What would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like?

Using an optimized, expendable starship could reduce the number of tanker missions required by up to 50 percent. This has downsides, including significantly increasing costs and undermining the entire point of Starship: complete and rapid reuse.

There is a third downside, and it is perhaps the most significant. An “expendable” Starship plan would be anathema to SpaceX’s leadership, including founder Elon Musk. Officials there don’t believe the space industry has fully digested how Starship launches will change the industry.

“You haven’t figured out yet how many Starships will launch,” a senior SpaceX source told Ars.

The company aims to launch 1 million tons of payload into orbit per year, the majority of which will be propellant. SpaceX simply believes that once it locks in Starship operations, it won’t be a big deal to launch a dozen or several more rockets per month. So why waste time on expensive rockets? That era is over.

enter the Dragon

The other option would be to rely solely on SpaceX hardware.

I don’t expect NASA to be interested in this idea, but it’s worth discussing. About a year ago, shortly after the presidential election, Republican space officials were considering canceling Artemis and substituting a “competition” similar to the commercial cargo program. It was thought that both SpaceX and Blue Origin would bid for plans to land humans on the Moon and that NASA would fund both.

However, these plans have largely fallen apart over the past 12 months. NASA (and perhaps most importantly, paymasters in Congress) prefer to stick with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for initial Artemis missions.

But if pressed, SpaceX could come up with a simplified moon landing architecture that requires less refueling. There are several ways this can be done, so I’ll present just one version here: