My current understanding, based off people I have talked to involved in HLS on the NASA side as well as reporting on HLS, is that Starship HLS is refueled twice on the way to the Moon. It is refueled in LEO after launch, then uses that fuel to get into a higher Earth orbit where it docks with another tanker and refuels again, at which point it then goes to Lunar orbit. The tankers can be pre-positioned, but even then the flight profile will take somewhere on the order of weeks to get into Lunar orbit. If you are using Starship HLS to get back from Lunar orbit you will also need to do this in reverse, though it may be possible to use some sort of aerobraking to reduce the refuels needed if Starship HLS is capable of it.
‘People I have talked to’ is so vague it could mean anything. As Starship’s payload, flight rate, et al. are in flux, it’s premature to assume there is a set plan. There are reasonable cases we can make for LEO-only refueling, HEEO-refueling, and so on, but I have seen little discussion of doing both LEO and HEEO. As far as getting to NRHO, that is a choice versus a limitation of Starship; there are very low-energy trajectories to various orbits near the Moon that come at the cost of time.
A Starship version needed for crew transport is probably one that can get from a fully refueled state in LEO to Lunar orbit (probably NRHO would be a good option, it's a great orbit for lunar ops in general and has lower delta-v requirements) and back to LEO without having to stop along the way during transit between the Moon and Earth to refuel. Designing for aerobraking would make things much easier. And if methalox ISRU is practical on the Moon, investing in that capability would also be benefitial to refuel while in Lunar orbit.
So a Starship already in development, then. I think you’re placing too much faith in unverifiable claims that Starship will be refueling in multiple Earth orbits. We don’t need methane or carbon on the Moon, though that would be great - oxygen itself is most of the mass of propellant.
I do want to emphasize though that Starship HLS is currently the only crewed version of Starship that seems to have significant development ongoing. We've seen renders of other crewed versions, and SpaceX says they will do it, but thus far we haven't seen any significant work on it. And I do believe they will make a crewed Starship eventually, just that it doesn't seem like it's coming soon. Even with Starship HLS there are a lot of doubts about it (and the stuff it needs to get to the Moon) being ready in time for AIII in 2028.
‘Seems to.’ All of the Starship variants have a good deal of commonality between them; development on non-task specific hardware benefits all of them. I have as many doubts about the SLS and Orion as you do of Starship.
Cancelling SLS and Orion after the Artemis 3, with a replacement architecture yet to be bid, let alone selected and developped, removes a lot of redundancy and backup if anything goes wrong with the hardware of the next 2 missions.
The SLS and Orion can’t be backup or redundancy for anything. They don’t have the flight rate, and NASA doesn’t have the budget.
More importantly, the recent budget request confirms what I had thought when I read Isaacman's testimony: There is no lunar ambition anymore, going to the moon is only to "beat the chinese", all the ambition is on mars under this administration, and with gateway and ESM requested to be cancelled, and the few surface collaborations in jeopardy, there is going to be much less of an international anchor to sustain a program through the following administrations
If one assumes that the only efforts that matter are the state’s, perhaps. But it’s primarily Gateway, SLS, and Orion that are in trouble, not CLPS or Artemis as a whole. The American private sector, also, is highly interested in the Moon and raising money. Such an effort will require a reasonable government presence on the Moon, including people.
Watching american hearings over the past months it is increasingly clear the US' lunar program is purely reactive to the chinese, the problem is that when your goal is only to strategically check your rival, bringing humans on the loop is an unnecessary burden. in my opinion, the logical conclusion of the current ideology is an abandonment of any permanent or even semi-permanent american crewed presence on the moon to focus on a strategical, semi-military largely uncrewed lunar program focused on strategically checking out the chinese lunar program and ILRS.
I don’t believe so. A strictly reactive effort would maintain the SLS and Orion, rather than attempting to shift to less expensive, more capable assets.
• How NASA EGS will get Orion ready for... 
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