While still unknown, issue 2 is hard to imagine breaking the whole plan. TPS were used before - Starship is bigger than Shuttle, but the principal possibility i

While still unknown, issue 2 is hard to imagine breaking the whole plan. TPS were used before - Starship is bigger than Shuttle, but the principal possibility is solidly here at least. Again, it's hard to imagine Elon explaining in half a year the absence of launches by the inability to invent a good attachment of TPS. Let's wait and see. Regulatory issues may have a hiccup on the frequency of heavy flights - liquid propellants in Starship don't have infinite shelf life on LEO, so refueling Starships will need to be launched promptly, and that's something which was never done by humanity - the combination of flight frequency and the size of payload (fuel). So FAA may object. Worse, something bad could happen - like a failure of a Starship, requiring attention of designers again, which would temporarily put on hold all other Starship flights. However, even these issues have low product of probability and severity, so Mars flights are still possible soon. Again, we'll see soon. Now that the wait time to results is compressed from decades to months, we need to adjust to this unusual luxury.