The alternative to Starship needs to solve many of the same problem and is from a less proven company. If they can do it, great but I don't think its more likely.
I'm perfectly comfortable with not landing 100t of material on either the moon or Mars. Have yet to hear any compelling argument for why we should except that ermygoerrdd sci-fi!!!11!!
Ok I misunderstood your argument. The fact is, its the governments planned to build a base. If your opinion is that instead we should build a base at the bottom of the ocean, you are correct, Starship is not a good engineering solution.
In fact, anything not in space wouldn't be ideal.
But that's a political choice, and Moon base is what NASA and congress are working towards.
Starship is going for a fully reusable upper stage. Google "second system syndrome." This is engineering by fiat. It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability to be demonstrated, and another 10 to make it reliable. And that's generous because it implies that other problems like in orbit refueling will get solved in parallel. How many starship problems have actually been solved in parallel?
I became a starship skeptic because I thought the project management was bullshit. Nothing I've seen changes in my mind about that.
I hate the typical "second system syndrome" nonsense. People always only use that for things that fail, while in reality plenty of second systems are good, technically and/or commercially.
Starship has come as close to landing an upper stage as its possible on water, and from orbital velocity. That's already a huge accomplishment and the landing on land has also been demonstrated.
Problems are constantly being worked on in parallel. Transferring fuel between tanks in the Ship is literally something already tested and that's a big part of the validation of inter-ship fuel transfer. There was even a NASA contract about exactly that. There is parallel work on the launch site, ship the booster and the interior (this is just less visible but its being worked on as we can see from the contract).
Orbital refueling can continually be worked on even if some ships fail landings.
> It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability
Or it could take less ...
And even so, if we ever want a serious moon base, an architecture like that is required. The tiny BlueOrigin lander might be ok for flags and footprints but not to deploy serious infrastructure.
The assertion that something like starship is required for a moon base is wild. Why would anyone want to have to rely on a rocket that needs multiple refueling missions before it can even start to go to the moon?
The whole starship project is the wrong way to get to the wrong goal.
Do the math on how much cargo and volume a moon base requires and then get back to me. Starship is big enough for crew to live in for extend period. Trying to do that with many smaller landers will require MORE launches for the same payload to the moon.
Do the math and you will see the same, its obvious once you think about it. Even most the smaller lander need refueling.
And if you actually think its viable to do Apollo style where we put everything on a single stack and land on the moon like that and build a base that way, you need to get your head examined.
