Stratolaunch has no advantage over Stargazer in that respect, and they've been trying to get ICON launched on a Pegasus since December of 2017. The "any time" advantage has not materialized in real world operations. Relying on a one-of-a-kind custom-built giant aircraft is not going to help any.
It's nearly double the delta-v of LLO. One of the major problems of Gateway is that it *isn't* in lunar orbit (because Orion can't get there), it's in a halo orbit around the L2 point that takes nearly a km/s more delta-v to reach, which is why NASA is talking about a separate tug, ascent module, and disposable descent stage. A single-stage lander capable of reaching the Gateway would be too big for SLS to handle. L5 is slightly more difficult to reach than even that, and much further in flight time.
Once you're out of propellant, you can't apply even a small amount of force.
Space travel is all about delta-v. The total change in velocity you can achieve with a rocket craft is determined by the exhaust velocity and the fraction of its initial mass devoted to propellant. Higher delta-v's require higher propellant fractions or higher exhaust velocities, and there's limits to both.
For an object sharing Earth's orbit around the sun (like one that has just barely escaped Earth), hitting the sun takes a delta-v of about 30 km/s, because you have to cancel out the object's orbital motion. Escaping it takes only 12 km/s because you can just add to it instead.
The F1 is a gas generator engine, one that operates at even lower temperatures and pressures than the Merlin 1D. Nobody's ever done a fuel-rich staged combustion engine with kerosene fuel because of the severe coking that would occur downstream of the preburner.
SpaceX could have pursued oxygen-rich staged combustion with kerosene fuel as is used in numerous Russian engines, but it results in lower specific impulse than full-flow staged combustion (the kerosene-fueled ORSC RD-180 only gets 338 s in vacuum, roughly what the Raptor gets at sea level), involves greater stresses on the single preburner driving both pumps, and would only be useful for boosters fueled and launched from Earth. Again, methane is the practical choice, with a set of benefits and tradeoffs that match their needs, not a choice made out of ignorance as you assert.
"Practical" involves more than specific impulse. Liquid hydrogen has not proven to be an economical booster propellant. Its low density makes tanks huge and hurts mass ratio while making it difficult to achieve sufficient thrust, typically requiring the cost and complexity of additional boosters to get off the ground. It works better as an upper stage propellant, but handling multiple propellants is also costly, and it's difficult to store in liquid form for any length of time. SpaceX has achieved major reductions in cost with a simple gas-generator engine using kerosene fuel.
All else being equal, methane's specific impulse advantage is canceled by its density disadvantage, but all else is not equal: methane is less prone to coking at high temperatures and is a closer match to LOX in temperature, enabling use of a full-flow staged combustion cycle that provides a specific impulse advantage far exceeding that from the different propellant chemistry, and greatly simplifying storage of propellants in orbit and during transit. And it provides these advantages while not being nearly as costly and difficult to handle as hydrogen and being dense enough that vehicles don't struggle to produce enough thrust to leave the ground, making it a far more practical choice.
Referencing the melting point is inaccurate, but not that bad of a Fermi estimate. Keep in mind that the outer skin doesn't have to carry the main mechanical loads. Musk is talking about a structure with two sheets separated by stringers that provide additional mechanical support as well as directing the flow of coolant fluid. The outer skin mostly has to handle the difference between static aerodynamic pressure and internal coolant pressure. Presumably the passively cooled portion would have a similar double-walled structure to limit heat transfer to the interior.
As for carbon fiber, it disintegrates long before it reaches such temperatures. The fibers themselves are quite heat resistant, not so much for the epoxy. A carbon fiber structure requires a thick layer of highly insulating thermal protection materials.
Moon bases are never going to be self-sufficient, they'll always be dependent on importing volatiles that the moon lacks. Mars has everything Earth does...more limited quantities in some cases, but more than enough for a self-sufficient colony's needs.
