I don't trust Musk very much these days, but one of the few ways I feel I can still trust him is that he seems to be genuinely and consistently motivated by Mars.
Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission.
But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship.
If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.
Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission.
But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship.
If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.