History of Starship in Timeline

By Popular Timelines Editorial Team · Updated: July 16, 2026

Starship is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by SpaceX, designed to be the world's most powerful rocket. It is a fully reusable, two-stage-to-orbit spacecraft capable of carrying both crew and cargo into Earth orbit, to the Moon, and eventually to Mars. The system consists of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage, both utilizing liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants. A key objective of the Starship program is to drastically reduce the cost of space access through rapid reusability, enabling large-scale satellite deployment, orbital refueling, and deep-space exploration. By prioritizing a design that allows for vertical landing and quick turnaround, SpaceX aims to make humanity a multi-planetary species, fundamentally changing the economics and logistics of space travel.

October 1973: Publication of the Enzmann Starship Proposal

In October 1973, the magazine Analog featured a proposal for the Enzmann Starship, an immense spacecraft concept designed to utilize a 12,000-ton sphere of frozen deuterium for pulse propulsion. The concept envisioned a vessel twice the height of the Empire State Building that would be constructed in orbit following initial interstellar probe missions and telescopic observations.

1994: Proposal of the Alcubierre Drive

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a paper proposing a speculative warp drive model. The Alcubierre drive suggests that spacetime can be manipulated to create a warp bubble that compresses space ahead and expands it behind, theoretically allowing for faster-than-light travel while remaining consistent with the Einstein field equations.

1996: Initiation of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program

In 1996, NASA officially launched the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program to conduct a rigorous scientific investigation into advanced concepts for spacecraft propulsion systems.

2002: Conclusion of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program

The professional scientific study conducted under the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program concluded its operations in 2002 after researching various advanced spacecraft propulsion methods.

April 2016: Announcement of Breakthrough Starshot

In April 2016, researchers introduced the Breakthrough Starshot program, an initiative focused on creating a fleet of miniature, light sail-powered spacecraft known as StarChip. These probes were designed to travel to the Alpha Centauri star system at significant fractions of the speed of light, with an estimated travel duration of 20 to 30 years and a 4-year signal delay for reporting data back to Earth.