If there were any doubts about SpaceX’s dominance in space, they were swept away after the company pulled off a near-flawless test of its massive Starship rocket late Tuesday.
After a string of failures, including a spectacular launchpad explosion in June, SpaceX hit all the highlights of its 10th test-launch of the rocket. Starship displayed the ability to recapture both the booster and the payload spacecraft, proving it will be fully reusable.
Perhaps it’s pure coincidence, but SpaceX righted the ship after Elon Musk returned full time to his businesses following his controversial stint as the mastermind behind the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk shifted about a fifth of his Falcon 9 engineering team to help with Starship, according to a Bloomberg News report. That’s the type of decision that has to come from the very top.
Legacy space companies from rocket launchers to satellite operators are on notice that Starship is on the cusp of going operational and that the cost of heavy-lift rocket launches is about to drop. The increased capacity to launch satellites cheaply will extend even further the market leadership of Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet company. The cash already flowing in from selling high-speed internet to rural customers and to everything that moves — airplanes, ships, RVs, etc. — will help fund Musk’s dream of putting humans on Mars.
Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and other legacy rocket builders have just fallen further behind after SpaceX showed that a fully reusable Starship is going to work. Starship’s second stage survived a reentry even though heat-shield tiles were removed and new ones were tested. A stress test provided a light show as the spacecraft’s flaps were pushed to the limit.
After hurtling toward Earth at more than 25,000 kilometers per hour, the craft slowed to below the speed of sound just before doing a flip and then firing three engines to hover briefly over the Indian Ocean. The spacecraft then sunk slowly into the roiling water like a buoy that slowly tips over.
During live launches, this spacecraft will land on a drone ship while the Starship’s booster can be snatched out of the Texas sky with giant mechanical tongs at the launchpad, which SpaceX demonstrated in earlier tests. During this latest test, the booster used varied engine combinations to collect data as it hovered over waters just off the Texas coast before plunging into the sea. These two pieces make the rocket completely reusable, a technology that has already revolutionized space launches and that Boeing and Lockheed lack.
For satellite operators, especially Eutelsat Communications SA, the eye-raising aspect of the test was the livestream of the so-called Pez dispenser spitting out eight dummy Starlink satellites. This is the spacecraft’s robotic system that moves a stack of flat satellites into position then shoves them one by one through a slot at a rate of a minute each. Starship will have capacity to deploy 60 of these satellites, several times the payload capacity of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
What should send shudders through the industry is that these dummy satellites were the same size and weight as a third generation of more capable low-Earth-orbit satellites that SpaceX is building. Low-Earth-orbit networks are the future of the business, and SpaceX owns this space.
Starlink has deployed 8,000 satellites in low Earth orbit; its closest competitor, Eutelsat, has 650. What’s more telling is that that last batch of 20 satellites that the European company launched were carried by a Falcon 9 rocket.
Physics gives satellites in low Earth orbit a big speed advantage because they are located about 550 kilometers (342 miles) from Earth, much closer than the large geosynchronous satellites that are 35,800 kilometers (22,245 miles) away. Low-Earth-orbit satellites are also smaller and less expensive than the large geostationary ones.
The catch is that these small satellites don’t move in sync with the Earth, which means a lot of them are needed to provide coverage. They also have a shorter shelf life, which requires constant launches to replenish and build the network.
Eutelsat announced it would raise 1.5 billion euros from investors and the French and UK governments to build out its low-Earth-obit network, which will make up for the declining sales at its legacy geostationary satellite business. Sales from the low-Earth-orbit business soared 84% for the year ended June while revenue at the company’s video business, which makes up about half of the company’s $1.2 billion in annual sales and is powered by geostationary satellites, fell 6.5%.
While Eutelsat can’t keep up with Starlink on capacity and price, it does have a large niche because it’s not US-owned and, more specifically, it’s not owned by an unpredictable, mercurial billionaire.
“Eutelsat is uniquely positioned as a European space connectivity champion in shifting geopolitical environments,” Chief Executive Officer Jean-Francois Fallacher said in an earnings conference call in early August.
When Starship begins commercial flights, SpaceX’s cost curve will decline even more while capacity to build out its network increases. Musk has talked about a network of tens of thousands of satellites to provide blanket coverage for high-speed internet.
The power of the network is most evident in Ukraine, where Starlink has helped keep the nation from being overrun by Russia. The service has spawned a cottage industry of Ukrainian technicians who have learned how to repair and harden for battle the Starlink ground equipment that captures the internet signal.
The success of the Starship test brings Musk’s dream of reaching Mars closer to reality. More immediately and nearer to Earth, it means that Starship will soon be seeding satellites throughout the sky, which rake in the cash needed to finance that dream.
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