The one thing that I think starship has proven is that for any major mission that stretches our current launch capanilities, it may be worth investigating developing a new launch vehicle instead of accommodating the ones we have.

Just think of all the engineering and risk that’s going into a process that will be used once.

I thought about this a lot while I was designing my own amateur liquid rocket. You would almost certainly save a lot of money across all launch programs from the payload, just by spending the effort upfront to qualify a new heavy lift system like a Saturn-VI or Starship.

I think its just such a difficult thing to justify huge upfront costs to congress, especially if you see how long it has taken SLS to get anywhere. IMO, ULA, Boeing (solo) and Northrop's cultures couldn't possibly cut it for developing another amazing vehicle at any appreciable speed without the Euphoria and meaning that the Space Race provided.

Good points. Sometimes projects need constraints to get moving.

Not even that — seeing how cheap Starship launches would be per kg of payload (I've seen a figure of $10), we could as well build a huge orbital station and just manufacture and/or assemble arbitrarily sized stuff in there or even in space. No atmosphere, and especially pesky oxygen, to deal with, no contaminants to keep out, no gravity to fight against. I'd imagine that any scientific and fabrication processes that need a deep vacuum would also greatly benefit from being done on a space station.

Zero gravity engineering is going to be an interesting challenge, and a source of many funny videos. (Possibly some less than funny, too.)

I would definitely love to see something like the Space Station V from Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey IRL. AFAIK it was almost a quarter of a mile in diameter. This seems to be suited for in-orbit fabrication and assembly.

I think if they had starship they'd have just built it foldable anyway but with a bigger mirror