This is not Trump.
Elon Musk has been working on this for decades — long before Trump was even a name in politics.
I doubt Musk was thinking about Starship twenty years ago in anything like its current form. But the plans, the ambition and the underlying idea have been on the table for a long time. And the potential was breathtaking from the beginning.
We simply did not dare to imagine it.
A transport system capable of moving enormous amounts of mass into orbit, repeatedly, at a cost that could eventually make today’s space infrastructure look almost absurd.
Now, for the first time, it is beginning to feel real.
And if it works, the consequences are difficult to overstate.
Take the International Space Station.
One Starship, transformed into a space station, could be larger, more capable and considerably more comfortable than the ISS ever was — potentially for a tiny fraction of what the ISS cost to build and operate.
Put two or three Starships together and we are no longer talking about an incremental improvement to existing space infrastructure.
We are talking about something humanity has never had before.
And again, potentially at a fraction of the cost of the infrastructure we have spent decades constructing.
But price is not everything.
The real significance is what suddenly becomes possible when the cost of putting mass into orbit falls far enough.
Think back to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
When Reagan announced SDI, the strategic vision was extraordinary, but much of the technology required to make it work simply did not exist. The idea was decades ahead of the engineering.
That is no longer necessarily the case.
Imagine a Starship converted into an orbital weapons platform, powered by a nuclear reactor and equipped with a high-energy combat laser.
Suddenly, the concept of intercepting ballistic missiles from orbit moves from science fiction into the territory of engineering.
And that matters because, for North America, intercontinental ballistic missiles remain among the few truly existential military threats.
An orbital system capable of detecting, tracking and potentially destroying them could fundamentally alter the strategic balance.
That is only one possibility.
And perhaps not even the most interesting one.
Because once an orbital economy begins to exist, the implications extend far beyond weapons.
The space between Earth and the Moon suddenly becomes accessible in an entirely different way.
Not merely accessible to astronauts on carefully rationed missions, but accessible to infrastructure, industry, transport and commerce.
That is the real revolution.
We should resist the temptation to jump immediately to Mars. Mars is spectacular, but it is also brutally difficult, enormously distant and unforgiving.
There is a much more immediate frontier sitting practically on our doorstep.
The Earth-Moon system.
A genuine cislunar economy would mean mining, manufacturing, fuel depots, stations, transport hubs and permanent infrastructure operating beyond Earth.
It would create an economic sphere that has never existed before.
And all of it depends on one deceptively simple proposition:
Make access to space cheap enough, and space stops being a destination. It becomes infrastructure.
That is the change Starship represents.
Not another rocket.
Not another NASA programme.
Not another expensive monument to human curiosity.
A transport system capable of turning orbit into a place where things happen.
Once that threshold is crossed, the question is no longer whether we can afford to go into space.
It becomes what we might do there once getting there is cheap.
That is a much more interesting question.