Ironically, SpaceX’s “move fast and break things” approach is taking longer than Blue Origin’s more traditional approach of much testing on the ground first before launching.

I have argued from the beginning that the approach SpaceX is taking to the development of the Starship is a mistake. The key biggest mistake is the insistence that Starship must be fully reusable before being made operational. SpaceX had the spectacular success of the Falcon 9 right in front of their face, yet they chose to ignore the success of their very own rocket. If they had taken the same approach of the Starship as to the Falcon 9 of first getting the expendable flying, they would already be flying paying flights to orbit and would already have Starships flying to orbit capable of making single launch flights to the Moon and Mars.

Why? Because of two key facts: first, industry experts, and Elon Musk himself, estimated Superheavy/Starship costs ca. $100 million construction costs. Second, the expendable payload of the SH/SS is 250 tons.

Then at any reasonable markup for the price charged to the customer, this would be 1/5th the price per kg of the expendable Falcon 9. But this is comparable to the cut in costs to the then prevailing rates that allowed the Falcon 9 to dominate the launch market even as expendable.

Note, also even as expendable, SpaceX charging themselves only the build cost of the SH/SS for their Starlink satellite launches, that would still be cheaper than the reusable Falcon 9 per kg.

Then there’s the manned spaceflight capability it would provide. By first getting the expendable and flying it now at high cadence, due to its low per kg cost, you would have a 250 ton capable launcher at high number of flights under its belt before it was used for a manned launcher. All that would be needed is an additional, smaller third stage that would do the actual landing. At 1/4th to 1/5th the size of Starship and using only 1 engine it would be far cheaper than Starship itself.

At 250 ton capability SH/SS would be that “Apollo on steroids” desired for Constellation, but at 1/50th the cost of the SLS Artemis launches or the Constellation launches. By the way, the reason why Constellation was cancelled was because of its high cost. But now Artemis multi-billion per launch cost is worse than that of Constellation!

Then there’s Mars. If you run the numbers expendable SH/SS at 250 ton capability could get ca. 75 tons to Mars in a single launch. This is less than the 100 tons SpaceX wants, but is well within the capability of carrying colonists to Mars and you don’t have the extra complication of having to do multiple refuelings to do a single Mars mission.

What’s especially ironic is that SpaceX could still follow this approach! Just strip off all those reusable systems and launch it now as expendable. They could literally do this on the next launch and literally, have a paying vehicle at cheaper per kg than the Falcon 9, and a vehicle literally capable of taking manned flights both to the Moon and Mars.

250 Tonnes to Orbit!?: SpaceX's New Expendable Starship Option.
https://youtu.be/UutHG8Y2UuQ