It was one of the most striking technological events of the year. On 13 October, Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, blasted into space from a launchpad in Texas. Its main booster reached an altitude of more than 65km before it began to hurtle back to Earth at a velocity greater than the speed of sound.

A crash was averted when the rocket – built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company – reignited its engines and slowed down until it hovered tantilisingly over the tower from which it had been fired aloft only seven minutes earlier. Pincer claws grasped the giant launcher and held it firmly in their grip, ready for refurbishment and relaunch.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.

The prestigious research journal Science was equally enthusiastic: “The feat heralds a new era of affordable heavy-lift rockets that could slash the cost of doing science in space,” it announced last month when it gave an award to Starship’s October flight as one of its Breakthroughs of the Year.

Musk’s company has already reduced the cost of putting cargo into orbit round the Earth by a factor of 10, the journal revealed. Once Starship – the most powerful launcher ever built, and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable – is in full operation later this year, further reductions of a similar magnitude can be expected, it added.

This view is shared by many space engineers who believe that Starship is poised to make a major leap with a schedule that could see it carry out launches every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have learned how to reclaim and reuse its main booster stage and will do the same for its upper stage this year, they say.

A total of 25 flights are now planned for the year ahead, an astonishingly ambitious programme. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the schedule they work by is unprecedented,” astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, told the website Space.com.

For scientists, the benefits of Starship are straightforward. Costs of missions on the resuable launcher could plummet from present levels and make it possible for them to carry out research in space which they simply have not been able to afford. This point is crucial, said Science in its editorial on Starship’s achievements.

Access to space has been too precious to risk failure in the past, and so components on Nasa missions are tested over and over again, pushing up costs, it pointed out. “But with routine Starship flights, scientists will be able to take more chances, building instruments with cheap, off-the-shelf parts and launching them often.”

Fleets of robot rovers could be sent to Mars, not just single vehicles, while flotillas of mirror segments could be flown in formation to create giant self-assembled telescopes in space. Such visions are exciting –though there are downsides to the success of Musk’s rocketry.