How should we think about Starship? - by Maciej Cegłowski

Mars For The Rest of Us

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How should we think about Starship?<br>What started as the Mars Colonial Transporter risks becoming a humble space truck

Maciej Cegłowski<br>May 27, 2026

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Last Friday, SpaceX tested the third version of its Starship rocket. It was the twelfth Starship flight overall and the first launch of this rocket in the V3 configuration, a substantially new design. It went like a lot of Starship test flights have gone—well enough to build hopes, but not quite well enough to declare success and start colonizing the Galaxy.<br>Opinion around Starship has a tendency to polarize. On one end is an extreme enthusiasm and a conviction that Starship will revolutionize space flight by bringing launch costs down by orders of magnitude. The rocket’s fans point to SpaceX’s immense success in operating the Falcon 9, the world’s first reusable commercial rocket, along with the rapid progress Starship showed during early flight tests in 2023. Launches in that ‘V1’ configuration showed that Starship could reach orbit1 and successfully re-enter the atmosphere. Both stages of the spacecraft (the Super Heavy first stage and the Starship upper stage) demonstrated precision controlled landings, and in 2024 SpaceX was able to catch and re-fly a Super Heavy first stage. From the optimists’ perspective, the Starship concept has been proven; what remains is a series of iterative improvements to make it operational, followed by scaling.<br>The opposing tendency is a skepticism that can shade into derision. Starship dislikers point out that the vehicle has yet to reach orbit, and that Elon Musk’s promises about its payload capacity keep getting pushed to future versions of the rocket. No Starship upper stage has made it through re-entry in anything like a condition to fly again, even though rapid reusability is essential to the economics of the program. And the lunar variant of Starship, paid for with taxpayer money, is years overdue. Moreover, there has been a tendency for the whole rocket to get redesigned just as things start to stabilize. The criticism is that SpaceX is not doing iterative flight testing so much as YOLO flight testing, and that it can’t get its ambitious design to close.<br>I have a similar struggle evaluating Starship that I do with AI. The core technology is undeniably real and transformative, but it comes welded to a preposterous vision of the future. In the case of Starship, that means hundreds of launches a day, vast orbiting data centers, and kilometer-length mass drivers on the Moon built to sub-micron tolerance. And the whole thing depends on the emergence of an orbital economy that, for several decades now, has resisted boosters’ efforts to will it into being.<br>It doesn’t help matters that people talking about Starship are often talking about different things. Starship is simultaneously a very big rocket, the second stage of that rocket, an operational concept, an enabling technology for colonizing Mars, and a deus ex machina for solving all practical questions of human space flight.<br>But between the reality and the woo there is a gray area that is hard to evaluate. So I’m writing this post to try to clarify my thinking, and in particular to try to figure out at which station I want to get off the hype train. I always welcome comments on my posts, but I would particularly welcome them on this topic, since there are so many different ways to think about Starship.

Starship as a vision

Starship was born as a Mars-going rocket, and the argument for it then was simple. Launch costs were the biggest barrier to settling Mars. The only way to make rockets cheap was to mass-produce them and stop throwing them away after each launch. So SpaceX set out to build a very big rocket that was rapidly re-usable and could ferry heavy payloads to the Martian surface.<br>SpaceX was serious both about the ‘rapid’ and ‘big’ parts of this vision for Starship. Their targeted payload to low Earth orbit was 100 metric tons, or about the mass of a fully-loaded Space Shuttle orbiter with a satellite stuffed inside.2 This capacity would make Starship more capable than NASA’s budget-obliterating Space Launch System, and nearly as capable as the 1960’s vintage Saturn V. A Starship that refueled in orbit (another part of the vision) could then go on to land that 100 ton payload on the Moon or Mars. When you consider that the heaviest object ever landed on the Moon weighed 17 tons (Apollo 17), and the heaviest payload to reach Mars weighs 1 ton (the Perseverance rover), you see the transformative potential of the technology.<br>Operationally, the giant rocket was supposed to behave more like an airplane, able to launch again within minutes after landing, and to fly many times before requiring a major overhaul. This capability would be a step change from the Falcon 9, whose reusable first stage has to be overhauled for days or weeks between launches, not to...