>NASA has for 80 years had to hobble around on clutches, with overblown budgets, inventing new technologies and shredding every bit of mass to get probes in and around the solar system
>for the first time in the history of the agency, someone came along and said "hey, instead of a closet on the Moon, we can give you a penthouse suite AND 100T payload to the surface, for 1/8th the cost of your SLS launch."
>before the HLS announcement, there was a virtual discussion that took place for lunar sample returns
>all parties present were talking about what kind of things they'd want to bring back with a 400kg mass budget
>HLS Starship gives NASA a potential sample return of 90718.5kg; 226.7x more than anything they have EVER EVER had the opportunity to do
>the scientific value of that much return mass from the Moon is unquantifiable. They can bring back lava deposits, deep core samples, water ice that's been shadowed in craters for a billion years, and god knows what else
>they'd be able to figure out what's really beneath the lunar regolith and get samples from there
>they'd be able to figure out how much of the Moon's composition is that of Earth
>when the chichxlub impactor happened, killing the dinosaurs, life was undoubtedly ejected from the Earth and some of it may have impacted the moon; so finding records in lunar core samples would be immensely valuable in quantifying the theory of transpermia
>having 10-20 tons of lunar regolith that can be used to recreate lunar conditions on Earth
>using that razor sand to create new solutions, lunar concrete, new materials to safeguard against it, new filtering technology, better cleaning technology to deal with it, using that much regolith to test with lab rats to understand the kind of damage it does to the lungs and other parts of the body, and how we can create better treatment and medicinal options for Moon, Mars, and other heavenly bodies
Hell yeah NASA's going rogue. They don't want congress to fuck it up.
