SpaceX is NASA’s biggest lunar rival

It was something amazing—an expensive, delicate ship falling out of the sky with such precision that it could be caught in a waiting pair of giant, gentle arms. If you wanted an illustration of the fact that Americans can do things in space beyond the reach of other earthlings the return of the booster stage of SpaceX’s fifth Starship test flight on October 13th could hardly be bettered.

It is a far cry from the days when America first kindled spacefaring fire in its belly. When, in May 1961, John F. Kennedy presented Congress with the goal of putting “a man on the Moon by the end of the decade” America seemed to be clearly lagging behind the Soviet Union; it would not put its first astronaut into orbit until the following year. But Kennedy’s advisers had chosen their target in the knowledge that the technology needed to go to the Moon was of a different order from that needed just to get into orbit. The USSR’s prowess in the latter was little help to it in the former. America consequently beat them to it, developing the mighty Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft which sat on top of it remarkably quickly.
Today America has not one, but two rockets which have more power at lift-off than the Saturn V: SpaceX’s Starship and the Space Launch System (SLS) developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Thus equipped, it might seem that getting Americans back to the Moon, as the agency was told to do by then-vice-president Mike Pence five years ago, should be a doddle.
Yet the Artemis programme, named after Apollo’s sister, has yet to see a crewed flight (the picture, above, is from its first and only uncrewed flight). NASA’s claim that its third flight, Artemis III, could see an American woman set foot somewhere near the Moon’s south pole, its primary target, in 2026 sits in the area where optimism is increasingly blurring into deceit. Some internal NASA documents make 2028 look more likely; outside observers, including some former insiders, talk of later still.
NASA programmes have a costly habit of being long drawn out; without competition, there is little to focus the mind. On the lunar front, though, there is clear competition. China has plans to fly its own astronauts to the Moon by 2030, and many Americans have a neuralgic reaction to the idea that America’s current geopolitical rival might put people on the Moon before America manages to return them there. Some fear it would look like a re-run of the space race of the 1960s, but one in which America loses, thereby demonstrating some terrible decline.
That would be the wrong conclusion to draw; America’s technological lead in space is broad enough that to be pipped to the post in one symbolically loaded (though scientifically unimportant) venture would not demonstrate all that much. But symbolism matters. NASA officials play down the very idea that they are in a race with China. ”We’ve already been to the Moon, [so] we already beat China to the Moon,” says Cathy Koerner, associate administrator in the agency’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. But if a day comes when a five-starred red flag hangs at the south pole of the Moon with no stars and stripes nearby, it will be a bad day to be NASA administrator, and a tense one on which to be president.
In a way, though, the more fundamental rival is SpaceX. Over the past ten years, NASA has started to move away from the time-honoured model which sees it tell private industry exactly what it wants built and then pay the price, with a handsome guaranteed profit added on. Instead, NASA tells companies what it wants done; lets them say how they would do it, how much new stuff they will have to develop and what that will all cost; and then offers fixed-price contracts to the best bids. The enlightened goal is to build up a thriving competitive market in such services.
The result has been the building up of SpaceX. The contracts the company won for delivering cargo and crews to the International Space Station (ISS) were fundamental to the development of its Falcon 9 rocket (which among many other things currently launches all the cargo destined for the ISS) and its Dragon space capsule.
In some ways this worked well for NASA; one internal study found that developing the space-station resupply capability in-house would have cost NASA $4bn, rather than the $300m SpaceX has charged. But the competitive market hardly appeared. The rockets which were used by the only alternative cargo supplier have been discontinued. Boeing’s attempt to build a capsule to compete with Dragon has been a costly and embarrassing flop.
SpaceX is not a contractor like others NASA is used to. It does not know its place. It did not just develop the Falcon 9: it made it reusable, which NASA would never have dreamed of doing. And it has real plans to do things once reserved for national programmes. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, says he wants to send uncrewed Starships to Mars within a few years, and crewed ones soon after. Those plans far outstrip NASA’s.
The supporting-player-turned-star dynamic is clearly visible in the needless complexity of the Artemis programme. Moon programmes, be they American or Chinese, named after male gods or female ones, all have two things in common: a crew capsule for getting people from the Earth to the vicinity of the Moon and back; and a lunar lander that takes people from that capsule down to the surface and back.
