Which branch of the government was it that built a fully reusable launcher capable of putting 100 tons into orbit? Must have been some incredibly secret military project, because it certainly wasn't NASA.
Musk has plenty he should feel ashamed about, but you're really selling the SpaceX Starship engineering team short here.
"selling the SpaceX Starship engineering team short here." Ehhh. Cybertruck, too? Tunnels, too? Dead chimps and bad brain surgery?
There is a common thread of hype, ego, or ketamine, driven engineering fiats, cheapness alternating with extravagance, and insecurity across all of Elonland.
I started watching Starship because I thought the "iterative" and "agile"-ish approach to the project was a lesson software people should learn about not taking even a very successful practice of Agile to projects where it has no business being.
If you do a proper critical path analysis of the starship project, even a casual one, you will conclude that it's going to be reusable and have that payload capacity somewhere between seven years from now and never, and cost more than whatever ULA and Boeing (!!) are doing.
I am not here to defend Musk, whose ego has obviously run away with him, nor to praise his empire of bullshit and flim-flam: just to point out that of all the things one could reasonably criticize him for, a lack of ambition in the Starship project really isn't one of them.
I'm surprised that they didn't finish the orbit and return testing with Block 1 before upgrading.