From: sylvia@email.invalid   
      
   On 14-Mar-22 11:20 am, JF Mezei wrote:   
   >   
   > What sort of testing and duration will be needed before NASA will trust   
   > to put people on a Starship and land it on moon and return to "gateway" ?   
   >   
   > I take it SpaceX will need to land a Starship succesfully and take off   
   > from Moon and prove it can dock ? How many times could it need to do   
   > this before there is trust in the platform?   
   >   
   > Obviously for Apollo, the LEM was manually driven to land, so they   
   > couldn't remotely test it so the first landing had to be tested. But   
   > prior to this, they had "iteratively" tested the Apollo platform with   
   > various tests around Earth and then one trip around the moon.   
   >   
   > Just curious how Starship would be tested for a mission that is quite   
   > different (though it does the same weekend camping trip capacity as Apollo).   
      
   As things are, the lunar Starship will only be used to transfer crew   
   between the lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon, and vice-versa. It   
   will not re-enter Earth's atmosphere, and will not have a heat shield   
   that would allow it to.   
      
   One might indeed wonder why Starship cannot do the entire job (other   
   than compromising Congress's pork barrelling), but that's how the   
   contracts stand.   
      
   Sylvia.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)