9 ms·

Starship lunar lander missions to require nearly 20 launches, NASA says

26 points by ironyman 3y ago

flerchin 3y ago
How did the folks in the 60s do this? Starship is going to be vastly more capable, but it's not finished, and it's vastly more complex.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Money, brains, and a perceived existential threat from the Soviet Union.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    I was a toddler when the Soviet Union dissolved, do you think the public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman? Also, I don't think that brains have changed that much in the past 60 years. Many of our best and brightest are now in fintech or adtech instead of manufacturing and research groups, but I wouldn't say that better brains were why the Saturn program succeeded when Starship seems to be as much of a challenge today (rather, I'd say the goalposts in economics, risk, and capacity have shifted).
    - chasd00 3y ago
      > public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman? I don't think so, i was a kid but remember breaking news on TV of Russian strategic bombers enroute to the US only to turn away at the last second. It was day by day whether society ended or not during the cold war.
    - justinator 3y ago
      China is where my iPhone is made (and everything else). Middle East is where my oil comes from. Russia is in a stalemate with a former satellite country whose main export is grain. They don't make a good antagonist.
    - avmich 3y ago
      Could be surprising, but some kids of the day in the Soviet Union were more fearful (well... wrong word...) of Chinese nukes rather than American ones.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Lots of money, only landing two people in a foil can with very little additional payload capacity, and not staying very long. Apollo cost something like $300 billion in 2023 dollars. NASA's contract for the Starship landing is $2.9b. SLS development has been around $12b with a marginal cost of $4b per launch. All together the Artemis program (SLS, Orion, Lunar Gateway Space Station, and Landers) is estimated to cost around $93b through 2025. The Apollo LEM had a payload capacity in the neighborhood of 1T. The Starship Lunar Lander is supposed to handle 100T+
- asciimov 3y ago
  More middlemen these days, all looking for their handouts.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    More middlemen? (pdf warning) https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STATE-OF-COMPETITION-WITHIN-THE-DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA... > Since the 1990s, the defense sector has consolidated substantially, transitioning from 51 to 5 aerospace and defense prime contractors. Also- if an entity is performing work under contract and gets paid for it how is that a handout?
    - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      I'm not necessarily agreeing with the poster above, but surely the number of prime contractors is not relevant to the number of non-prime sub-contractors?
  - stetrain 3y ago
    Artemis is less expensive than Apollo, at least so far. There is definitely a fighting over handouts component, but this mostly seems to be at the Congressional level where they legislate how the rocket will be built and what kind of boosters it will have, and those requirements have a habit of lining up nicely with existing defense contractors in the states they represent.
- ls612 3y ago
  Much more money was spent, and mass to the lunar surface was far smaller than the Starship lander.
- Casteil 3y ago
  Single use 'Hail Mary' style rockets
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > How did the folks in the 60s do this? A huge commitment of resources relative to national output (2.5% of GDP over a decade—that's spending annually about 70% of what the US currently spends on defense), limited mission scope, limited planning for anything to be usable beyond “get to the moon”, and higher risk tolerance. Also, counting both unmanned tests as part of the program, the 1960s moon program (Gemini + Apollo programs) took more than 20 launches given all that.
- Veedrac 3y ago
  The Apollo Lunar Module had 6.7m³ volume. Starship HLS should have around 1000m³. Apollo LM had about a 5 ton dry mass. Starship LM would be probably well over 200. Apollo LM got around with a ton of stages. Starship LM gets around with refueling flights.
- perihelions 3y ago
  High risk tolerance in a war-torn era which held military pilot lives cheap, expendable, noble to sacrifice. (Not commenting which mindset is wiser or foolish-er; just think it worth highlighting, underscoring how starkly different our eras' mindsets are. I think it's worth pondering. Do you even know how many workmen died in the trenches of the Apollo Program industry? I don't have a clue either. That one SpaceX employee died on the job is national news in our time—in the 50's-60's, all blue-collar jobs were orders of magnitude more horrible).
