[0xffff2]

It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)

[tsimionescu]

I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.

[panick21]

Starship is irrelevant. SLS was dumb already in 2011 when Starship doesn't exist. Its a dumb system and was never the right system. NASA own analysis showed that.

People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.

Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.

[avmich]

> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.

If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?

And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?

I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.

[pfdietz]

Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.

[brandonagr2]

You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.

[itishappy]

Is it clear how many SLS launches would be needed to subsume Starship's part of the mission?

[bparsons]

We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.

[0xffff2]

I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.

[panick21]

True but we know for a fact that it doesn't consume 4-5 billion $ a year for the last 15 years like SLS/Orion because SpaceX couldn't afford that. If you actually do some basic math and look at SpaceX revenue and so on, you can make some pretty decent guesses. And SpaceX is analyzed in detail by lots of people.

[nine_k]

Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.