a cadence of more than one launch a day; it says its factories could eventually build 1,000 Starships a year. Mr. Musk talks of dropping the cost of shipping a ton into orbit by at least tenfold.

SpaceX was founded “to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets”. It is undoubtedly doing the first of those and with this week’s success it is better placed to accomplish the second. Mr. Musk says that in 2026, the next time the planets are well-aligned for such ventures, SpaceX will send five uncrewed Starships to Mars. Crews will follow perhaps four years later. He hopes before too long to be sending hundreds of Starships and tens of thousands of people at every more or less biennial opportunity. Some of the journeys will have return legs: Starship uses fuel that is in principle fairly easily synthesized on Mars. But his main purpose is settlement.

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Mr. Musk is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to predicting when his companies will achieve his goals. Starship was meant to have been flying years ago. Fully self-driving cars from Tesla, a car company which he runs, have often been postponed, too. But people who set his wild ambitions at naught have an even worse record.

Whenever the crewed missions start, potential settlers can expect a hard and possibly horrid time. Though Mars looks a bit like the American West, it is far less hospitable: bereft of liquid water, of a breathable atmosphere, of native life to use for shelter or food and of resources to sell to the people left behind on Earth. Efforts to set up isolated societies from scratch have failed in much more clement places, sometimes very nastily; the messianic and millenarian tendencies behind such endeavors, clearly seen in some would-be Martians as well as Mr. Musk himself, could exacerbate the risks. But SpaceX looks set to pursue its interplanetary goal until it achieves something like it, or tragedy strikes, or other forces intervene.

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As it does so, it will open up the possibility of other previously impossible and conceivably more fruitful enterprises. Starship should allow SpaceX to increase the capacity of its Starlink satellite-communications system beyond anything previously feasible. Other companies plan to use Starship to launch space stations. One contract for a commercial Starship trip around the Moon has been cancelled, but there will surely be others. Astronomers dream of huge space telescopes (even as they fret about Starlink and its like blocking the view of the cosmos from Earth’s surface). Tech visionaries look at space’s supply of uninterrupted solar energy and wonder if they should be harnessing it to train AIs in orbit. Generals think dark thoughts about what might be dropped on whom, and how hard. And competitors in America, China and perhaps elsewhere will vie to replicate and surpass what SpaceX has done. After Starship’s success, normal weeks in space may soon look very different.

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By The Economist
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