The Only Justifiable Reason For Starship To Exist
And it's not science or exploration.
SpaceX’s Starship, the future of space flight, and humanity’s ticket to Mars. Its next test flight is rapidly approaching, and if Musk can get it to land correctly, it could be genuinely revolutionary. But, when you take a moment to think about what Starship actually is and how SpaceX is actually going to use it, suddenly it makes zero sense. In fact, there is actually only one use case in which I can justify its existence, and it doesn’t even seem like SpaceX is looking to use it that way. Which is not only a shame but also an astonishing oversight for Musk.
I can summarise the issues with Starship in one word: emissions. Starship and its booster use 1,015 tonnes of methane as its fuel. That means a single Starship launch produces 2,791.25 tonnes of carbon dioxide! But, for Starship to work economically, there has to be a huge fleet of them, with around three launches per day. As such, the Starship project will likely produce a massive 3,056,418 tonnes of carbon emissions yearly! That’s more than most small nations. But this will actually have a far more significant effect on the climate, as these emissions are injected into the upper atmosphere, where they can do more damage. This is also why even if Starship used carbon-neutral biofuel (which it currently doesn’t, and Musk has no plans on using it in the future), it would still have a negative impact on the climate.
With such a vast climate impact, you need to ensure whatever you are using Starship for can justify such damage.
Musk plans to use Starship to expand Starlink and take humans to Mars, then eventually set up a Mars colony. Sadly, neither of these justifies the damage. Firstly, solar-powered high-altitude drones, such as Airbus’s Zephyr, can offer the same service but with higher flexibility, lower cost, and no emissions. If they got even a fraction of the cash injection Starship has got, they could be up and running in a few years. As for Mars, it is a dead planet with fatal levels of radiation, bitter cold, and toxic soil. It can’t even be terraformed; without a magnetic field, it will always lose its atmosphere and revert to its current desolate state. It’s not a future haven for humanity, and trying to start a colony there would be a dead-end vanity project. Likewise, it’s definitely not worth the planet-wrecking emissions.
But, NASA wants to use Starship to send astronauts back to the Moon and possibly Mars. Which definitely seems like a noble cause. However, as NASA’s incredible fleet of Mars rovers and interplanetary probes has shown, we don’t need to go to these other words to explore them personally. In fact, there is an argument that sending probes and rovers is actually a much more efficient way to explore the cosmos, as they are a significantly cheaper alternative to astronauts. What’s more, as they are smaller and lighter, they can launch on smaller rockets, making them less damaging to the environment.
The other use case for Starship is to reduce the cost of launching satellites. But why? It’s not like our lives are being limited by this issue. Really, what we need to do is make our current rockets more eco-friendly. Relativity’s upcoming 3D-printed hydrogen-powered is precisely that, with zero carbon emissions from launch, fewer carbon emissions from manufacturing, and a high enough payload for typically commercial operations.
When we are careening towards a global climate catastrophe, none of these can justify the enormous carbon cost of Starship. But there is a use case that can: space-based solar power.
You see, there is no night in space, and as long as satellites are above Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), they can receive 24/7 direct sunlight unfiltered by any atmosphere. This means that solar panels in space can generate up to 40 times the power of solar panels on Earth each day! Moreover, while solar power has incredibly low carbon emissions, around 6g of carbon dioxide per kWh, almost all of these emissions come from their manufacture. So, if you can figure out a way to build a solar farm satellite in MEO and then beam its energy back to Earth, we could get an uninterrupted supply of renewable energy 24/7, without any habitat loss, and the increased energy output of the panels would counteract any emissions created by launching the satellite. In fact, such a space-based solar farm could actually end up having lower emissions per kWh than current solar energy! It would literally be a perfect energy source and could enable us to take a significant leap towards net-zero.
Now, the one big issue here is: How do you transfer this energy back to Earth? Luckily, there are multiple programs worldwide, all with viable solutions to this conundrum. Many of these already have working prototypes, and as such, we should have solved this problem in the next 5–10 years and be ready to deploy space-based solar power. However, these satellite solar farms will have to be enormous and constructed in space in a similar fashion to the ISS. Such a project would require a giant launch vehicle that is cheap to launch, otherwise the price of the energy would be horrific, and launch at a high frequency, otherwise it would take far too long to build. It wouldn’t matter if it created a carbon footprint, as this will be offset by the reduced emissions of the energy the satellite will create. Well, Starship is the only launch vehicle that fits this bill.
Sadly, though, Musk seems to have no plans to chase this potentially brilliant technology or to use Starship to deploy it. It’s a vast opportunity missed too, as if SpaceX focused on space-based solar power, then they could have a near monopoly on the global energy supply. After all, it would be by far one of the best forms of energy we have ever had, and every nation would scramble to get their hands on it.
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Sources: SpaceX, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Yahoo, Worldometer