Elon Musk: It's got to be like Starship lands, you refill propellant and you just take off again.

“You know, it's a terrible metaphor, but the important thing is that the cat gets skinned at the end of the day and then you arrive at some solution that enables full reusability. That's the key.

Can you land the rocket and without any kind of laborious inspection, maybe you spend half an hour just visually scanning the tiles, but you can't go and test every tile and make sure the gaps are perfect and do 40,000 tile tests. It's got to be like it lands, you refill propellant, unless a whole bunch of tiles fell off, you just take off again.

Rapid reusability is the key. We need to make the tiles not fall off because if a bunch of tiles are falling off, then we're just not gonna have a rapid reusability situation, [a refly] within an hour of landing type of thing.”

From: Interview with Everyday Astronaut, May 27, 2025