There is considerable international interest in STARS. For example, Russia is involved in the precursory asteroseismological EVRIS programme on MARS94, and there has in the past been a proposal to NASA for an Asteroseismology Explorer, headed by Prof. H. Hudson, though it was not funded. In view of the unavailability of another XMM bus, it might seem desirable to seek collaboration with another partner. Therefore, it will be one of the major objectives of the Assessment Study to determine whether STARS is to be an ESA-only mission, in which ESA will be responsible for overall spacecraft and mission design, integration of the payload onto the spacecraft bus, system testing, launch and operations, or whether collaboration with another agency is to be preferred. It is envisaged that the payload of STARS will be provided by Principal Investigators and their groups which are funded from national sources. The choice of orbit will depend on whether collaboration with another agency is involved. Extrapolating the results of the PRISMA Phase A Study, an XMM-like bus would be more than adequate to support the payload. The most stringent constraint is to have a pointing stability of no worse than 3 arc sec.