But Musk has done enough feats which earlier scoffed at and dismissed off hand, for him to be taken seriously. Even if he undershoots by 24x, it is still 1 launch of starship a day (which is very easily feasible), implying over 36,500 tonnes of mass to orbit.
What if this is used to place say 35,000 tonnes of stainless steel rods (that are able to survive reentry, and have a terminal speed of 10 Mach) in orbit?
1. Who is going to have to pay for all that payload to be launched?
2. Who is going to develop such a system to control/deploy all those rods for military strikes? Call it 5 years if they start now
3. Starship can reach 1650C during reentry, so is protected by ceramic tiles in places. Stainless steel rods would likely burn up. The next possible candidate is Tungsten. But only 84,000 tonnes of Tungsten is mined globally, and China accounts for 83% of that mining. So call it 5 years for the US to build a new Tungsten supply chain and mines.
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In 5 years time, China should have a number of companies with functional reusable Falcon 9 analogues, possibly even a Starship equivalent.
If the US wants to militarise space with thousands of orbital bombardment weapons, the US will likely regret such an outcome.
Currently China has limited military means to attack targets in the Continental USA, but that will change if China matches the USA with thousands of orbital bombardment weapons.
In comparison, the US already has military bases arrayed across China's eastern coastline and can use these local bases to attack mainland China anyway
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And if we look at the latest price surveys from China, they indicate China produces/consumes twice as much actual economic output of goods and services as the US. We can see this reflected in electricity consumption (a 2.2x difference), which is a rough proxy for economic activity in a modern economy.
So what is the likely outcome of any arms race?
