Tim Dodd

thousand kilograms at liftoff what ended up landing on the moon by the time the descent stage had used a propellant to slow down out of lunar orbit has to slow down which lowers its orbit and that orbit ends up intersecting the moon you have to keep slowing down keep slowing down keep so you don't smash into the moon yeah you burn through about eight tons of propellant it was 15 tons at the start of its burn and it goes through eight tons so by the time it lands on the moon

I think it's seven or eight tons.

I think it's about seven tons that lands on the moon.

So 7,000 kilograms out of 2,900,000 kilograms, right?

So when you do that equation, you're talking about a quarter of a percent of mass.

that was lifting off from Earth actually touched down on the moon.

That's not much, you know, less than 1% of what took off mass wise actually landed on the moon.

That is insignificant.

What SpaceX is trying to do, they're trying to reverse this because right now SpaceX is NASA's

uh lunar lander they're one of two there's blue origin and there's spacex they're both contracted for the human landing system to be able to land humans on the moon and instead of hey let's send this four billion dollar rocket and only get point two five percent of its mass onto the moon what if instead of throwing it all away we actually got it up into orbit this thing is huge it's a hundred uh tons dry at least a hundred tons so a hundred thousand kilograms dry

Massive.

How much bigger than the Saturn V?

So just the dry mass alone.

So the Saturn V alone was 2.8, we'll say, 2,800 tons.

Starship is about 5,000 tons when it's fully fueled.

So it's over twice as heavy.

And so it has twice as much propellant, which means it has twice as much potential.

However, they're reusing, they're planning to reuse everything.

There's only two stages.

The boosters reuse and famously gets caught by the launch tower.