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I thought the Angry Astronaut had a decent take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X3PkSBqei4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X3PkSBqei4

• bryanlarsen 2y ago
  There's no way the first 2 modules of Gateway are going to be ready by Q3 2026 either. That would require them to be 2 years ahead of schedule, and that never happens. OTOH, this Apollo 9 type mission could actually happen in 2026.
  • jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    It'd be neat to see Starship used for something sooner rather than latter, but like Angry Astronaut it feels to me pretty preposterous to make a mission that doesn't really incrementally help us towards the goal, that's just a one-off standalone thing.
    • bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Neither mission put people on the moon, they're both just risk reduction missions. They're just reducing risk on different things. So it depends on your opinion on where the risk is. There's a ton of risk in both Starship and Orion, so the proposed mission reduces a lot of risk. Angry's proposed mission would push back the eventual moon landing date. The Apollo 9 style mission wouldn't, if it can be done without ICPS. We're only going to build 3 ICPS's, so if we expend 1 of them for Angry's mission then we'll need EUS to land on the moon, making it highly unlikely we'll land on the moon before 2030. OTOH, the boosters and core stage of SLS can be built a rate of about 1 mission per year, so if we do the Apollo 9 thing in 2026 it means we can't do the moon landing before 2027. Which is the scenario we're already in, so no big deal. Even better would be to use a Falcon Heavy or a Vulcan to get Orion into LEO.