Starship Is Going Nowhere

A devastating revelation.

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

One of the few upsides to SpaceX’s rapidly approaching IPO is that we finally get to glimpse the murky world of its obscure finances. They are legally obligated to show us how cash moves through this beast, and the picture painted by the recent filings is not pretty. You see, from orbital data centres to Starlink, NASA missions, and even Musk’s fabled anarcho-capitalist feudal settlement on Mars, Starship is critical to unlocking SpaceX’s future. Yet, these IPO filings only highlight that it is a biblically expensive mess going nowhere fast. But I don’t think people realise just how damning this revelation is, because it proves that Starship is nothing more than a hopeless money pit.

The Gap

Let’s start with this revelation. Reuters reported that, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings, the company has spent more than $15 billion on Starship so far. That validates my previous estimate that Starship “costs are close to $10 billion, if not significantly more”. Now, in our current crazy times, that might not sound especially expensive, but it is. For some context, Falcon 9 cost just $400 million to develop, and the initial budget for Starship was $5 billion. So, Musk has already blown the budget more than two times over.

Yet, Starship isn’t even close to finished, let alone being a viable, functional launch vehicle.

The only real targets it has achieved so far are completing a suborbital flight, reaching orbital velocity (but not orbit), landing and relaunching the booster (which is much easier than the upper stage), and conducting a splashdown landing of the upper stage. For spending three times the initial budget, that is pathetic progress.

So, how far does Starship have to go?

Well, Starship has two main use cases.

The easiest and simplest is launching Starlink satellites into LEO (Low Earth Orbit). For Starship to be a viable and profitable way to launch Starlink satellites, it needs to reach LEO with its promised 100-ton payload, land both stages, and ensure both stages are rapidly reusable with virtually no maintenance costs. That way, it will be able to launch around 40 Starlink V3 satellites per launch for a nominal cost of $70 million per launch. This would reduce the cost of launching Starlink satellites by roughly over 200%, enabling Starlink to firmly operate at a profit, not just a positive EBITDA.

The much more difficult use case is for out-of-orbit flights like NASA’s Artemis missions and Musk’s Mars missions. This is because Starship can’t travel directly to these planets; it needs to use other Starships to refuel in LEO. This creates quite a complex and highly risky mission profile. First, a ‘depot’ variant of Starship is sent into orbit, then multiple ‘tanker’ variants of Starship shuttle fuel to the depot, 100 tons at a time, until the depot is full. After this, the Mars/Moon-bound Starship launches to LEO, rendezvous with the depot, fully refuels itself from the depot, and then fires off to its destination. Each Starship variant will have complex, unique systems, and each fuel transfer will carry a risk of a mission-ending catastrophic explosion. As such, this mission profile is significantly more complex than a simple Starlink launch.

So, what targets does Starship need to meet to be able to conduct Starlink launches, and how many more do they need to meet to pull off Moon/Mars missions?

In truth, there are loads of targets, and they are much harder to achieve than what SpaceX has accomplished so far.

So, let’s go through them, shall we?

Targets Until Starship Reaches Usability

1. Reach Orbit

Let’s start with the main one: Starship needs to actually reach orbit. So far, the most it has achieved is take 16 tons on a transatmospheric flight at orbital velocity. ‘Transatmospheric’ means it just skimmed the upper atmosphere, so it reaches a lower altitude than ‘suborbital’, which in itself is (typically) lower than required to reach proper orbit. Transatmospheric and suborbital flights, even at orbital velocities, can’t deploy satellites into orbit. But this isn’t as simple as it might sound, given that rockets have to expend kinetic energy (speed) in order to gain altitude. So, even though Starship has reached orbital velocity, it needs to expend a lot more energy to reach orbit, which requires burning more fuel — and, crucially, Starship might not have this fuel available. The extra fuel required to take Starship from its current transatmospheric path up to LEO is roughly 20 tonnes (as calculated by Thunderf00t), which suggests that Starship can currently reach only the lowest possible orbit if it carries no payload! So as it stands, just reaching orbit is a potentially difficult target to meet.

2. Increase Payload

Getting to orbit alone isn’t enough to make Starship viable; it has to actually carry stuff there, and for the economics to work out, it needs to meet its target payload-to-LEO of 100 tons. So, Starship needs to transition from a max payload of 16 tons on a non-orbital flight to 100 tons, or sixfold its current payload, on an orbital flight.

