You gotta get off Earth no matter where you go in space. It's almost free to come home from LEO, you get a huge amount of free velocity change returning from the moon. (At the cost of rejecting the heat)
the required mass ratio is an exponential function of the velocity change so adding another 2.5 km/sec for this and another 2.5 km/sec for that you are making the mission much more difficult.
It's bad enough that it takes two stages to get to LEO comfortably but going beyond that adds cost and complexity pretty quick, for instance the large number of Starship launches required to get a Moon mission into the right orbit.
I like to think about what interstellar travellers would do if they wanted to land on the Earth on the assumption that they are accustomed to life in deep space and have spent 1,000 to 10,000 years "living off the land" off comets and rouge planets and are used to a lifestyle like cutting up a planet like Pluto and building a number of small ringworlds powered by D-D fusion.
I'd conjecture that despite having advanced technology they would still find the "reverse space shuttle" problem where you land with a full load of fuel and then take off from the ground to be difficult. It's not like they are going to haul a space shuttle along with them and would probably find it non-trivial to 3-d print one from plans that old. My take is that it would probably take them a decade to figure it out and that they might well come up with an alternative answer like
which depends on in-space infrastructure that they'd be experience with although it could work together with an air-breathing aircraft which would be something new for them.
In the rocket equation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
the required mass ratio is an exponential function of the velocity change so adding another 2.5 km/sec for this and another 2.5 km/sec for that you are making the mission much more difficult.
It's bad enough that it takes two stages to get to LEO comfortably but going beyond that adds cost and complexity pretty quick, for instance the large number of Starship launches required to get a Moon mission into the right orbit.
I like to think about what interstellar travellers would do if they wanted to land on the Earth on the assumption that they are accustomed to life in deep space and have spent 1,000 to 10,000 years "living off the land" off comets and rouge planets and are used to a lifestyle like cutting up a planet like Pluto and building a number of small ringworlds powered by D-D fusion.
I'd conjecture that despite having advanced technology they would still find the "reverse space shuttle" problem where you land with a full load of fuel and then take off from the ground to be difficult. It's not like they are going to haul a space shuttle along with them and would probably find it non-trivial to 3-d print one from plans that old. My take is that it would probably take them a decade to figure it out and that they might well come up with an alternative answer like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)
which depends on in-space infrastructure that they'd be experience with although it could work together with an air-breathing aircraft which would be something new for them.