The genius of the Saturn V was that it was sized to carry a smallish capsule and lander all in one flight. A model unveiled in February 2024 suggests that China is planning two launches. One Long March 10 rocket (a souped-up version of the already operational Long March 5) puts a single astronaut into orbit around the Moon in a capsule called Mengzhou, (“Boat of dreams”). A second Long March 10 then sends the lander Lanyue (“Embracing the Moon”), to the surface of the Moon with two more people on board. They spend six hours doing science, taking selfies and raising flags before a part of the lander takes them up to dock with Mengzhou. Then all three astronauts head back to Earth (see graphic).
With Artemis, things are more complex, because NASA is using hardware not specifically designed for the task: a capsule, Orion, which Lockheed has been working on since the 2000s, and the rocket meant to launch it, the SLS which Boeing and others have been working on since the 2010s. Both programmes have gone well over schedule, and cost more than $20bn each, though, thanks to a mixture of politics (big space programmes have strong support from politicians from states where the money is spent) and the sunk-cost fallacy, they are what Artemis must use.
Unfortunately, Orion is quite a large capsule, and though SLS can produce tremendous power at launch, it is less effective thereafter. This means that the SLS as currently configured cannot put Orion into the sort of low orbit around the Moon that Apollo used and China is planning. Instead, Artemis mission plans have Orion loitering in the Moon’s vicinity in a highly elongated “near-rectilinear halo orbit” (NRHO). The good thing about an NRHO is that you can get an Orion into one using an SLS. The bad thing is that getting down to the Moon from one requires considerably more oomph than getting down from a low orbit. So does getting back up.
The SLS cannot deliver a lander capable of such things to the halo orbit chosen for Orion. So NASA put the problem of making up for the deficiencies of its plan out to tender. It asked the industry for a “Human Landing System” (HLS) which could get from Earth to the halo orbit, down to the Moon and back up again. The winning bid was SpaceX’s offer of a modified Starship.
The HLS starship will take the same approach to the Moon as Mr Musk wants to take to Mars. First, SpaceX launched a Starship modified to serve as a propellant depot. This will sit in low-Earth orbit where yet more Starship launches, perhaps a dozen or so, will fill it up. Then another Starship will take off and fill up its tanks. Fully fuelled, Starship has enough oomph for a one-way mission to Mars—or, alternatively, for a trip to a lunar NRHO, then on to the surface of the Moon and back up to the waiting Orion (see graphic).
The only reason anyone has for thinking such a scheme might work is that SpaceX has a truly remarkable record in terms of engineering. It is not hard to believe that the company will, in time, build a fleet of Starships which are fully reusable. Transferring large amounts of propellant between craft in orbit is a new challenge, but surely not an unmeetable one. And the company has already developed one life-support system, for Dragon: there is no reason it should not, in time, develop a second capable of keeping the Moonwalkers on the Starship HLS alive for the duration of their flight and lunar sojourn.
The idea that this will all be done in the next couple of years, though, stretches credulity. In “Reentry”, his recent book about SpaceX, Eric Berger, a journalist, talks about what the engineers there call Mr Musk’s “green lights to Malibu” approach to timelines. In principle, if every light is green and if you drive at 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, you could get from the company’s former headquarters in Hawthorne to Malibu in under half an hour. But because that never happens, you cannot. The first flights of the crewed version of the Dragon, of the Falcon Heavy and of the Starship all took place years after Mr Musk had said they would. Having the Starship HLS ready to take part in Artemis III in 2026, as NASA claims may happen, is the green light to Malibu and back over and over again.
When it finally happens, though, SpaceX will have versions of Starship tailored for Mars ready, too; the Mars-bound version just has to combine the landing-vertically-on-its-own legs capability needed for the HLS with the thermal protection already needed by the everyday version of Starship (to shield it from the heat generated by passage through a planetary atmosphere). Once Mr Musk has a Mars-capable Starship he will use it at the first opportunity. So by the time SpaceX has completed an uncrewed dry run of an Artemis landing there is every chance that it will also have sent a number of uncrewed Starships off to Mars. The odds are even better that this will impress people more. With good reason: SpaceX will be showing it can do things NASA pretty much can’t.
For America and for Mr Musk, to the extent that their interests align, that looks great. For NASA it does not. In the 1960s landing on the Moon was not an end in itself. It was the means to something else: a challenge, in Kennedy’s words, “to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”. The engineers at SpaceX demonstrate America still has remarkable energies and skills; NASA’s Artemis programme is neither organising them well nor discovering the best they can offer.
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