It's easier to land payloads on Mars than it is on the moon. While the atmosphere can't brake large vehicles to subsonic speeds, it can still take care of the majority of the entry velocity, which lunar landers must deal with using their landing rockets. Mars missions do have to carry a few months of consumables for the trip in addition to what they'll need on the ground, but that's hardly something that requires 30 years of experience on the moon to achieve.
You are only looking at the room-temperature performance, while the advantages of stainless are under cryogenic and reentry conditions. An aluminum structure (or their originally planned carbon fiber composite) would need to be protected by TPS materials that are either extremely fragile, or thick and relatively heavy (and still rather fragile).
Also look at the problems NASA has had welding the thick aluminum walls of the SLS tank. Steels, even stainless steels, are easier to work with, and their density means the tank walls can be thinner. SpaceX uses the same materials and processes on their aluminum Falcon 9 rocket, and is quite familiar with their advantages and limitations.
It's a reusable launch vehicle, it doesn't just get manufactured, put on the pad, launched, and thrown away. The corrosion resistance is required just for surviving reentry, and the vehicles will be spending potentially years exposed to weather on the coast.
About 2/3 of the structure by length (more by mass) is cryogenic propellant tanks. Those tanks absolutely are going to be cold at liftoff, and it's still carrying landing propellants in internal tanks on the way in.
Titanium is far more difficult to work with and has problems with oxidizing atmospheres. While they upgraded some Falcon 9 booster parts from aluminum to titanium for its temperature tolerance, Starship goes through much hotter reentries.
They could conceivably do some fancy sandwich of an Inconel outer layer over titanium base structure or such in the warmer parts of the vehicle to save a bit of mass, but that would greatly complicate the structure and manufacturing processes...you can't just weld those metals together like you can stainless steel components. Maybe Starship II will have a more complex but mass-efficient approach, but they're trying to reduce development costs and schedule...they aren't even using vacuum-optimized engines on the initial version.
The Atlas was a near-SSTO vehicle that used stainless steel balloon tanks, but that certainly does not mean that stainless steel is only useful for near-SSTO vehicles with balloon tanks. The fact that you can't reach the mass fractions needed for SSTO with rigid stainless steel tanks is rather irrelevant to staged vehicles.
Starship will only ever go to orbit when launched on a booster. As such, it has sufficiently forgiving mass ratios that it doesn't need balloon tanks.
I'm not sure about yours, but my washing machine doesn't have to operate at cryogenic through incandescent temperatures. Stainless steel alloys can be *really* good at cryogenic temperatures where common steel and carbon fiber composites are brittle. Ordinary steel would rapidly burn if exposed to reentry conditions, aluminum would melt and carbon fiber would start to decompose and burn if not covered with a substantial thermal protection layer.
Aluminum and carbon fiber have their own problems with manufacturability, durability, and ease of modification or repairs. Stainless alloys let them sidestep those difficulties while getting many of the advantages of ordinary steels.
With an under-engined F9 first stage and a stripped down Dragon capsule, and sufficient number of flights? Sure.
The first stage has the performance to push a second stage with full propellant load and a Dragon capsule on top to a couple km/s downrange velocity at ~70 km altitude, then return to its landing site. Drop the second stage and reduce engine count to account for the reduction in mass, and it'll have enough excess performance for a slower, higher altitude max-Q and a longer reentry burn that makes for a more benign reentry than even the standard RTLS burn.
There's no need to redesign anything, and it's doubtful that there'd be enough business for you to break even doing so. The biggest risk to the above plan is probably the additional development needed to return to the original Dragon powered landing plans. It's only vaguely plausible because they already have a booster and spacecraft built to carry crew.
Air resistance is basically negligible for orbital launch vehicles, especially for those with dense fuels...the Saturn V (a kerosene-burner like Falcon 9) only lost 40 m/s to aerodynamic drag. They're moving slowest when they're in the densest atmosphere, and get out of it very quickly. The only serious losses are gravity losses. And for orbital launch, those are about 2 km/s. For suborbital launch to 100 km, that's more like your total delta-v requirement, gravity loss being more like 0.6 km/s.
