SWITCHED ON
The daily technology series nobody asked for but everyone needed
To Infinity and Beyond the Budget: The New Space Race
Reusable rockets have genuinely changed the economics of getting to orbit. What happens next is considerably more contested than the billionaires funding it would like you to believe.
The case for becoming a multi-planetary species is genuinely compelling if you think on timescales of thousands of years. The case for making it the defining technological priority of the 2020s, while the planet we currently live on is running a rather urgent set of problems, requires a somewhat more creative argument.
Yesterday we were inside the body, specifically inside the question of whether we can grow replacement organs from scratch — the transplant waiting list, the vascularisation problem that makes engineering solid organs so difficult, what xenotransplantation with modified pig organs has actually achieved, and a realistic timeline that is considerably longer than the headlines suggest but considerably more hopeful than the status quo. Today we are leaving the body, leaving the building, leaving the atmosphere, and in some proposals leaving the planet entirely. Space. The final frontier, the ultimate moonshot, the arena where technological ambition and budget reality collide at approximately escape velocity. Let's talk about what has actually changed, what is genuinely being built, and what is still, charitably, a vision statement.
The honest starting point is that something genuinely significant has happened in the past decade, and it deserves to be acknowledged before the scepticism arrives.
01 — What Reusable Rockets Actually Changed
For the first fifty years of the space age, rockets were single-use. You built an extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily complex machine, you lit it on fire, and assuming it did not explode — which, with some frequency, it did — you used it once and it was gone. The economics of this approach constrained access to space to governments with defence budgets and the occasional telecommunications conglomerate with extremely patient investors.
SpaceX changed this. The development of the Falcon 9's reusable first stage — a booster that launches, separates, and lands itself vertically for refurbishment and reuse — was not a trivial engineering achievement. It was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the most significant advances in launch technology since the Saturn V. The cost per kilogram to low Earth orbit fell dramatically. Cadence increased. The manifest became commercially diverse in a way that government launch programs never were.
The numbers bear this out. When SpaceX was founded, the cost of launching a kilogram to low Earth orbit was roughly $50,000 to $60,000 on existing vehicles. Falcon 9 brought this to roughly $2,700 per kilogram at current rates. Starship, SpaceX's fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle currently in development and testing, targets costs that could fall to hundreds of dollars per kilogram at scale — a reduction of two orders of magnitude from where the industry started. These are not realised figures for Starship yet. They are the target economics that drive the design philosophy. But the trajectory is real and the Falcon 9 numbers already are real.
Cheap access to orbit does not automatically produce a reason to go to orbit. But it removes the cost barrier that made asking the question pointless for fifty years. That is genuinely significant, and it is actually happening.
The downstream consequences are already visible. Satellite internet constellations — Starlink most prominently — are deploying thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit at a pace and cost that would have been impossible under previous launch economics. Earth observation, communications redundancy, and global broadband coverage in underserved regions are the near-term applications. The orbital economy is real, growing, and built on the foundation that reusability created.
02 — The Starship Question
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It is also, as of this writing, still in the test and development phase, having conducted a series of increasingly successful integrated flight tests that have moved from spectacular explosions to controlled splashdowns to, most recently, demonstrated catch of the Super Heavy booster by the launch tower's mechanical arms — a sequence that looked, to anyone watching, like something from a science fiction film. The engineering achievement is real.
What Starship is designed to do is enable a qualitative shift in what is possible beyond low Earth orbit. It is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — both stages. It is designed to be refuelable in orbit, which is the key enabler for deep space missions, because the fuel required to go from Earth to Mars cannot be carried on a single launch; it must be staged. And it is designed, ultimately, to carry humans to the Moon and then to Mars.
NASA has contracted SpaceX to use a Starship variant as the Human Landing System for the Artemis program — the initiative to return humans to the Moon. The timeline for this has slipped repeatedly, as large government space programs have a tendency to do. The technical and contractual challenges involved in orbital propellant transfer, which Starship's Mars architecture requires and which has never been demonstrated at operational scale, remain significant. None of this means Starship will not work. It means the timeline from "increasingly successful test flights" to "reliable crewed interplanetary transport" involves solving a sequence of hard problems, each of which takes time.
03 — The Mars Question
Elon Musk has stated, with remarkable consistency over many years, that making humanity multiplanetary — specifically establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars — is the primary purpose of SpaceX and the central project of his life. The sincerity of this commitment appears genuine. The question of whether it is achievable on the timelines he projects, and whether it is the right priority, are separate questions that deserve serious treatment.
