I strongly disagree. > iterative engineering approach to something and complex and full of hard dependencies as Starship will achieve rapid reusability sometim

I strongly disagree. > iterative engineering approach to something and complex and full of hard dependencies as Starship will achieve rapid reusability sometime between much later than promised and never To the opposite, you can't have a complex system working without having first simpler system working, and then iterating from that. Let me know if you need the quote. For rockets in particular, the approach "build a little, test a little" is the current best practice. Starship complexity of course is splittable into engine complexity, set of engines, body, simple control and then other functions - actually, with the exception of Raptors, it's quite an iterateable system. > This is a project with an unknowable worst-case completion date because there are way too many issues with too many unknowable times to resolve issues, many of which can only be worked on once previous issues are resolved, and way too many issues continue to be discovered. No, this is totally wrong. And the current pace of existing testing shows just that. "unknowable worst-case completion date" - strictly speaking, you can never be sure 100% about anything, and if you understand this statement "reasonably", then it's just wrong. Starship will be flying more or less successfully in 3 years, that's rather conservative, and in this decade, very conservatively. Otherwise it will probably be dropped, but chances for that are really low. "there are way too many issues with too many unknowable times to resolve issues" - no, there are just several rather well-known areas - like, attitude control on the orbit (done with somewhat smaller orbiting bodies), thermal protection during return (done with similar materials, spaceplanes, so both materials and aerodynamics are not completely new), active bracking with engines (done extensively with Falcon-9 first stages), getting caught with Mechazilla (fine controls for Falcon-9 landings and even helicopter catches of payloads from space are relevant) and then quite a number of progressively smaller issues. Will work no problem in the end, high probability. "many of which can only be worked on once previous issues are resolved" - not exactly. While you can't return with orbital speed unless you got that speed in the first place, other issues could be tested - and Starship flights to 10 km altitude a few years ago were just that, tests for the last 10 km of flight. Not exactly identical to how it's going to happen according to today's plans, but not irrelevant either. "way too many issues continue to be discovered" - why do you think that? Rockets are something which was done with 50+ years old technology, which for this area is quite a bit; there's just not too much of complexity here. "Rocket science is not a rocket science", as they say in the industry. "Converging on completion is not in sight." - again, where did you get this from? You're way off in your estimates. It's not known about number of tankers needed to refuel one Starship. But this is not a particularly important question. Even with 30 tankers required the system still could be made to work. And likely there will be much less of tanker flights than that, so what's the problem?