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In a talk given to Tesla Owners Silicon Valley yesterday, Elon Musk shared details about SpaceX’s Starship program. Starship is the world’s largest under-development rocket, and SpaceX is currently working on its tenth full-stack flight. According to Musk, SpaceX should meet two key Starship objectives, i.e., the upper stage ship’s recovery and orbital propellant filling, next year by the earliest. The two goals are essential to reduce the rocket’s launch costs, and SpaceX is yet to make any progress with either as it continues to face one setback after another with the Starship test campaign in 2025.

SpaceX’s Starship Had A High “Giggle Factor,” Reveals Elon Musk

Musk started his talk by commenting that he knew developing the Starship rocket would be hard. “Starship is a crazy program on so many levels Because you have something with two-and-a-half, and future versions will be three times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket which was previously the largest rocket and the largest flying object ever made,” he said.

The rocket is “three times the thrust, roughly twice the weight of the next largest flying object ever made,” which was NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket for the Apollo program. What makes the rocket “crazy” is that SpaceX aims to make it “fully and rapidly reusable,’ according to the executive. As a result, Starship is “really one of the hardest engineering challenges that exists,” he shared.

Starship’s complexity meant that when “we first started talking about Starship, people thought this was impossible,” outlined Musk. According to him, Starship had “a very high what I call the giggle factor,” where people would “immediately start giggling at the absurdity of it all.”

The Super Heavy booster at the launch pad ahead of Starship Flight 8. Image: SpaceX

The conversation then shifted to the current state of the Starship program. Musk said the ship’s heat shield continues to be its hardest part since it’s expendable. According to him, “solving the heat shield problem is, I think, probably the single most biggest remaining challenge for Starship.” The upper stage Starship spacecraft uses thousands of heat shield tiles manufactured by SpaceX internally. The heat shield is essential to make Starship fully reusable since the ship has to survive atmospheric reentry.

After making the heat shield, “getting the upper stage, or the ship, to land and also get caught by the giant metal chopsticks” is the next key objective for Starship, said Musk. The tower catch is equally indispensable for Starship reusability since, without it, SpaceX has to land its rockets in the water. Musk is “hopeful that the ship will be recovered, maybe this year, but certainly [by] the first half of next year.”

Once SpaceX starts recovering the ship with the tower arm chopsticks, it should have made “further improvements to make the ship and the booster, not just reusable, but fully and rapidly reusable,” he shared. These upgrades will be essential to “drop the cost per flight, cost per ton, of payload of Starship, below that of a Falcon 1 rocket. Of an expendable Falcon 1.”

Musk shared that the lower launch costs mean that “getting a hundred tons or more to orbit, of useful payload, will cost less than a rocket that would ordinarily deliver half a ton, which was Falcon 1.”

Another key objective of the Starship program, which is crucial for both interplanetary missions and NASA’s Artemis moon missions, is in-space refueling. Calling the propellant transfer ‘refilling’ instead, the process will first have “two Starships come together and dock and transfer propellant from one Starship to another,” after which SpaceX will work on an orbital propellant depot,” he shared.