The engineering challenges of Mars colonisation are not trivial, and they are not primarily rocket challenges. Getting to Mars is the part that SpaceX has the most tractable path to solving. Staying alive on Mars is another matter. Mars has no global magnetic field, leaving its surface exposed to solar radiation and cosmic rays at levels that are hazardous for long-duration human presence. It has an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide and roughly one percent the pressure of Earth's — thin enough to be useless for breathing but thick enough to create significant drag during entry and complicate landing for heavy payloads. Surface temperatures average around minus 60 degrees Celsius. There is no liquid water on the surface. Growing food in Martian regolith, which contains perchlorates toxic to humans, requires substantial processing.
A self-sustaining Mars colony — one that could survive without resupply from Earth — requires solving life support, power generation, food production, water extraction, radiation shielding, medical care without Earth hospitals, and manufacturing capability for spare parts and infrastructure, all simultaneously, on a planet where Earth is between 3 and 22 light-minutes away and resupply missions are possible only during launch windows that occur every 26 months. Musk has described wanting one million people on Mars by 2050. The logistics of this — the sheer number of launches, the life support infrastructure required, the supply chain — are staggering. The current human record for continuous presence in a hostile off-Earth environment is roughly 14 months, on the International Space Station, with continuous resupply from Earth.
Mars colonisation is not impossible. It is an engineering problem of extraordinary complexity operating on a timescale that is almost certainly longer than its most prominent advocate publicly acknowledges. Both things matter.
04 — The Other Players
The new space race is not only SpaceX. China's space program has matured substantially and rapidly. The Chinese National Space Administration has landed a rover on the far side of the Moon — a first — returned lunar samples, and is pursuing a crewed lunar landing program with stated ambitions for a permanent lunar base by the 2030s. The pace and ambition of Chinese space activity is routinely underestimated in Western coverage. It should not be.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has had a considerably rougher development trajectory than SpaceX. Its New Shepard suborbital vehicle has been flying and has carried passengers, including Bezos himself. Its New Glenn orbital rocket conducted its first launch in early 2025. Its Blue Moon lunar lander has been contracted by NASA as a second Human Landing System option. The company has moved more slowly than SpaceX and attracted more criticism for it, but it is building real hardware toward real missions.
Rocket Lab, a smaller launch provider, has established itself as a reliable option for small satellite deployment and is developing a medium-lift reusable rocket. A growing ecosystem of launch providers, satellite operators, and in-space service companies is emerging around the infrastructure that SpaceX normalised. The orbital economy is not a single company. It is an industry.
05 — The Question Worth Asking
The technological case for space exploration is real. Scientific return from space-based astronomy, Earth observation, and planetary science has been extraordinary and continues to be. The economic case for the orbital economy — communications, navigation, Earth observation, eventually resource extraction — is increasingly substantive. The long-run case for human presence beyond Earth, as a hedge against civilisational risk on timescales of centuries and millennia, is not obviously wrong.
The question that tends to get crowded out by the excitement is about priority. The resources — financial, human, political attention — being devoted to Mars colonisation exist in a world where climate change is an active emergency, where billions of people lack reliable access to clean water and basic healthcare, where the orbital debris problem is becoming a genuine constraint on future space access, and where the immediate benefits of space investment accrue primarily to already-wealthy nations and already-wealthy individuals.
None of this is an argument that space exploration is wrong. It is an argument that the framing of space as the urgent civilisational priority — the thing we must do now, before it is too late — sits in some tension with the condition of the planet whose problems are considerably more immediately lethal than the absence of a Martian outpost. The two are not necessarily in competition for the same resources. But the enthusiasm gap between "we're going to Mars" and "we're going to fix the water supply in sub-Saharan Africa" tells you something about which problems get to be called moonshots and which ones are just considered hard.
Tomorrow we are coming back to Earth and going online — specifically into the infrastructure that makes all of it possible. The internet itself: where it came from, how it actually works, who controls it, what satellite internet is changing about global access, and whether the digital divide is closing or just changing shape. See you then.
Switched On is a daily technology series covering AI, social media, data privacy, and the digital forces reshaping modern life — with no corporate spin, no false comfort, and absolutely no mercy for buzzwords.