  - threeio 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... is a start? Probably doesn't take into account contractor lives offsite or heart attacks offsite, etc.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I've read a couple histories of the Apollo program, and they spared no effort to keep the astronauts safe. The Apollo 1 fire came close to causing the entire program to be shut down.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      That generations safety obsession lost us space for a generation, in the same way their no-nuke fixation lit our only planet on fire. These are the sins of my parents.
- idlewords 3y ago
  They did it by not trying to land a huge fueled rocket on the Moon (on its tail!) and then have the whole thing take off again. The rocket equation bites you in the ass very quickly once you commit to a 1950's sci-fi style landing with a big silver rocket that you insist on taking home with you. I don't know what you mean by more'capable' in this context if the system needs 20 times the launches and nonexistent technology (in-orbit refueling) to achieve the same goal.
  - SECProto 3y ago
    This is the answer. Apollo missions were essentially 6 stages (3 to orbit then TLI, lunar descent stage, lunar ascent stage, CSM). Maybe 7 if you count dropping the service module for reentry. The whole concept of starship only works if they can launch reliably a couple times a day
ge96 3y ago
man is on drugs comment I look forward to the time in the future when life is more than about living eg. going to work, paying bills, etc... the greater picture of what is out there and spreading ourselves out, in case we are the first which is hard to believe. I'm sitting at a work cubicle now typing this, my mind is constrained to the system on Earth. It is sad to think you're just a cause-effect driven machine eg. if happy/good = continue.
- jfengel 3y ago
  You're pinning a lot of hope on space, and I doubt it's going to work out to you. You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces. You can spread out today, right now. You'll have air available for free, at a pressure and temperature you can tolerate (or easily modify to get there). Space isn't going to improve your nihilism. It's incredibly hostile to life, and you'll put in all of your effort just keeping from asphyxiation. The rocks out there are different from earth rocks, but I bet you haven't even put much thought into all of the different kinds of rocks you have available to you right now. I suspect you'll quickly get bored of the fact that non-living planets have a lot less going on than living ones. There will be a chance for people to do them the first time, but the low-hanging fruit will all be picked quickly, and everybody else is just going to be standing about wondering why they wanted so badly to go to a place with nothing interesting happening. Don't get me wrong: space is cool and I'm glad we're going. But I don't think it's the existential cure-all that you (and many others) seem to imagine that it is. If your actual interest was spreading out, you'd already do it. I believe that your malaise is due to something else entirely, and I think you could take more realistic steps to do something about it.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    I bet even if you did nothing everyday on the moon it would feel more productive and have more gravitas just because you’re on the moon; atleast for the first few decades.
  - kaibee 3y ago
    > You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces. All already owned and claimed by someone, backed by the force of violence. I agree with you about space not being solution, but I don't think its as simple as you put it.
asciimov 3y ago
I wonder, is it science that limits our payload sizes or is this just modern bureaucracy that forces so many launches. My money is on bureaucracy.
- Veedrac 3y ago
  Blame the rocket equation for this one.
  - pasttense01 3y ago
    If you are not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
- jameskilton 3y ago
  Yeah, this one is pure physics. It's hard and expensive to get off the planet, and even more so to get to the Moon.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Here's your culprit: Mtotal = Mempty * e^(deltaV/Vexhaust) If you work backwards from launching a couple of hundred tons from the moon, you end up needing all these refueling flights. Compare that to the 2.5 ton mass of the Apollo ascent stage. The rocket equation does not play.
jjk166 3y ago
