I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.

I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.

Starship HLS is estimated to require 22 refueling launches to support 1 moon mission.

	▲	Ankaios 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		OP, this is probably the source of the confusion. Some people are claiming that SpaceX will need 20+ refueling launches for human lunar landings. However, that's a very different claim than reusable rockets requiring 23x more launches just to carry the same amount of payload to Earth orbit.
	▲	echoangle 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Without knowing how much it would take in expendable configuration, that doesn’t imply that it takes 23 times as many launches
	▲	wat10000 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How is that even relevant? The Starship HLS launch won’t be landing the upper stage.

palata 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.

Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.