1. This is just basic orbital mechanics. Multiple missiles are launched from different locations at different targets. The launches are not fully simultaneous. Each kill vehicle must be at the right place at the right time to intercept its target. If you launch all kill vehicles from the same location at the same time, the differences between the required velocity vectors are easily several km/s.
2. The midcourse phase typically takes ~20 minutes. You can't predict the trajectory accurately during the boost phase, and you have the wrong kind of missile for intercepting the target during the terminal phase. If your boost phase is 9 minutes instead of 4 minutes, you have 11 minutes instead of 16 minutes for political and tactical decisionmaking.
3. What is the price of a fully disposable Starship? How many of them do you need to have one ready to launch at any time? Because if you have them on standby, you can't use them for any other purpose, and they are effectively disposable.
> What is the price of a fully disposable Starship?
Musk aims to get the cost of building one Starship to $5 million [1]. That sounds insane, I know, but he also aims to build about 1000 of them. When you get to this scale of mass production, efficiencies of scale kick in. Could he be wrong. I suppose so, but even if he's wrong by a factor of 10 or 20, it would still provide a tremendous value proposition for an Anti Ballistic Defense system.
2. The midcourse phase typically takes ~20 minutes. You can't predict the trajectory accurately during the boost phase, and you have the wrong kind of missile for intercepting the target during the terminal phase. If your boost phase is 9 minutes instead of 4 minutes, you have 11 minutes instead of 16 minutes for political and tactical decisionmaking.
3. What is the price of a fully disposable Starship? How many of them do you need to have one ready to launch at any time? Because if you have them on standby, you can't use them for any other purpose, and they are effectively disposable.