This is a lie:

"Starship’s early developmental challenges meant that target whizzed by."

This article is not to be trusted.

My call:

It will be too much work to man-rate Starship in time and the landing will be done by a Blue Origin lander. Starship will bring it to the moon and back, along with an Orion for the launch and reentry.

Even without the really complicated things like human rating a rocket that has no provision for an escape system, none of the schedules presented in the past or that are likely to be presented in the future are plausible.

There's no way that the launch cadence is going to accelerate to where they can refuel a Starship in orbit in a reasonable amount of time.

Three years ago I looked at all the dependencies in the starship project and concluded that the schedule is pure bullshit. It's worse: they never really made a proper schedule because it would've scared them. They're announcing stretch goals and smoking hopium.

That behavior happens all the time in projects. But not at the scale of starship.

Starship is 100% the wrong design. Way too many complications with Starship. So much can go wrong.

LOR is the right approach.