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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> Not exactly, as the fuel provided in orbit by these other missions will allow a much larger payload to reach the Moon's surface and return.

Amortized over the number of launches it takes to get a single moonshot.

> StarShip can already deliver a similar payload to orbit as Saturn V

But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit. We have plenty of rockets capable of getting to orbit. And given that satellites have differing needs when it comes to orbital trajectories, it's unclear whether we even need that capability. By analogy, we've had jumbo jets for decades, but most air routes are not flying on jumbo jets, because the demand isn't there.

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> Amortized over the number of launches it takes to get a single moonshot.

Saturn V was completely destroyed by each launch with only the payload surviving. It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison when you compare # launches.

Those 10-15 launches of StarShip will be a lot cheaper than a single Saturn V launch because at the end you still have all the StarShips you launched and all you used was some methane and oxygen.

> Those 10-15 launches of StarShip will be a lot cheaper than a single Saturn V launch because at the end you still have all the StarShips you launched and all you used was some methane and oxygen.

Minus the maintenance for the wear-and-tear of expending (ahem) astronomical amounts of energy to propel the largest rocket ever built into space and then return through atmospheric re-entry ten or more times. Just because you have built a machine that might, at scale, be more economical than an expendable rocket does not mean that the economics will actually materialize such that it ever makes sense to realize that scale, especially if you dectuple your expected operating costs.

> But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit.

The way rocket staging works - each stage delivers the next stage to a predefined orbit / trajectory or energy level. It is not Saturn V that went to the moon, it just lofted a payload (final stage) into orbit that could perform a TLI.

This was the final stage of the Saturn V rocket for TLI (123,000 kg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-IVB

In orbit refuelling with StarShip is a major innovation, meaning that we don't need to separate payloads into parts and assemble them on orbit. Instead we can refuel a reusable boost stage.

> But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit.

Yet it was used to put Skylab in orbit.

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