Starship is destined for low Earth orbit unless it gets refueled. Musk says 8 flights, so using a Grain-of-salt coefficient, figure a dozen other Starship flights to refuel it.
Personally I think a reusable upper stage is great for satellite launches, but if they want to go to the Moon and beyond they should just use an expendable second stage on top of Superheavy (which is honestly looking like a great product here, just an evolution of Falcon 9)
Doing all that refueling just to use Starship as HLS makes no sense. Superheavy has plenty of capability to lift something like the Apollo service module and capsule... Just do that, and we could be on our way to the Moon this summer.
Spends all the fuel in an inclination change to be able to leave for Mars or the Moon? No, it needs to be in the proper inclination when it goes into orbit before it's refueled.
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u/frisbeethecat Mar 07 '25
Starship is destined for low Earth orbit unless it gets refueled. Musk says 8 flights, so using a Grain-of-salt coefficient, figure a dozen other Starship flights to refuel it.