Starship: The Dawn of the Reusable Superheavy

SpaceX has come to dominate the American space industry. Now they are dreaming bigger.

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Elon Musk has never been one to hide his ambition. In 2005, a year before SpaceX would launch its first rocket, he was already hinting at plans to build a spacecraft more powerful than had ever flown before. The BFR — officially the Big Falcon Rocket, though the F sometimes stood for something else — would, in his imagination, carry more than one hundred tons into orbit, open the doors to Mars and let humanity blossom out across the Solar System.

It was a heady vision, and one that looked rather ambitious. Just a year later SpaceX would see its first attempt at launching a rocket — the Falcon 1 — spin out of control and crash back to Earth. By 2008, after two more failures, Elon Musk and SpaceX were running short on cash. Just one more failure, Musk later said, would have meant the end.

Fortunately for him, attempt number four was a success. On September 28, 2008, the Falcon 1 reached an altitude of four hundred miles, fired its engines to circularise its orbit, and deployed a lump of metal into orbit. It was…