20 launches of reusable vehicles. At an estimated $40 Million per launch, 20 launches is still way cheaper than a single launch of an expendable moon rocket (Saturn V ~ $1.3 Billion per launch, Artemis ~ $ 4.1 Billion per launch).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > In order to be able to meet the schedule that is required, as well as managing boiloff and so forth of the fuel, there’s going to need to be a rapid succession of launches of fuel 20 launches in rapid succession
- idlewords 3y ago
  Fantasy rockets are always cheap! Let's wait until they fly one. But there's a separate issue too; let's say generously each launch has a 98% success rate, that alone means a 1/3 chance the mission will fail. So you need to start adding backup missions to the plan, exacerbating the problem. The trouble here is not just launch cost but also launch cadence. How do you launch 20 huge rockets in short succession when one heavy launch per month is about the best that's been done to date?
  - wmf 3y ago
    You need one backup launch window (so 21 instead of 20) and a backup rocket; these seem like no problem. I think launch cadence can also be solved with proper incentives.
    - idlewords 3y ago
      If launch #8 blows up your launch tower, you do in fact have a launch cadence problem. For the naive math to work, you need to build 21 launch pads, etc.
      - kulahan 3y ago
        If the optimistic guess is $40M, wouldn't things have to go really, really, really wrong for it to be anywhere near the $1.3 Billion? I mean, those numbers aren't exactly close at all. Even if it's naively optimistic, it still seems unquestionable that it'll be a lot cheaper, no? Am I missing something?
cubefox 3y ago
2021 Blue Origin on SpaceX's Artemis III plan doesn't seem far off: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fhodq59wvaUjv7c5eqw2KWAsYFAs7UH3fQZOVmVwZIJY.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df7552ac7ce972045599f81e6c67765d78036ca78 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
idlewords 3y ago
No one seems to mention that this whole architecture requires a specific technology, in-orbit refueling, that does not exist. It would be cool to have it! But it's one of those technical problems that grows in difficulty and complexity the more you look at it in detail. It is very hard to move tons of propellant around in zero-G (or fractional G) and the learning curve for it has to be done in space. Multiply the difficulty by a factor of 10 or so if the propellant is also a cryogen.
- rmu09 3y ago
  I'm curious why a crygenic fuel is harder to transfer in space than something like kerosene? Space is cold, so my naive idea is that a crygenic fuel is easier to keep liquid (non-frozen).
  - teraflop 3y ago
    Space isn't "cold", it's a thermal insulator. Objects in space are still illuminated by sunlight whenever they're not in shadow, which heats them up, and the vacuum makes it difficult for them to get rid of that heat. That's why (for instance) the JWST has a sunshade that is considerably larger than the telescope itself, just to keep it cooled to 50K -- which is still well above the boiling point of liquid hydrogen. It's also why the ISS has large radiators so that it doesn't get too hot for human habitation.
    - rmu09 3y ago
      A large sun shade for an object in low earth orbit shouldn't be that much of a problem. Transferring a liquid in microgravity should be equally difficult regardless if it's cryogenic or not.
      - rokkitmensch 3y ago
        That sunshade will turn into a big sail in LEO, annoyingly.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
avmich 3y ago
According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) Launch mass: 1320 tons (120 tons dry) Payload capacity: 100 - 150t (fully reusable)[1] 250 - 300t (expendable)[2] So, to fully fuel up a Starship on LEO 1200 tons of fuel are needed, which are between 8 and 12 full payloads of said Starship. Yes there could be some boil-off. Refueling station could be protected both by Sun screens (a-la JWST if you wish) and include active coolers. This is an old topic in space technology, e.g. both Buran (30 days of orbital flight while keeping LOX liquid onboard) and Vulcan's second stage (LH2 onboard) focused to an extent on that. We do have a long history of refueling - since at least station Mir the visiting Progresses used to refuel the station, only the liquids were different, and of course the amounts were very different. Still this increases hopes that we can develop the refueling technology since we'll soon need more of it. Those multiple launches don't necessarily spell doom to the lunar plans for Starship. For example, Falcon-9 is reliable enough to have a hundred consecutive successful flights. And even in 1960-s the idea to have multiple launch pads to be able to launch even after catastrophic event on one of them wasn't too radical. And majority of activity of this kind is probably going to be unmanned, which makes things faster and cheaper to repeat if something goes wrong.

