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
Username Protected wrote:
Isn't the cryogenic refueling driven by wanting to use the spaceX upper stage as a lander - and its 10X larger than really needed.
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.