The lander isn’t Starship. It’s just the lander. And NASA didn’t put all its eggs in one basket on the lander.
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If they could only learn to trust the wisdom of the markets… /s
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Some people fail to get that.
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You make a fair point, they don’t want to have all their eggs in one basket and are looking for other options. But so far, per existing contracts and allocated funding, they are currently depending on SpaceX.
They’re currently depending on every company working on the project.
From bolts to space suits to food to electric switches.
Edit:
Mucks is just another contractor working on NASA’s project and plan. He didn’t pay for this - envision the plan - or act as the project manager. That’s all NASA.
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Nobody here is saying otherwise. My point is that NASA’s current plan assumes that a functional heavy lift rocket (the one that will launch the lander) will soon be available from SpaceX. And, per the contract, that that rocket will be cheaper than SLS. That’s all.
We can’t estimate that because SpaceX does not have moon-capable human-rated rockets or capsules.
SpaceX goes to low earth orbit, and they are great at it. They cannot go to the moon, and won’t be able to any time soon, which is part of why Artemis exists. Again for the cheap seats- going to the moon is many many many times harder than LEO. It is not just “go to orbit, then go a little farther!”. The challenges of space flight increase exponentially with distance. People vastly underestimate how hard this is and assume Space X can just do it because Musk says so and their ships have iPads in them.
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Exactly! NASA doesn’t build anything. They’ve always managed a huge network of independent contractors to do all the work, and they’ve historically been very good at it. No private company has ever achieved engineering management and oversight at this scale. Maybe someday one will, but I wouldn’t put my money on an overworked tech company run by a childish egomaniac to do it.
Apollo had 400,000 engineers working on it. Yes, really. 400,000. A tiny percentage of those worked at NASA. The rest were at private contractors, all managed indirectly by NASA. Apollo was an engineering project management triumph more than anything else. Anyone in industry knows that engineering projects are like herding cats. It’s hard to even get five of them moving in the same direction for a while. That is what Apollo did and is the management power that NASA has. This is what is needed to go to the moon.
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It’s really depressing how eager some people are to dismiss the complexity of what NASA pulled off in the 20th century. It’s mind-bogglingly amazing, in a number of levels. I’d argue the same about the Soviet space program, too. And some rich dudes really think they can just come along and replicate it… nah.
I hope that more historians study the space programs of the 20th century and really get the scale of the achievement embedded into the popular imagination…
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It’s a sad commentary on peoples’ understanding of history, I guess. As an Apollo buff, I get riled up when people minimize how unbelievably complex and difficult it was. When people say (or imply) that SpaceX can do it, it is a minimization. SpaceX is great at many things (especially burning out their employees) but the moon is a whole other animal.
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This is real problem here. At this point, we can shoot stuff up reliably but we have no incentive to go and honestly I don’t think we should even though I’m a big fan of space science. Right now, we need to focus on dealing with orbital garbage. The fact, no one really seems to want to tackle this issue as an international effort bothers me greatly since if there’s ever to be a chance to have a permanent presence on the Moon and beyond then we have to know how to clean up after ourselves and build infrastructure in space for everything we’ll need to cut costs.
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Oh believe me sis, that I know! 
As someone who studies the cold war era, I’m right with ya…
Space X will go for the easiest path, and fail miserably. However, if they stopped treating their employees like dog shit, they could contribute to another great achievement…
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But the plan for Artemis 3 (the picture I posted, which comes from a NASA slide deck) requires that the Starship lander will go to Lunar orbit on its own, without using the SLS, so clearly NASA expects that SpaceX will have developed that capability (with NASA’s help?) possibly as soon as 2025. However:
I would assume this SpaceX quote is significantly discounted. The PR (and ego) boost for Musk to be able to take credit for a Moon landing would surely persuade him to cover a chunk of the bill out of pocket, hoping to recoup that through future commercial space tourism business, contracts for Mars missions, etc. My guess is that if NASA were to try to get a contract for repeated Lunar flights, the price tag would go up.
So my original question about the price in terms of actual SpaceX expenditure still stands. I’m not persuaded that Starship / Super Heavy would actually be any cheaper than the SLS at getting to the Moon, and the disparaging attitude towards the SLS doesn’t seem warranted.
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As does my point- we cannot calculate costs for something that does not exist. Everyone expects it to exist and hopes it will, and when it does, we can cost it out.
If you’re asking for a best estimate of their costs at that pointed compared to Artemis, that’s in all sincerity a fool’s errand. Cost estimation in aerospace is a notoriously fictional exercise. Sure they can come up with a number, but it won’t mean anything.
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Sure, I understand that. I’m just hoping to see something in the same vein as the SLS cost per launch estimates that keep being thrown around, which also don’t entirely make sense until the rocket is actually launched.
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Yah that’s fair. NASA being a public organization and SpaceX being private, though, we probably won’t get anything. NASA is basically required to make up numbers (and boy are they made up) ahead of time because they are transparent and publicly funded. If SpaceX would give any numbers, you can bet they’d be Musk lies anyway. Once they are officially building hardware as a government contractor for this project, then it’ll all be public and we can start estimating, maybe.
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