The Mars smokescreen was strong so a lot of people bought into it, even employees who didn't have the security clearances.

The origin of SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and Pete Worden really make it clear though.

https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles/116333241408716236

Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.

I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.

You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.

I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.

But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.

The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?

China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.

North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.

Curious to know what the smoke would be screening?