[blago]

Are you saying that there will be a large number of Starships on duty for immediate launch to deploy kill vehicles over an arbitrary area in space over and around the US? I'm no expert but this sounds pretty different form what Starship is designed to do. And not cheap at all.

[cryptonector]

I think u/credit_guy means that with Starship the U.S. could put a constellation of anti-missile missiles in orbit and keep them there for the long haul. If Falcon 9 can put up 5,500 sats in a few years, Starship could greatly increase the rate at which the U.S. can build not just comms constellations but also reconnaissance ("spy") constellations, missile defense constellations, anti-sat constellations, maybe even nuke constellations, who knows.

I suspect that missile defense constellations would have to be truly gargantuan though, because of some N thousand missile defense sats most will not be able to reach the missiles being launched at any given point, thus to counter a 1,000 ICBM/SLBM threat the missile def constellation might have to have 20x -maybe even 100x- that many space-launched anti-missile missiles. That seems prohibitively expensive even if internal Starship launch costs ever come down below $5 million each.