SpaceX’s Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It can transport three times more payload mass and four times more volume to orbit than any other launch vehicle in history while offering the potential for significant cost reductions.
Starship will expand the potential for existing space businesses while paving the way for entirely new industries. Given the magnitude of this change, the Space Capital team spoke with 25 senior industry leaders and surveyed nearly 100 top engineering, business, and academic professionals to better understand the dynamics at play. Almost all agreed that Starship is critical to the future of the growing space economy as it unlocks a new engineering paradigm and inspires the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers.
During our interviews, we identified 11 primary use cases that can broadly be categorized as scaling established capabilities and unleashing new opportunities. We then asked our survey respondents to force rank these use cases based on technical feasibility and market viability. The clear winner is mega-constellations, which is both technically demonstrated today and has a large and growing market.
However, we were surprised to learn that few are ready for (or are even thinking about) the changes Starship will bring.
At the engineering level, Starship will “end the tyranny of mass efficiency” Jaret Matthew at Astrolab told us. This fundamental shift will allow spacecraft to be designed with more capabilities, be produced with simpler methods, and fly new mission profiles. More broadly, Starship will accelerate a transition away from the exquisite, expensive, and singular space-based infrastructure of yesterday to the mass-produced, low-cost, large-scale, and distributed platforms of tomorrow.
This transformation will also come with its challenges as Starship faces technical, regulatory, and geopolitical hurdles. Starship is well positioned to weather these factors as it comes to market with three anchor customers: NASA, DoD, and Starlink. Over time, Starship will introduce many novel use cases through its pioneering capabilities in payload mass, volume, and launch cadence.
These use cases range from mega-constellations of satellites to in-space production of pharmaceuticals and our research uncovered significant differences across the technical feasibility and market viability indicating potential risks and opportunities for investors and founders. There are a few companies already building for this new paradigm, but a tremendous amount of white space remains for innovators to explore. Starship presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for new engineers and entrepreneurs to rethink what is possible in space.
And if you would like to hear from the authors of this report, please check out The Space Capital podcast episode, Starship: The Next Giant Leap here!
