The commercial moon trip that was planned for that Chinese billionaire was canceled due to a lack of confidence and nasa has reopened the lunar lander contract because of how far behind starship is.

The entire design paradigm of starship as a lunar vehicle is also highly dubious. Requiring double digit launches of refueling tankers, that have never been tested or demonstrated as possible, just to get to the moon is not exactly cheap or low risk. If we’re generous and say that launching anything to LEO on starship costs the same as a falcon 9 launch(74 million), and it will take the 16 refueling launches to get to the moon that NASA conservatively estimates, and there’s no boil off of fuel between refueling launches or scheduling delays requiring extra launches due to boil off, then the total cost of a moon mission with starship is now 1.18 billion dollars. The SLS, Frankenstein creation that it is, costs roughly 2.4 billion for a launch. SLS is double the cost on paper, yes. However there is a few massive points in its favor: it has flown twice without blowing up unexpectedly, it does not require over a dozen launches of other rockets to do its only job, and it has actually delivered a payload to the moon. Starship right now can claim none of these things.

Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles, it currently has no way to deploy any meaningful cargo to Leo besides fucking starlink satellites. So it can’t even be used to construct the lunar gateway or an orbital tug.

Please stop huffing Elon’s vaporware.

[–] melfie@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.

Edit:

This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.

It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.