SpaceX turned science fiction into science fact last week after the rocket manufacturer successfully launched its 397-foot Starship spacecraft into the atmosphere, and, seven minutes later, caught the rocket’s Super Heavy booster with “chopsticks” on its launch tower.
The difficulty of this feat can’t be overstated: SpaceX caught an 11 million pound, 226-foot-tall tower that was hurtling out of the sky with a pair of “chopsticks”. Two days after the launch Musk said early in 2025, the company hoped to “catch the ship too,” referring to the Starship spacecraft itself. Successfully catching the Super Heavy rocket was a huge step toward SpaceX’s ambitions of flying humans to the Moon, Mars, and even from city to city on Earth — the company claims it could fly passengers from London to New York on its Starship in 29 minutes.
The reason why it was so important? The ability to reuse its rockets allows SpaceX to lower launch costs.
One of the biggest hurdles to expanding space travel has long been cost. Payload Space estimates that the Starship costs $90 million to manufacture, including $1 million for each of its 39 Raptor engines. Single-use rockets would make space travel too expensive for all but the wealthiest parties, such as billionaires and governments, but reusable rockets have allowed SpaceX to lower its prices, making space travel a viable opportunity.
While SpaceX hopes that Starship will eventually lead missions to the Moon and Mars, the company has already both saved and disrupted the US space industry with the success of its Falcon rockets.
At the turn of the 21st century, space exploration was on its deathbed. In 1966, three years before Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man,” NASA’s budget was $5.9 billion ($55.7 billion in 2023 dollars), or 4.41% of the entire federal budget.
By 2001, that number had declined to just 0.76% of the federal budget or $24.2 billion in 2023 dollars. This budget decline was accompanied by a decline in launches into space: In 1969, America launched 62 objects into space. In 2001, that number was just 34.
One reason for this, as Musk realized before founding SpaceX in 2002, was that launch costs for single-use rockets were too expensive. The price per pound to take a payload to low Earth orbit on one of NASA’s shuttles (which were retired in 2011) was $30K in 2021 dollars. After failing to secure a rocket from Russia in 2001, Musk set out to build his own reusable rockets from scratch, starting with the Falcon 1.
Designed to be a low-cost alternative to satellite launch vehicles from public companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the Falcon 1 became the first privately funded and developed launch vehicle to go into orbit when it carried a dummy payload into low Earth orbit in 2008.
Following the retirement of the partly recoverable Falcon 1 in 2009, SpaceX focused on improved reusability in its next model, the Falcon 9. Ultimately, the company succeeded, with the Falcon 9 rocket boasting a two-stage design with a fully reusable first stage that decreased launch prices to as low as $1.2K per pound in 2022 – an almost 30x reduction.
These cost reductions have coincided with a SpaceX-driven space renaissance over the last 20 years. In 2003, the US sent just 28 objects into space (out of 88 total around the world). In 2023, the US launched 2,166 objects into space – more than the rest of the world combined. Now, SpaceX hopes to build on this momentum with its Starship by accelerating the number of people that the US sends to space.
If you want to read more about SpaceX’s founding story, cosmic ambitions, product evolution, and market opportunities, read our full memo on the company here.
