Britain needs to join the new space race

Elon Musk’s Starship is the biggest rocket ever built. Sending it into space is hard; bringing it back to Earth, in a fit state to be reused, is even harder. The rocket booster, having just carried a craft into space, must not be allowed to crash into the Atlantic and sink to the seabed. Instead, in order for it to be swiftly relaunched, it must fall vertically – back onto a launchpad.

But as the rocket approaches touchdown, its engines have to fire towards Earth in order to slow its descent. And the colossal heat and force generated by these engines is enough to cause severe damage to the launchpad and surrounding infrastructure. That’s why Musk’s team have devised what they call ‘chopsticks’: mechanical arms with which the 469ft SpaceX launch tower will catch a falling rocket booster.

So far, the chopsticks are just prototypes. Soon, though, they will be used to try to catch a Starship booster. This innovation will help SpaceX make it cheaper than ever before, by a huge margin, to get things into space. It will unlock an exciting new era of both economic activity and adventure.

Some of this economic activity includes the manufacture of drugs and fibre-optic cables, which are best done in the ultra-low gravity one encounters outside the Earth’s atmosphere. By the end of this decade, the space economy will be worth $1 trillion, according to consultancy firm McKinsey. In subsequent decades, our ambitions will expand further. With a fair wind, we will mine asteroids, service extraterrestrial colonies and travel from one point on Earth to another via space. London to Sydney in less than two hours could become a reality.