Europe Just Unveiled a Serious Rival to SpaceX’s Starship
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Space<br>Europe Just Unveiled a Serious Rival to SpaceX’s Starship<br>By Mark Thompson, Universe TodayMay 17, 2026No Comments5 Mins Read
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SpaceX Starship ignition during its launch on IFT-5. Credit: Steve JurvetsonA DLR analysis suggests Starship may define the future of heavy launch, but Europe could pursue a smaller, more efficient partially reusable path of its own.<br>In the summer of 2023, SpaceX achieved something that aerospace engineers had discussed for generations, even if many did not expect to witness it themselves. Starship, a stainless steel vehicle taller than a thirty-story building, fired all thirty-three of its engines at once and rose from the coast of Texas.<br>The test flight was not flawless. But the rocket left the pad. Later, during flight test five, the Super Heavy booster returned and was caught in mid air by the giant mechanical arms of its own launch tower. At that point, it became hard to deny that spaceflight had entered a new era.<br>Starship is being built to deliver more than 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit while being fully reusable. If SpaceX reaches that target, Starship would become the most powerful and most economical rocket ever built. For national space agencies and private launch companies worldwide, the central question has shifted. It is no longer whether Starship could transform the industry, but how everyone else should respond.<br>Starship’s numbers face scrutiny<br>Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have now released one of the most detailed independent studies of Starship’s performance to date. Notably, they did not base their work on SpaceX’s public performance claims. Instead, they reviewed the publicly streamed footage from the first four integrated flight tests and extracted telemetry data moment by moment.<br>Super Heavy Booster 12 approaching the tower during Starship flight test 5 on October 13, 2024. Credit: Steve JurvetsonThey then used those data to create and test detailed performance models of the vehicle. The resulting assessment presents Starship as a system whose real capabilities are more carefully defined, yet still more impressive than its promotional image might suggest.<br>The analysis confirmed that in its current form, a fully reusable Starship that can deliver around 59 tons to low Earth orbit. That is roughly what a Falcon Heavy can achieve without recovering any of its boosters at all. The next generation version, equipped with the more powerful Raptor 3 engines and enlarged fuel tanks, is projected to achieve around 115 tons in reusable mode and potentially 188 tonnes if flown expendably, surpassing even the mighty Saturn V of the Apollo era. But the more striking part of the paper is a detailed design for a European alternative capable of launching over 70 tonnes to orbit, called the RLV C5.<br>Europe’s alternative trades scale for efficiency<br>The concept pairs the winged, reusable booster stage from DLR’s long-running SpaceLiner project with an expendable upper stage designed to maximize payload. It burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which is a more efficient combination than the methane and oxygen that power Starship’s Raptor engines, and its booster does not land the way Starship’s does.<br>Instead of descending tail-first on a column of rocket fire, the SpaceLiner booster glides back through the atmosphere on wings, before being captured in mid-air by a large subsonic aircraft. It is a recovery method that sounds almost science fictional, but one that DLR researchers argue has distinct advantages: the booster needs no fuel reserved for landing burns, which means more of every kilogram of propellant goes towards actually reaching orbit.<br>Artist’s impression of the SpaceLiner full configuration during the ascent phase. Credit: ToSch1983Deutsches ZentrumIn comparison, Starship is more than three times heavier than the RLV C5 at launch. A significant portion of that mass is the cost of full reusability: heat shield tiles, landing fuel, structural reinforcements, the wings. Of every ton Starship sends to orbit, only around 40% is payload however the RLV C5, with its simpler partially reusable approach, manages to put 74% of its mass-to-orbit into useful payload. What it lacks in raw capacity, it gains in efficiency.<br>Reusability creates strategic choices<br>The DLR researchers are careful to frame this not as a competition but as a choice. Starship’s extraordinary capacity and planned rapid reuse make it ideal for missions requiring truly massive payloads, for example, moon bases, Mars missions, and giant satellite constellations.<br>The RLV C5 addresses a different need for sovereign European access to super-heavy lift...