In order to refill the tank of a starship in orbit, they would need to launch at least 15 additional starships back to back, i.e. at least 15 launches have to be carried out all without issues, probably more for redundancy just in case, and it has to be done fast because since the fuel is cryogenic (methane Lox) it boil off over time and has to be dumped overboard.

And all of that is assuming they can even get the starship orbit capable in the first place, which they haven't been able to do at all.

fUel eFfICiEnCY.

I'm not a science guy, but isn't fuel efficiency like the most central issue of rocket science?

lets just stop advancing tech, because doing what we are now, but more, is easier.

The rocket equation means that even a modest improvement in the efficiency of the fuel or combustion is worth an exponential improvement in payload mass. What that means in practice is that if you can squeeze out improvements in your propulsion that make it 5% better, it's equivalent to making your whole payload much more than 5% lighter (exactly how much depends on where you started, but it easily could be 20%).

The math behind this is actually really cool. The intuitive explanation is that making your payload lighter is the same as just adding more fuel (the mass ratio gets larger). If you think about what happens as you add more and more fuel, you'd expect that you'd eventually reach a point where nearly all the additional fuel you're adding is spent on pushing other fuel rather than the payload. Only the last bit of fuel in the tank is spent only accelerating payload, so the tradeoff between using fuel to push fuel vs pushing payload is inevitable, but the tradeoff means that there's diminishing returns to improving the mass ratio.

So think about how much money is spent trying to make rockets lighter. Making propulsion technology more efficient is exponentially as important. These people hate science.

Ahh yes... "Starship." That piece of crap that has only managed to deliver a flaming banana to the Indian Ocean at mach 10. Once. The rest of the time it breaks up into a debris field before it can even manage that much. Yeah, I'm sure that'll happen any day now. Right around the same time as FSD that was set to be rolling out about 10 years ago.

But no, let's rediscover rocket science from first principles because the last 60 years of established doctrine don't "move fast and break things" enough. Absolute fucking morons.

I'm also reminded of that 1950s slogan of "Energy so cheap you won't even meter it!" Yeah still waiting on that one too 75 years later.

It is hard to overstate how delusional it is to think that chemical rockets could ever compete with nuclear thermal. It's in the same category as scoffing at computers because you can just hire more people with slide rules to do your calculations.

the delivery of propellant to LEO that I endorse:

While this is a blow to space travel, I am very glad that the US is not yet crazy enough to allow Elon to make a nuclear engine.

nuclear-electric rockets are woke. we need space x rockets that roll coal and have a dixie horn.

Me in KSP insisting to my GF that I can "eyeball" that single burn from LKO to a Jool Aerobreake.

If I had a nickel for every time the US cancelled a thermal nuclear engine program, I'd have two nickels, which isn't very much but it's weird that it's happened twice.

Are you technically delivering the propellent to LEO if you blow up in LEO?