... yeah, like the moon is not that far away in terms of miles (my Honda has made it halfway there) but it is astonishingly far away in term of energy -- especially if you want to return to Earth.

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.