âHow about 45 hours to see if a command worked?â
i dunno. has voyager ever tried therapy? goddamn it brain, i told you what to do years ago 
NASA Oral histories over in the magical history threadâŚ
TIL Skylab stayed empty for five years before it came down!
If the shuttle hadnât been delayed⌠This is a bit oversimplified, but all things being equal itâs not wrong as such to blame Richard Nixon.
Two short primers for anyone who is interested:
part three and also four as a conclusion;
part four is a must see in regards of how to do a mission-programm properly like apollo and how bad its so far done with artemis III;
There goes my morning. 
I donât really see it.
âRocket Cargoâ has been proposed, under different names and as various concepts, on and off, for the last 50 years or so. Usually a SSTO (single stage to orbit) vehicle, sometimes reusable, sometimes not. Ballistic suborbital flights, longer flights skipping on the upper atmosphere like a stone on a pond, proper (low) orbit flights, and anything in between. The military has always been interested because they are always on the lookout for anything that might give them an advantage over any adversaries. It never happened, mostly because itâs too expensive even for the military. The vehicles as such may be cheap-ish (theyâre not, really), but the infrastructure youâd need to fly them at short notice is gigantic. And reusable wonât significantly lower the costs unless youâd fly a lot of them all the time, i.e. like airplanes.
Saying this âcould eventually work out to be cheaper on a daily rate than using C-17sâ is delusional magical thinking. Weâve been though this with the Space Shuttle already. The cargo rates in $/kg that were promised maybe would have been possible if every Shuttle would have made around 50 flights per year each. There is plenty of concept art where you see Shuttles land, sit in a hangar for a bit for refurbishment and then launch again. Reality simply doesnât work like that for a system as complex as this.
Launching whatever military payload into orbit with Starship has similar problems. Just how often do you need to launch 100 metric tonnes into orbit at short notice? Or at all, for that matter? How is this going to work, build multiple launch pads, multiple vehicles and cycle through them in a way that at least one of them is ready to launch within, say a day? Sure, possible on the technical side of things - if you have the budget. Which nobody has.
(There are reasons why ICBMs switched to solid fuel motors as soon as possible and are not SSTOs.)
Offering this as a service to the military with on-demand flights could also only work out financially if Space-X would already fly lots of Starships all the time. Which they wonât because the market isnât there. If it was someone would have built super-duper heavy lifters like Seadragon (also a reusable design) decades ago.
ETA:
SSTOs
[A Jaw-Dropping Crescent Moon Meets Jupiter: The Night Sky This Week (forbes.com)]
How lucky I am! Itâs going to rain on Wednesday!
