Europe's Answer to Starship

Europe's Answer to Starship By Mark Thompson - March 01, 2026 11:03 PM UTC | Space Exploration In the summer of 2023, something happened that engineers had talked about for decades but few genuinely expected to see in their lifetimes. SpaceX's Starship, a stainless steel tower taller than a thirty storey building lit its thirty three engines simultaneously and lifted off from the Texas coast. It did not go entirely to plan. But it went. And when the Super Heavy booster returned in flight test five to be caught, mid air, by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower, it was clear that the rules of spaceflight had fundamentally changed. Starship is designed to carry more than 100 tonnes to low Earth orbit in fully reusable form. If it achieves that goal, it will be the most capable and most cost effective rocket in history. For space agencies and rocket companies around the world, the question is no longer whether this represents a revolution, the question is what to do about it. Super Heavy Booster 12 approaching the tower during Starship flight test 5 on October 13, 2024 (Credit : Steve Jurvetson) Researchers at the German Aerospace Center have just published one of the most rigorous independent analyses of Starship yet attempted and unusually, they did not rely on SpaceX's own claims. Instead, they extracted telemetry data from the publicly broadcast footage of the first four integrated flight tests, second by second, and used it to build and validate their own detailed models of the vehicle's performance. The result is a picture of Starship that is both more grounded and more impressive than the marketing suggests. The analysis confirmed that in its current form, a fully reusable Starship that can deliver around 59 tonnes to low Earth orbit. That is roughly what a Falcon Heavy can achieve without recovering any of its boosters at all. The next generation version, equipped with the more powerful Raptor 3 engines and enlarged fuel tanks, is projected to ac...