Starship will play a key role in NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions. SpaceX was contracted to land Astronauts on the moon for Artemis 3 & 4 via a specialized lunar variant of Starship.

Starship will be the largest spacecraft ever developed, which will deliver unparalleled capabilities to the lunar surface, but will also require unprecedented refueling procedures. The lunar lander will need to be refueled 4+ times, each requiring a full launch of Starship, which is already larger than the Saturn V moon rockets of the 60’s.

Since it’s totally reusable, this will actually cost significantly less than competitor options.

We are definitely about to enter a new era of spaceflight.

It's like the late 60s all over again.

It has been exciting and frustrating watching this develop. They flew a very rough prototype of the upper stage to 150 meters and landed it back in 2019. On 5 May 2021 they flew a prototype of the upper stage that looked very similar to the latest model to 10km and landed it. But no flights since.

The lower stage is an absolute beast of a rocket in every way. 33 engines totalling 17,000,000 lbf of thrust. As wide as a school bus is long. As tall as a 20 story building by itself, and the second stage sits on top of that.

Can't wait to see it fly. Wish I could be there to feel the Earth tremble. Maybe some day.

If Jeff Bezos had hair, he'd be ripping it out.

Bezos has the skills. He should move BO to Washington and drive the work on a day to day basis himself.

If he was the motive factor SpaceX would be bankrupt today

I doubt it. Bezos built BO as a standard rocket company with standard development procedures -- money heavy but hardware poor. Do all the design up front, make it perfect, so you know nearly 100% that it will work. This did make it easy for him to hire some of the best in the business, but it's also a very slow and restricted development method. There's nothing to learn from in this process, only putting your ideas to paper, and eventually into hardware.

Musk drew from his software development days and made it hardware rich. Build, test, evaluate, wash, rinse repeat. See what works in real life, see what doesn't, and change accordingly. This is why we saw so many rapid unscheduled disassemblies. But it's also why SpaceX advanced so quickly.

The days of it being okay to blow stuff up are now over for Starship. A full stack blow up would damage that very expensive launch tower, so they now have to tread carefully.

A while back I calculated out how much it would cost to fuel Starship based on existing known numbers. I can't remember exactly, but it was only like a few million dollars, and that to send 100 tons to LEO. Musk's goal of $10/kg to LEO seems pretty doable.