Thinking in terms of energy actually understates the issue. The difficulty doesn't scale with the energy given to the final payload, it scales with the size of the launch vehicle which has to carry propellant along with that payload. That's not quadratic, it's exponential. That's why the ability to remove vehicle mass by staging is so important.
And of course, you also need an actual spacecraft. If you somehow put "SpaceShipTwo" into orbit, it'd be helpless and the occupants would shortly die. It's not a spacecraft and is not built to operate in that environment.
And then there's the little detail that SpaceShipTwo can't even reach 100 km...they're targeting 50 mi, 80 km.
Just stick a Dragon on top and there's your escape system. Limits your passenger capacity, but there's not going to be that many people flying anyway. Launching a Dragon capsule above 100 km (or hey, 200 km, why not?) won't stress the stage anything like an actual launch, you'd likely launch with a fraction of a full propellant load and remove some engines, reducing the reflight costs.
40% of the regular launch cost is in the expendable second stage and fairings. If they could find enough interest for 50 full flights (a long but very easy life for booster and capsule), it'd give them the same profit margin at a bit over $100k per person...but only 60% of the profit per flight, while competing with the real orbital flights (which there will be a lot of when they start putting Starlink up) for pad infrastructure and personnel. And are there actually 50 flights worth of customers for something that bears about the same relationship to real spaceflight as riding a bike into the waves has to an ocean cruise? (Though at least they'd be in an actual spacecraft.)
So yeah, SpaceX could easily do this, it's just not worth their time.
People do talk about those things, if you'd bother to look.
We have essentially no data on low gravity environments, only microgravity and full Earth gravity, but the relationship is likely to be very nonlinear, with even a small amount of gravity mitigating much of the effects. If it does prove to be a problem that can't be dealt with medically, there are centrifuges. The toxicity and prevalence of perchlorates is wildly exaggerated, and they are easy to deal with. And apart from the fact that terraforming isn't necessary and would at most be a concern of future generations of Mars colonists, Mars would be able to hold an Earthlike atmosphere for millions of years without a magnetic field. The problem with terraforming is building enough of an atmosphere that doesn't have lethal CO2 content.
And of course, there aren't actually any payloads that require SLS's capacity. Currently, all it's planned to be used for is to throw 10 t LOP-G modules out to a cislunar NRHO, along with an Orion containing some people because...well, because what else are you going to use Orion for? It can't go anywhere else.
We're also not orbiting Sag. A*, it's just in the center of all the mass we *are* orbiting. The Milky Way outmasses it a few hundred thousand times over, if it disappeared it'd only affect the closest stars in the core. It also doesn't have anything like the claimed effect on star formation. Perhaps they did in the early universe when they were surrounded by huge disks of accreting gas that outshone the rest of their galaxies, but not today.
Nuclear saltwater rockets solve the mass production issue. All your critical masses of fissile material go in one big tank stuffed full of neutron absorbing structures. (Check thoroughly for leaks.)
And you don't need nearly as much shock absorption, since your exhaust is a continuous blast of dissociated water and decaying fission products.
You can't explore a body with a quarter of Earth's total land area with 12 people, mostly non-specialists, working for a few days. There's plenty of research left to be done on the moon.
That research is the main reason to go there, though. It's not a stepping stone into the solar system, the orbital mechanics don't work out...a craft that can just barely go there has nearly enough performance to blow right past it and go to Mars. It's not enough like Mars or asteroids to be useful for learning how to work with them. And He3 is a joke. Apart from being scarce enough that we'd strip mine the entire moon over the course of a few centuries to get it...and then run out...p-B11 fusion gets all its benefits without using rare fuels, and the D-T fusion reaction that we can actually achieve in the near future lets us breed tritium that spontaneously decays into He3. Even with fission reactors, we can synthesize it more economically than we could mine it from lunar regolith.
