Artist’s rendering of Starfall provided during the launch live steam

After completing one test flight in June, SpaceX has signed its first customer for its Starfall recoverable capsule, Space Microgravity Development (SpaceMD), a wholly owned subsidiary of the space manufacturing company Redwire.

SpaceMD’s first Starfall mission is planned for launch in 2028 and is expected to have the capacity to carry up to 32 of Redwire’s Pharmaceutical In-Space Laboratory (PIL-BOXes), making it the largest dedicated commercial microgravity research mission flown to date. Drug candidates selected through SpaceMD’s research initiatives will leverage the highly tailorable microgravity environment and mission duration provided by Starfall before returning to Earth for analysis, accelerating pharmaceutical development and other forms of commercial research.

SpaceMD will develop a new variant of PIL-BOX, to contain and optimize research aboard the entire Starfall spacecraft, ensuring immediate value to pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology innovators, and academic researchers. This work builds upon hundreds of pharmaceutical and life sciences experiments and R&D that Redwire has flown and conducted on crewed systems from the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station (ISS).

Starfall is in direct competition with Varda — whose capsule design is much smaller but has now been flown and recovered six times (but not reused) — as well as a half dozen other proposed recoverable capsule companies that have obtained investment capital but have not yet flown. Normally one would expect Starfall’s larger size compared to all these other capsules would mean it would cost more to launch, but SpaceX also provides the rocket, and is thus able to undercut its rivals.

In other words, this deal signals the desperate need in the American launch industry for other rocket companies to compete with SpaceX. Without that competition the entire new in-space industries, from space stations to recoverable capsules to data centers to internet constellations, are dependent on this one company to get into orbit, even as this one company is also capable to doing all these things itself.

Note that I am not demanding government intervention to break up SpaceX. That kind of response in the past to such situations has always done more harm than good. All we need is aggressive competition from others, within the framework of freedom. This is how America was built. It would be wise to return to that tradition.