I didn't mean this ship and booster, I mean in a year or so when they're done with the test phase and frequently launching Starlink satellites on Starship.

What exactly do you think is the “more technology development than the current flights actually show“ needed to get into and out of orbit?

My impression is they just need to leave the engines on a little longer to get to orbit, then turn them on again with the ship pointed in another direction to get back to the suborbital trajectory they’ve already demonstrated deorbiting from.

The hard part is reentering through the atmosphere without burning up, flipping, and landing, which they’ve already demonstrated multiple times. There’s no additional atmosphere between where they’ve flown and “orbit”.

They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.

But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.

TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.

The nice thing about SpaceX’s rapid iteration philosophy (and having Starlink as its first “customer”) is that they can account for engine unreliability by building extra margin into early launches, fly with reduced payloads, collect data on failures, and improve the reliability over time.

“Tries to block” is different than “fights for a piece of the same pie”.

While Starlink is never going to compete with fiber purely on speed, it’s available now, cheaper, and fast enough for residential customers. It will get faster over time as well.