Do Starships that do the refueling and stay otherwise in Earth SOI count? Or (as I would expect) only Starships that get to the transfer orbit to Mars count?

@Irigi Yes starships that leave esrth. They don’t have to land or even make it to Mars just using the launch window in 2026

@ZacharyAustin
>"Yes starships that leave esrth. They don’t have to land or even make it to Mars"

So I take it from this that if a Starship gets say 40% of way through Mars Trans-Orbit(MTO) insertion burn before engines permanently shut down such that the Starship leaves Earth sphere of influence(SOI) but never really in an orbit that gets anywhere near Mars, then this counts?

There potentially could be a marginal issue with this in that if a MTO insertion burn failed fairly early and the ship went into an unstable orbit around Earth, it might be unclear whether it would eventually be thrown out of Earth sphere of influence. You might want to put a time limit for exiting Earth SOI? Maybe an alternative might be to set a % of insertion burn or % of delta-v needed but these probably run into difficulties of getting information and/or whether the delta-v achieved needs to be in the correct direction. However it is a pretty unlikely / marginal problem, just thought I would mention it in case you want to clarify.