SpaceX didn’t want to blow up its launchpad. It may have done just that

Secondly, no decision at this point will save them two months. They are in for many months of reconstruction, apart from all the other design changes needed. They are also in for FAA scrutiny that will take at least several months. There is a large incentive to be unrealistic about this: A realistic view of delays makes an already very optimistic schedule for supplying a Starship-based lunar lander to the Artemis project look very risky.

What we are seeing is the limits to scaling an iterative project. It is transitioning from learning how to weld stainless steel, which can evolve quickly, to learning how to fix multiple large problems when every iteration costs 39 rocket engines, 200 tankers of fuel/oxidizer, etc.

You can use atmosphere as the propellant. And accelerate as much as you need at the upper levels of atmosphere. Potentially you can use aerodynamics (basically fly inverted) to get to even higher velocity than the orbital velocity. Then, you can stay there at the upper levels, as long as you need to, and charge your tanks (you can initially take off with an empty tank of propellant). Once this is done, you can adjust the angle of attack and ease of into the higher orbit, switching to space flight.

It involves hypersonic flight, but there is nothing impossible here.