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How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20?

I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.

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What was the one failure of the Saturn V that you mention? If you're thinking of Apollo 13, that took place after the Apollo stack had ditched all of the Saturn V stages.

Apollo 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6

Had that happened on a crewed mission, they could have returned astronauts safely. Which is probably why they went ahead with Apollo 8

Thanks for that link!

How many tons of payload would that Starship land? How many could Saturn V?

If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon.

Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.

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