Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

The last I had read is that NASA is planning a mission with Artemis to land men on the moon. However, the plan is/was to use Elon Musk's Starship to rondevue with Orion in the Moons orbit, tranfer the landing party to the Starship and use Starship to actually land on the moon.

Question or Gigem: Am I correct about this or do you have any information regarding this?

This is 100% true.  SLS/Orion cannot co-manifest a lander of any size due to the lack of performance and the weight of the Orion CSM/SM, and the lack of power from the Orion SM.  

Back around 2020, NASA put out a bid for a HLS, or Human Landing System (dumb name).  I'd like to point out that prior to the SLS rockets start, there were almost no commercial providers for space and rocket systems.  Everything was pretty much gov't contracted.  What I'm referring to is not only Space X and the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy, but Rocket Lab, and various other space entities.  Starting in the mid 2010's, and especially after 2016, Space X has not only dominated US Rocket launches, but world-wide mass to space, by a larger percentage.  
Now, Elon and Space X has been working on Starship/Super Heavy (SS/SH) for about 10 years now.  Elon has always stated his goal is to get to Mars.  Love the man or hate him, he's got big plans.  

SS/SH, as a system, far out-classes anything that NASA/Boeing/Gov't can do.  Elon envision SS to be 100% reusable, and it's quite a bit larger than either Saturn V, or SLS, in both terms of size and power.  It's taller, and has more thrust.  

It's unlike anything ever seen before, because it's made from Stainless Steel.  Elon pivoted to SS once he figured out he couldn't make it work with composites.  

You may wonder if it has landing legs like the Falcon 9, and the answer is no.  Elon realized that the extra mass of having legs would take away from the MTO, or mass to orbit.  This is one of the things that limited the space shuttle, it was indeed powerful, but the shuttle itself was so heavy it subtracted from it's cargo mass to orbit.  

SS/SH are both expected to be landed, or caught, back on the launch tower.  Space X has already done this, twice, for the SH part.  

I hope to hell some of that was copy & paste - I did read it all and found it interesting

Negative ghostrider.  

After the moon landings, NASA obviously struggled to find purpose, as noted above.  I agree the ISS has not yielded much beyond how to survive long time in earth orbit.

The upcoming mission is puzzling, to me, why not send an unmanned ship to do the same thing?  I don't see why the four humans aboard are somehow changing anything.

I recall grandiose proposals to build a launcher in the Andes, sounded like an idea, never happened, using a rail gun to do the initial acceleration.

The key is a cheaper way to get something into orbit.

NASA actually never struggled to find purpose, they were given a new purpose every 4 years, or sometimes every 2 years by a congress that was only concerned with jobs in their district.  

Despite it's shortcomings, we did learn a lot with the space shuttle.  It was a worthwhile endeavor, it should have just lasted 15 years at most instead of 30.  

And there were plans, plans that got scrapped, changed, or were never realistic. 

The amount of science that NASA has done over the last 50 years is staggering. For a hot minute, the Soviet Union was kicking our tails.  First satellite, first man, first woman, first to see the back side of the moon. 

After about 1968, it’s pretty much been all US. First to have a manned orbit around the moon, first to dock in space, first communication satellite, most powerful rocket, biggest space station, first reusable spacecraft, first to put 7 people into space simultaneously. First to send a probe to Mars.  I believe the Soviets had first to Venus, and actually had a very robust Venus exploration program including several landings ( with pictures!). Because of orbital dynamics, Venus is much easier to reach than Mars. It’s also an acidic, literal hot hell hole. 

Nobody has done solar system exploration like US. 

We’re still the only country that has successfully sent probes to the outer solar system.  Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and finally Pluto. It took so long to get a probe to Pluto that in between the time they launched and arrived they literally downgraded Pluto from a planet to a mini-planet. Multiple, even dozens of missions.  

The Soviets tried, and exploded many rockets and had many failed missions. The EU….either doesn’t care or doesn’t have the funds. 

NASA actually never struggled to find purpose, they were given a new purpose every 4 years, 

I should perhaps have said they struggled to find a consistent long term goal.  One was the ISS, one was the shuttle (ostensibly a way to get stuff to orbit cheaply), one was exploration of planets etc.  IMHO, the latter has been more beneficial to us, and can largely be done with robots today.  I think the two large space telescopes have done real stuff beyond providing snazzy photos at times.

At least Musk articulated one possible long term goal, Mars colonization.  What SpaceX has done is pretty amazing, to me, and I realize Musk may have had little to do with much of it.  Does a Mars return mission make sense now, or perhaps a one way to Mars mission instead, manned?  Maybe, the vision of getting humanity onto another rock makes sense to me.

I've read about the possibility of pseudo-terraforming Mars, to get atmospheric pressure up to negative need for suits, you'd still need an O2 tank.  Radiation remains an issue of course.  

"We" spend so much on other stuff, though, and our finances are not good.

One idea is mining an asteroid, by altering its orbit into a Lagrange point and building a metals factory.  I see some weird numbers justifying that from enthusiasts.

But, basically, getting anything into low Earth orbit is still very expensive.

It makes a bit more sense with respect to colonizing the Moon, which is bereft of heavier metals, like iron.  But for things like gold etc., yup, it would crash the markets.

And colonizing the Moon might make little sense.