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Why bother putting it into a circular orbit? I don't see the point.

As I understand it the big drawback to EOR from an engineering standpoint is that the added complexity introduces a bunch of extra failure modes.

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If you boost something up to orbital velocity and LEO altitude but don't circularize, its orbit still intersects the atmosphere, if not the earth. The delta-v required to keep from falling back down would be better used to push into whatever transfer orbit you want.

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