>>14262175You could, but better to simply extend it via the cargo space in the trunk. Mainly because if the dracos can sustain the burn time, in addition to being a good stress test for Starship (potentially long term), they can also act as additional lifeboats on station.
>>14262177It just needs to last long enough for Starship to come online. For example, if you took an HLS class starship and overengineered it a bit to be able to handle the LEO micrometeor prone environment, and launched 2 of them into ISS orbit and docked them north hatch to north hatch, you'd get probably 2-3x the ISS usable volume AND up to 200-250T of cargo space independent of the habitation and science activity space. Additionally, because the HLS Starships don't have to land, you can attach 4 international docking adapters along cardinal points on the ship (independent of the cargo hatch) and reinforce them relative to the ship's hull. Then when you have the 2 HLS class Starships docked as the ISS replacement, you now have an extension capability of 8x. If you were to then dock 8 more HLS class Starships to that, you'd have a proper replacement to ISS at a much more massive scale wherein each partner of the station minus Russia now, could get their own Starship for their own habitation AND science areas. Plus, best of all, each HLS class starship is essentially its own lifeboard. So in the event of a disaster everyone can either pile into the nearest starship and detach OR everyone can disconnect from the station via their own Starships and move to safety.
It's super versatile/utilitarian as a result and vastly modular with over abundance of redundancy.
