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Lunar Starship would involve on orbit refuelling and cargo transfer if used as a reusable lunar lander. In case your unfamiliar there’s a specific variant of St

Lunar Starship would involve on orbit refuelling and cargo transfer if used as a reusable lunar lander. In case your unfamiliar there’s a specific variant of Starship being proposed (and built?) for landing on the lunar surface it’s designed to avoid problems like having those big raptor engines blast tons of lunar dust around. So using starship to loft the payload into orbit on a reusable launcher, and lunar starship to land it re-usably on the moon is probably one of the only near term practical methods to large scale lunar construction, everyone else keeps throwing away expensive hardware.

m4rtink 6y ago
Indeed! The general idea is that you will have a lunar starship variant that will live in space after initial launch and will be periodicaly refuelled and stocked with cargo in LEO by regular tanker and cargo Starships as needed.
giantrobot 6y ago
Firs the Lunar Starship is not currently being built and has no buyers lined up. Second in-orbit cargo transfer and refueling is not a solved problem. Third Starship is not currently flying and it remains to be seen if it holds up to a fraction of Musk's claims about it. Fourth space construction is far from a solved problem and remote (Lunar far side) construction isn't even a thing, we don't even have large scale remote construction on Earth. Building something like a radio telescope on the Moon is not impossible and doesn't require any unobtanium. It is however pretty far out in terms practicality. Just about zero of the engineering capability required has been demonstrated. Even if my estimates for a Lunar radio telescope were off by an order of magnitude and it would only cost a billion dollars, that's still several FASTs or Arecibos you could build on Earth. The Lunar environment is harsh. Micrometeorites, cosmic rays, and solar flares would wreak havoc on sensitive components of a telescope (radio or otherwise). They're much more of a hazard on the Moon than on Earth because the atmosphere and magnetic field protect the surface. A repair or replacement of a component on a terrestrial instrument might be thousands or millions of dollars. For a Lunar instrument would be at least in the millions. There's a very weird meme going around that because SpaceX exists doing things in space is suddenly simple and cheap. Space is hard. SpaceX et al are making it less expensive but not by huge divisors. A Falcon 9 reusable is only a little cheaper than a Proton-M for similar capability. It's cheaper than ULA rockets by about half. It's a feat for sure but it's not like LEO is suddenly as affordable as air freight.

m4rtink 6y ago

Indeed! The general idea is that you will have a lunar starship variant that will live in space after initial launch and will be periodicaly refuelled and stocked with cargo in LEO by regular tanker and cargo Starships as needed.

giantrobot 6y ago

Firs the Lunar Starship is not currently being built and has no buyers lined up. Second in-orbit cargo transfer and refueling is not a solved problem. Third Starship is not currently flying and it remains to be seen if it holds up to a fraction of Musk's claims about it. Fourth space construction is far from a solved problem and remote (Lunar far side) construction isn't even a thing, we don't even have large scale remote construction on Earth. Building something like a radio telescope on the Moon is not impossible and doesn't require any unobtanium. It is however pretty far out in terms practicality. Just about zero of the engineering capability required has been demonstrated. Even if my estimates for a Lunar radio telescope were off by an order of magnitude and it would only cost a billion dollars, that's still several FASTs or Arecibos you could build on Earth. The Lunar environment is harsh. Micrometeorites, cosmic rays, and solar flares would wreak havoc on sensitive components of a telescope (radio or otherwise). They're much more of a hazard on the Moon than on Earth because the atmosphere and magnetic field protect the surface. A repair or replacement of a component on a terrestrial instrument might be thousands or millions of dollars. For a Lunar instrument would be at least in the millions. There's a very weird meme going around that because SpaceX exists doing things in space is suddenly simple and cheap. Space is hard. SpaceX et al are making it less expensive but not by huge divisors. A Falcon 9 reusable is only a little cheaper than a Proton-M for similar capability. It's cheaper than ULA rockets by about half. It's a feat for sure but it's not like LEO is suddenly as affordable as air freight.