Earth-to-Earth Starship: How SpaceX Is About to Revolutionize Travel and Shrink the World
Starship will transform not just Space, but Earth, in exactly the same way that airliners and automobiles changed a world of steamships, trains, and horses. Our latest Deep Dive.
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by Rod D. Martin
May 29, 2025
In every age, there comes a machine that changes the world. Not merely through novelty or incremental progress, but by upending the logic of time and space itself. The Roman road. The steamship. The railroad. The jet engine. The Internet. Each reshaped civilization, rewrote expectations, and redrew maps.
Even more than AI (which he’s also creating), Elon Musk’s Starship is that next machine.
It was built to colonize Mars. But before it ever leaves Earth orbit, Starship is about to make oceans irrelevant. In fact, before it becomes the backbone of multiplanetary civilization, it will become the fastest way to get from New York to Shanghai, from Dubai to Los Angeles, from Seoul to Buenos Aires.
We’re not talking about faster planes or better airports. We’re talking about ballistic point-to-point rocket flights — suborbital hops that carry passengers or cargo halfway around the world in under an hour. Not 14 hours. Not 7. Less than one.
And we’re not talking fantasy. We’re talking imminent reality.
SpaceX’s Starship is not just a rocket. It is the world’s first reusable, heavy-lift, ultra-high-cadence transportation system — the successor to and replacement for long-haul aviation, disrupting global logistics and fulfilling a decades-old dream, civilian and military: to deliver anything, anywhere, anytime, at orbital speed.
The idea isn’t new. Heinlein wrote stories about ballistic point-to-point rockets in the 1940s. Wernher von Braun proposed similar in 1956. The U.S. military has explored suborbital logistics concepts since the 1960s. It’s investing in its Rocket Cargo program now.
What’s changed is the technology — and the rise of a man willing to build it.
The Vision: Global Cities, Minutes Apart
Imagine waking up in Tokyo and attending a lunch meeting in Paris. Imagine delivering a 100-ton payload from Florida to Afghanistan — without overflight permissions, staging bases, or weeks of lead time.
This is the promise of Earth-to-Earth Starship: to collapse distance into time, to deliver cargo and people between any two points on the planet in under 60 minutes. Not by flying through the air, but by briefly exiting it.
Take off vertically from an offshore platform outside New York City. Burn through the atmosphere in three minutes. Coast over the curve of the Earth for twenty-five. Reenter over China. Land softly on another ocean platform off the coast of Shanghai. Total flight time: 39 minutes.
That trip would be a 15-hour direct flight on Air China today.
Here are some sample city pairs to give you a sense of the magnitude:
New York to London: 29–30 minutes (vs. ~7 hours 55 minutes by commercial airliner)
New York to Los Angeles: 25 minutes (vs. ~5 hours 25 minutes by airliner)
New York to Shanghai: 39 minutes (vs. ~15 hours by airliner)
London to Dubai: 30 minutes (vs. ~7 hours by airliner).
London to Hong Kong: 34 minutes (vs. ~11 hours 50 minutes by airliner)
Los Angeles to Sydney: 40 minutes (vs. ~15 hours by airliner)
Bangkok to Dubai: 27 minutes (vs. ~6 hours 25 minutes by airliner)
Dubai to Tokyo: Approximately 35 minutes (vs. ~9–10 hours by airliner).
Tokyo to Singapore: 28 minutes (vs. ~7 hours 10 minutes by airliner)
San Francisco to Delhi: 40 minutes (vs. ~15 hours by airliner)
Sydney to Tokyo: 33 minutes (vs. ~8–9 hours by airliner).
Atlanta to Nairobi: 38 minutes (vs. ~16–18 hours by airliner, including connections).
Anywhere to anywhere? Less than one hour.
The degree to which this shrinks the world is breathtaking. All of these are shorter flights than my milk run on Delta from Destin to Atlanta. And at the right price, that shrinkage will become very real very fast, as people in Atlanta discover they like to commute from a home with views of Mount Kilimanjaro, or the Eiffel Tower, just as much as they enjoy commuting from the shores of the Gulf of America.
SpaceX released a concept video for this in 2017. But the idea predates the animation. Musk has long envisioned leveraging his Mars vehicle for terrestrial transport. And the Department of Defense is betting billions on the same thing.
