By Rod D. Martin | RodMartin.org | Mar 03, 2025
Starship makes possible a world where the U.S. can deploy an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour, and supply it entirely from home. “Hegemony” doesn’t begin to cover it.
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?
Wars are often won by those who can move the fastest, supply the best, and sustain their forces longest. A conflict in Taiwan or the Baltics could see adversaries complete their objectives before the U.S. military can even begin meaningful counter-operations.
Starship negates all these timelines. Instead of waiting days or weeks for military assets to arrive by conventional means, forces could be on the ground on the same day as an invasion. No need for prepositioned stockpiles, forward operating bases, or painfully slow sealift capabilities. Those days are over.
In a Taiwan crisis, Starship could land American armor and mechanized infantry before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) finishes crossing the Strait. It would change the strategic calculus entirely. Every U.S. war game predicting Taiwan’s fall under a rapid Chinese assault assumes conventional response times. Starship forces a complete rethink, for both sides. It will allow American forces to arrive in time to fight the decisive battle, not the delayed counter-offensive.
In the Middle East, Starship would allow the U.S. to surge forces only when necessary. This removes vulnerabilities associated with maintaining exposed regional bases, which are constantly under threat from drone strikes, missile barrages, and local unrest. The ability to drop a full combat force onto any battlefield from U.S. soil drastically reduces the risks associated with regional basing and offers a level of strategic flexibility unseen in military history.
In some future NATO-Russia conflict, the U.S. could project power into Eastern Europe at speeds that make conventional force movements obsolete. One of Russia’s biggest strengths is its ability to rapidly deploy forces near its borders using rail, ground, and prepositioned logistics hubs. The U.S. and its allies, by contrast, require weeks to build up forces and move heavy equipment across the Atlantic. Starship eliminates this disadvantage. If conflict erupts in the Baltics, the U.S. wouldn’t have to rely on contested European supply lines — it could drop entire brigades straight into Poland, Lithuania, or Estonia before Russia’s initial assault gains traction.
But logistics is the lifeblood of war, and Starship would make resupply and sustainment a continuous, high-speed operation. Instead of waiting weeks for sealift convoys, a division operating overseas could be resupplied from the U.S. mainland in real-time. Ammunition, fuel, medical supplies — whatever is needed — delivered from American soil directly to the battlefield in under an hour.
This breaks every existing logistical paradigm. A commander in the field wouldn’t have to ration ammunition and supplies based on what can be transported safely through contested territory. Instead, high-tempo operations could be sustained indefinitely, with real-time resupply ensuring maximum combat effectiveness. If an armored unit in Eastern Europe needs immediate replenishment of anti-tank munitions, they won’t have to wait for overland convoys vulnerable to interdiction. A Starship could land behind friendly lines and deliver everything required within minutes.
The days of vulnerable supply chains stretching across hostile terrain would be over. The entire military supply model would shift from slow and predictable routes to a dynamic, unpredictable, and unassailable network of suborbital resupply. This would make the U.S. military infinitely more agile than any adversary on Earth. Starship transforms logistics from a constraint into an overwhelming advantage.
Does the Math Work? Yes.
What we want to be able to transport and sustain is one U.S. division. Most of you are old enough to remember the 2003 Iraq War. You will recall that America destroyed the entire Iraqi Army — fourth largest in the world at the time — and overran the entire country in just three weeks.
What overwhelming force accomplished this? The 3rd Infantry Division. That’s all. (Yes, we wanted the 4th ID to invade from the north, but at the last minute our “ally” Turkey balked, so we went ahead with only the 3rd. Worked out just fine.)
This is why I’ve focused on transport capacity sufficient to deploy and sustain a division. A single American division is one of the most lethal forces on Earth, more than capable of conducting an entire war (with air support, of course).
The SpaceX Starfactory is designed to build a Starship a day. A fleet of 1,000 Starships could thus be constructed in about three years. Current Starship is designed to lift 100 tons, but Elon has said that he intends to increase that number to 200. That’s a combined 200,000 tons of payload.
As to cost, Musk’s math suggests a per-launch operational cost of $700,000 once the system reaches economies of scale. But let’s say $2 million is our high-end estimate. To fly a fleet of 1,000 Starships would cost between $700 million and $2 billion per sortie.
Now let’s look at what we’re up against, and what we’re competing with.