The actual name for Elon Musk's "Starship" is "Cheapship"

What Elon Musk is really trying to achieve with his fleet of "Starships", are throwaway, disposable, cost-free rockets -- Cheapships, effectively, which can be built and launched for almost no money, at all. Now, you might say this is rather an odd thing for the world's greatest exponent of reusable rocketry to pursue. After all, so far with SpaceX, Elon has been rather successful in promoting and exploiting and concept of reusable rockets. His Falcon and Falcon Heavy rockets have, at least to some extent, cut the cost of using liquid fueled rockets, and even Communist China is now building its own version of a reusable rocket in the Long March 9, which is supposed to be fully reusable. The problem is, though, that none of these rockets are really fully reusable, or even close to it. They're more "salvageable" than "reusable". Most of the rocket materials and some of its structure are salvaged, but, actually, the cost of reusing Elon's rockets is a full two thirds the cost of building them from scratch. So, while significant savings certainly accrue if the rocket is repeatedly reused, which can more than cover the costs of developing the reusable technology, these remain very expensive launch systems. It still costs 67 million dollars to launch the Falcon, and 100 million dollars to launch the Falcon Heavy. And these costs, which are merely what is required to put satellites into low earth orbit, increase exponentially as we try to launch satellites or astronauts to the Moon or planets. So, Elon Musk, who, apparently, really does want to go to Mars, needs much, much lower costs for rockets to achieve his ultimate ambitions. So he's trying to build a rocket made of extremely inexpensive materials, in hopes that this will lower the costs of using them. He's using cheap stainless steel instead of expensive Titanium and other such materials. He's using dozens of small engines instead of a few large engines, in hopes that this will reduce their cost. He's hoping that economies of scale will reduce labor and materials costs to near zero, if he can expand to operating hundreds or thousands of Starships all at the same time, and he has his accountants working on theories that prove just that. He's predicting the costs of launching the rocket with 100 tons of material into low earth orbit will be just 10 million dollars. From the start of launches. Where does he get this figure? Because low end estimates of current costs for the stainless steel, rocket fuel and engines required to build and launch Starship are around 10 million dollars. He's assuming no labor costs at all. He's assuming an all volunteer workforce, including engineers, scientists, technicians and astronauts. Everyone working for nothing, at all. He's further predicting that the cost of launching the rockets will be just one million dollars, because the costs of all related materials will drop by 90% as the result of economies of scale, while labor costs will remain at zero. Now the big problem here, is that the majority of the cost of liquid fueled rockets is the labor involved in building and maintaining them. Often, the vast majority of costs is simply technical labor. And, it really doesn't follow from the fact that the materials used in constructing a rocket are quite cheap, that the rocket is cheap. Let's suppose, just for fun, that Elon Musk decided to build his Starship entirely out of paper mache. Now, paper mache is often made from waste paper, so, effectively, the costs of paper mache could be zero. Hence, if Elon Musk builds the fuselage, engines and all related parts from paper mache, he could argue that building his rocket costs nothing at all. Indeed, paper mache is highly flammable, so, he could also use paper mache for rocket fuel, I suppose. So, launching his Starship again costs nothing at all. Indeed, who knows, maybe with sufficient expertise and advanced materials treatments, paper mache could actually be used to construct and power rockets. And, if all the experts and technicians treating the paper mache to make it usable worked for nothing, well, I guess the rocket would indeed cost nothing to use and launch. So, we could use these paper mache Starships to send enormous quantities of paper mache into space, to provide "refueling" for Starships, and, given that Elon's accountants have proved that all this costs nothing, the refueling could go on forever, for nothing, and take these paper mache Starships to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri and, ultimately, the Andromeda Galaxy. Of course, rockets scientists don't work for free. And, paper mache rockets probably wouldn't work very well, if at all. And making paper mache work in a rocket probably would be a very expensive proposition, indeed, as we're finding out -- Elon's spent 10 billion dollars on his "cheap" Starship, without getting it to work. Nevertheless, NASA has seen fit to make a multi-billion dollar "contract" with SpaceX to send astronauts to the Moon on his "Starship". Because NASA really still has to try to keep making the case that it can send astronauts into outer space, because that's what President Kennedy founded it to do, really. Even though President Eisenhower thought it was totally impractical, because liquid fueled rockets simply weren't a practical technology for doing this, at all. Now, in the 1960's, when NASA was getting 5% of the total U.S. budget, they could indeed get to the Moon. With astronauts. Anyone want to give NASA 5% of the total U.S. budget now?