How did you think he was going to pay for colonizing Mars?
The capability to transport 200 tons of cargo anywhere on Earth in under one hour is not just useful: it’s transformational, in exactly the same way that airliners and automobiles changed a world of steamships, trains, and horses. It changes the rhythm of war, disaster relief, diplomacy, and commerce. It also changes what, and who, we consider “nearby”.
How Do We Get to That Future?
Starship is not a paper project. It’s flying. Its ninth test flight — including the first-ever reused Super Heavy booster — was this Tuesday. It ended in an RUD: a “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”. But it achieved most of its goals, and each test makes it more reliable, just like countless rocket designs before it.
The vehicle consists of two stages: the Super Heavy booster, 226 feet tall and powered by 33 Raptor engines, and the Starship upper stage, 164 feet tall with six engines and a heat-shielded aerodynamic body.
Fully stacked, Starship is 400 feet tall, weighs over 5,500 tons fully fueled, and is capable of lifting 100 to 200 metric tons of useful payload — more than any rocket in history.
But payload mass is not the main story. The true revolution is full reusability. Starship is designed to launch, land, and relaunch, fast — like a 737, not a Space Shuttle or an ICBM. No stages discarded. No parts recovered by helicopter or trawler. Just fast turnaround and rapid redeployment.
Starship is the first rocket designed for the same principles as commercial aviation: high volume, fast cadence, and minimal marginal cost per flight.
It runs on methane and liquid oxygen — cheap, storable, and mass-producible on Mars and elsewhere around the Solar System, including Earth. But here on Earth, the real benefit is economic. Falcon 9 already cut launch costs dramatically. Starship will take that much, much further.
It’s not just the most powerful rocket ever made — it’s also likely to become the cheapest per pound.
For comparison, here’s cost per pound of useful payload to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) for various rockets:
Space Shuttle: $30,000 per pound
SLS (expected): $15,000 per pound
Titan IV Heavy: $14,000 per pound
Delta IV Heavy: $6,500 per pound
SpaceX Falcon 9: $1,850 per pound. No wonder it now launches 85% of everything that goes to space.
Now compare Starship, operational version and planned version 3:
Starship (100 tons): $9.07 per pound
Starship v.3 (200 tons): $4.54 per pound
That brings travel by Starship down to airline ticket prices. And Elon is seeking to cut even those costs by more than half.
That brings rocket technology out of the rarefied realm of billion-dollar launches into the world of hourly departures and millions of passengers. And Musk has said repeatedly that Earth-to-Earth could undercut long-haul airfares within a decade of adoption.
Passengers at the Edge of Space
So let’s talk passengers.
You wake up in Miami and ride a boat 20 minutes to an offshore pad. You check in for your flight — not at an airport, but at a launch tower. You board Starship with 200 fellow passengers. You strap in. The countdown hits zero.
33 Raptors light. You feel 3 Gs press you back in your seat. In two minutes, you’re in near-space. For twelve minutes, you arc across the edge of the atmosphere in microgravity. You reenter on a steep trajectory. And a few minutes later, you land vertically — soft as a feather — on a floating pad near Tokyo.
No turbulence. No layover. No jet lag. No waiting 16 hours to cross the Pacific. Not even enough time for drink service. You leave Florida before sunrise. You land in Japan before breakfast.
Total trip time: 48 minutes.
Early adopters won’t be tourists. They’ll be diplomats, executives, and military personnel. But the pattern is familiar. Once a high-end, government-subsidized infrastructure is proven safe and profitable, the price curve crashes.
That’s what happened with jet travel. That’s what happened with cellphones. That’s what happened with the Internet.
Earth-to-Earth Starship isn’t Concorde 2.0. It’s what Concorde should have been — and what it never could be. Concorde was beautiful. But it was loud, slow to turn around, and fuel-inefficient. Starship is fast, silent outside launch and reentry, fully reusable, and radically scalable.
It’s the most efficient form of high-speed intercontinental travel ever devised.
And SpaceX isn’t planning ten of these vehicles. It’s building thousands. Starfactory is designed to crank out one a day, every day. Just as Tesla scaled EV production to mainstream levels, Musk intends to scale Starship to the point of ubiquity. And when that happens, long-haul aviation will go the way of the ocean liner.
