When did starship troopers come out?

Starship Troopers is a science-fiction film directed by Paul Verhoeven and released in the United States on 7 November 1997. It adapts, loosely, the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein, which won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1960. The film satirised militarism through a war between humanity and an insectoid species, and its title has no connection with any real launch vehicle: the starships of the novel are fictional interstellar troop carriers.

Search engines now conflate the film with Starship, the fully reusable launch system that SpaceX has been developing since the late 2010s. The rocket's name was adopted in November 2018, when Elon Musk renamed the vehicle previously known as BFR. Its upper stage is also called Starship, and its booster Super Heavy. The first integrated flight test took place on 20 April 2023 from Starbase in Texas; the vehicle was destroyed a few minutes after lift-off, but later flights achieved orbital-class trajectories, controlled splashdowns and, in October 2024, the first catch of a returning booster by the launch tower arms.

The film had sequels released direct to video in 2004 and 2008, animated features in 2012 and 2017, and a long afterlife in video games and comics. The launch vehicle, by contrast, is meant to carry more than 100 tonnes to low Earth orbit and is contracted by NASA as the lunar lander for the Artemis programme. If the question is about the cinema release, the answer is 1997; if it is about the SpaceX vehicle, the meaningful dates are 2018 for the name and 2023 for the first flight.