There was a Smarter Every Day video just published where he gave a talk to some people from NASA, some of the things he revealed and how little the people in the room seemed to know were a bit shocking. Like, no one knows exactly how many Starship launches it will take for refueling everything to get Artemis and supported hardware to the moon (the latest paper says “at least 12”), and how the ways they’re looking to do are very complex meanwhile the Apollo engineers literally wrote the book on how they did it - TL;DR keep it simple, build in a ton of redundancy.
The thing is, doing another Apollo isn’t what anyone wants. We already went to the moon to say we could do it. The new program is aiming to do more with less.
Of course, trusting know liar Elon Musk, the man who couldn’t deliver pizza on time, let alone a rocketship, was a massive fucking mistake. Starship will never meet the deadline, and I’ve got good money on Blue Moon being done before Starship.
Just a note for those keeping score, since Starship needs to do 2 test landings on the moon BEFORE Artemis 3, at 12 launches per mission, that requires 39 launches, 36 recoveries and 36 successful space docking and fuel transfer missions. They’re currently at zero for all of those.
SLS/Orion, meanwhile, has done loops around the moon, meaning that apart from not having a crew, it’s done everything it needs to.
