It's not clear for me how important gateway is. Many critics say it's not needed for lunar or Mars missions. It means just using more fuel to get there.
There may be some advantages, like re-use ascent modules and risk reduction for lunar missions.
There may be some advantages, like re-use ascent modules and risk reduction for lunar missions.
Starship is trying to be launch vehicle, cruise stage, landing/ascent vehicle and reentry vehicle all in one and has to make huge sacrifices in terms of payload capacity and delta-v to achieve that.
Starship can land on the Moon and return, but it needs a fleet of tankers to refuel it for each trip. A specialised crew transfer vessel (no heat shield, no aero surfaces, no landing legs) would be able to head directly from LEO to LLO and transfer crew without having to be refuelled in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth first. Using Starship to get from Earth to the Moon is like using a Ram 3500 to pick up groceries from the corner store.
SpaceX is already talking about a few different variants of Starship (Crew, Cargo, Tanker, Lunar Landing). There's no reason why they couldn't come up with a special "Lunar Transfer Starship" variant to meet the use case you describe
Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.
> NASA's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2020 is $22.6 billion. It represents 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion the United States plans to spend in the fiscal year.
NASA uses less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget. If you care so much about budget waste, there are a myriad of other places you could complain about (how about defense or healthcare spending?)
The practical benefits of NASA's science and engineering efforts have been laid out many times in many different places. There are also less practical benefits; for example, how can you quantify the impact that the Blue Marble photo had on the environmental movement? That was only possible because we put someone on the Moon.
Curmudgeons like you will always be around, and those of us who enjoy seeing humanity push itself and accomplish incredible things are happy to ignore you :)
Solve that first, and then we can easily quantum teleport ourselves to anywhere in the solar system. Then reconstitute ourselves at the destination point. And hopefully your device didn’t make a quantum error during the rematerialization process.
You’d have to send the complement quantum teleportation receiver device to Mars, and set it up there first.
Then the device would have to rematerialize you back into fleshy form from pure quantum information residing in your quantum storage buffer.
Oh and make sure that a fly doesn’t enter the quantum teleportation device with you, as you initially get quantum scanned and dematerialized from Earth.
And you must enter the quantum teleportation device without any extra external clothing on. Since version 1 of the device has difficulty differentiating between organic and inorganic materials.
Once we colonize the solar system, the next frontier to explore will be interstellar travel. I think research on faster than light travel will be what brings teleportation to us rather than the other way around.
Even if FTL were indeed impossible, I think pursuing it would bring interesting discoveries and technologies.
I doubt the sort of teleportation you are talking about there could be made to work, but if we assume that it could, it would make Mars more like Antarctica than colonial North America. It would be a place to visit, but would just be a research appendage without its own self-sustaining population or manufacturing infrastructure.
We have the technology to do it now, but it would be a suicide mission.