That would be a monumental leap for SpaceX. Is there any evidence in SpaceX’s past that suggests they can increase payloads to this degree? Well, not really. The first-ever Falcon 9 rocket (V1.1) had just a 13.5-ton payload to LEO, but the completely redesigned Falcon 9 V1.2 wasn’t just SpaceX’s first partially reusable rocket; it upped this payload to 22.8 tons to LEO. That looks like a 73% increase. But in reality, it isn’t. For one, V1.1 wasn’t reusable, and V1.2 could only reach 22.8 tons when fully expended; its reusable payload to LEO is much lower at 17.5 tons. As such, V1.1 and V1.2 are almost totally different rockets. V1.1 was basically a scale test bed for developing the booster landing technology, and SpaceX needed to redesign and scale the entire thing from the ground up to both introduce reusability and increase payload. But crucially, since the introduction of V1.2 (also known as Block 4) in 2015, Falcon 9’s payload to LEO has not increased.

In other words, there is very little precedent for SpaceX, let alone the entire rocket industry, to dramatically increase the payload of a rocket without a total redesign, let alone increase it by over sixfold. I cannot overstate the size of this challenge, especially when making Starship bigger alone won’t solve it.

3. Deploy Payload To Orbit

Starship has already tested its payload bay doors by ejecting Starlink dummy satellites during one of its transatmospheric flights. But, as Blue Origin recently demonstrated, it is one thing to carry a payload to orbit and eject it, and another to deploy it in the correct orbit. Starship is a large,, unregulated vehicle that is still suffering from engine failures during ascent. These issues can cause rockets to deliver satellites to the wrong orbit, which is simply not acceptable. So, not only does SpaceX need to get Starship into orbit and then somehow increase its payload to a colossal 100 tons, it also has to solve these reliability and accuracy issues so that it can actually be useful for delivering payloads, not just taking them on a scenic flight.

4. Land And Catch Upper Stage

To reduce weight by removing the landing legs and increase landing precision, SpaceX has opted for both of Starship’s stages to land using ‘chopsticks’. Essentially, the rocket has to come to a hovering stop just above the landing pad, and two giant arms will catch it in mid-air. It is an impressive technical feat, as you have to be pinpoint precise, and SpaceX has proven they can handle it with the Super Heavy Booster. But, if they want Starship to be a fully reusable rocket (which the economics of the rocket entirely depend upon), then they need to catch the upper stage, too.

You might think landing the booster and the upper stage are similarly difficult tasks, but that isn’t the case. The upper stage will land at three times the velocity, meaning the amount of kinetic energy that has to be scrubbed off compared to landing the booster is enormous. On top of that, it has to re-enter the upper atmosphere, which adds incredibly complex fluid dynamics to the equation. The forces involved are immense, and even a slight error could shift the landing spot by tens of metres. Despite these challenges, it seems SpaceX has nearly got this down to a tee, with recent upper-stage splashdowns being just 3m from the target landing spot. That is impressive, but potentially too inaccurate to catch the upper stage.

Plus, there is the issue of safety. Musk has stated that “SpaceX will only try to catch the ship [upper stage] with the tower after two perfect soft landings in the ocean. The risk of ship breakup over land needs to be very low.” When you consider that Starship is still losing critical heat shield tiles during landing, that Musk has admitted this could cause horrific failure and that explosive engine failures have been commonplace for the past year, the chances of meeting this safety threshold in the near future are not looking likely.

5. Reuse Upper Stage

It’s one thing to land a rocket and another thing to send it back up into the heavens. To do that, the rocket needs to be, at the very least, salvageable. The main structure should not be exposed to too much heat during re-entry, given that it could be too malformed or brittle to be reused. Likewise, the engines, fuel tanks, and heat shield need to be in good enough nick so that they only require light maintenance. Otherwise, it could very easily be cheaper, quicker and easier to just scrap the one you landed and build a new one from scratch. But that would defeat the purpose of landing it.

It’s like trying to restore a crashed car. Sometimes the car can outwardly not look too bad. But once you get into the nitty-gritty, they aren’t always salvageable. Ask me how I know…

Considering the difficulty SpaceX has experienced with the upper stage’s heat shields (with more on that topic in a second), this could be a much more troublesome issue to overcome than you might think, as critical structures and systems appear to be regularly exposed to excessive and damaging heat during landing thanks to heat shield failures.

