Using an optimized, expendable Starship might reduce the number of tanker missions required by up to 50 percent. There are downsides, including a significant increase in costs and an undermining of the whole point of Starship: full and rapid reuse.

There is a third downside, and this is perhaps the most important one. An “expendable” Starship plan would be anathema to the leadership of SpaceX, including founder Elon Musk. Officials there do not believe the space industry has fully digested how Starship will transform the launch industry.

“You don’t yet understand how many Starship launches will happen,” a senior SpaceX source told Ars.

The company is aiming to launch 1 million tons of payload to orbit per year, the majority of which will be propellant. SpaceX simply believes that once it locks in on Starship operations, launching a dozen or many more rockets per month won’t be a big deal. So why waste time on expendable rockets? That era is over.

Enter the Dragon

A second option would be to rely solely on SpaceX hardware.

I don’t expect NASA to be interested in this idea, but it’s worth discussing. Nearly a year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election, Republican space officials were considering canceling Artemis and substituting a “competition” similar to the Commercial Cargo program. It was thought that both SpaceX and Blue Origin would bid plans to land humans on the Moon and that NASA would fund both.

These plans have largely fallen by the wayside in the last 12 months, though. NASA (and perhaps most importantly, paymasters in Congress) prefer to stick with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the initial Artemis missions.

But if pressed, SpaceX could come up with a simplified Moon landing architecture that requires fewer refuelings. There are multiple ways this could be done, so I’ll offer just one variant here: