The trajectory was chosen by NASA because the Orion capsule on top of the SLS rocket do not have enough efficiency to be on a low regular lunar orbit while landing and bringing back astronauts. This trajectory has nothing to do with SpaceX.

Nor did I say it did, I said some brain dead idiots sent the contract off to a company who designed a craft incapable of doing what we have done previously, congrats Lockheed for fucking up our next moon program. It's you who equated that to SpaceX lmaoo

When comparing the one rocket to land on the moon to the 15 launches (thank you for writing launches and not rockets, as Destin Sandlin wrongly did) is because the mass delivered to the surface is gigantic compared to Apollo. Why? Because we do not want to say "we did it!" We want to say "we live there!".

I mean it really doesn't matter are you going to have astronauts just chilling for like a year in orbit waiting for those launches, racking up radiation? Saying the reason we need 15 launches for starship is specifically due to mass is such a cop-out. It's due to how limited the amount of fuel we can send up to refuel in orbit is, it's fucking stupid at our current level of space infrastructure. We still haven't even tested it, what we need another 4 decades for this terrible plan to come to fruition? Take note of what the Apolo engineers stated as far as stepping stones in development. If you take too big of leaps, you will not adequately be able to evaluate what when wrong if something does, take to small of steps and you will never reach the goal. We decided to take such massive leaps with no forethought on its efficiency.

Can people stop saying SpaceX rockets explode? They do not.

No, that is precisely what occurred with starship. You can see the Shockwave from the explosion, which means you had the oxidizer mix with the propelent before exploding during the flip phase, that's a major fucking failure. It was not a rupture like previous issues nor was it terminated, it fucking exploded lmao. The worst part all that lovely telemetry that's gonna help them out gave zero indication of said catastrophic failure so that's gonna be such great info for them right? Just like the first test that failed when they knew the pad wouldn't be strong enough and caused damage to the rocket, meaning they got no actionable data?

As of now, and evolving for Starship:
$7B cost, 4 from NASA for the first 2 missions
11 years for the first tests, still no rocket
Can bring 220,00lb and 35,000ft³ to the moon
And they still and up with a rocket NASA can continue to use at very low price (less than 25% than SLS per mission)

Star ship has not been a proven concept and is still actively in development, these numbers mean nothing right now. With massive issues looming and 90% of what's needed not even tested yet but go ahead keep riding daddy musk as if he isn't killing good ideas with lofty moving goal posts and a complete lack of understanding for what's being developed.