What does Starship mean?

Starship is the classic word for a vehicle capable of traveling between stars, drawn from literature and film. SpaceX adopted the term in November 2018 to replace BFR, short for Big Falcon Rocket, which the company itself had used since 2017 and which in practice was read a different way. Elon Musk justified the choice with the project's ambition: a vehicle meant for trips to Mars and, in the long run, beyond. The name is aspirational; the system is not designed to travel to other stars.

Starship is both the name of the full system and of its upper stage. The complete vehicle consists of two stainless-steel parts: the Super Heavy booster, about 71 m tall with 33 Raptor engines, and the Starship spacecraft, about 50 m tall with six Raptors, which carries the payload or crew and is designed to re-enter and land under propulsion. Both stages run on methane and liquid oxygen, and both are designed to be fully reusable, something no orbital launcher has achieved so far.

The first prototypes flew in Texas starting in 2019, with hops of a few meters and later climbs to 10 km. The first integrated flight with Super Heavy launched on April 20, 2023 and ended in an explosion after four minutes; subsequent flights progressively completed stages: separation, controlled re-entry, splashdown of both parts, and in October 2024, the booster's capture by the launch tower's arms. NASA has contracted a version as the lunar lander for the Artemis program, and SpaceX positions it as the successor to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.