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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

They might be comparable without refueling, but Starship utilizes refueling to massively increase it's deep space mass budget.

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Starship might utilize refueling. So far it hasn’t done anything of the sort.

Starship must utilize refueling. It can't get to, land on, and return from the moon without it.

This is the huge difference. Apollo missions used two launches of the Saturn V - one for the crew capsule and one for the lunar lander, which rendezvoused in orbit. Artemis is planning on using one SLS launch for the crew capsule, and an estimated 8-16 Starship launches for the lunar lander and refueling.

That isn't how the Apollo missions worked. They put the command module, service module and the LEM on a single Saturn 5[1]. Once in space, the command+service module would need to turn around and dock with the LEM before heading off to the moon.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/diagrams/apollo.html

1: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/diagr...

> Apollo missions used two launches of the Saturn V - one for the crew capsule and one for the lunar lander, which rendezvoused in orbit.

That was a concept called "Earth Orbit Rendezvous" which was discarded early on during the Apollo program in favor of "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous" where the Command and Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM) was launched on a single Saturn V. You can see this in the movie Apollo 13.

> Apollo missions used two launches of the Saturn V - one for the crew capsule and one for the lunar lander,

What? Have you watched any Apollo mission media ever?

Watch Apollo 13 the movie at least and get the most basics of facts straight.

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