[Dr4kn]

Falcon 9 is still the most advanced rocket flying real missions to date. The only thing close to it is Blue Origin, which didn't even have their maiden flight yet.

Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter.

Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.

[pfdietz]

And, eventually, if it becomes cheap enough to put people in space for the task, you can plan to actually maintain things there rather than design for extreme reliability.