6. Reduce Failure Rate

Okay, so let’s say hypothetically SpaceX has ticked off all of these targets. Starship now resembles a usable launch vehicle capable of full reusability. We are getting somewhere! Unfortunately, it still won’t be viable because of its failure rate.

Starship’s latest version (V2) had a 60% failure rate, with Launches 7, 8 and 9 exploding in the sky, with the transatmospheric Launches 10 and 11 being considered ‘successful’. That is an abysmal track record. No one in their right mind, not even Elon, would use such a rocket to put even the cheapest satellite into orbit, because the risk of losing it in a fiery inferno is greater than it actually reaching its destination.

Now, I personally don’t think SpaceX can reduce its failure rate. To me, it looks like Starship was built incredibly light in an attempt to increase its payload capacity, but this, in turn, has made it too weak. In other words, SpaceX is trapped in a catch-22. They can make Starship more robust but it will reduce whatever payload capacity it has (or possibly make it too heavy to reach orbit), or they can lighten it to carry a payload, but the risk of catastrophic failure becomes exceedingly high.

Either way, this is a major problem that needs to be solved before it can ever be used to truly launch payloads to orbit.

7. Rapid And Long-Term Reusability

After meeting all of these targets, Starship can begin shuttling Starlink satellites into orbit. Hurray! However, it will be excruciatingly expensive, possibly even more expensive than launching them from Falcon 9. Why? Because, as it stands, both Starship and the Super Heavy Booster will require extensive refurbishment between launches. It’s also not clear what the overall lifespan of these space frames is, whether they can last just a few launches or tens of launches before needing to be retired. Both of these factors heavily increase the cost per launch to the point where Starship might not even be a viable launch vehicle. Indeed, even with optimistic refurbishment and space frame lifespan numbers, Starship could be more expensive per kg to LEO than Falcon Heavy (read more here).

Musk wants to achieve ‘zero touch’ refurbishment, which anyone with a hint of aerospace experience knows is never going to happen in a million years.

But even getting the upper stage mildly reusable might be unfeasible, because the heat shield can’t even survive a single reentry, let alone multiple. Musk has stated that “we are not resilient to loss of a single tile in most places,” and indeed they are still losing multiple tiles per landing. But it gets worse. On their last test flight, SpaceX tried using metallic tiles rather than ceramic ones, with the idea that they might be slightly more robust. But, as it turns out, these metallic ties aren’t actually capable of doing their job to protect the vehicle from reentry heat! Again, anyone with aerospace knowledge could have predicted it a mile away.

As such, SpaceX is currently stuck with its ceramic heat shield tiles. Like Thunderf00t pointed out, these tiles use the same tech as the SpaceX Shuttle’s famously single-use heat shield and are so badly built that they appear to be optimised to be replaced every flight rather than be reused.

Again, this is not an easy problem to solve, and will take a veritable revolution in material science to achieve.

8. Orbital Refuelling

So after ticking off all these targets, SpaceX can start working on travelling to the Moon and Mars. The first stage of this process is to test and demonstrate orbital refuelling between two Starships. Quite simply, this is a monumental challenge.

Firstly, getting two gigantic spacecraft like this to successfully and securely dock in orbit will be a huge achievement.

Then there is the issue of transferring the cryogenic liquid oxygen and methane from one Starship to the other. The risks involved with such a procedure are astronomical. The likelihood of fuel loss, leaks, thermal damage from leaks, structural damage from pressure, and catastrophic explosions is high. This is handling liquid oxygen and flammable liquid gas at the same time in an extreme environment, after all — it is the epitome of dangerous! In fact, this technique is so dangerous that Starship has already experienced explosive refuelling failures down here on Earth.

So conducting orbital refuelling, even if it only refuels a tiny amount, will be a revolutionary milestone for Starship.

9. Develop, Test And Deploy Depot Variant

Once SpaceX proves orbital refuelling technology, it is time to iron out the kinks and make it actually usable. The first step in this strategy is developing the depot orbital refuelling station variant of Starship, as it has to reduce boil-off to near zero in order to make this entire project viable.

Boil-off is exactly as it sounds. The cryogenic liquid fuel will heat up when it is exposed to the raw, unfiltered might of the Sun. Once it is exposed, it will boil. If you don’t want the pressure-vessel fuel tanks to explode, you need to vent out the evaporated fuel to control the pressure. As such, over time, fuel in the depot Starship will boil off into space.

