Starship
SpaceX's large, reusable rocket system designed for missions to Mars and other deep space destinations.
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How Starship compares
6 creators weighed in
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Falcon 9
Different focus
SpaceX's orbital rocket
Starship reuses both stages; Falcon 9 throws away its upper stage every flight, like tossing a medium jet.
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6 creators
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6 creators
Starship reuses both stages; Falcon 9 throws away its upper stage every flight, like tossing a medium jet.
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"Once we can refly the ship we will have made the first fully reusable orbital rocket. Starship the booster lands back at the launch pad, the ship will land back at the launch pad, and it's designed for not just full reusability but also ..."
Compared to Falcon 9 (which loses the upper stage each flight, equivalent to throwing away a medium-sized jet) and the Space Shuttle (partly reusable but cost more per flight than expendable rockets)
"They're building these two Starship gigafactories designed to produce something like three Starships per day. Because Starship is reusable, on a sort of three or four year time frame, that could lead to us having thousands of times the c..."
Compared to Falcon 9 and other current launch vehicles
"When we started the company in June of 2022, our pitch deck was all about Starship and it was all about building — physically — what's the largest possible satellite you could build using Starship."
K2 pivoted to Falcon 9 compatibility after being advised not to go full send on Starship in 2022
"A successful launch of Starship 13. SpaceX has confirmed launch and splashdown. It deployed 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites and achieved a successful soft landing on the Indian Ocean with the vehicle remaining intact, which was ext..."
Cost to orbit: $10-$100/kg target vs Falcon 9's $2,000-$3,000/kg vs Space Shuttle's $54,000/kg
"Starship is obviously the first example of a vehicle where we don't throw away the upper stage. Building multiple factories to mass-produce that hardware, multiple launch pads — once Starships are launching with frequency and they've wor..."
Compared to Falcon 9 (which will be shut down), Blue Origin New Glenn, Stoke, and Rocket Lab Neutron as part of the broader reusable launch ecosystem
What creators say
"Starship and its predecessors have brought online an enormous amount of upmass capacity, and all of the existing markets for upmass aren't enough now to saturate what Starship enables."
More from Alex Wissner-Gross →
"Starship flight 14 reached orbit for the first time... Every time I see this fly, the booster, it's gorgeous."
More from Peter Diamandis →+8 more mentions from Peter
"Elon wants Starship to be the mechanism that gets us to Mars. He's projected originally 2026 was a projection. Now Tesla Optimus on Mars in 2028."
"Elon just announced his intentions to implement 30 Starship launches per day by 2030. More than a launch every hour. That's roughly 10,000 launches..."
"You think about when a vehicle the size of Starship comes down on the lunar surface — believe me, that's going to blast out a little bit of craters, send debris."
More from Jared Isaacman →+2 more mentions from Jared
"When launch costs come down like materially, Starship, you got a shot."
"Starship is obviously the first example of a vehicle where we don't throw away the upper stage. Building multiple factories to mass-produce that ha..."
"Once we can refly the ship we will have made the first fully reusable orbital rocket. Starship the booster lands back at the launch pad, the ship will land back at the launch pad, and it's designed for not just full reusability but also rapid reus..."
More from Elon Musk →"The key question people should be asking about orbital compute is Starship reusability. With Starship reusability, launch cost goes to under a billion. So the economics just instantly flip. An increasing fraction of the world's compute is going to..."
More from Gavin Baker →+1 more mention from Gavin
"When Starship is reusable, it's going to cost $5 billion to put a gigawatt of compute into space."
"Elon's still waiting for FAA approval on his steel Starship. You could actually watch it playing out in China where their regulatory agencies are allowing them to move much more quickly."
More from David Friedberg →
"Our entire company is a bet on launch costs coming down. If Starship and New Glenn don't work, then we don't work because the economics don't pencil out."
More from This Week in Startups →+1 more mention from This
"he'll probably just shut that program and then pivot fully to some like Starship Dragon, you know, Blue Origin, Blue Lander, etc. type of architecture"
"They're building these two Starship gigafactories designed to produce something like three Starships per day. Because Starship is reusable, on a sort of three or four year time frame, that could lead to us having thousands of times the capacity to..."
More from Philip Johnston →"In order to really make life multiplanetary happen, you need to be able to take Starship to Mars and then make fuel on Mars and bring it back. And to do that, you need power."
More from Tori Shivanandan →"When we started the company in June of 2022, our pitch deck was all about Starship and it was all about building — physically — what's the largest possible satellite you could build using Starship."
More from Guillaume Verdon →
"Starship launched and there's a beautiful video that somehow got taken down, so we can't even share it."
More from Jordi Hays →
"This is a Starship. You feel it. You like his kids started crying like we want to go inside. Like it's disturbing like the amount of energy that's coming out of these rocket boosters."
More from Joe Rogan →+1 more mention from Joe
"It's also the reason why the Starship is shaped the way it is at the tip. Elon wanted to be like Spaceballs. He's like, 'Make it more pointy.'"
"SpaceX's human lander based on its Starship vehicle"
More from TBPN →+1 more mention from TBPN
"liquid hydrogen that a future Starship might use for fuel"
"Chandler was the lead propulsion engineer on Starship."
More from Chandler Luzsicza →"It's 274 launches per day on Starship. It's a launch every 5.3 minutes, which of course he says, listen, in the airline business, that's normal."
More from Peter H. Diamandis →"So there's there's a trade on getting that cost down between building them super large like Starship and reusability and then mass production."
More from Jim Cantrell →Keep exploring
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