26 points by ironyman 3y ago

How did the folks in the 60s do this? Starship is going to be vastly more capable, but it's not finished, and it's vastly more complex.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Money, brains, and a perceived existential threat from the Soviet Union.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  I was a toddler when the Soviet Union dissolved, do you think the public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman? Also, I don't think that brains have changed that much in the past 60 years. Many of our best and brightest are now in fintech or adtech instead of manufacturing and research groups, but I wouldn't say that better brains were why the Saturn program succeeded when Starship seems to be as much of a challenge today (rather, I'd say the goalposts in economics, risk, and capacity have shifted).
  - chasd00 3y ago
    > public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman? I don't think so, i was a kid but remember breaking news on TV of Russian strategic bombers enroute to the US only to turn away at the last second. It was day by day whether society ended or not during the cold war.
  - justinator 3y ago
    China is where my iPhone is made (and everything else). Middle East is where my oil comes from. Russia is in a stalemate with a former satellite country whose main export is grain. They don't make a good antagonist.
  - avmich 3y ago
    Could be surprising, but some kids of the day in the Soviet Union were more fearful (well... wrong word...) of Chinese nukes rather than American ones.
stetrain 3y ago
Lots of money, only landing two people in a foil can with very little additional payload capacity, and not staying very long. Apollo cost something like $300 billion in 2023 dollars. NASA's contract for the Starship landing is $2.9b. SLS development has been around $12b with a marginal cost of $4b per launch. All together the Artemis program (SLS, Orion, Lunar Gateway Space Station, and Landers) is estimated to cost around $93b through 2025. The Apollo LEM had a payload capacity in the neighborhood of 1T. The Starship Lunar Lander is supposed to handle 100T+
asciimov 3y ago
More middlemen these days, all looking for their handouts.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  More middlemen? (pdf warning) https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STATE-OF-COMPETITION-WITHIN-THE-DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA... > Since the 1990s, the defense sector has consolidated substantially, transitioning from 51 to 5 aerospace and defense prime contractors. Also- if an entity is performing work under contract and gets paid for it how is that a handout?
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    I'm not necessarily agreeing with the poster above, but surely the number of prime contractors is not relevant to the number of non-prime sub-contractors?
- stetrain 3y ago
  Artemis is less expensive than Apollo, at least so far. There is definitely a fighting over handouts component, but this mostly seems to be at the Congressional level where they legislate how the rocket will be built and what kind of boosters it will have, and those requirements have a habit of lining up nicely with existing defense contractors in the states they represent.
ls612 3y ago
Much more money was spent, and mass to the lunar surface was far smaller than the Starship lander.
Casteil 3y ago
Single use 'Hail Mary' style rockets
dragonwriter 3y ago
> How did the folks in the 60s do this? A huge commitment of resources relative to national output (2.5% of GDP over a decade—that's spending annually about 70% of what the US currently spends on defense), limited mission scope, limited planning for anything to be usable beyond “get to the moon”, and higher risk tolerance. Also, counting both unmanned tests as part of the program, the 1960s moon program (Gemini + Apollo programs) took more than 20 launches given all that.
Veedrac 3y ago
The Apollo Lunar Module had 6.7m³ volume. Starship HLS should have around 1000m³. Apollo LM had about a 5 ton dry mass. Starship LM would be probably well over 200. Apollo LM got around with a ton of stages. Starship LM gets around with refueling flights.
perihelions 3y ago
High risk tolerance in a war-torn era which held military pilot lives cheap, expendable, noble to sacrifice. (Not commenting which mindset is wiser or foolish-er; just think it worth highlighting, underscoring how starkly different our eras' mindsets are. I think it's worth pondering. Do you even know how many workmen died in the trenches of the Apollo Program industry? I don't have a clue either. That one SpaceX employee died on the job is national news in our time—in the 50's-60's, all blue-collar jobs were orders of magnitude more horrible).
- threeio 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... is a start? Probably doesn't take into account contractor lives offsite or heart attacks offsite, etc.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I've read a couple histories of the Apollo program, and they spared no effort to keep the astronauts safe. The Apollo 1 fire came close to causing the entire program to be shut down.
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    That generations safety obsession lost us space for a generation, in the same way their no-nuke fixation lit our only planet on fire. These are the sins of my parents.
idlewords 3y ago
They did it by not trying to land a huge fueled rocket on the Moon (on its tail!) and then have the whole thing take off again. The rocket equation bites you in the ass very quickly once you commit to a 1950's sci-fi style landing with a big silver rocket that you insist on taking home with you. I don't know what you mean by more'capable' in this context if the system needs 20 times the launches and nonexistent technology (in-orbit refueling) to achieve the same goal.
- SECProto 3y ago
  This is the answer. Apollo missions were essentially 6 stages (3 to orbit then TLI, lunar descent stage, lunar ascent stage, CSM). Maybe 7 if you count dropping the service module for reentry. The whole concept of starship only works if they can launch reliably a couple times a day

