NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to the lunar surface.

Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to mention docking and orbital re-fueling.

Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.

SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.

Booster re-usability is only the first half of the problem. It's the second stage re-usability that makes Starship viable despite its massive second stage. The re-entry heating is trashing their second stages which would make the killer feature of Starship, fast turnaround, impractical.

Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.

Who cares? Even if they never solve the flap issue, the cost of bolting on new flaps every flight is minimal.

That's like bolting new wings on a 777 after every flight. It's going to cost a LOT and you won't be able to just load up fuel/passengers and take off again.

I'm sure SpaceX will eventually fix the problem. They are well funded, the materials exist, and they have amazing engineers. They just haven't reached that point yet.