Surely the could put a traditional upper stage on Super Heavy and just go directly to the moon, no? I’m not sure what the obsession with second stage reuse is, because you lose almost all your margin.
Falcon Heavy (as its name implies) is not capable as a super-heavy lift vehicle. Past GTO, it can only carry 18 tons. You need more than double that to reach the Moon and come back, as NASA did in the 1960s.
Space X cares way more about reusability than the moon, they're not actually in a race to the moon. Step 1: build the best general solution. Step 2: do everything
You're confused. Elon said two weeks ago that they have given up on Mars and the Moon is the goal they're currently working on. He said it will probably take them another decade to catch up to NASA of the 1960s by reaching the Moon with a real super-heavy rocket that actually works.
SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.
Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.
Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad
Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?