It was originally designed for manned interplanetary missions, but then they (wisely) decided to pivot when it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen.
I have yet to be convinced that Starship’s payload capacity is actually a good thing, from a big picture perspective. It looks to me like a possible case of shouting, “I meant to do that!” after a pratfall. On a months-long trip to Mars, you need a vehicle that big for the sake of the human occupants. For launching Starlink, it’s less clear whether the ability to deploy so many satellites at once was worth the vehicle’s development costs. Perhaps it’s just inherited from an earlier iteration of the program that had different goals, and a more modest design would have been more economical. Worse, so far it seems like Starlink might be it. Most other use cases people have proposed for putting 40 tonnes in orbit on a regular cadence are the kind of highly speculative grasping at straws that accompanies any technically impressive solution in search of a problem.
Shuttle was supposed to be two different vehicles: a potentially reusable but a cheap unmanned heavy lift vehicle plus a small reusable manned shuttle.
A lot of the vision was actually around building orbital solar arrays (remember the microwave power plant from sim city 2000?) to resolve the oil crisis.
The oil crisis went away and the microwave arrays idea didn't make much progress and shuttle' budget got cut until they could only do one vehicle, so they tried to combine both and have a reusable heavy lift manned space glider.
But because the microwave arrays weren't going to happen nor was the earlier L1 space station idea (and skylab deorbited before shuttle's first launch) they had nowhere to shuttle anything to, so instead they just ended up with a heavy lift LEO launcher that had people onboard for some reason.
Ofc they eventually got the ISS as a destination, much later.
Just speculating, but the US Military has money burning a hole in their pocket and could be interested in putting 40 tons to orbit several times a month.
I have yet to be convinced that Starship’s payload capacity is actually a good thing, from a big picture perspective. It looks to me like a possible case of shouting, “I meant to do that!” after a pratfall. On a months-long trip to Mars, you need a vehicle that big for the sake of the human occupants. For launching Starlink, it’s less clear whether the ability to deploy so many satellites at once was worth the vehicle’s development costs. Perhaps it’s just inherited from an earlier iteration of the program that had different goals, and a more modest design would have been more economical. Worse, so far it seems like Starlink might be it. Most other use cases people have proposed for putting 40 tonnes in orbit on a regular cadence are the kind of highly speculative grasping at straws that accompanies any technically impressive solution in search of a problem.
A lot of the vision was actually around building orbital solar arrays (remember the microwave power plant from sim city 2000?) to resolve the oil crisis.
The oil crisis went away and the microwave arrays idea didn't make much progress and shuttle' budget got cut until they could only do one vehicle, so they tried to combine both and have a reusable heavy lift manned space glider.
But because the microwave arrays weren't going to happen nor was the earlier L1 space station idea (and skylab deorbited before shuttle's first launch) they had nowhere to shuttle anything to, so instead they just ended up with a heavy lift LEO launcher that had people onboard for some reason.
Ofc they eventually got the ISS as a destination, much later.