At first, of course, it will be expensive. So were steamships. So were jetliners. But once safety is proven and volume increases, pricing will fall dramatically.
Falcon 9 already delivers satellites at 10%-20% of the cost of traditional expendable rockets. Starship is poised to cut that by orders of magnitude. And it can carry almost twice as much as a 747 or C-5 — 200 tons — in 40 minutes, not 14 hours.
Starship’s fundamental advantage is economic: full reusability. In case you were wondering how Starship can so badly undercut the pricing of traditional rockets, consider this. If you built a new airliner 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 you buy by roughly $493,650.79. Each way.
Yes, how we approach rocketry has been crazy for a long time.
The same infrastructure built for Mars and the Moon is about to make the Earth very small.
Military Starship: Logistics at the Speed of War
Earth-to-Earth Starship is not just about passengers. It’s about troop transport, cargo — and speed.
In war, in disaster relief, in global business, time is the one non-renewable resource. Traditional logistics move mass, but they move it slowly. Starship moves it now.
Imagine the Pentagon being able to deploy an entire armored division to Eastern Europe in an hour. Or deliver 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to a tsunami-ravaged island before the first helicopter takes off. Or supply critical munitions to an ally mid-conflict, with no airbases or ports required. Or relocate a satellite ground station in 45 minutes.
Better still, imagine a complete logistics solution that replaces (for example) the supply line from the East Coast by sea to Karachi, up the Peshawar railway, and by truck over the Kyber Pass to Kabul or Kandahar. Real-time resupply, in an hour, not a month. And without armed resistance along much of the path.
It’s transformative. I wrote an entire Deep Dive on this, “Military Starship: How SpaceX is About to Make America Globally Dominant”. I encourage you to read it: it shows how we’ll be able to deploy and supply an army on the scale of the Iraq War entirely by this means, and at a price similar to the sea and air transport actually used, with deployment in an hour, not months.
The Department of Defense is already investing in this use case under its Rocket Cargo program. The Space Force, Air Force, and U.S. Transportation Command are actively funding research into how to use Starship to deliver troops and supplies.
No runways. No sea lanes or choke points. No haggling with corrupt countries along the path. Just a pad and a payload. And even the pad is optional: Starship is designed to land and launch again from undeveloped, uneven planetary surfaces. The shipment arcs over oceans and continents — and lands right where you need it. A field outside Kharkov or Kaohsiung will do just fine until a proper base can be built.
But once that infrastructure is in place, those same facilities enable civilian applications. A world with Starship delivery is a world where Amazon can ship goods internationally — not next day but next hour. Where hospitals can source life-saving medication from the other side of the planet. Where chipmakers in Taiwan and manufacturers in Germany can operate as if they’re across the street.
Medical supplies. Satellite parts. Human organs. High-value microchips. Crisis-response equipment. Food in a famine zone. A water purification system for a devastated island. Starship can deliver intercontinental shipments before a FedEx jet is wheels-up.
And yes, it can deliver Christmas gifts across the globe in less time than Santa Claus.
That’s not just progress. That’s liberation. It’s also the formula for American global dominance.
Remember: Falcon 1 flew in 2006. By 2024, SpaceX was launching more mass to orbit annually than every other country combined, fully 85% of everything launched into Space for the entire planet.
Now imagine that same curve applied to terrestrial transport, military or civilian.
Civilizational Change
Throughout history, technology that collapses space reorders civilization. The railroad built continental empires. The steamship enabled global trade and missionary work. The jet engine expanded tourism, commerce, diplomacy, and military reach exponentially.
In a world with routine Earth-to-Earth flights, the entire logic of basing, alliances, and chokepoint strategy begins to erode. The ability to move mass at speed becomes a new axis of national power.
And commerce? Transformed. If a product can be in Frankfurt, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires all in the same day, then the logic of production and distribution will follow. So will finance. So will culture. So will where we get to choose to live.
In a Starship-connected world, New York and Nairobi are closer than New York and Newark used to be.
Even real estate values shift. Cities with launch access will gain new strategic and commercial relevance. Inland cities with air traffic congestion may lose it. And small, agile countries with stable governments, good tax policy, and lovely geography — think Singapore, Panama, Iceland — can punch far above their weight.
