[AlexandrB]

The tower catches are great, but the payload rating has been reduced several times now[1] and with it the economic argument for how Starship will make launching much cheaper than today as well as suitability for lunar/Mars launches. For Starship to be revolutionary enough for this kind of valuation it has to not just work, but outperform current solutions.

SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).

[1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...

[fastball]

That article is two years old. In traditional space launch terms that is a very short amount of time, but in SpaceX terms that's quite a while. They've already progressed to Starship 2 since then and are going to launch Starship 3 imminently (slated this month), which has Raptor v3 engines onboard and come with the efficiency gains you are talking about.