This is a much more serious problem than it sounds. If we assume Starship can deliver 100 tons of fuel to the orbital depot once a week, and that its boil-off is reduced to just 1% per day, then it would take over 100 refuelling missions over two years to get it close to full. That would also put the price tag for a Starship Moon mission at $7.7 billion, or way more than NASA’s already operational SLS (read more here).

For reference, in 2024, NASA stated that storing cryogenic fuels in space for more than a few days is not possible.

But this goes beyond time and cash constraints. Even if SpaceX reduces the risks of orbital refuelling, some risks will always remain. This means that boil-off directly causes a substantial amount of mission risks by increasing the number of refuelling missions required. This issue is so challenging that, under certain circumstances, a Mars Starship mission has more than an 80% chance of exploding in LEO rather than actually making it to Mars (read more here).

As such, developing a reliable depot variant of Starship with near-zero boil-off is critical to getting Starship to the Moon or Mars. And, as it stands, many aren’t even sure if this is possible.

10. Develop, Test And Deploy Tanker Variant

The same is true for the tanker variant. It needs to excel at in-orbit docking and transferring fuel. But it also needs to be exceptionally reusable, potentially more so than the normal Starship, as it needs near-zero turnaround time to reduce the boil-off issues (given that when there is less time between refuelling, there is less boil-off).

Again, many are not convinced this is even possible. But this stage is required before a proper mission to the Moon or Mars is feasible.

11. Develop And Test Human Landing System (HLS)

SpaceX’s contract is for a lunar lander variant of Starship known as the HLS, capable of shuttling astronauts to and from the lunar surface and the Orion spacecraft.

The HLS has all the same problems as the depot and tanker variant turned up to 11.

Firstly, SpaceX needs to develop and test life support, docking and crew transport systems, as well as a Starship variant capable of carrying them.

But they also need to make Starship’s rocket engines durable enough to not only last for the trip to the Moon but for landing and launching from the dusty lunar surface over and over again with no maintenance. The cryogenic liquid-fuel high-power rockets that Starship uses are notoriously short-lived and difficult to reignite repeatedly, as the stress they endure is immense, and even small problems render them useless.

But again, HLS will need to operate around the Moon for months at a time without refuelling. This means it will need to have even less fuel boil-off than the depot.

This is why Apollo landers used hypergolic propellant thrusters, as these are simple, reliable rockets that use fuels stable enough to last months, if not years in space.

However if you wanted to use Starship for a Mars mission, all of these issues are again exacerbated by the longer travel time and Mars’ increased gravity compared to the Moon.

Developing the HLS and its equivalent Mars vehicle is technically a single target, but it is so complex and involves so many challenges that it is by far one of the most difficult targets in Starship’s roadmap.

Overview

Put simply, it has taken SpaceX three years, (as of writing) 11 test launches and over $15 billion to meet four of its main targets (completing a suborbital flight, reaching orbital velocity, landing and relaunching the booster, and conducting a splashdown landing of the upper stage). But it still has 11 main targets to go, each one being significantly harder than the last.

But let’s be generous. Let’s assume that the time and cost to required to meet each target will be the same as the first four — how much will it cost, and how much longer will it take for Starship to be complete? Well, if you crunch the numbers, it will take another $41.25 billion, and about 8.25 years. Remember, in late 2034, it will be nearly a decade after Starship was supposed to land on the Moon).

Let’s be honest though, the targets SpaceX has yet to reach are at least twice as difficult as those it has already achieved. So, very roughly, it would equate to another $82.5 billion and another 16.5 years, placing the total cost at $97.5 billion and a completion date of sometime in the early 2040s.

Yeah, I’m starting to think that Musk’s claim that Starship would only cost $5 billion and be fully prepared in a few years was total bulls**t.

Why Does This Matter?

Well, it’s quite straightforward. SpaceX’s IPO is reportedly going to raise $75 billion, and this cash is mostly supposed to be spent on building and launching orbital AI data centres as well as expanding Starlink into proper profitability. But with the revelation that SpaceX has sunk $15 billion into Starship and not gotten very far at all, it heavily implies that this cash isn’t enough to get Starship up and running. Which is a huge problem because if there is no Starship, then SpaceX can’t deploy AI data centres, or make Starlink truly profitable, as they both depend on the uber-cheap launch costs Musk promised Starship would have. So, what does that say about the IPO?

In short, Starship costing over $15 billion to date undermines the narrative around SpaceX and its IPO. It should make any potential investor question where their cash is going and any pundit question Starship’s and possibly even SpaceX’s viability.

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Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!