In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia. These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they’re due to provide a final report by June.
We don’t actually need Starship to be man-rated, though. Use it to launch cargo, fuel, and unmanned vehicles, and then send astronauts up on a Falcon 9 (which is already routinely shuttling people to space) and have them transfer over in orbit.
We don’t even need Starship to be reusable for it to be cheaper than SLS. Though reusability is another whole order of magnitude or two of improvement.
