NASA Still Doesn't Get How Big A Deal Starship Is

That's an exaggeration.  I'm sure - I know that parts of NASA are seriously looking into Starship - the groups that want to do exploration of the outer planets for one. It's just that this story revolves about a conversation between an engineer from Johnson Spaceflight Center in Texas, the home base of the astronaut corps, and a SpaceX program manager.  The conversation took place last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston and is reported by Eric Berger of Ars Technica.  The conversation was between Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center, and Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX.

The story starts simply enough, to quote from the article:

He (Michel) works in the area of in-situ resource utilization, the processing and use of local materials known more colloquially as "living off the land." What role, he asked, should NASA’s technical workforce play in developing these technologies?

In answering the question, Matthews urged Michel and his colleagues and NASA to think bigger about what they could do on the surface of the Moon with a vehicle as capable as Starship. This would be wholly different from any capability NASA has ever had before.

A little over a year ago, NASA announced they had selected SpaceX Starship for the Human Landing System.  I've been reporting on this since before the contract award, and somehow these little mind-blowing facts hadn't imprinted on my memory.  

1.  NASA's contract was to deliver 865 kg to the moon's surface. 
2.  Starship can deliver 100 metric tons.  Since 865 kg isn't even 1.0 metric ton, Starship can deliver over 100 times what NASA asked for.  More precisely, 116 times what NASA asked for.   

It's hard to put that concept into easily envisioned things.  As Aarti Matthews said, “And it’s really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It’s 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants.”  Clearly, nobody wants to put 11 elephants on the moon, nor does anybody think sticking fire trucks or more than a couple of rovers on the moon are a good idea but the number is completely out of proportion to everything NASA has struggled with since the early days.  Back in the Apollo days, there was talk about a cargo-only version of the Lunar Excursion Module.  With the Saturn V lifting it, the most powerful rocket on Earth, that LEM would put about five tons on the moon.  Less than one twentieth of Starship.

Matthews again:

"NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It’s significantly higher mass. It’s essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that’s coming online."
...
"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you’re fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you’re fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That’s gone away entirely."

And it gets even more mind-blowing.  According to estimates on Casey Handmer's blog, an expendable Starship, which lands on the Moon and stays, could bring more than 200 tons to the Moon. Twice as much as the option Ms. Matthews was referring to.  

For some reason, this world-changing aspect to Starship and Super Heavy hasn't really sunk in to lots of minds.  Nobody has seen a spacecraft like this.  It's bigger and more powerful than the Saturn V, yet is not just completely reusable but intended for rapid turnaround re-use, even point to point passenger service on Earth.  Yeah, there's that unfortunate fact that it still hasn't flown and isn't fully developed yet.  The problems continue to be worked on as they show up.  Starship/Super Heavy appears closer to flying successfully than being a dead end that'll never fly.

It's more like the beginning of a new age than business-as-usual, just-another-rocket.

A SpaceX montage from my February '21 post reporting that SpaceX had prototyped the elevator shown on the right. You'll note the Starship on the right isn't painted and has fins - more like the prototypes we were seeing back around then than the painted ship on the left.