In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia. These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they’re due to provide a final report by June.
SLS is a pretty badass rocket but damn is it expensive, prohibitively so.
I wonder if there’s a more achievable lunar architecture that just uses a ton of Falcon Heavy launches instead. Maybe a lunar cycler?
Given that SpaceX Starship is already on the critical path for Artemis anyway, I’d plan on using that if I was in charge. Falcon/Dragon launches can be used to put crew in space if Starship itself can’t be man-rated in time.
Yeah I’m mostly worried about the time it takes to get Starship stable and rated for humans. It took around 10 years from the first Falcon 9 launch to the first crewed Falcon 9… I certainly hope that it goes faster for Starship.
We don’t actually need Starship to be man-rated, though. Use it to launch cargo, fuel, and unmanned vehicles, and then send astronauts up on a Falcon 9 (which is already routinely shuttling people to space) and have them transfer over in orbit.
We don’t even need Starship to be reusable for it to be cheaper than SLS. Though reusability is another whole order of magnitude or two of improvement.