ge96 3y ago

man is on drugs comment I look forward to the time in the future when life is more than about living eg. going to work, paying bills, etc... the greater picture of what is out there and spreading ourselves out, in case we are the first which is hard to believe. I'm sitting at a work cubicle now typing this, my mind is constrained to the system on Earth. It is sad to think you're just a cause-effect driven machine eg. if happy/good = continue.

jfengel 3y ago
You're pinning a lot of hope on space, and I doubt it's going to work out to you. You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces. You can spread out today, right now. You'll have air available for free, at a pressure and temperature you can tolerate (or easily modify to get there). Space isn't going to improve your nihilism. It's incredibly hostile to life, and you'll put in all of your effort just keeping from asphyxiation. The rocks out there are different from earth rocks, but I bet you haven't even put much thought into all of the different kinds of rocks you have available to you right now. I suspect you'll quickly get bored of the fact that non-living planets have a lot less going on than living ones. There will be a chance for people to do them the first time, but the low-hanging fruit will all be picked quickly, and everybody else is just going to be standing about wondering why they wanted so badly to go to a place with nothing interesting happening. Don't get me wrong: space is cool and I'm glad we're going. But I don't think it's the existential cure-all that you (and many others) seem to imagine that it is. If your actual interest was spreading out, you'd already do it. I believe that your malaise is due to something else entirely, and I think you could take more realistic steps to do something about it.
- huytersd 3y ago
  I bet even if you did nothing everyday on the moon it would feel more productive and have more gravitas just because you’re on the moon; atleast for the first few decades.
- kaibee 3y ago
  > You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces. All already owned and claimed by someone, backed by the force of violence. I agree with you about space not being solution, but I don't think its as simple as you put it.

asciimov 3y ago

I wonder, is it science that limits our payload sizes or is this just modern bureaucracy that forces so many launches. My money is on bureaucracy.

Veedrac 3y ago
Blame the rocket equation for this one.
- pasttense01 3y ago
  If you are not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
jameskilton 3y ago
Yeah, this one is pure physics. It's hard and expensive to get off the planet, and even more so to get to the Moon.
idlewords 3y ago
Here's your culprit: Mtotal = Mempty * e^(deltaV/Vexhaust) If you work backwards from launching a couple of hundred tons from the moon, you end up needing all these refueling flights. Compare that to the 2.5 ton mass of the Apollo ascent stage. The rocket equation does not play.

jjk166 3y ago

20 launches of reusable vehicles. At an estimated $40 Million per launch, 20 launches is still way cheaper than a single launch of an expendable moon rocket (Saturn V ~ $1.3 Billion per launch, Artemis ~ $ 4.1 Billion per launch).

