Military Starship: How SpaceX Is About to Make America Globally Dominant

While Elon Musk focuses on Mars, the Pentagon sees his new Starship program as the key to literal global domination. And if “amateurs talk about strategy, but experts think about logistics”, SpaceX has created exactly what’s needed.

How is Starship Different?

Starship is unlike any rocket before. It’s 100% reusable. It lifts 100 tons, and that number will grow to 200 tons at least (the Saturn V Moon rocket, most powerful in history until now, could lift 130 tons). Starship can also refuel in orbit, so it can send that whole enormous cargo (which might well be several hundred people) anywhere in the Solar System and return whole. The Saturn V could only get a fraction of its payload to the Moon, returning only a tiny capsule.

The difference is staggering even before you consider this. Unlike airplanes, NASA, Boeing, China, Russia, Europe, everyone throws away every rocket they launch. What would it cost if you treated airplanes the same way? If you built a new one every time you flew, on average (based on list price for a new 737), that would increase the cost of each and every plane ticket by roughly $493,650.79. Each way.

You wouldn’t go see grandma a whole lot.

This is why rockets have never been used to move passengers or cargo from point to point on Earth: the way we’ve always done it makes it ludicrously cost prohibitive. But the SpaceX approach completely changes that paradigm. Musk has stated Starship’s cost per launch could drop to as little as $700,000 (for the whole rocket, not just one ticket). By comparison, NASA’s new SLS Moon rocket clocks in at $4.5 billion. Yes, with a “b”. Per launch. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.

And if that weren’t enough, Starship is also cheap to produce, made from common stainless steel at Starfactory in Starbase, Texas. The intended manufacturing rate? One Starship per day. One SLS? Years, with not one part reusable.

The economics are straight out of Heinlein.

The question, of course, is why would Elon want to be able to build a new Starship every day? The things are reusable: even a handful would revolutionize space, and certainly no one has mass produced such things before. Who would even buy them?

But cost determines use. Supply creates demand. Things heretofore written off as not merely impractical but absurd suddenly become routine. The Bessemer process gave rise to skyscrapers and battleships, Ford’s assembly line put a car in every garage, the transistor put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket.

And while these cost structures do indeed make it possible to colonize Mars — and mine asteroids, and manufacture in orbit, and build space stations the size of cities — they enable some very different possibilities here on Earth.

There’s no need for rockets to go to space. Now that rockets can land, they can just as easily take off from one place and land at another. Airplanes do this. ICBMs do too, albeit one-way.

What SpaceX is building is more than just a rocket. Starship is a strategic weapon, not as a one-off but as a fleet. A fully reusable heavy-lift system capable of hauling 200 tons per launch per rocket is not just an engineering marvel: it’s a military revolution.

Strategic Mobility at Hypersonic Speeds

Why? Because a fleet of Starships could land an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour and keep it supplied in the field.

Just as the speed of tanks revolutionized warfare between the World Wars, this development changes everything. Forget C-17s and cargo ships: you might as well use horses and wagons. A fleet of Starships is not just an incremental improvement in logistics: it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. The ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth will give the United States overwhelming power, unlike anything heretofore seen outside of science fiction.

And let me stress: we’re not just talking about the initial deployment. The bigger deal is the resupply. It took six months in 1990-91 for the United States to get its forces in position to invade Kuwait. Maintaining them in the field required a constant stream of slow-moving cargo ships from U.S. ports halfway around the world. A decade later, and for 20 years thereafter, a similar supply chain ran through Karachi, Pakistan, up a rail line, then on truck convoys over the Khyber Pass. Since that was often impractical (there were these pesky Taliban guys about), the military frequently had to rely on the only available alternative, a grueling 36 hours on a C-17 (including layovers). All of this depended on deals with shady, unfriendly countries, subsidies (bribes), and endless risk of attacks on our personnel.

What if you could ship everything you wanted anywhere in the world straight from Texas? Or Florida? Or anywhere else? In under an hour?

Read more HERE.