The Starship Launch

     On 4/20/2023 Elon Musk's SpaceX launched the first test flight of a fully assembled Starship with booster rockets. What does the first successful launch of Starship mean? It means that Elon Musk has taken his first major step towards colonizing Mars. The rocket made it off the launch pad with 30 of its 33 engines burning, and flew for over 3 minutes and 30 seconds by which point three more engines had failed. It reached over 2,000 km per hour and 39 km into the sky where it was supposed to separate and go to stage 2, but that failed and after tumbling a few times in the sky SpaceX had to destroy Starship, or as the commentators said, it had a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly or RUD over the Gulf of Mexico.

     SpaceX stressed that all of this was just for the purposes of data gathering, as we've seen them do in the past with their other platforms. Just like the Falcon system they will iron out the bugs and Starship will become a reality, which means 10 times as many next generation Starlink satellites can be launched at once. If the U.S. military didn't already get everything necessary for orbital kinetic weapons up there with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, they can certainly get their Rods From God into orbit with Starship. If you're not familiar with them, Rods From God are telephone pole sized tungsten rods with the ability to be directed while they're falling from orbit as part of Project Thor, and the idea is that the United States will place a bunch of launch arrays in orbit around the planet. And then if anybody so much as annoys us we drop a telephone pole on them that hits the ground with the force of a nuclear bomb, but no fall out and no violating the international treaties about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in space.

     The first country to get Rods From God into orbit can potentially end all wars on the planet, and SpaceX has an exclusive contract to only take things into space for the U.S. Military. A significant portion of SpaceX missions with the Falcon and Falcon Heavy have already been for the U.S. Government, and the payloads are secret, so some of the infrastructure for the Rods From God may already be up there, but at 12 tons a piece the individual tungsten Rods have been waiting for Starship to be finished, because the Falcon 9 can only lift 9 tons to geostationary orbit, and the Falcon Heavy has only had five flights. With Starship they will be able to take a dozen Rods From God at once into space, and the cost to launch drops from 6.8 million a ton with the Falcon system to only 20,000 a ton with Starship, well within the U.S. Military black budget, or the Space Force budget. 

     When Elon Musk said that he was going to colonize Mars 10 years ago I don't think anybody took him seriously, but each incremental step he has taken with SpaceX has shown that he could potentially do it. And with this test launch of Starship he has shown that it is now only a matter of time before he is flying to Mars. We live in heady times. Having flown Estes rockets as a child, and recognizing that Starship generated twice the thrust of the Apollo-era Saturn V rockets, watching the over $200,000,000 prototype Starship lift off was an amazing sight.

     All of Elon Musk's companies except for Neuralink and now Twitter are directly related to colonizing Mars. He has electric cars, batteries and solar panels with Tesla, tunneling and brick making with the Boring Company, and satellite communications and now Starship with SpaceX, all necessary infrastructure for colonizing Mars. The exact size of Starship was arrived at through calculating the amount of infrastructure necessary to transport to Mars combined with the necessary capacity to transport a million people there so that by 2050 there could be a colony of a million living on Mars.  The final result has a carrying capacity of 150 tons in a standard recoverable configuration where every booster stage is recoverable along with Starship itself, or 250 tons if it is "expendable."  A carrying capacity of 150 tons is over 15 times what the Falcon has been carrying for SpaceX, and over 3 times what the Falcon Heavy can carry, but the Falcon Heavy appears to have been only a test platform to get to Starship.

     Another business for SpaceX is InterContinental travel. They will launch Starship, fly out of the atmosphere and drop back down next to another continent, and it's like flying to another city a few hundred miles away in an airplane. SpaceX will have spaceports off the coasts of continents in the oceans, and also in Lake Michigan, and it should be competitive with international air travel with the bonus of arriving sooner and flying in a spaceship. So good luck to Mr. Musk in all his endeavors, and now that Starship is becoming a reality, I look forward to the day he launches InterContinental flights and then to the day that he colonizes Mars.