Given that there are not many missions today that need a Falcon Heavy, I am wondering how many commercial launches need Starship, beyond the moon and mars mission?
Nothing is currently built around starship (other than Starlink, obviously), and you can bet there won't be many single-sat payloads the near future. Once starship is operational you'll see more appetite commercial entities to build a bigger GEO (or whatever) than the current 5m class of launchers can lift, but its really hard right now for someone to pin their business model on the success of a rocket development program. More likely for those kinds of missions, Starship will be considered a cost opportunity, not a volume opportunity.
NASA and definitely defense-type entities will be even farther behind for science/exploration missions, as their acquisition process is even more conservative.
Commercial entities with constellation aspirations will be the first to lean into Starship, as there's of course potential for a lot of cost and mass-rate upside from Starship, but we're still years away from that. But...there's also the big problem with commercial constellations...there's only one and a half out there to-date (and none on the horizon for years)...and one of those constellations is in-house. And the pretender constellations that are out there booking are buying up the 5m class (+NG). For instance, not sure it came through this forum, but
Oneweb signed up with Relativity (who haven't launched
anything, let alone a big stick) a few weeks ago.
Anyway, from a hucking-things-into-space perspective, I'd guess 2026-2028 is when we really start to see the shift away from 5m vehicles (including Falcon) to Starship, Obviously, contracts will come much sooner than that. ...though that's when we'll really start to see things like Neutron and Terran-R and New Glenn really hit their stride, and maybe even some of the smaller players like Firefly and ABL will have compelling vehicles also.
