What is pending for SpaceX Starship to be a Moonship for NASA astronauts? Nearly everything.

Sign in<br>Subscribe

First launch of SpaceX’s Starship V3 launch vehicle. Image: SpaceXSpaceX’s latest suborbital test flight of its two-stage Starship rocket on May 22, debuting a refined V3 version, was successful in its liftoff, stage separation, mock satellite deployment test, and the upper stage’s soft oceanic splashdown while its heat shield remained intact through atmospheric reentry. However, the flight failed in even attempting a soft splashdown of the large booster, which impacted somewhere unstated in the waters of Gulf of Mexico. The flight also did not test the planned reignition of an upper stage Raptor engine in space because one of the engines had failed early in flight. This means SpaceX will likely have to delay an orbital test flight of Starship until an upper stage engine relight is demonstrated in a future flight.<br>In 2021, NASA selected Starship’s lunar variant for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon in 2024 for almost $3 billion, a price proposed by SpaceX itself. Starship’s early developmental challenges meant that target whizzed by. More importantly, last year’s multiple failures of Starships against SpaceX’s own repeatedly promised timelines continued to mount delays, significantly slowing down NASA’s progress in having humans land on the Moon again via Artemis IV. Given the delays, and the hanging 2028 political deadline to “beat China”, the agency decided to reopen the landing contract. Thus Blue Origin can now vie for the first Artemis landing mission despite its own challenges. In this overall context, the V3 Starship’s first flight continues only slow progress for NASA and the US while a sea of milestones remain untouched in the lead up to landing humans on the Moon. Somehow by 2028, SpaceX still needs to achieve the following:<br>have lofted Starships return to launchpads by default<br>perform an orbital flight<br>consistently deploy satellites and other payloads in Earth orbit<br>human-rate the whole launch vehicle and demonstrate docking with the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis III Earth orbit test mission<br>perform cryogenic fuel transfers between Starship upper stages in Earth orbit<br>refurbish and refuel Starships fast enough to reach the high cadence required, itself unspecified, for the Artemis IV crewed Moon landing<br>demonstrate an uncrewed lunar landing and takeoff prior to carrying crew<br>demonstrate avoiding cryogenic fuel boil-off in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface, to simulate Starships waiting for or hosting astronauts<br>Two years later that last promised, even a baseline demonstration of in-orbit fuel transfer between Starship stages has not been in sight. Moreover, we don’t even have a firm enough launch target for Starship’s uncrewed lunar landing demonstration either from SpaceX or NASA. We also don’t have public information on what SpaceX’s supposed accelerated Lunar Starship proposal in response to NASA’s reopening of the astronaut landing contract looks like. Simply put, NASA’s road to landing humans on the Moon again has been crawling through Starship.<br>China, the catalyst<br>In the meanwhile, China has bagged a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected, spanning prototype tests of its Moon rocket, the crew capsule, the lander, and supporting navigation and communications infrastructure. This year, China has conducted an in-flight abort test of the crew capsule, provided new details on the planning and development of various elements of China’s crewed Moon missions, and is on track for more planned tests.<br>High-level diagram of the simple, nominal mission profile and architecture China is employing for its upcoming crewed Moon landing missions. Image: KaynoukyMany dismiss China’s simple two-launch approach as being less ambitious than Artemis, saying that being Apollo-like makes their plan faster to execute. Since when is a crewed Moon landing an easy feat in itself? It’s the first time China is even attempting the feat, and any architecture for the same makes for an enormous undertaking by default that deserves respect. You can’t call Apollo a historic feat while simultaneously downplaying others trying to take a similarly practical approach.<br>In response to China’s pace, portrayed by the US as a “race”, NASA has been trying to remove or reduce requirements to allow Starship and Blue Origin to meet the agency and its Orion craft somewhere in between. For example, the effective cancellation of the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat earlier this year removed the requirement for Starship or Blue to orbit the Moon in Gateway’s specific NRHO orbit, allowing them to dock with the crew-hosting Orion spacecraft in other potentially feasible shared orbits. Relatedly, Marcia Smith reported that NASA is considering the first Artemis landing to not be amid the treacherous terrain of the Moon’s south pole and lie more equator-ward instead. Targeting a non-polar landing...