This week, the world left behind 69 years of space exploration and commerce and entered the age of Starship, an era that will be defined by drastically lower launch costs and a notable increase in the amount of material humans send to orbit.
SpaceX launched its huge reusable rocket into orbit on Monday, completing the maiden commercial mission to deploy the company’s new V3 satellites.?Although SpaceX didn’t attempt to recapture either the booster or the second?stage spacecraft during Monday’s mission, the company has already demonstrated it can catch the booster, and it previously made a controlled landing of Starship in the Indian Ocean — paving the way for routine capture of both stages for reuse, which is the key to lower costs and more frequent launches.
The industry already got a taste of lower launch costs with SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, whose booster is retrievable. Worldwide orbital launches tripled to 329 last year from 102 in 2019. Falcon 9 accounted for half of those 2025 launches and carried more than 80% of payloads by tonnage. Starship is designed with a payload capacity of 100 metric tons, more than five times Falcon 9’s capacity to low Earth orbit.
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