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Are you saying ESA should have waited for this to be technically possible? Or that it is technically possible now and ESA should have looked in to this option?

• perihelions 3y ago
  It's a speculative, blue-sky idea—as is the context discussion that's proposing to assemble space satellites in a remote desert for optimization reasons. It's not technically implausible. Starship (upper-stage only) in principle has a very long hop range—it's almost an SSTO by itself [0]. In principle it could also support landing on non-spaceport facilities like deserts—after all it's explicitly designed for landing on the moon, in accordance with the NASA Artemis contract. Would SpaceX be thinking about trying long-range hops on Earth, as a testing mechanism? I'm not sure it'd be completely crazy to consider that. Musk has extensively talked about the concept of Starship (full stack) as city-to-city passenger transport [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-transport-earth-travel https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...