Is this guy actually a fan of disposable rockets? Because that sounds like what he’s hinting. People still think that? That doesn’t mean there’s no issues with

Is this guy actually a fan of disposable rockets? Because that sounds like what he’s hinting. People still think that? That doesn’t mean there’s no issues with the Starship design. I am still scratching my head a little about stainless steel, which is heavy, and given that the supposed advantage of not needing heat tiles seems to have been proven a mirage so far. I am also skeptical that they’ll make second stage reusability work. First stage, sure. They are almost there. Just like F9 the math works fine, and reusing that is a big win. Second stage reuse is so much harder. What I would do is scrap it in favor of a whole different way of looking at Starship. The upper stage is a spaceship. It belongs in space. It’s never coming home. That would let you drop so much complexity, structural mass, heat tiles, etc. It could probably land and take off from the Moon or Mars, maybe with a much smaller booster for the latter, since those bodies have a lot less gravity. Or maybe it lands on the Moon or Mars and never leaves, becoming habitat and being stripped for materials. I could see that for the first dozen or two. A reusable fuel tanker version that is literally nothing but a cone shaped fuel can with a rocket on it is possibly doable, so maybe there’s that. At least until we can make methane and liquid oxygen on the Moon. The most logical way forward to get to multi planetary civilization is to build a moon base. Then use that as a factory and staging ground to build and launch huge spacecraft for Mars. In 1/6 gravity and no atmosphere you could manufacture and launch things way larger than anything that could be sent up from Earth without nuclear rockets. You could also launch nuclear rockets from the Moon, come to think of it, since the Moon has no biosphere and its surface is already bathed in radiation. Even something like Orion (a.k.a. the devil’s pogo stick) could go up from there, though from the far side to avoid EMPing satellites in the Earth-Moon system. With a Moon first plan the upper stage could become a Moon ship made to fly to the Moon, land, and be habitat or materials. Mars stuff gets built on the Moon where you get to play with big boy toys like LANTR or Orion, which lets you launch the kinds of spacecraft you’d actually want to take to Mars. Lots of ways to get around full second stage reusability without throwing away the second stage if your goal is a real human presence in space.