Starship: The Next Giant Leap
Why Starship Matters and How It Will Impact the Space Economy
Last year, I had the incredible opportunity to work at Space Capital, a venture capital firm that focuses on the space economy. The Space Capital team regularly publishes industry-leading research and insights, including Chad Anderson’s book, The Space Economy. I highly recommend checking out that book to gain a deeper understanding of the past, present, and future of space-based technologies and the effects on not only our lives on Earth but also on enterprise, government, and consumer markets for decades to come.
During my time at Space Capital, the team and I wrote a research report about Starship, investigating how it will impact the space economy and unlock new capabilities. This article acts as a short preview of the full report, which can be found here and at the end of this article. The Space Capital team and I have also created a podcast and Youtube video giving an overview of the report (which can also be found below). More recently, I spoke about Starship’s impact on the Overview podcast with Anshuk. Now, let’s get started.
How Starship Makes SpaceX a Leader in the Satellite Race
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 and I 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, as shown in the following figure. We then asked our survey respondents to rank these use cases based on technical feasibility and market viability. The clear winner is mega-constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, 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, such as K2 Space’s Starship-class satellites and Starlab’s Starship-class space station, 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.
If any of this interests you, please be sure to check out my full Starship report below. Additionally, to put Starship in context with the larger NewSpace economy, please refer to my “NewSpace Guide To The Galaxy” and “Exciting NewSpace Companies” (link at the end).
If you have any questions or want to just discuss anything space related, I would love to connect! Reach out to me via email: tycho@stanford.edu or Linkedin.
Tycho Bogdanowitsch
Final Links
The Starship Report: Download the full Starship report here
Listen to the Space Capital Starship podcast here, where Chad, Justus, and I give an overview of the major themes of the Starship report
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