alt Hacker NewsWhat do you mean too big for orbital payloads? Mass to low earth orbit is what matters, which starship is well optimized for. You could always put a tiny third stage on there to go places, but that is back to the apollo style yeeting a tiny amount of mass somewhere else and would not help with getting serious tonnage to the moon and mars
> Mass to low earth orbit is what matters
For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.