Why yesterday’s SpaceX launch was such a huge deal for space travel

Starship is designed to be the world’s first fully reusable rocket, meaning both the booster and the spaceship should be able to return to Earth ready to be used again.

Super Heavy’s successful landing on Sunday is one of the last big steps toward achieving that goal.

The savings of reusability aren’t hypothetical; SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 boosters have already proven that reusability can cut costs. SpaceX is able to offer cheap and quick turnaround launches at around $67 million per flight, which is about $1,500 per pound of payload.

By comparison, the Space Shuttle cost about $25,000 per pound to fly when it was active.

Musk has previously said his ambition is to bring Starship costs down to about $10 million per launch, a drastic price cut that could open the door for futuristic space industries like asteroid mining and space factories and ultimately pave the way toward achieving Musk’s vision of a colony on Mars with 1 million people.

Starship is the vehicle that’s supposed to make Musk’s Mars dreams come true.

“No rocket before this has had the potential to extend life to another planet,” Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 for this very purpose, said in April. Musk isn’t the only one.

“I have little doubt that it’s going to be the workhorse that will bring humans back to the moon and Mars,” Olivier de Weck, professor of aeronautics, astronautics, and engineering at MIT, previously told Business Insider.

“It’s not just a cool rocket project, but literally it has the potential to change the fate of humanity,” he said.

SpaceX makes rocket history

In past Starship test flights, the Super Heavy booster either exploded mid-flight or landed in the water. Sunday’s test flight was the first time the booster returned to its launch site.

After its 33 Raptor engines roared to life, lifting Starship toward its destination, the booster headed toward home. As it neared the launch tower, it fired three of its engines to slow down, and then like something out of a sci-fi film, it slowly lowered itself gently into the tower’s mechanical arms as SpaceX employees screamed and cheered in the background.

However, the company has faced a series of setbacks and delays since Starship’s inaugural orbit-height flight 18 months ago. SpaceX said regulators were delaying Starship’s fifth test launch because of minor changes and that the FAA was dragging its heels.

But on Saturday, the FAA approved Starship’s fifth launch and SpaceX wasted no time and launched the very next day. The FAA did require that SpaceX take more steps to better analyze the environmental impact of its launches moving forward.

For example, SpaceX will have environmental engineers check how the launches affect nearby animal nesting sites during and after launches, The New York Times reported.