A landing eight years in the making
At 13:50 UTC on 6 June 2024, the world’s tallest and most powerful launch vehicle roared off Boca Chica’s pad for the fourth time. Unlike its three predecessors, Starship Flight 4 concluded with two improbable words from SpaceX mission control: soft splashdown. Both the Super Heavy booster and the 50-m Starship upper stage executed near-textbook re-entry burns, survived peak heating and deceleration, and made controlled water landings in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean, respectively. It was the first time a fully-integrated, fully-reusable super-heavy system had flown to space and returned all of its hardware intact.
The result capped almost exactly eight years of iterative development since the carbon-fiber “BFR” concept morphed into the stainless-steel Starship we know today. For the commercial launch market—and for anyone who cares about Moon bases, Mars missions or orbital factories—6 June may prove to be the most consequential date since Apollo 11.
Closing the reusability loop
Reusable rockets are not new—Falcon 9 first landed in 2015—but scale matters. Starship’s 150 t to low-Earth orbit (LEO) payload capacity roughly quintuples Falcon 9’s, yet SpaceX projects a marginal cost per launch below $10 million once the fleet enters airline-style operations. If those numbers hold, the cost of placing a kilogram in orbit would fall from today’s $2,700 (Falcon 9 rideshare) to well under $70.
That two orders-of-magnitude shift rewrites every line item in a space mission spreadsheet:
• Satellites no longer require origami-like folding mechanisms, slashing engineering complexity.
• Constellations can launch hundreds of spare spacecraft at once, smoothing network capacity peaks.
• Deep-space probes can fly wet—carrying ample propellant for agile, extended missions instead of executing delta-V haircuts.
In other words, Starship doesn’t just make launches cheaper; it erases design constraints that have shaped spacecraft for six decades.
Beyond the Moon billboard
NASA’s choice of a modified Starship as the Artemis lander looked risky in 2021. Flight 4’s success vindicates that bet. The same hot-rod that kissed the Gulf of Mexico last week will evolve into a lunar surface variant with additional methane-oxygen tanks, legs and docking ports. Once on the Moon, the mammoth pressurized volume—over 1,000 m³—translates into an instant habitat bigger than the International Space Station’s Destiny module.
But the bigger play is orbital refueling. Starship can’t lift itself plus 100 t of cargo to trans-lunar injection in one go; it needs on-orbit tanker sorties. Flight 4 proved the underlying hardware can survive round trips, pushing propellant-depot architectures from PowerPoint to scheduling software. Lockheed Martin, Blue Origin and European agencies have already accelerated depot demos slated for 2026–27.
A catalytic economic ripple
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Launch bottleneck removal: Start-ups planning synthetic-diamond factories, 3D-printed organs or space-based solar arrays can now build business models on single-digit million-dollar logistics budgets.
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Megaconstellations 2.0: Amazon’s Project Kuiper, OneWeb Gen-2 and China’s GuoWang all eyed Starship as a contingency. Flight 4 flips contingency to default. Expect a bandwidth glut in 2028.
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Earth-to-Earth hops: Although temporarily shelved, the idea of 40-minute intercontinental cargo flights re-enters the conversation each time Starship nails a landing. Regulatory hurdles remain Everest-size, but the precedent for operational safety just got firmer.
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Policy dominoes: The FAA’s revised launch license issued after Flight 3 required 17 safety-critical changes. SpaceX implemented and validated them in six months. That pace will shape future environmental and safety reviews for entire industry segments.
Engineering takeaways
• Heat shield tiles: Of 18,000 tiles, only nine were lost—a drastic improvement over the 960 missing on Flight 3. The proprietary Sharkskin adhesive applied in February appears to have solved shear-off issues.
• Attitude control on ascent: Vector control upgrades reduced roll rate by 40 %, aligning stage-separation timing to the millisecond. That translated into a booster that still had 13 % propellant margin for its landing burn.
• Liquid methane autogenous pressurization worked flawlessly, eliminating the need for bulky helium tanks—a big win for Lunar and Mars variants where resupply is impossible.
What could still go wrong?
Starship is not yet human-rated. NASA rules require a 1-in-500 loss-of-crew probability; Falcon 9/Dragon currently offers 1-in-270 on paper. Extrapolating reliability curves from four flights is statistical heresy. Achieving airline-like sortie rates will demand ground-segment automation that can refuel, inspect and stack 120-m hardware in under 24 hours—without cutting corners.
There is also the geopolitical wildcard. If Starship drops launch costs to tens of dollars per kilogram, military payloads proliferate. Expect renewed debates at the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on whether the Outer Space Treaty’s liability clauses need a 2020-sized update.
Why June 2024 marks an inflection point
Think of pre-Starship spaceflight as the mainframe era—powerful, exclusive, and expensive—but necessary to seed the ecosystem. Starship is the microcomputer moment. Cheaper access invites a Cambrian explosion of niche applications, some frivolous, others transformative, all enabled by a hardware platform that suddenly makes space a normal part of the engineering design space.
History rarely flags its hinge moments in real time, but the synchronized double splashdown on 6 June felt like one. It reset the asymptote of what’s technically and economically feasible above the Kármán line. Whether humanity uses that new bandwidth to mine asteroids, beam solar power or build orbital junkyards remains uncertain. What is certain is that the limiting reagent is no longer lift capacity—it’s imagination.
Sources
- SpaceX. “Starship Flight 4 Mission Update.” 7 June 2024. https://www.spacex.com/updates/starship-flight-4
- Wikipedia. “Starship (spacecraft).” Accessed 20 June 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(spacecraft)