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The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.

Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.



Still, LEO is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System, so that's exciting.


Also you can assemble things in LEO from multiple launches. Once you're up there, you have a lot more freedom in terms of size and shape.


Halfway to anywhere, but the window to anywhere is quite small. For Mars, I think it's only a few weeks every two years or so. So having a lot of mass already halfway there when the window opens would be quite advantageous.




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