>>12823772True, but the beauty of the starship is that it's a multipurpose vehicle.
It's a rocket that can reach pretty much anywhere in the solar system. It's a Lunar/Earth/Mars lander. It's crew capsule. It's a return vehicle. It's a cargo vehicle. It's a tanker. ect...
This is not the most efficient thing but consider the alternative where each is a different piece of hardware, SpaceX can't do all of these themselves.
And if we have to wait for NASA to let others compete against each other for contracts, each part being made by someone else, it's not gonna be ready by 2035, gonna cost tens of billions more and maybe there will even be some dropouts along the way causing the whole project to be shelved.
The way I see it only the starship can bootstrap human space exploration. They need to get it working as promised first before we can think about building and improving on top of the starship architecture. An orbital tanker seems like the first good addition to that.
