[throwawaymaths]

Sorry I should have been more clear. Starship is itself fantastic, but the starship lunar lander requiring 15 refuelings is extremely high risk and worthy of criticism. Also, why does it take 15 refuelings?? That seems like a lot. I could imagine 2 or 3, but is the proportion of fuel that makes it into orbit from a fully laden starship that low?

I can see starship (or something equivalently big) being eventually used to ferry large components to the moon, but to make the first phase of the manned part of the program dependent on that seems crazy.

If lunar starship (or an equivalent) could make it up in one refueling, it would IMO be less crazy, even if you had to ditch the whole thing on the moon each time.

[dotnet00]

15 was likely a pessimistic assessment. Likely calculated assuming that they have to use a regular old Starship (rather than a tanker variant) with near current specs, with no weight savings or any of the engine improvements, with conservative return fuel requirements. Basically, based on the data they had at the point of months before they submitted the proposal, when they were at the first iteration of Raptor and prior to all the different refinements they've been working on.

That said, that many launches is not that crazy and Starship wasn't the only proposal involving several launches and several orbital docking maneuvers. Basically all of them involved that in some form.

We've kind of been living in a bubble where any research on orbital refueling was forbidden by decree of Congress critters. But dozens of refueling launches should be well within our technical capabilities and SpaceX hasn't been the first one to suggest such systems. It's a necessary technology for realistically expanding human presence into space.

[sabareesh]

I believe again we are shortsighted here, it is not about just going back to moon but it is to establish as base. Based on wikipedia starship can take 100 tons to Moon after several refueling, which makes sense. We have already had our boots on the Moon why do you want to do the same again with almost no value of doing so after spending several billion dollars

[throwawaymaths]

Nobody is disputing 100 tons to moon capability is worth investing in. The plan though is to use starship for the first manned landing. Even that would be way less insane if you could get away with just parking an expendable starship in orbit around the moon, or deorbiting it or something and get away with fewer refuelings for the first landing. But that's not the plan.

[sabareesh]

Did you say first manned landing ?

[throwawaymaths]

First crewed landing of the Artemis program. Am I wrong about that?