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> In order to be able to meet the schedule that is required, as well as managing boiloff and so forth of the fuel, there’s going to need to be a rapid succession of launches of fuel 20 launches in rapid succession
idlewords 3y ago
Fantasy rockets are always cheap! Let's wait until they fly one. But there's a separate issue too; let's say generously each launch has a 98% success rate, that alone means a 1/3 chance the mission will fail. So you need to start adding backup missions to the plan, exacerbating the problem. The trouble here is not just launch cost but also launch cadence. How do you launch 20 huge rockets in short succession when one heavy launch per month is about the best that's been done to date?
- wmf 3y ago
  You need one backup launch window (so 21 instead of 20) and a backup rocket; these seem like no problem. I think launch cadence can also be solved with proper incentives.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    If launch #8 blows up your launch tower, you do in fact have a launch cadence problem. For the naive math to work, you need to build 21 launch pads, etc.
    - kulahan 3y ago
      If the optimistic guess is $40M, wouldn't things have to go really, really, really wrong for it to be anywhere near the $1.3 Billion? I mean, those numbers aren't exactly close at all. Even if it's naively optimistic, it still seems unquestionable that it'll be a lot cheaper, no? Am I missing something?

cubefox 3y ago

2021 Blue Origin on SpaceX's Artemis III plan doesn't seem far off: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fhodq59wvaUjv7c5eqw2KWAsYFAs7UH3fQZOVmVwZIJY.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df7552ac7ce972045599f81e6c67765d78036ca78 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

idlewords 3y ago

No one seems to mention that this whole architecture requires a specific technology, in-orbit refueling, that does not exist. It would be cool to have it! But it's one of those technical problems that grows in difficulty and complexity the more you look at it in detail. It is very hard to move tons of propellant around in zero-G (or fractional G) and the learning curve for it has to be done in space. Multiply the difficulty by a factor of 10 or so if the propellant is also a cryogen.

rmu09 3y ago
I'm curious why a crygenic fuel is harder to transfer in space than something like kerosene? Space is cold, so my naive idea is that a crygenic fuel is easier to keep liquid (non-frozen).
- teraflop 3y ago
  Space isn't "cold", it's a thermal insulator. Objects in space are still illuminated by sunlight whenever they're not in shadow, which heats them up, and the vacuum makes it difficult for them to get rid of that heat. That's why (for instance) the JWST has a sunshade that is considerably larger than the telescope itself, just to keep it cooled to 50K -- which is still well above the boiling point of liquid hydrogen. It's also why the ISS has large radiators so that it doesn't get too hot for human habitation.
  - rmu09 3y ago
    A large sun shade for an object in low earth orbit shouldn't be that much of a problem. Transferring a liquid in microgravity should be equally difficult regardless if it's cryogenic or not.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      That sunshade will turn into a big sail in LEO, annoyingly.
- cryptonector 3y ago

avmich 3y ago

According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) Launch mass: 1320 tons (120 tons dry) Payload capacity: 100 - 150t (fully reusable)[1] 250 - 300t (expendable)[2] So, to fully fuel up a Starship on LEO 1200 tons of fuel are needed, which are between 8 and 12 full payloads of said Starship. Yes there could be some boil-off. Refueling station could be protected both by Sun screens (a-la JWST if you wish) and include active coolers. This is an old topic in space technology, e.g. both Buran (30 days of orbital flight while keeping LOX liquid onboard) and Vulcan's second stage (LH2 onboard) focused to an extent on that. We do have a long history of refueling - since at least station Mir the visiting Progresses used to refuel the station, only the liquids were different, and of course the amounts were very different. Still this increases hopes that we can develop the refueling technology since we'll soon need more of it. Those multiple launches don't necessarily spell doom to the lunar plans for Starship. For example, Falcon-9 is reliable enough to have a hundred consecutive successful flights. And even in 1960-s the idea to have multiple launch pads to be able to launch even after catastrophic event on one of them wasn't too radical. And majority of activity of this kind is probably going to be unmanned, which makes things faster and cheaper to repeat if something goes wrong.