[mlindner]

I agree it would have been a neat way to start things off. But I have no doubt someone else will come along to pick up that mantle.

Also, I'll note: It is completely about the delays. That's what dearmoon says and that's what the participants of the flight say, and that's what reporters about it say.

There aren't any rumored performance issues with Starship. On some hate forums there's a few people that have tried to claim, using a slide from a SpaceX presentation that shows the achieved orbit of the recent Starship launch, that it is somehow indicative of the entire performance of the vehicle going forward. Rather than just their own malicious misinterpretation of the facts.

[MisterBiggs]

I should have been more clear, I meant specifically getting Humans to the Moon is looking much more difficult than SpaceX initially believed. In orbit refueling will require incredible vehicle performance, launch cadence and vehicle manufacturing. All things SpaceX can surely achieve in time. I speculate that in 2017 when the dearMoon deal was struck Elon had a much different ConOps in mind for this mission.

[mlindner]

Ah ok. However I do think they assumed in-orbit refueling for the DearMoon mission. Starship was designed from the get go to only barely make LEO with a very large payload (or go a bit further with a smaller payload) and then anything higher energy would require refueling the vehicle.