Humanity’s everlasting goal to explore has hit the wall of space. To surpass this wall, new technologies must be engineered to fly over. After the space race, space development almost halted until the establishment of private space corporations. SpaceX, one of the most well-known and ambitious companies, has made lofty promises. Their new rocket, Starship, is meant to be the first fully reusable, largest, and heaviest payload rocket ever developed to send humans to Mars. While seemingly unrealistic, the development of Falcon 9–one of the most reliable rockets ever–shows their credibility. However, if you follow Starship’s development, starting with its announcement in 2018, there have been 10 test flights, with only five successful flights, and a swarm of critics stating that engineers are overworked with unrealistic expectations. So, how credible are SpaceX’s plans with Starship?

SpaceX differentiates itself from private companies through its quick iterative design and test cycle. Unlike other companies, SpaceX prefers doing multiple tests, failure or not, to learn about its current design flaws. While this seems like a no-brainer to do tests, it comes at a cost. Most businesses don’t follow this policy because of the cost of constructing multiple spaceships to be tested. SpaceX has already spent around five billion dollars on Starship, which is more expensive than every rocket currently in use. Five billion dollars is high for an unfinished rocket, so is Starship close to finishing?

Starship’s development has been criticized because its high costs have been spent on several test flights that have spectacularly failed, many from seemingly obvious, avoidable issues. Several failures were caused by structural integrity. For example, on test flight 9, the Starship’s structure could not withstand the forces experienced during reentry. The reentry caused a rupture in methane tubes and an explosion. Not only test flight 9, but several tests have failed because the structure could not protect the internal components.

To make matters worse, Starship is falling short on its promises even in successful tests. While Starship is the largest rocket currently, it has still failed to be completely reusable or carry the payload promised. The payload is the real issue. Starship is pledged to hold around 150 tons, 6 times more than the previous SpaceX rocket, Falcon 9. However, Starship has only held 20 tons in its numerous tests.

Now SpaceX engineers must fix a structural issue while improving the payload of Starship. Traditional means of strengthening the rocket will increase the weight and limit the already small payload. While Musk is one of the wealthiest men in the world, having already spent five billion dollars, it is hard to call Starship a success.

Let us not forget that this previous model of constant testing has worked before. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is said to be one of the most reliable rockets in the world. While expensive, consistent testing gave them a tremendous amount of data to remove any flaws in the system. Musk repeated this as the goal of these tests, “…each launch is about learning more and more about what’s needed to make life multiplanetary and to improve Starship…” [1]

Starship is far from being the promised ship of the future. For SpaceX to fulfill its promise, it must strengthen the structural integrity or lower the forces the ship experiences while keeping the weight low. Hopefully, these 10 test flights will give SpaceX engineers enough data to create a spaceship for Mars in the future.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/spacexs-starship-faces-10th-test-after-previous-flights/story?id=124822338