Couple of milestones before that:

- flying reused booster + Starship

- longer in orbit missions for Starship of weeks or months. There are some non trivial issues with that probably; and you'd need that to not make refueling pointless.

- having two active launch sites. Nor strictly required but probably handy if you are going to have two Starships in orbit at the same time.

They might not get to all that in that order. But the important step today is that they get to inspect a "flight proven" Starship without water damage. I bet they are going to learn a lot of details of where exactly they need to iterate and improve. This took them some time with Falcon 9 as well. We've gotten used to this thing basically launching and landing without many issues. But that wasn't always the case. 2027 is probably going to see an increase launch rate.

Moon landings are going to be an interesting one because it depends on NASA as well and the decision making around that is very political. On the other hand, there's going to be increasing peer pressure from the Chinese. They have their own plans and it doesn't involve waiting for NASA to get there first. They are targeting 2030 for a manned mission. I expect the politics might get a bit more opinionated on that topic as that gets closer. The long term game here is not just landing and planting another flag but actually establishing a permanent presence on the moon. That involves flying useful payloads back and forth. Starship seems designed for that.

What happens after that is going to be an interesting one. IMHO, Starship is optimal for earth landings but not necessarily for the moon and Mars. What's currently flying is probably over engineered for a place with no atmosphere and one 6th of the gravity (the moon) or a very thin atmosphere and one third of the gravity (Mars). Would those flaps even work in the Mars atmosphere? However, it's a great launch vehicle to get components in space to build something more optimal. Also the booster might be used to launch other things than Starship. Like something that will never come down and can instead be fueled for deep space missions and Mars/Moon landings.

It's important to be able to set aside cynicism, even if for a single hour, to enjoy technological achievements like this.

In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.

And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.

The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)

Launches, Starlink, military provide cash. SpaceX needs to be profitable at least to some extent.

All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.

Those exploration dreams can only exist via the bankrolling of government contracts and riding bubbles.

Google is only able to fund Waymo, Quantum Computing, etc because of their questionably moral ads cash cow.

I don't know how long it will take, but I'll be here watching you seethe as they hit each one and you post another list.

What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.

I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.

That's your reaction to watching this? Pretty sad.

I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams. If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.