… at the expense of progress and the American tax payer.
I feel I need to put that figure into perspective.
If we accept these calculations, then a Starship lunar mission will require at least 69 launches (68 tanker missions plus one outgoing Starship) to carry 50 tons of payload to the Moon. Now, I have calculated that a realistic launch cost for Starship is $70 million (read more here), putting the launch costs of this mission alone at $4.83 billion. That is equivalent to $96,600 per kg to the Moon.
By comparison, NASA’s SLS Block 1B can take 38 tons to the Moon in a single launch, at a cost of roughly $2.5 billion per launch, which works out to $65,800 per kg to the Moon.
https://wlockett.medium.com/starship-launch-13-exposed-its-fatal-achilles-heel-ef968e7e5b2d
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