Ambitions and an active development program. They're at least working on something that could be useful for economically launching large amounts of mass, instead of screwing around with air launch or barely-physically-plausible SSTO spaceplanes or pretending there's no economic case for reuse.
I doubt they'll find developing their first orbital launch vehicle as smooth going as some of their fans believe (New Glenn's first launch has likely already been pushed back to 2021), but they're far ahead of everyone else who might compete with SpaceX.
Most of those capabilities are unnecessary for either the moon or Mars, and aren't likely to ever be developed without active manned space exploration to drive the need for them.
What we really need is greatly reduced cost and deployed transportation infrastructure capable of frequent deliveries of large payloads, and people actually getting out there, discovering the problems that need to be solved, and working out solutions for them. Make it easy to get mass into orbit, and people will research stuff like magnetic shielding and advanced propulsion. Meanwhile, what we have is enough to start going to the moon and Mars. If SpaceX achieves their goals with BFR, the BFS will go straight from LEO to the surface of Mars with 150 t of payload and with a trip time short enough that simulated gravity, exotic radiation shielding, etc are unnecessary; then refuel and launch from Mars to land back on Earth. This isn't a tin can that can barely get a few humans there, it's a serious transport craft capable of supporting well-equipped research expeditions and colonization efforts. Blue Origin has similar ambitions focused around the moon.
The Lunar Orbiting Platform (or whatever they're calling it today), though...yeah, it's embarrassingly lacking in ambition and potential for meaningful progress. It can't even be occupied full time, and any reasonable lunar or Mars mission would blow right past it without wasting delta-v on rendezvous.
A large helicopter, with pilot trained for such operations and insurance to cover the risks involved, and a separate ship for it to operate from would all be quite expensive. With the film canisters, it didn't matter if it cost a few million to arrange their recovery, but with these, the whole point is to save a few million.
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Stratolaunch has no advantage over Stargazer in that respect, and they've been trying to get ICON launched on a Pegasus since December of 2017. The "any time" advantage has not materialized in real world operations. Relying on a one-of-a-kind custom-built giant aircraft is not going to help any.
It's nearly double the delta-v of LLO.
One of the major problems of Gateway is that it *isn't* in lunar orbit (because Orion can't get there), it's in a halo orbit around the L2 point that takes nearly a km/s more delta-v to reach, which is why NASA is talking about a separate tug, ascent module, and disposable descent stage. A single-stage lander capable of reaching the Gateway would be too big for SLS to handle. L5 is slightly more difficult to reach than even that, and much further in flight time.
Once you're out of propellant, you can't apply even a small amount of force.
Space travel is all about delta-v. The total change in velocity you can achieve with a rocket craft is determined by the exhaust velocity and the fraction of its initial mass devoted to propellant. Higher delta-v's require higher propellant fractions or higher exhaust velocities, and there's limits to both.
For an object sharing Earth's orbit around the sun (like one that has just barely escaped Earth), hitting the sun takes a delta-v of about 30 km/s, because you have to cancel out the object's orbital motion. Escaping it takes only 12 km/s because you can just add to it instead.
The F1 is a gas generator engine, one that operates at even lower temperatures and pressures than the Merlin 1D. Nobody's ever done a fuel-rich staged combustion engine with kerosene fuel because of the severe coking that would occur downstream of the preburner.
SpaceX could have pursued oxygen-rich staged combustion with kerosene fuel as is used in numerous Russian engines, but it results in lower specific impulse than full-flow staged combustion (the kerosene-fueled ORSC RD-180 only gets 338 s in vacuum, roughly what the Raptor gets at sea level), involves greater stresses on the single preburner driving both pumps, and would only be useful for boosters fueled and launched from Earth. Again, methane is the practical choice, with a set of benefits and tradeoffs that match their needs, not a choice made out of ignorance as you assert.
