THE NEW SPACE RACE: Catching the Starship: A Breakthrough for Humanity.

Many of the barriers to interplanetary travel and colonisation that feature in popular science articles—such as the threat of cosmic radiation and the difficulties involved in running bioregenerative life support systems—are in fact mass problems in disguise. Radiation can be mitigated by travelling faster through deep space—which uses more propellant, so it’s a mass problem; and by employing additional shielding, also a mass problem. A closed-cycle bioregenerative life support system, which recycles all human waste products into consumables, is beyond our technology at present—but the gap between what is needed and what can be produced through recycling can be made up with supplies from Earth—and so that, too, is a mass problem.

There are still many engineering problems to be solved, but there is also an ample supply of problem solvers on Earth, whose work will be enabled by the coming dramatic drop in launch prices. Just as the density of transistors was the fundamental problem that had to be solved to enable the entire computer industry to rapidly solve software problems, cheap mass to orbit is the fundamental problem which, when solved, will allow rapid solutions to all the other problems of living in space. If the Starship development program succeeds, it is going to unlock this for us.

Starship flight test 6 could come before the end of the year.