There is ice on the moon for H2/LOx rockets, but starship is methane/lox. I'm sure there is enough carbon around to make methane, but for short lunar hops and low acceleration, H2/Lox might be a better bet. The round trip to/land on the moon is a lot of delta-V if you do it single stage, and the higher ISP of H2/Lox may be a major advantage

But we are a long way from having fuel manufacturing on the moon, a LOT of infrastructure needs to be landed there first.

The way Artemis is planned,a lot of things all have to work. In addition to SLS and Orion. We need starship to work, and its upper stage to be man-rated for lunar ops.. in-flight refueling to work. Long term cryo propellant storage. The starship upper stage probably also needs a lot of mods - the delta v to land on the moon, then take off again is high, and starship is carrying a lot of unnecessary engines, fins, etc.

We probably need successful recovery of starship lower and maybe upper stages - and the latter needs successful reentry.

The single stage land / takeoff from the moon is only useful if the lander can be serviced in lunar orbit for another flight.

Starship needs all the life support equipment for early human landings before there s a lunar base. Also needs rough surface compatible landing gear.

None of this is impossible, but its a lot, and is likely to take a long time. The Govt and taxpayers may get fed up long before then, or the Chinese may send a manned mission and take the wind out of the sails of the Artimis program.

Agree, Alpaca seems like a reasonable design for a lander, though I don't know much about it



The cryogenic fuels were chosen because they or their constituents exist on the moon and can be used for refueling once the infrastructure is in place.

Starship is 10x larger than other landers because its purpose isn’t to take 4 people to the moon. It’s like having a school bus to take your kids to soccer practice; it wasn’t designed for that but you can make it work if you want to. There are potential advantages including larger payloads, more people, the ability to use the ship itself as a base while the stuff around it is built… but it was not envisioned to be a moon lander. The best design for that IMO is the ALPACA, which NASA discarded.

Starship was not intended to be a lunar lander. It was designed for a different mission. The HLS version is a significant modification, so things like engine count, aerodynamic control flaps, heat tiles, landing legs, descent engines, are all subject to change from the prototypes Mars landers that we see flying in tests. What will be kept and what will be changed are not yet known, but I think that it's safe to say that the HLS Starship is going to look different than the current designs.

Burning Methane does make refueling in the distant future more challenging on the moon, but at the rate we're going it's going to be another fifty years before a permanent base is sitting there if it ever is. If Starship is going to be a meaningful part of the HLS, the landing gear and vehicle geometry are going to have to be seriously engineered. The south pole of the moon is rougher and far less flat than the places that Apollo visited. Until somebody gets up there with a bulldozer and clears a landing pad they're going to need a lander that can handle a slope and uneven terrain without any question. ALPACA has a far better design in that regard, but nobody seems to want it.

Agree.

I'm really surprised that SpaceX is pushing starship as s lunar lander, mars transfer vehicle etc. These are very different types of operations - and spacecraft are very tight mass margin machines.

Assuming it works, starship should have no trouble launching a modest sized lunar lander complete with fuel. It has higher mass to orbit than SaturnV and that launched the lander and the command module in one go.

Starship might need a high energy 3rd stage for that, not sure

I think that for SpaceX it was about gaining R&D money for the Starship program. Not to say that they don’t intend to provide value, but that they are taking advantage of the opportunity to help their development of Starship despite the distraction from its actual purpose.

Meanwhile, at the time the offer was made, SpaceX was the closest to having something remotely capable of doing the job, and it was way cheaper than the other candidates. I think that NASA decided that it was a cheap way to get the ball rolling.