SpaceX, in a perfect world, just wants to be the railroad to facilitate others who want to build stations, bases, mining, recycling, etc.
As far as the greenness of rockets, recycling would be 5th in the 5 R’s:
- Refuse: refuse to use wasteful rockets? I don’t really know how to apply this one.
- Reduce: I suppose rideshares and vehicles with multiple hosted payloads are good
- Reuse: See: SpaceX
- Repurpose: Wet workshops?
- Recycle: energy intensive and would need tons of infrastructure to process and use on orbit
I hope so, but if they launch on the suborbital trajectory again because they aren’t certain about the Raptor relight for a deorbit burn, then I’m guessing a Starlink won’t be able to deploy and raise its orbit in time to not also reenter.