"Practical" involves more than specific impulse. Liquid hydrogen has not proven to be an economical booster propellant. Its low density makes tanks huge and hurts mass ratio while making it difficult to achieve sufficient thrust, typically requiring the cost and complexity of additional boosters to get off the ground. It works better as an upper stage propellant, but handling multiple propellants is also costly, and it's difficult to store in liquid form for any length of time. SpaceX has achieved major reductions in cost with a simple gas-generator engine using kerosene fuel.
All else being equal, methane's specific impulse advantage is canceled by its density disadvantage, but all else is not equal: methane is less prone to coking at high temperatures and is a closer match to LOX in temperature, enabling use of a full-flow staged combustion cycle that provides a specific impulse advantage far exceeding that from the different propellant chemistry, and greatly simplifying storage of propellants in orbit and during transit. And it provides these advantages while not being nearly as costly and difficult to handle as hydrogen and being dense enough that vehicles don't struggle to produce enough thrust to leave the ground, making it a far more practical choice.
Referencing the melting point is inaccurate, but not that bad of a Fermi estimate. Keep in mind that the outer skin doesn't have to carry the main mechanical loads. Musk is talking about a structure with two sheets separated by stringers that provide additional mechanical support as well as directing the flow of coolant fluid. The outer skin mostly has to handle the difference between static aerodynamic pressure and internal coolant pressure. Presumably the passively cooled portion would have a similar double-walled structure to limit heat transfer to the interior.
As for carbon fiber, it disintegrates long before it reaches such temperatures. The fibers themselves are quite heat resistant, not so much for the epoxy. A carbon fiber structure requires a thick layer of highly insulating thermal protection materials.
So you'll want a vehicle capable of landing a hundred tonnes or so of payload at a time. If only someone were working on such a thing...
Also note the water's 4 km below the Mars equivalent of "sea level", not below the surface. Much of the actual surface actually cuts into this layer.
Moon bases are never going to be self-sufficient, they'll always be dependent on importing volatiles that the moon lacks. Mars has everything Earth does...more limited quantities in some cases, but more than enough for a self-sufficient colony's needs.
It's easier to land payloads on Mars than it is on the moon. While the atmosphere can't brake large vehicles to subsonic speeds, it can still take care of the majority of the entry velocity, which lunar landers must deal with using their landing rockets. Mars missions do have to carry a few months of consumables for the trip in addition to what they'll need on the ground, but that's hardly something that requires 30 years of experience on the moon to achieve.
You are only looking at the room-temperature performance, while the advantages of stainless are under cryogenic and reentry conditions. An aluminum structure (or their originally planned carbon fiber composite) would need to be protected by TPS materials that are either extremely fragile, or thick and relatively heavy (and still rather fragile).
Also look at the problems NASA has had welding the thick aluminum walls of the SLS tank. Steels, even stainless steels, are easier to work with, and their density means the tank walls can be thinner. SpaceX uses the same materials and processes on their aluminum Falcon 9 rocket, and is quite familiar with their advantages and limitations.
It's a reusable launch vehicle, it doesn't just get manufactured, put on the pad, launched, and thrown away. The corrosion resistance is required just for surviving reentry, and the vehicles will be spending potentially years exposed to weather on the coast.
About 2/3 of the structure by length (more by mass) is cryogenic propellant tanks. Those tanks absolutely are going to be cold at liftoff, and it's still carrying landing propellants in internal tanks on the way in.
Titanium is far more difficult to work with and has problems with oxidizing atmospheres. While they upgraded some Falcon 9 booster parts from aluminum to titanium for its temperature tolerance, Starship goes through much hotter reentries.
They could conceivably do some fancy sandwich of an Inconel outer layer over titanium base structure or such in the warmer parts of the vehicle to save a bit of mass, but that would greatly complicate the structure and manufacturing processes...you can't just weld those metals together like you can stainless steel components. Maybe Starship II will have a more complex but mass-efficient approach, but they're trying to reduce development costs and schedule...they aren't even using vacuum-optimized engines on the initial version.
