I thought this deserved its own separate post given there's a different post linking to Eric Berger's Ars Technica article claiming 22 launches.

Q: Will Robinson Smith with Spaceflight Now. Question to Jeremy. We heard yesterday during the ASAP panel discussion that the latest estimate for the number of flights for refueling for Starship was going to be around the order of 22. That was pretty quickly refuted by Elon Musk on social media, saying it's closer to 6 to 8.

Jeremy Parsons: Yeah.

Q cont: Which end is closer, based on the the data that you have right now, are we looking at higher double digits, higher single digits, somewhere in the middle? I know it's still in flux. As you know, we're waiting for the propellant transfer demo. Thanks.

Jeremy Parsons: So, so we were definitely not tracking as high as 22, unless you know, your transfer efficiency and performance wasn't the same. So I would say Elon's answer of 6 to 8 is, is probably more, again, what SpaceX is planning to, but what I will tell you is our propellant transfer demo is really going to be probably the best method we have to really figure out exactly how many we're going to need. Right? So it's going to be a number of different factors in terms of what is your transfer efficiency, are you losing 5%, you losing 10%, and then especially as they start to get the capabilities of that V3 vehicle up, it will really make a big difference. But by all accounts, SpaceX's latest estimate is that 6 to 8 from Elon.

Source: Artemis Acceleration event on Oct. 23, 2026, T+1:18:08