This is ridiculous. Look at the cost to put a crewed Artemis in orbit around the moon, in a single use launcher and capsule, to transfer to a Starship lander waiting for them.
Then look at the scale of the reusable Starship missions to get the lander there - and keep and refuel it there for future missions at a fraction of the cost.
And all on the taxpayers dollars… Not only is the entire Starship program 1/40 the cost - the taxpayer isn’t paying for it.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a...sion-jtlcqsxt9
Artemis: Nasa’s return to moon to cost an ‘unsustainable’ $4.1bn per mission
America’s return to the moon will cost more than $4.1 billion per mission, making it unsustainable in the long term, the space agency’s inspector-general has warned.
The total cost of Nasa’s lunar programme, Artemis, will have ballooned to $93 billion by 2025 — before it even gets its new rocket off the planet for a test flight.
“That is a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable,” Paul Martin, the space agency’s inspector-general, told a hearing of the House space and aeronautics subcommittee.
The warning throws into question the long-term future of Nasa’s new Space Launch System (SLS) — the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V that flew humans to the moon from 1968 to 1972 under the Apollo programme.
The ever-increasing costs are unlikely to derail SLS in the near term but questions have persisted for years as to the wisdom of continuing with its development. By comparison, SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle — also currently under development and
aiming for its first uncrewed test-flight around the earth this year — comes in at about 1/40th of the pricetag….
The programme has faced schedule delays, cost overruns and a “confusing mishmash of contract types and untried approaches to organisations and management”, Don Beyer, a Virginia congressman and the committee’s chairman, said.….
Martin laid part of the blame at the door of Nasa contractors including Boeing, which he accused of “poor planning and poor execution” and on Congress for contracting procedures that he said had failed to incentivise timely delivery of developmental milestones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS