Flying astronauts to the Moon requires a lot of fuel. To get there, SpaceX's Starship will need to be refueled in Earth orbit, before it can target our satellite. But how many "tankers" will be needed exactly?
To send humans to the Moon, SpaceX's Starship will need to be refueled in space. Concretely, a first manned ship will take off to place itself in Earth orbit. Other ships will then join it to transfer fuel to it. From then on, the Starship will fly to the Moon. So the question is how many maneuvers will it take to fill these tanks.
A few days ago, Blue Origin officials, visibly still annoyed by NASA's decision to choose SpaceX as the sole provider to deliver its astronauts to the surface of the Moon , published a much-discussed infographic. In this image, the company indeed claims that SpaceX will have to carry out more than ten Starship launches filled with fuel to allow a single spacecraft to travel to the Moon.
As this infographic came out, SpaceX had not yet communicated on the number of maneuvers required for such a manned mission. We don't know where these numbers came from. On Twitter, Elon Musk still reacted by pointing out that given the amount of payloads of the spacecraft in orbit (about 150 tons), a maximum of eight launches would be necessary to fill the 1200 ton tanks of his lunar ship.
He also adds that a trip to the Moon could be done without flaps or a heat shield. Thus lightened, the Starship might only need half a full load, or four tanker flights.
Elon Musk further added that even if SpaceX needed ten or more launches, that wouldn't be a problem. “SpaceX has already performed more than sixteen orbital flights in the first half of 2021 and has docked with the Station (much more difficult than docking with our own ship) more than twenty times “, can we read in a follow-up tweet.
A priori, SpaceX seems confident, and by extension, so does NASA. However, another question arises:if the Starship needs four, six or eight supplies before it can fly to the Moon, how long could these operations last? For now, we still don't know. In the meantime, SpaceX will have to operate a first orbital flight (probably before the end of the summer), before proposing a first refueling in space as part of a demonstration mission . Only then can we really anticipate the number and duration of these supplies.
