Allison P. | Red Phoenix international correspondent–

2337 27 May 2025 UTC, 33 Raptor engines roared to life in a glorious return to flight for the Starship Super Heavy program, carrying with it hope for the future and the promises of commercial spaceflight providing cheap access to space. It failed, just as had the previous eight flights of Starship in chorus with the previous 51 years of private spaceflight. This comes amid discussions to cancel the SLS and Lunar Gateway programs. 

Despite extensive use of double-speak and redefining success there is little other way to view the Starship program than as an abject failure. The Starship program after 9 flights has thus far failed to achieve a stable orbit, it has had continuous problems in being able to light and maintain engines (1,2,3,4,7,8,9), it has struggled to maintain control (1,3,9), the heat shield has suffered numerous burn-throughs (4,5,6), and the vehicle has exploded multiple times (1,2,7,8,9). 

To date no orbital program can be directly compared with the magnitude of Starship’s repeated failures — not Atlas, not Thor, not Astra, not Proton, not even the N1. The Soviet N1 did fail four times, and it was estimated supposedly to require ten to twelve to become fully operational (this is difficult to verify), however this project was never completed and did not have the computational power, nor the infrastructure, nor the materials knowledge we have today. Fittingly the only program which has had a comparable string of failures is the Nazi V2. It required a total of 16 launches before having a successful test flight in 1943.

Martianerreichsführer-hopeful Elon Musk has promised Starship to be capable to launch for a price of two million USD which would represent a three order of magnitude reduction in cost, something many believe is key to industrializing space. Starship will as well be capable to launch multiple times a day and will carry its first passengers to Mars in 2024! (According to an article published May 28, 2025.) These values are wholly unrealistic and even the most idealistic of trade studies suggest a factor of at least 100 fold larger. However this is not the first time such promises have been made. In 2013 SpaceX promised Falcon 9 to be capable for 5-7 million USD and to relaunch within 24 hours neither of which has yet occurred. In 2018 it was again promised that Falcon flights would be 5 million USD. This however has not come to pass.

Although SpaceX has been a focus of this article and my own personal ire as a rocket scientist, they are not the first nor hardly the only to promise radical cost reductions via private industry. There have been four main waves of promises for the delivery of the free market. The first was in the late 70’s through Truax’s Private Enterprise and OTRAG in West Germany (and later Zaire and Libya after the political situation in West Germany proved untenable for their program). The second era was during the death knells of the USSR as they plastered advertisements on their rockets and sold off Mir. However during this same period in the United States the rocket Pegasus was developed and Conestoga to capitalize on smaller payloads and the failure of the shuttle. The third was during the later 90s primarily focused on MEO satellite phones which failed spectacularly and gave us such wacky proposals as the Roton. We are currently in the fourth and so far most successful generation of space privatization with multiple companies developing and deploying rockets including SpaceX, RocketLab, and Blue Origin among a handful of others.

A commonly reported figure is that SpaceX and private spaceflight in general has reduced the cost to launch by a factor of 10 or 20 from around 54000 USD/kg to 2700 USD/kg. This is however an extreme and very likely purposeful mischaracterization of the state of the market. Cost per kilogram is itself not a good indicator of capability, however even in this commonly used metric, private space flight does not measure up to its promises. This value is achieved by dividing the programmatic cost of the shuttle by its maximum payload (1500M/27,5T) and comparing that to the cost of a reused and recovered falcon 9 (62M/22,8T) to its maximum capacity. However, the falcon 9 does not cost 62M, nor was that 62M ever for a disposable booster, nor does it regularly fly in a disposable manner as that would violate the economics of SpaceX’s design philosophy, nor is the necessary payload adapt fitting a standard part of which only actually became available recently. Instead the current number is closer to 4000 USD/kg (70M/17,8T). This brings the price roughly in-line with Russian, Chinese, and Indian launch providers. On top of that the space shuttle was a manned craft carrying seven passengers aboard. These two craft are not comparable and the capabilities of the shuttle have never been matched. However if one were to mechanically apply numbers to compare — 55M*7+4M/T*17.8T=456M, a value very close to the shuttle’s often listed marginal cost at least in 2011 dollars (note the 55M, the most common value, is disputed by sources with some claiming as high as 88M). A recent study in Acta Astronautica has found that the privatization of space has not resulted in significant savings, but instead show an average annual launch cost between 1996 and 2024 of 2.8% (nor is this the first such study to note stagnant or increasing costs). It is unclear if this value accounts for inflation, however, that means in the best case, the privatization of space has only maintained the dollar cost of space access at a pretty significant cost to nearly everything else. 

For the benefits we receive from the privatization of space, in particular raining debris over the Caribbean, damaging ground based observatories, and creating near constant collision risks, the damage caused by this privatization is quite significant and in many ways quite difficult to measure. Spaceflight used to be considered a very comfortable and cushy job, however from personal discussions the changes in the industry have caused massive shifts in workload and culture to a very toxic environment filled with long hours, tight deadlines, and immense pressure to perform while at the same time wages have been stagnating, benefits slimmer and harder to find, and job security non-existent. However the bigger issues of private space flight are institutional – knowledge used to be concentrated within several large bureaus and stable organizations, more and more knowledge is scattered and expertise is not retained (this is likely a significant component of starships failures as they are widely understood to have lose most of their long term staff and have many very young engineers).

While the research and development before were publicly funded and available, now the research and development are still publicly funded, however the results, and the profit from those results, will be private. The rockets being built today would not be possible without the research done and made available by the US and the USSR. The materials science that underscores nearly every modern engine was a result of Soviet scientists in the 60s, the thermal tiles that protect Starship are a direct descendant from work on the Shuttle program, vehicles like Dreamchaser is a descendant of the Soviet BOR-4, the computational power and handling systems a result of knowledge gained from the USSR and US but as well France since the 60s. The knowledge and capability within our industry is built upon the work of thousands who came before us, and without that information available, it will be impossible for the next generation to effectively build on top of our work.

Despite lofty promises, access to space has not meaningfully changed with privatization of space. Instead, formerly comfortable workers and public money have been squeezed for the profit of a few billionaires. Unfortunately for our dear comrade Tim Curry, space is no longer the one place that has not been corrupted by capitalism.

Categories: Technology, U.S. News