If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?
And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?
I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.
I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.
But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.
I’m disgusted with Musk and can still see that SpaceX is the best thing going right now.
Why do Starship launches explode? Because SpaceX is pushing the envelope in multiple directions at once. Why is SLS “reliable”? Because it’s doing absolutely nothing new whatsoever, and doing it at an appalling cost in dollars and time.
SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.
Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.
Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad
Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.
Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.