The Atlas was a near-SSTO vehicle that used stainless steel balloon tanks, but that certainly does not mean that stainless steel is only useful for near-SSTO vehicles with balloon tanks. The fact that you can't reach the mass fractions needed for SSTO with rigid stainless steel tanks is rather irrelevant to staged vehicles.
Starship will only ever go to orbit when launched on a booster. As such, it has sufficiently forgiving mass ratios that it doesn't need balloon tanks.
I'm not sure about yours, but my washing machine doesn't have to operate at cryogenic through incandescent temperatures. Stainless steel alloys can be *really* good at cryogenic temperatures where common steel and carbon fiber composites are brittle. Ordinary steel would rapidly burn if exposed to reentry conditions, aluminum would melt and carbon fiber would start to decompose and burn if not covered with a substantial thermal protection layer.
Aluminum and carbon fiber have their own problems with manufacturability, durability, and ease of modification or repairs. Stainless alloys let them sidestep those difficulties while getting many of the advantages of ordinary steels.
With an under-engined F9 first stage and a stripped down Dragon capsule, and sufficient number of flights? Sure.
The first stage has the performance to push a second stage with full propellant load and a Dragon capsule on top to a couple km/s downrange velocity at ~70 km altitude, then return to its landing site. Drop the second stage and reduce engine count to account for the reduction in mass, and it'll have enough excess performance for a slower, higher altitude max-Q and a longer reentry burn that makes for a more benign reentry than even the standard RTLS burn.
There's no need to redesign anything, and it's doubtful that there'd be enough business for you to break even doing so. The biggest risk to the above plan is probably the additional development needed to return to the original Dragon powered landing plans. It's only vaguely plausible because they already have a booster and spacecraft built to carry crew.
Air resistance is basically negligible for orbital launch vehicles, especially for those with dense fuels...the Saturn V (a kerosene-burner like Falcon 9) only lost 40 m/s to aerodynamic drag. They're moving slowest when they're in the densest atmosphere, and get out of it very quickly. The only serious losses are gravity losses. And for orbital launch, those are about 2 km/s. For suborbital launch to 100 km, that's more like your total delta-v requirement, gravity loss being more like 0.6 km/s.
Thinking in terms of energy actually understates the issue. The difficulty doesn't scale with the energy given to the final payload, it scales with the size of the launch vehicle which has to carry propellant along with that payload. That's not quadratic, it's exponential. That's why the ability to remove vehicle mass by staging is so important.
And of course, you also need an actual spacecraft. If you somehow put "SpaceShipTwo" into orbit, it'd be helpless and the occupants would shortly die. It's not a spacecraft and is not built to operate in that environment.
And then there's the little detail that SpaceShipTwo can't even reach 100 km...they're targeting 50 mi, 80 km.
Just stick a Dragon on top and there's your escape system. Limits your passenger capacity, but there's not going to be that many people flying anyway. Launching a Dragon capsule above 100 km (or hey, 200 km, why not?) won't stress the stage anything like an actual launch, you'd likely launch with a fraction of a full propellant load and remove some engines, reducing the reflight costs.
40% of the regular launch cost is in the expendable second stage and fairings. If they could find enough interest for 50 full flights (a long but very easy life for booster and capsule), it'd give them the same profit margin at a bit over $100k per person...but only 60% of the profit per flight, while competing with the real orbital flights (which there will be a lot of when they start putting Starlink up) for pad infrastructure and personnel. And are there actually 50 flights worth of customers for something that bears about the same relationship to real spaceflight as riding a bike into the waves has to an ocean cruise? (Though at least they'd be in an actual spacecraft.)
So yeah, SpaceX could easily do this, it's just not worth their time.
People do talk about those things, if you'd bother to look.
