Tim Dodd

It's not even NASA yet.

He's describing Starship, exactly.

That's exactly what Starship's trying to do.

And the reason why, and even today it's criticized as being too technically challenging because they're trying to, they have to rely on two unproven technologies so far.

Those technologies are orbital refueling.

No one's ever transferred that much propellant.

I mean, we're talking about thousands of tons, like a thousand tons of propellant.

Cryogenic, so you have liquid methane, liquid oxygen needing to be transferred from a depot onto this moon landing vehicle.

That's technology number one.

The other one, in order to even be able to refuel the depot and get the depot, you have to have this rapid reusability thing nailed down.

They have to be able to land a rocket, fill it up just like an airplane and take back off again.

These are huge.

The biggest engineering challenges ever.

The space shuttle tried to incorporate some of the reusability because it's an obvious thing.

Like, why are we throwing away billions of dollars of hardware?

Why aren't we reusing this stuff?

Right.

Well, the smartest minds in the world have always wanted that.

Werner Von Braun wanted that.

It's extremely hard.