Latest estimate for Starship launches required to support a Moon landing? 22
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It was fashionable for sci-fi fans in the 1980s to think that the Apollo mission sold out the possibility of a much bigger presence on the moon for something like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel but Von Braun's Lunar Orbit Rendezvous plan was so much more feasible than all the alternatives.
The depressing thing about Starship as a lunar vehicle is that it does all of those launches to land and return at most a few metric tons unless it can be refueled with lunar origin fuel.
It might happen that Superheavy and Starship simply aren't big enough to do that job. As we know, rockets efficiency increases the bigger they get.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat"
Of course O2 is most of the propellant mass so you get some benefit from ISRU even if you have to ship in H2 or CH4 from Earth. Contrast that to the Mars situation where DAC of CO2 is easy though we don’t know where and how deep you’ll have to dig for H2O… but it is there.
Note if we send the Starship on a one-way trip we can send a much bigger payload and break it down for parts. At the very least a fuel factory and other bottom-of-pyramid manufacturing systems will need storage tanks. If it really takes 22 launches to land a Starship on Earth the reuse fraction will be very very good.
I read that Starship can hold up to 100 people, which is well outside of what's required for the first landing missions. But if NASA is really intent on a full moon base, I could see it making sense to develop that capacity from the outset.
Still... even if we had a moon base, wouldn't we also want a small craft for emergencies -- like having a car and a bus? So developing that first (or in parallel with the future "moon bus") would have made sense.