Of course, none of this happens without resistance. New technology always faces pushback — not least from the incumbent providers.
Starports must be built. Maritime and airspace regulations must be rewritten. Insurance markets, environmental reviews, and public trust must be earned.
And there’s also the human factor. Flying at 17,000 mph on a rocket is not yet a comfort zone. But neither was flying at 200 mph in 1939. Fear fades. Track records grow. And nothing drives confidence like repetition.
Compared to building self-sustaining cities on Mars, getting a Starship from Los Angeles to Seoul is a paperwork problem. So is getting thousands there.
The Pentagon will help. So will NASA. Once the military use case is proven — and once early adopters start to profit — widespread civilian adoption will follow.
And this may be the most important point: what begins as military necessity inevitably becomes civilian infrastructure. It happened with the railroad. It happened with aviation. It happened with GPS, with the internet, with jet engines, with nuclear power, with microchips.
It is happening again with Starship. This is not “dual-use technology”. It’s single-use: speed. It changes everything.
The civilian Earth-to-Earth version of Starship is the dividend of defense and NASA spending, not to mention Elon’s private funding of his Mars vision. As reliability improves, and demand builds, the commercial sector will flood in.
The result will be what always follows: a golden age of commercial spinoffs, platform acceleration, and infrastructure development. And for a company like SpaceX — with commercial cadence, cost control, scale, plus Elon’s brilliance and speed — that evolution will move faster than anything in aerospace history.
Each test adds data. Each explosion yields progress. Each booster refinement becomes a template for hundreds more.
No other technology on the horizon can compete. Not hypersonic jets. Not supersonic revivals of Concorde. Not maglev trains (though Hyperloop might yet connect shorter-distance city pairs at a similar reduction in travel time). All of those are bounded by atmosphere, cost, and physics. They’re Zeppelins and steam trains in the jet age.
And once enough routes exist, and enough infrastructure is deployed, there will be no going back. You can’t go back to horses once the railroad arrives. You don’t fly Pan Am prop planes once you’ve ridden a 767.
And you won’t wait 16 hours to cross the Pacific when you can do it in 40 minutes.
This is the deeper point. Earth-to-Earth Starship is not a transportation idea. It is a civilization accelerant.
In reality, the world is not small — it’s slow. Starship makes it fast.
We think we live in a globalized world now. And in some senses we do. But many people thought the same in 1900, in a world unrecognizable today. We move faster now, but we are still bound by distance.
By chokepoints.
By fragile supply chains subject to attack.
By port backlogs and tanker schedules and air freight queues.
By overflight permissions and fueling stops.
Starship erases those. It makes the world immediate.
Once you can go anywhere in 45 minutes, the structure of cities, countries, companies, and even families begins to change. Automobiles and airliners spread out cities, enabled commutes, and made life national. Starship makes it global and celestial.
Oh, you didn’t forget that part did you? Yes, fleets of Starships can deploy Marines to Mosul or bulk freight to Boston or Beijing. But they can also mine the asteroids, build factories, solar stations, and cities in orbit, and create a civilization on Mars. And they will.
That’s the century ahead.
But back on Earth, why manufacture near market centers when markets are now just 40 minutes away? Why base your company in one hemisphere when you can hop between offices faster than checking into a hotel? Why fly overnight when your competitor arrives in time for lunch?
Starship is not a better airplane. It is a new layer of civilization.
And like Henry Ford and Bill Boeing in the 1920s, Elon Musk is building it right now.
I pretend to no great originality in this--I'd read all the SF stories too--but I promoted this idea more than thirty years ago to a senior executive at McDonnell-Douglas. He and I were both working AAAM at the time but we'd discussed the Mickey Dee work in SSTO...Delta Clipper, a proof-of-concept project underwritten by SDIO (or possibly BMDO, I don't offhand recall when they changed their name).
McDonnell were having trouble getting funding for the program, and I suggested they should go talk to the Commandant, USMC. Their pitch should be: "Help us out here and we can build a platform that will put a Marine platoon anywhere on the planet within an hour." Dunno if that ever went anywhere, but..."Today you see this prophecy fulfilled in your sight."