In many ways, SpaceX's Starship rocket is a metaphor for the company as a whole. It's an impressive piece of space hardware but it's also deceptive when it comes to scale. You can go online and buy a desktop model of the vehicle and when you set it up away from any context of size you fail to grasp just how big and powerful this machine is.

You don't realize that the Starship Version 3 (V3) is the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 408 ft (124 m), it dwarfs the Apollo Saturn V that only measured 363 ft (110 m). The Starship also has almost twice the thrust of the Moon rocket. Add in a payload of over 100 tonnes and Starship is a monster by any standard. Yet, unless you're standing next to it, it can be hard to truly gauge its size.

It's the same with SpaceX itself. When it was founded in 2002, it looked like a vanity project of a billionaire electric car maker. Many people still see the company as that, but the truth is that SpaceX went from nothing to the leading orbital launch provider on the planet in a remarkably short time. And the scale of this achievement is much, much larger than popular perception.

Since the first Sputnik went into space in November 1957, all of the governments and private companies on Earth have launched an estimated 15,062 payloads into orbit. Starting a tad later in 2008, SpaceX has managed to shoot 14,844 payloads into space – almost equal to the total of the rest of the world combined. By the time you read this, the company may well have exceeded it.

To this can be added technological innovations that the aerospace field now takes for granted. SpaceX was the first privately funded company to send a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit in 2008. It sent the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station in 2012. Then there was the first powered landing of an orbital rocket first-stage booster in 2015. And in 2017 we saw the first reflight of an orbital rocket stage. Then in 2020, SpaceX sent the first private astronaut mission into space.

Now, all of this is not to parade SpaceX's achievements, though they are impressive. What is important is that the company isn't some anomaly that could fade away tomorrow. It's the harbinger of what could be a second Space Age – one that could make the first look like a 100-tonne, 15th-century carrack compared to a nuclear-powered, 70,000-tonne, Ro-Ro container ship the size of a small town.

What has happened is that SpaceX is the first of a growing number of companies that are overturning and replacing the business models that have dominated the space sector since the beginning. Up until about 20 years ago, space launches were the reserve of national space agencies, the military, and a handful of large businesses. The pace of launches was at a steady cadence, averaging 95 per year worldwide at their height in the 1970s and '80s.