NASA Has Been Reluctant to Say How Many Starship Launches It Takes to Fuel a Moon Lander.
The number in question is the count of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit so that it can fly to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit. Ars Technica reports that this number has been a moving target over the years.
NASA's typical response, according to Ars, has been: “We don't know for sure, so we're not going to say.” In 2023, the then-director of NASA's Human Landing System, Lisa Watson-Morgan, told Ars that NASA had a general idea but that she was reluctant to say exactly what it was.
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The reluctance is almost the story: a number that keeps moving suggests the scale is not yet fixed.
Not necessarily evasion. Watson-Morgan's “general idea” suggests NASA had at least a rough sense of the figure; the trouble is committing to a number that keeps changing.