NASA’s Artemis program, which plans to return Americans to the surface of the Moon, depends pretty heavily on being able to actually land on the Moon. Unlike the old Apollo program, this time around that critical task has been handed over to the private sector to figure out. In 2021, SpaceX was given $3 billion to accomplish that task. Now, doubts are growing that Elon Musk’s rocket company will be able to deliver that capability within the next few years, putting the entire project at risk. Worse, if SpaceX can’t make a lot of progress soon, odds are that the Chinese will pull off their own Moon landing before America does.
The idea is that SpaceX will use its huge, complicated, and reusable Starship to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface and back. But Starship has been suffering a variety of problems, leading three of the last four to blow themselves up (though the latest flight did successfully complete its mission and return for recovery). As the New York Times notes, SpaceX still has yet to test some of the most complex components of the lunar landing, such as the never-before-attempted in-Earth-orbit refueling of the rocket, requiring at least 15 smaller launches just to get Starship the propellant it needs for the mission. Plus, Starship will need to perform a successful uncrewed landing before putting people in it.
SpaceX doesn’t appear anywhere close to nailing those capabilities down (or even testing them), which doesn’t bode well for a proposed Artemis III mission in 2027. Then again, other parts of the mission, such as Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will take the astronauts from the Earth to the Moon’s orbit, are also struggling with time and budget constraints. So, if NASA does start slipping behind China, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But Starship will need to build out the most new and unproven technologies to work, making it the riskiest asset in the whole operation.
Wait, there are two rockets going to the Moon?
The Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s were incredible feats of planning, organization, and engineering. Artemis is radically more complex even than that. The plan, essentially, goes like this: Starship will launch into Earth orbit, using up most of its fuel. It will then need to refuel in Earth orbit, receiving propellant from those 15 other launches that SpaceX will need to send to it. Gassed up, it will fly into lunar orbit. Once there, it can loiter for up to 100 days.
To be clear, there are no astronauts on Starship. They will go onto the Orion spacecraft atop the SLS, which will only launch once Starship is in place. After Orion arrives in lunar orbit, it will dock with Starship, and two of the four astronauts will transfer over. Starship will the descend to the surface, a giant 165-foot colossus looming over magnificent desolation (for reference, the old Apollo landers were 23 feet tall). It will double as the astronauts’ house.
After the lunar mission is accomplished, Starship will launch itself back up into orbit and dock with Orion so the astronauts and any recovered samples can be transferred over. As Orion heads back to Earth, Starship will either stay in the Moon’s orbit for possible reuse or fling itself off into the universe.
That is… wildly complicated with a lot of moving parts. And again, a lot of those capabilities aren’t even scheduled to be tested yet! For a mission planned for 2027!
Why on Earth (or the Moon) is NASA doing it this way?
You may be wondering why NASA simply doesn’t do it the old Apollo way, a proven technique and one of America’s greatest triumphs. There are a couple of answers to that. First, this current proposal was greenlit by the first Trump administration, which liked the idea of offloading costs and development to the private sector. Second, the sheer size of Starship is a big plus: it enables much heavier payloads to both descend to and ascend from the lunar surface. It also allows for physically larger pieces of equipment, or pieces that come in awkward shapes, expanding the range of science that can be done on the Moon.
And remember, Starship will also be the astronauts’ house. So they get a big house. That’s nice.
There was one other good reason to do it this way: it was all supposed to be done by last year. At least, that’s what the original proposal predicted. In other words, these capabilities were originally considered to be easier to acquire, at least in part due to promises from Musk. And when Musk makes a promise, the government can take that to the bank.
China takes the old road to the Moon
By contrast, China is trying a different approach: just do what the Americans did last time. The country’s Lanyue lunar lander sure looks a whole lot like what we put on the Moon a few decades ago. Because the lander is the same, the rest of the mission package is also similar — a big rocket called the Long March will launch a smaller spacecraft (the Mengzhou) on a trajectory to the Moon, at which point the small lunar lander will detach, land, and then launch back up to the Mengzhou, which will take the astronauts home.
China knows that can work, because it’s already been done. That also makes development relatively quick, since the goalposts are known quantities. It won’t necessarily be an improvement on the old Apollo missions, as Artemis is trying to do, but it will at least get boots onto white powder. The country hopes to do so by 2030, sort of an unofficial clock on Artemis to beat.
The New York Times quotes a few sources as saying that Starship won’t likely be ready until at least 2032. Meaning, we’re losing the race. That said, Transportation Secretary and also acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy insists that we won’t lose the race because, well, we won’t! As NASA stares a potential budget typhoon in the face, Duffy appears to be trying to reorient the entire agency towards the Artemis mission and away from pretty much everything else.
Even if NASA can do that (big “if”), that doesn’t change anything over at SpaceX. In its defense, the company has transformed the economics of spaceflight with its Falcon series of rockets, so it has accomplished some pretty remarkable feats in its time. Turning Starship into a reliable lunar lander will be its biggest yet, if it can pull it off. And if it can, then the spacecraft will get one big step closer to its real prize: Mars.
