Not gonna matter if they don’t pull the plug on starship being the lunar lander.
They were supposed to do an unmanned lunar landing with the thing earlier this year. Currently it has failed to deliver itself to any orbit, let alone demonstrate the ability to refuel in orbit and reach the moon.
And that’s with empty test articles, no life support equipment, food, water, or anything else the crew is going to need.
Starship is at best, years behind schedule, and at worst, an outright snake oil scheme designed to defraud American Taxpayers.
Same for SLS, except way more expensive and way more far behind schedule.
Did some googling (go verify these numbers yourself if you want to):
- SLS Dev.Costs so far: around $11.8 Billion (numbers from 2023 report), development started in 2011, reuses actual space shuttle parts instead of developing something on their own. Costs per launch estimate: $4.1 Billion
- Starship Dev.Costs so far: $5 Billion, started somewhere in 2019, based on Falcon technology, which started in 2002. Cost per launch estimate: realistically somewhere around $100 Million (Falcon 9 costs ~$62Million per launch including profit). I’ll ignore SpaceXs delirious goal of $2-$3 Million per launch for now.
Both companies are far behind schedule and budget. I think SLS will put a lander on the moon first and SLS will land the bulk of the whole program on the moon afterwards. Sort of like comparing an F1 car with a Full-sized Truck. After that Starship 3 launch, which was mostly successful, I am quite sure they’ll make it work at some point in the future.
You’re comparing a fully finished rocket development program to a half developed rocket.
SLS already did its first flight almost 2 years ago. It successfully delivered a fully functional crew capsule to earth orbit, and that capsule successfully flew around the moon and returned to earth. It was a fully functional rocket that completed all of its mission objectives.
Starship has not delivered itself to any orbit, let alone any useful systems. Flight 3 was “mostly successful” in the same way a crash landing is a landing. The stated goal was a suborbital flight to test booster return, the Pez door(something they are not contracted to develop), in flight fuel transfer, and Ship re-entry.
Starship managed to reach a suborbital altitude and speed. The booster separated and started its return, which ended in it slamming into the ocean at fighter jet speeds. The Pez door got jammed open after its first test, they just didn’t do the fuel transfer test(moving some fuel from a header tank to the main tank) and the ship was out of control and couldn’t be oriented for re-entry. It entered the atmosphere with its heat tiles facing sideways to the atmosphere and promptly disintegrated.
They failed more than half the goals of the flight. Basically everything after stage separation was a failure, and I don’t put much stock in the corporate spin of “everything after cleaning the pad is icing on the cake”
We’re not even talking about the fact that a fully fueled ship that’s supposed to take 100 tons to orbit is incapable of getting itself to orbit. Or that Elon recently announced Starship 2, which is going to be bigger and can take 150 tons to orbit. Starship 2 was not on the development timeline for Artemis.
If Starship ever makes it to orbit, I have no doubt that it will cost just as much as SLS to develop and launch.
