This morning, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched a rocket dubbed “Starship” from a site near Brownsville, Texas.

SpaceX planned to bring the huge first-stage booster of “Starship,” called the “Super Heavy,” directly back to its launch pad and capture it with the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower in an unprecedented maneuver. Seven minutes after launch, the Super Heavy landed with pinpoint precision in the Mechazilla launch tower’s metal arms. After performing maneuvers, Starship landed in the sea. This is a historic moment in the annals of space travel.

Starship is a superlative spacecraft and a marvel of modern engineering. As space expert Eugen Reichl said in an interview with the author:

Almost nobody realizes just how revolutionary this spacecraft really is. Starship will dominate space transport for the rest of the twenty-first century. It’s huge, yet cheap to build, it blurs the lines between traditional aerospace and shipbuilding, and draws on influences from automotive engineering. It is versatile. It will be built in a wide range of configurations and has the potential to open up the entire solar system to human exploration.

The name “Starship” is somewhat confusing as it collectively refers to both the first-stage Super Heavy (or booster) rocket (71 meters) and the actual Starship spacecraft—the rocket’s fifty-meter second stage.

Before Starship, the Saturn V rocket was the largest and most powerful rocket in history. It was used to transport the first humans to the Moon in the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. Standing approximately 110 meters tall, Saturn V was only slightly smaller than the........

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