On 2020-05-18 11:28 AM, David Spain wrote:
That's very interesting. Was that ever formally proposed? Or even
better, use Dragon 2 for a crew carrier and the Starship [AS] a new and
(vastly) improved "upper stage". Neither of which need SLS to get to
orbit or to refuel.

Now Starship doesn't depend on a crew cabin to be useful and we're not
wasting billions of dollars on SLS to mainly just get to LEO with no
practical upper stage yet in sight...

A Starship as a fully reusable/refuelable upper stage transfer vehicle.
Why even bother with heat shielding if it is never intended to return to
Earth? And Dragon2 evolves into longer duration crew vehicle for Earth
orbital and lunar orbital or gateway excursions from/to a landing
vehicle that gets refueled by the Starship transfer vehicle.

Still don't have a reusable lunar lander but is this the beginning of a
workable lunar exploration architecture? Can a lunar lander burn
methalox as a fuel?

If Starship matures into its own crewed vehicle we could do away with
Dragons, lander and gateway. But that's still a hell of a lot of wait
time for Starship development that really isn't necessary, unless the
trade off between getting a crewed Starship built and a lunar lander is
a wash. Other than the lander, I think we could get a gateway built PDQ
since it's primarily a filling station to make a reusable lander design
simpler.

Sometimes tho parallel development is a good thing. IF all things being
built by the private sector can track TOGETHER. Which used to be NASA's
job, making sure that happens.

Since the money on SLS is already sunk, maybe we can use it as an
expendable BDB to get lunar surface bound cargo to LEO for transfer
later by Starships until they are all used up? Man I wish we had that
money back, we need to stop doing SLS in place of a reusable lunar
lander. Like yesterday.

Dave