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Why isn't anyone pointing at an obvious elephant in the room? There is no manned moon lander in the (serious) works. It will be at least 10-15 years before one is created. Only the orbital vehicle and the rocket for it exists yet.

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Except there is. NASA has already selected SpaceX to land the first Artemis astronauts on the Moon: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/as-artemis-moves-forward-...

And while there maybe delays with Starship, it's certainly not 10-15 years away.

For all the good things about SpaceX, landing a few astronauts to the Moon by having about ~100K tons launched initially (~15 Starship+Superheavy flights for multiple tanking) is a crazy plan.

Yes, it will be crazy unused capacity at least for the first human landing and then some more. But once the system is better tested and refined, the latter of which NASA _is_ investing in Starship for (https://blog.jatan.space/p/moon-monday-issue-70), we will get massive returns, literally. There's also talk in the latest Planetary Science Decadal to evolve the CLPS model by setting up funding mechanisms to allow science community members to fly robotic payloads on such high-capacity Starship flights and really leverage its potential: https://blog.jatan.space/p/moon-monday-issue-74

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