I'm no fan of SLS, but check your terminology here: You're talking about Starship in the present tense, but it hasn't launched _either_, so you can't say it "can" go to the moon etc either.

Starship is awesome, but it's an insanely ambitious project. No one knows how long it'll take to get it right.

But SLS is in no way able to go to moon or earth with what they are currently building?

What makes this so weird to me is that SpaceX does have Dragon already which just brought more people into orbit this week - e.g. proven and way cheaper of what SLS is supposed to do in this mission - unless I'm missing or not understanding something.

So you're right the starship portion to moon (and hopefully mars) is similar to SLS in that it's not realized ye

But looking at the part SLS is supposed to play in this production, that role has already been acted successfully by Dragon. I'd say spacex gets the space oscar for it, though i doubt they get the trophy this weekend :)

Orion basically is ready. There is an uncrewed full stack test flight around the Moon scheduled for November this year, Artemis I. Decent chance it will slip by a few months, but still highly likely to happen by early next year. And then in 2023 they have planned a crewed test flight (orbiting the Moon but not landing, like Apollo 8).

I think SpaceX wants to focus as much of their development resources as possible on Starship. They'd rather focus their energies on that rather than on coming up with new versions of Crew Dragon. Starship, if successful, is going to kill SLS/Orion in the medium-to-long term. I don't think there is any great benefit to SpaceX in trying to kill it in the short-term. That'd be walking into a potentially expensive and risky political battle with vested interests in Congress, and why get them offside when doing so isn't on your critical path to your ultimate goal?

Starship itself?.. Being built with such technologies, so cheap (Elon mentioned that Boca Chica works are quite small percents of what SpaceX is doing in terms of money), so fast - and yet we already have a successful-ish landing from ~10 km height.

Of course, we don't know for sure. But it surely doesn't seem too bad, especially now - and for some it was clear when SpaceX was just created.

Also considering the planned SLS "landing" mode they are also on par so far.

Because Moon-bound Starship will be quite different from Earth-bound - not enough to not call it Starship, but still - the Moon-bound will be optimized for less gravity (different legs?), no atmosphere (no wings), braking using engines in the middle of the body, not in the tail section, Moon-specific systems like ladder or elevator etc.

Starting new missions from outside a strong gravity field seems like such a huge advantage. I guess most people want a destination and not just a more long term established presence.

You don’t get to do this, period. All your crew and all your materials are ultimately coming from Earth (or, in some plans, are mined in-situ). You use considerably more resources getting to your waypoint than you save by leaving from there.

Being farther out of the gravity well isn’t entirely positive either; you’re losing out on significant savings from the Oberth effect. Earth-Moon Lagrange points are well past the minimum-cost orbit.

Wait till we start making LOX (and later, I think, metals) on the Moon from regolith. The process is old and tested on Earth, the missing part is actually experimenting with this on the Moon. And as soon as we have more or less robust Earth-Moon transportation, this will become important, as it will significantly simplify near Moon operations.

Do you know NASA runs, right now, competitions for e.g. lunar ice extraction and purifying?

This is the key state differentiator.

If you bring everything from Earth, it doesn't make sense. (So why are we doing it now?)

But once you start procuring resources from outside gravity well, things look different.

But this isn't necessarily advocating for a full time in-orbit refuelling station either. The plan might be to instead launch 2 or 3 rockets, 1 with the stuff and the others with fuel. They meet up in orbit and the fuel rockets refill the stuff rocket so it can go on to Mars or wherever, then they return to Earth for the next mission.

Such a thing might make sense once there are, say, 50 or 100 starships.

For the foreseeable future, all missions will "start" in Earth's gravity well due to the fact that the o2 and ch4 are all down here. It will be some years until we have significant fuel stores in space.