... 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.
Fuel factory is hard on the moon. O2 is plentiful in rocks everywhere there is very likely to be H2O at the poles and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was buried ice or some water or hydration elsewhere…. There could be some carbon gases frozen at the poles but I wouldn’t count on it. Blue Origin’s lander is a safer bet in terms of fuel.
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.
Destin ( from Smarter Every Day on YT ) did a fantastic presentation talking about this two years ago. It was a major eye-opener.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
... 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.
I guess a good first payload would be a fuel factory.
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"
Fuel factory is hard on the moon. O2 is plentiful in rocks everywhere there is very likely to be H2O at the poles and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was buried ice or some water or hydration elsewhere…. There could be some carbon gases frozen at the poles but I wouldn’t count on it. Blue Origin’s lander is a safer bet in terms of fuel.
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.