Delays with SpaceX’s Starship risk NASA moon landing timeline, watchdog says
By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, March 10 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s Starship has accumulated at least two years of development delays since NASA selected the rocket as a lander for astronauts to the Moon in 2021, and it is expected to need more time to clear remaining obstacles before landing on the Moon, NASA’s inspector general said on Tuesday as the agency plans to accelerate the program.
NASA has worked with a wide range of companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, in its multibillion-dollar Artemis program to launch routine astronaut missions to the Moon, eager to do so before China sends its own crews to the lunar surface by around 2030.
But growing delays in SpaceX’s development of Starship, the program’s first lander to carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, have gradually pushed back what was initially a 2024 moon landing goal — although officials at the time treated 2024 with skepticism.
Among the most difficult steps on Starship’s path to becoming an astronaut-rated lunar lander, the inspector general said in its report Tuesday, is requiring the rocket to refuel in space before flying the rest of the way to the Moon, a risky and delicate process that has never been attempted on such a scale.
For a spacecraft to land a crew of astronauts on the Moon, SpaceX will first need to launch more than 11 other spacecraft into Earth’s orbit that will serve as resupply tankers. One of these spacecraft will be a propellant storage depot requiring more than 10 spacecraft to fill enough fuel that will be transferred to the spacecraft that lands on the moon.
Taller than a 15-story building, Starship is powered by approximately 1,200 tons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, two highly explosive propellants that must be kept at cryogenic temperatures, or temperatures below -238°F (-150°C).
Docking spacecraft together and carefully transferring super-cooled propellants at least 10 times into low-Earth orbit, a politically and commercially vital region of space with a booming level of satellite traffic, would be one of the riskiest challenges for a company that has routinized orbital rocket landings and astronaut launches to the International Space Station.
NASA officials overseeing SpaceX’s spacecraft development “consider demonstrating cryogenic propellant transfer to be one of the most significant technical challenges facing SpaceX,” the report said.
“NASA is following a major risk that some of the cryogenic technologies and capabilities developed by SpaceX will not be sufficiently mature” before the moon landing in 2028, the report said.
SpaceX has launched its Starship system 11 times since 2023 in a series of test flights closely monitored by NASA officials.
Last month, NASA added an additional Artemis test mission and acknowledged the technical challenges its contractors face in the Artemis lunar program, in which SpaceX will land humans on the moon in two missions starting in 2028, followed by similar crewed landings by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
The agency has chosen 2028 as the target moon landing date for Starship.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette, editing by Franklin Paul and Chizu Nomiyama)
