<story><title>NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasa-wants-to-see-gas-stations-in-space-but-so-far-its-tanks-are-empty/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martythemaniak</author><text>I read a good analysis of Artemis a while back that essentially calculated the cost per hour of time-on-moon and in that sense it was easy to see that the program was a significant upgrade over Apollo and the costs weren&amp;#x27;t that bad when calculated per hour. Achieving a 10x improvement over the previous generation usually can&amp;#x27;t be done without doing &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; new and different that hasn&amp;#x27;t been done before, and in-orbit refuelling fits right in. Gemini and Apollo had to work out and develop far more tech to do what they needed to do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>How does this work out? Instead of one rocket they will have to launch a dozen or so rockets for one visit to the moon. Why did they choose this option to begin with? And is cost per time on moon not a bit misleading, just stay longer and this cost goes down? You obviously have to bring more food and air and so on, but is that really a significant amount? Or are there other limiting factors that prevent you from staying say a month?</text></comment>
<story><title>NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasa-wants-to-see-gas-stations-in-space-but-so-far-its-tanks-are-empty/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martythemaniak</author><text>I read a good analysis of Artemis a while back that essentially calculated the cost per hour of time-on-moon and in that sense it was easy to see that the program was a significant upgrade over Apollo and the costs weren&amp;#x27;t that bad when calculated per hour. Achieving a 10x improvement over the previous generation usually can&amp;#x27;t be done without doing &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; new and different that hasn&amp;#x27;t been done before, and in-orbit refuelling fits right in. Gemini and Apollo had to work out and develop far more tech to do what they needed to do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChicagoBoy11</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s also fascinating is that they are going with, in VERY BROAD strokes, the concept that was Von Braun&amp;#x27;s preferred method to achieve this back in the day too, but it was abandoned in favor of the lunar orbit rendesvouz.&lt;p&gt;For a critique of the current method, I found the SmarterEveryDay lecture on it gave some good food for thought!</text></comment>