I thought SpaceX was at least on the right track with Starship, but then I read this article talking about how even one trip to the Moon could take up to 20 launches:
What’s worse for musk - china launched and landed its own reusable rocket. Successfully landed. Spacex only cash cow now have a solid competition from china. Tesla is already losing globally to byd, no reason to believe margins gonna improve there.
So if we assume they manage to build a fully rapidly reusable rocket and launch infrastructure (the latter of which is incredibly questionable), the only marginal cost increase is just labor to conduct the launches and consumables.
And the physics says more like 17 launches, but at the end of the day, that’s just how much it costs to send 200 tons to the moon, AND bring the rocket back. They’re not jettisoning stages or leaving the rocket behind in the moon like Apollo.
The numbers are mind boggling, and short of nuclear rockets and space elevators, there is literally no way to do this short of many, many, many tiny launches, and it’s way less risky to have those tiny launches refill a tanker in LEO than to send 20 launches to the moon independently. Plus there would be no way to send large pre assembled components like nuclear reactors and construction/manufacturing equipment. Everything would have to be manufactured and assembled on the moon.
I thought SpaceX was at least on the right track with Starship, but then I read this article talking about how even one trip to the Moon could take up to 20 launches:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/12/nasa-says-up-to-20-spacex-starship-refueling-launches-per-moon-mission.html
What’s worse for musk - china launched and landed its own reusable rocket. Successfully landed. Spacex only cash cow now have a solid competition from china. Tesla is already losing globally to byd, no reason to believe margins gonna improve there.
So if we assume they manage to build a fully rapidly reusable rocket and launch infrastructure (the latter of which is incredibly questionable), the only marginal cost increase is just labor to conduct the launches and consumables.
And the physics says more like 17 launches, but at the end of the day, that’s just how much it costs to send 200 tons to the moon, AND bring the rocket back. They’re not jettisoning stages or leaving the rocket behind in the moon like Apollo.
The numbers are mind boggling, and short of nuclear rockets and space elevators, there is literally no way to do this short of many, many, many tiny launches, and it’s way less risky to have those tiny launches refill a tanker in LEO than to send 20 launches to the moon independently. Plus there would be no way to send large pre assembled components like nuclear reactors and construction/manufacturing equipment. Everything would have to be manufactured and assembled on the moon.