Why Starship Might Finally Make Spaceflight Boring — and That’s a Good Thing
A few days ago, humanity was treated to the fourth test flight — IFT-4 — of the Starship–Superheavy monstrosity from SpaceX. This is not your quaint, tin-can capsule with a flag slapped on the side. This is an unapologetically oversized, steel-skinned brute of a rocket, the aerospace equivalent of parking an oil refinery on a launch pad and daring it to fly. It’s been striding across the news cycle for the last couple of years, stirring awe, skepticism, and mild terror. But this particular test was different. This was the one that made every space tragic — myself included — jolt upright and mutter, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
And I’m not the jumpy type. It wasn’t suspense in the traditional, “Oh God, please don’t blow up” sense — though with rockets, that’s never completely off the table. It was suspense of another kind: the sharp, spine-prickling awareness that you might be witnessing the first functional brick in a future you’ve been told about since you were small enough to believe adults didn’t lie. We’ve always imagined what could be done with a beast like this, but we’ve also been around long enough to know that Elon Musk’s publicity oxygen tent can keep even wheezing, half-formed dreams alive far longer than they deserve. We understand that grand visions require time, industrial-scale money, and a streak of stubbornness that borders on pathology. Until IFT-4 actually clawed itself off the pad and into the sky, it was still all too easy to dismiss it as smoke and mirrors.
I was born in 1969, the year when humanity first dragged itself onto another world and left bootprints in the Moon’s dust. My parents, sensing history was about to happen, bought their first black-and-white television specifically to watch it unfold. That TV quickly became an altar — not for news, not for sitcoms, but for moments when mankind did something absurdly ambitious. I don’t think anyone in my household cared much about TV until Armstrong stepped off that ladder, and then suddenly, we were worshipping at the altar of cathode-ray space. By cosmic coincidence, I was a “Spacie” from the cradle. Frankly, I suspect I’d have been a space nerd regardless — but being born into that year was like being handed a lifelong membership card to the Cult of Tomorrow.
This post first appeared in 2024, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
Like the rest of my generation, I grew up on a diet of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and the more obscure space pulp that TV executives greenlit when they were drunk on the idea of cosmic adventure. We had comic books showing Jupiter’s moons as glittering metropolises, novels where interstellar empires rose and fell before lunch, and special-effects-laden TV shows where humans zipped across the galaxy in ships that never once sprung a coolant leak. These weren’t documentaries — they were fever dreams of a spacefaring humanity that moved between worlds as casually as changing trains. And as ridiculous as some of it was, it stamped itself into our collective imagination.
The problem is that those dreams aged poorly when measured against reality. Year after year passed, and the gleaming future stayed stubbornly fictional. No glittering orbital cities. No colonies terraforming Mars. No asteroid mining fleets or kilometer-wide solar collectors soaking up sunlight like cosmic beach towels. Certainly no warp drives, tachyon converters, or Dyson spheres. Instead, we got more space stations that looked like repurposed plumbing, and an endless sequence of small, brave robots sent off to die quietly on other worlds.
Why? The short answer is devastatingly simple: space is ruinously, preposterously expensive.
For most of the last half-century, everything thrilling that happened beyond Earth was really just a geopolitical pissing contest between a handful of wealthy, paranoid nations. The moon landings weren’t about scientific destiny; they were about one superpower slapping the other across the face in full view of the class. Space wasn’t a business — it was an expense account, and the accountants were national governments.
When the Cold War ended — and with it the single greatest aphrodisiac the Space Race ever had — the flood of money slowed to a dismal trickle. Without the delicious fear of losing face to an ideological enemy, space programs became “budget items,” and budget items get cut. That’s why the Shuttle program drifted along without a bold successor, why so many grand follow-ups to Apollo became museum dioramas instead of launch manifests.
The one exception was satellites. Not all of them — plenty were still prestige projects in disguise, draining public coffers — but a chunk of the satellite market actually paid for itself. Communications, GPS, Earth observation — things that could be invoiced. But even here, the price tag was absurd.
Why? Because in space, there is no “good enough.”
Here on Earth, we build under the assumption that anything can be repaired. We budget for maintenance, we tolerate recalls, we patch and reissue. If something breaks, you send a technician. Mass production and quick iteration drive prices down over time.
In space, the technician isn’t coming. Whatever you launch must work flawlessly for its entire mission. If that’s a deep-space probe, we’re talking decades. Even for low-Earth orbit hardware, rescue is wildly impractical except in the most high-profile cases — like the Hubble servicing missions, which cost the GDP of a small country.
This is why space hardware is overengineered to an almost comical degree. The simplest component must be fashioned from exotic alloys, tested beyond the point of sanity, and wrapped in multiple layers of redundancy. Launch costs are so high that you cannot risk needing to do it twice.
And then there’s the tyranny of rocket fairings. Even the biggest rockets can’t launch something in its fully deployed form, so everything must fold up like an origami project designed by lunatics. That’s why Mars rovers land like robotic Swiss Army knives, unfolding limbs and panels and masts in an intricate dance. One stuck hinge, and a billion-dollar mission turns into very expensive space litter. The testing alone consumes staggering amounts of time and money.
Now picture a future where much of that pain evaporates. A vast, reusable rocket hauls cargo into orbit cheaply and often. It delivers not just payloads, but the components of an orbital waystation — a truck stop in the sky, part refueling depot, part service yard.
Lose a heat shield tile during ascent? No panic — the waystation stocks spares. An engine acts up? Swap it out before continuing. Suddenly, your spacecraft doesn’t need to be built like a Fabergé egg wrapped in paranoia.
For satellites, the change is even more profound. Build them from ordinary materials. Ship them up in parts. Assemble them in orbit with the patience of a mechanic and the indifference to perfection that mass production allows. Forget the deployment origami — just bolt the panels on.
A “space tug” — an orbital tow truck — ferries them to their final destinations. For nearby orbits, slow but miserly ion drives powered by the waystation’s giant solar arrays will do the trick. For more exotic trajectories, chemical boosters are on hand. And because the waystation sits in eternal sunlight, the power never runs out.
The depot also stores cryogenic propellants behind vast sunshades creating a cold bubble that needs no energy to be maintained, keeping them chilled with minimal loss. Over time, the station sprouts habitats, research labs, comms hubs, even rotating modules for artificial gravity. Picture a cluster of Starships lashed together, slowly spinning to give long-term crews something resembling bone density.
Once you have this, the economics of space turn inside out. You can standardize components. You can build fleets of small, specialized satellites instead of a single, fragile, do-everything miracle machine. If you lose one, it’s a shrug, not a scandal.
As for space mining — it’s a seductive fantasy, but Earth will remain the primary supplier for a long time. The real revolution is access: getting to orbit cheaply and being able to do things there. Fully reusable rockets are just the first step. Orbital infrastructure is the game-changer.
Yes, Starship still has development hurdles — but so did Falcon 9, which began life as a serial fireball generator and is now the industry’s poster child for reliability. Ten years ago, watching a booster land upright was like seeing a unicorn tap-dance. Now it’s so routine that the livestream commentators barely raise their voices.
IFT-4 felt like a hinge in history. It hinted at a future where space is no longer a boutique origami contest for billion-dollar toys, but a scheduled, industrial pipeline — more like shipping containers than moonshots. The drama will fade, replaced by timetables and cost sheets.
And that’s the real win. The moment space becomes boring is the moment it becomes ours.
