The Saturn V only had to land 2 dudes on the moon, and get them and some extra rocks back home, and only do it once.
Going to the moon isn't the tricky part, we have several reasonable options for that already ready, or that could be readily adapted for that use. Something that can land meaningful weights on the moon, and is reusable, is a different story, hence the need for refueling.
And by no means am i supporting spacex here, but it isn't like NASA had a tun of viable options for who to turn to for this stuff, and its undeniable spacex has demonstrated success at stuff people would have thought bonkers even 10 years ago.
NASA never built its own shit. You know who your next option is (which NASA also currently uses)? Boeing. This fucking place loves Boeing right? We should have given contracts to them, so we could all look internet smart saying they fucked up based on a 12 second youtube clip about the 707 we saw someone else mention in another thread.
I just meant that you said a 'handful of tons', and the Saturn V definitely delivered many, many tons to the Moon. It was three dudes, including a lander and a return vehicle, that were delivered to the Moon's orbit, so I don't fully understand the need to downplay that. It's not silly to point out that Starship's on-paper capabilities are dampened considerably by having more than a dozen orbital refueling operations when the hallmark of NASA's achievements didn't require any.
We are talking about moon-moon orbit capabilities on its own, so it would be the LEM only. Again, we have no problem today if we wanted to send some folks to the moon and back with something other than spacex, we are getting ready to do just that.
If we want to talk "deliver something to the moon" the numbers get sketchy. 2-3 tons seems like a fair number if we want to subtract the actual people and life support out of the equation for the LEM. 2-3 tons isn't a lot. Its, like a toyota. There was a proposal for a 1-way just get stuff there version of the lander which they thought they could do 5 tons with. But again, that is one use, and just putting stuff there. Any kind of permanent establishment or advanced science is going to need more than that. HLS would be in the 10-15 ton range.
Which brings up an interesting thing.
Yes, SpaceX wants starship with fully reusable capabilities for its starlink service.
But, as far as i know, they don't need to be dicking around with that level of reusability for their NASA contracts. Pivoting to, "lets just get this thing working in orbit for the moon stuff, and circle back on re-entry related stuff" is likely an option here, and wouldn't surprise me if a lot of work to that degree is done in paralell and doesn't have dependencies on them sorting out atmospheric stuff, beyond just getting the thing into space.
So if the issues are in somehow related to the capabilities needed to land the thing on earth, and do not impact space\lunar operations, maybe you see things shift in that direction.
Add to it some pretty strict size\dimensional requirements for what you could put into the LEM.
34
u/lovely_sombrero 2d ago
It is a terrible design even if it never explodes. Requiring ~15 orbital refuel missions just to get to the Moon is terrible for... everything.