In the 1960s, NASA considered two ways to get to the Moon: direct ascent and Earth orbit rendezvous. Direct ascent used a huge rocket to go directly to the Moon and land a rocket the size of an Atlas I.

Earth orbit rendezvous used smaller rockets to put the parts into low Earth orbit (LEO) one at a time to build the moonship, like the way they built ISS. They would send a bunch of fueling missions to the moonship, and then send it all to the Moon to land a rocket the size of an Atlas I.

In the 1960s, sending a bunch of fueling ships did not seem unreasonable, but somehow it seems unreasonable today.

A huge difference between then and now is that back then we used expensive expendable rockets that took a month of launch-pad time to prepare, and today we can use cheap reusable rockets that can launch from the same pad in a few days. Starship may be able to launch from the same pad at a cadence of once a day, or maybe even more frequently.

Starship may not be the most efficient way to land men on the Moon, it probably is not, as it was not designed for lunar landings but for atmospheric landings on Mars and Earth. However, it is the hardware that we seem to have in the next few years, and it seems capable of taking massive hardware and lunar-base modules. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is probably much better for landing men on the Moon. Neither seems to be optimal, however. We clearly need more work to increase efficiency in lunar operations. Considering how nascent such operations are, right now, this inefficiency is expected.