We have essentially no data on low gravity environments, only microgravity and full Earth gravity, but the relationship is likely to be very nonlinear, with even a small amount of gravity mitigating much of the effects. If it does prove to be a problem that can't be dealt with medically, there are centrifuges. The toxicity and prevalence of perchlorates is wildly exaggerated, and they are easy to deal with. And apart from the fact that terraforming isn't necessary and would at most be a concern of future generations of Mars colonists, Mars would be able to hold an Earthlike atmosphere for millions of years without a magnetic field. The problem with terraforming is building enough of an atmosphere that doesn't have lethal CO2 content.
Then stop doing it? It's a lousy argument built on ignorance of the political obstacles involved in making use of Antarctica.
And of course, there aren't actually any payloads that require SLS's capacity. Currently, all it's planned to be used for is to throw 10 t LOP-G modules out to a cislunar NRHO, along with an Orion containing some people because...well, because what else are you going to use Orion for? It can't go anywhere else.
We're also not orbiting Sag. A*, it's just in the center of all the mass we *are* orbiting. The Milky Way outmasses it a few hundred thousand times over, if it disappeared it'd only affect the closest stars in the core. It also doesn't have anything like the claimed effect on star formation. Perhaps they did in the early universe when they were surrounded by huge disks of accreting gas that outshone the rest of their galaxies, but not today.
Nuclear saltwater rockets solve the mass production issue. All your critical masses of fissile material go in one big tank stuffed full of neutron absorbing structures. (Check thoroughly for leaks.)
And you don't need nearly as much shock absorption, since your exhaust is a continuous blast of dissociated water and decaying fission products.
You can't explore a body with a quarter of Earth's total land area with 12 people, mostly non-specialists, working for a few days. There's plenty of research left to be done on the moon.
That research is the main reason to go there, though. It's not a stepping stone into the solar system, the orbital mechanics don't work out...a craft that can just barely go there has nearly enough performance to blow right past it and go to Mars. It's not enough like Mars or asteroids to be useful for learning how to work with them. And He3 is a joke. Apart from being scarce enough that we'd strip mine the entire moon over the course of a few centuries to get it...and then run out...p-B11 fusion gets all its benefits without using rare fuels, and the D-T fusion reaction that we can actually achieve in the near future lets us breed tritium that spontaneously decays into He3. Even with fission reactors, we can synthesize it more economically than we could mine it from lunar regolith.
Ambitions and an active development program. They're at least working on something that could be useful for economically launching large amounts of mass, instead of screwing around with air launch or barely-physically-plausible SSTO spaceplanes or pretending there's no economic case for reuse.
I doubt they'll find developing their first orbital launch vehicle as smooth going as some of their fans believe (New Glenn's first launch has likely already been pushed back to 2021), but they're far ahead of everyone else who might compete with SpaceX.
Most of those capabilities are unnecessary for either the moon or Mars, and aren't likely to ever be developed without active manned space exploration to drive the need for them.
What we really need is greatly reduced cost and deployed transportation infrastructure capable of frequent deliveries of large payloads, and people actually getting out there, discovering the problems that need to be solved, and working out solutions for them. Make it easy to get mass into orbit, and people will research stuff like magnetic shielding and advanced propulsion. Meanwhile, what we have is enough to start going to the moon and Mars. If SpaceX achieves their goals with BFR, the BFS will go straight from LEO to the surface of Mars with 150 t of payload and with a trip time short enough that simulated gravity, exotic radiation shielding, etc are unnecessary; then refuel and launch from Mars to land back on Earth. This isn't a tin can that can barely get a few humans there, it's a serious transport craft capable of supporting well-equipped research expeditions and colonization efforts. Blue Origin has similar ambitions focused around the moon.
The Lunar Orbiting Platform (or whatever they're calling it today), though...yeah, it's embarrassingly lacking in ambition and potential for meaningful progress. It can't even be occupied full time, and any reasonable lunar or Mars mission would blow right past it without wasting delta-v on rendezvous.
A large helicopter, with pilot trained for such operations and insurance to cover the risks involved, and a separate ship for it to operate from would all be quite expensive. With the film canisters, it didn't matter if it cost a few million to arrange their recovery, but with these, the whole point is to save a few million.