The Imminent Catastrophes behind Elon Musk’s “Starship”

Written by: Leo A. on 17 July 2024

(Above: Elon Musk at the Kennedy Space Centre in 2020 with then President Trump in preparation for the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/   Public Domain)

An often-overlooked way in which Australia is kept dependent on foreign powers is through access to space. Since this country currently has no orbital launch ability of its own (this could change later this year with Gilmour Space’s Bowen Orbital Spaceport granted Australia’s first orbital launch facility licence), Australian satellites must be launched on foreign soil by foreign, typically American or French, space programs. 

One of these programs, Elon Musk’s American corporation SpaceX, has been regularly making their way into the news headlines. The most recent topic of discussion concerns test flights of the “Starship” launch system, the most recent of which took place on June 6. There are two key causes of concern that should be considered in light of these recent developments. 
 
A New Greenhouse Gas Catastrophe 
 
First, the environmental impact of this new rocket has been mostly overlooked – perhaps due to the assumption that Starship is no more environmentally harmful than similar rocket systems, or perhaps due to the assumption that anything sufficiently “futuristic-looking” can’t possibly have a catastrophic environmental impact. Both of these assumptions are false. 
 
What sets SpaceX’s Starship apart from previous heavy-lift launch vehicles is the chemical reaction used for its propulsion system. All large rockets are powered by a combination of an oxidiser and a fuel. Like similar systems, Starship uses liquid oxygen as its oxidiser, no problem there, but unlike similar systems it uses liquid methane as its fuel (this combination is sometimes referred to as “methalox”). 
 
Methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas, dozens of times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. While the methane is intended to be burned in the ignition chamber during launch without leaking into the air, there are many steps in the process in which this could happen. Consider all the moments during the production, storage, transportation etc of the methane in which some of it can escape containment. Not to mention how much of it might not even ignite when it’s injected into the chamber and could simply exit the nozzle into the air, or how much of it may be released into the air during an explosive launch or re-entry failure (of which there have already been several). Even for the methane that does ignite as intended, the combustion reaction produces carbon dioxide as an exhaust product, so either way thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases are being released with every launch. Now multiply that by the thousands of launches that are being planned, and a very serious problem begins to emerge. 
 
And why was such a devastating fuel chosen for the Starship programme? This question was answered in detail in a 2016 presentation when the programme was pitched in detail for the first time. Three fuel options were originally considered – kerosene, hydrogen and methane. Kerosene cannot be manufactured using the available resources of any worlds besides Earth, so the choice was primarily between hydrogen and methane. Reasons given in the presentation for choosing methane over hydrogen included several “disadvantages” of hydrogen that have already been resolved across decades of aerospace experience in using hydrogen in rocket propulsion. But one line in the comparison chart sticks out like a sore thumb: “Cost of propellant”. 
 
That’s what it’s really about. Methane was the cheapest of the three rocket fuels to mass-produce. As fancy and “shiny” as Elon Musk’s projects depict themselves, in the end they’re driven by the same motivations as any other bourgeois entity. 
 
The rejected fuel option, hydrogen, may deserve a closer look. At the present time, nearly all of the world's current supply of hydrogen is unsustainably created from fossil fuels, however there are methods of producing it in a clean, renewable manner, and these methods could theoretically be scaled up during a transition away from fossil fuels. It appears doubtful that clean hydrogen could itself become a major energy source, as some capitalists such as Twiggy Forrest claim, however it does not have to be in order to be used for space travel. Unlike methane, hydrogen itself isn’t a greenhouse gas, and in any case doesn’t remain in Earth’s atmosphere for long. And the combustion product of hydrogen and oxygen is water. In other words, the exhaust forms a tiny, temporary artificial cloud during launch. There are other environmentally-friendly methods of reaching space as well, some of which do not involve traditional rockets at all. 
 
American Tools of War 
 
Musk’s venture, like other parts of the space program, is intimately tied to Imperialist warfare - both supporting current wars and preparing for future ones. This has always been true, in fact the American space program began as little more than a military project for developing ICBMs aimed at the Soviet Union, China, and their allies. In the present day, military satellites serve numerous functions in support of the war machine, ranging from long-distance communications to spying on an opponent’s actions. SpaceX already regularly launches military satellites, and isn’t even against repurposing non-military satellites into tools of war. For example, the “Starlink” satellite network, supposedly designed to assist in giving internet access to remote communities, has been used by Ukrainian forces in the ongoing inter-imperialist proxy war so regularly that the one time Musk didn’t allow it’s use became newsworthy. 
 
Unlike any orbital launch vehicle currently in use, Starship has the capability to launch over a hundred tonnes of payload into low earth orbit at once. Such a capability in American hands can, and will, be used for malicious purposes. In the immediate, short-term future, this will play a role in the ongoing campaigns of imperialist aggression around the world. In the more distant, long-term future, the roles of military satellites may expand to encompass, for example, the ability to directly strike targets on the ground from orbit, and this may be seen in the larger conflicts that Australia will likely be dragged into. 
 
Looking deeper into the future 
 
We shouldn’t lose sight of another risk that could emerge if the Starship programme is successful at establishing regular interplanetary travel for profit-oriented purposes. Environmental destruction will follow wherever the interests of capital are given priority, and there’s no reason this trend would not continue offworld. By now lead, microplastics, and other pollutants have been found in every rainforest, glacier and deep-sea trench on Earth. Even Low Earth Orbit has been polluted by the Kessler Effect over the past few decades (and the Starlink project has made this far worse in recent years). Deep Space remains the one place that has yet to be corrupted by capitalism, and it should remain that way. One world has already been devastated by careless exploitation, we should hope that number does not increase. 
 
This does not mean that space travel itself is inherently reactionary or counterrevolutionary. If anything, history shows us the opposite. While many of the Soviet Space Program’s most infamous accomplishments took place during the 1960s, Soviet superiority in space already began before this. For example, in July of 1951, the Soviet Union launched the first mammals to survive a flight into space. Three years later in 1954, a developmental plan was proposed for the world’s first artificial satellite – what we now know as Sputnik 1. The foundations of a powerful space program had already been laid by the time of the revisionist takeover.

We should also remember the PRC’s “two bombs one satellite” programme. As early as 1958 Mao Zedong formally announced the development of a Chinese orbital space program. In April of 1970, China’s first satellite was successfully launched into space, making China the fifth nation to put a spacecraft into orbit using its own rocket. So no, the corruption of space travel by bourgeois interests does not make space travel itself inherently negative. 
 
Nor is the often-discussed ambition of populating other worlds (the term “colonization” is often used but appears unsuitable as this has little in common with the deadly colonialism of the past and present) counterrevolutionary either. In fact, this concept was first seriously promoted by a Soviet rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. A few short years after the establishment of the USSR, he published a plan for the long-term expansion of the human species into space. 
 
And this will likely happen in the future. Other worlds will likely be populated, not as a result of some billionaire’s side-project, but as the result of a socialist endeavour – likely of an international collaboration of socialist states. If the struggles of the present day are eventually won, this will be just one part of the bright future our children and grandchildren can look forward to. 

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