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What would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like?

artemis, hls, Space, spacex, starship / 9u50fv / November 13, 2025

The problem is that it may be difficult to find options that both NASA and SpaceX like.

An image of SpaceX’s “Lunar” variant of Starship on the Moon’s surface. Credit: SpaceX

In what will likely be his most consequential act as NASA’s interim leader, Sean Duffy said last month that the space agency was “opening up” its competition to develop a lunar lander that will put humans on the surface of the Moon.

As part of this move, Duffy asked NASA’s current lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, for more nimble plans. Neither has specified those plans publicly, but a recent update from SpaceX referenced a “simplified” version of the Starship system it’s building to help NASA return humans to the Moon.

“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities,” the company said. “In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”

So what would a simplified architecture look like? It is difficult to say for sure, but there are some interesting ideas floating around.

First, let’s make a couple of assumptions. Any approach to shortening the Artemis III timeline should not involve major hardware changes. This rules out a “stubby” version of Starship, which would require a significant reworking of the vehicle’s internals. Essentially, any new plan should use hardware that exists largely in the structural shape and form it’s in. And for SpaceX, we’ll assume that “simplified” means not working directly with other contractors beyond those already involved in Artemis III.

With these ground rules, there are two changes that SpaceX, in conjunction with NASA, could make to simplify or potentially accelerate Artemis: “Expendable Starships” and “Enter the Dragon.”

Expendable Starships

One of the biggest challenges with the existing plan is refueling in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, SpaceX must launch a “depot” variant of Starship and then fuel it with “tanker” Starship upper stages. Once this depot is full, the “lunar lander” variant of Starship launches, is refueled, and then flies to the Moon. There, it awaits a crew of astronauts on board Orion to land them on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit.

Estimates vary widely for how many ‘”tanker” Starships will be required to fuel the depot for a lunar mission. In truth, no one will know the answer until there is a mature Starship design with real-world performance numbers and demonstrated efficiency of propellant transfer and storage.

Critics of the SpaceX plan, and there are many, say the mission architecture is clunky and untenable. One household name in the space industry recently told Ars he believes it would take up to 20 to 40 “tanker” launches to fill a depot. That seems high, but a number in the ballpark of 12 to 20 flights (probably with the next-generation V4 ships) is realistic.

That is a lot of launches, to be sure. But it’s not inconceivable that a company now regularly launching three Falcon 9 rockets a week could launch a dozen or more Starships per month in the not-too-distant future.

There is one relatively straightforward way to cut down on the number of “tanker” launches. For early Artemis missions, SpaceX could use expendable “tanker” Starships rather than landing and reusing them. It is not clear how much this would boost the capacity of Starship, but it likely would be considerable. SpaceX probably could remove the grid fins (multiple tons), as well as a tiled heat shield that (according to rumors, it must be said) is running considerably more massive than what was budgeted for. There also would be propellant mass savings without the need for reentry and landing burns.

Using an optimized, expendable Starship might reduce the number of tanker missions required by up to 50 percent. There are downsides, including a significant increase in costs and an undermining of the whole point of Starship: full and rapid reuse.

It is safe to say that Starship will be the largest human spacecraft to land on the Moon by far. Credit: SpaceX

There is a third downside, and this is perhaps the most important one. An “expendable” Starship plan would be anathema to the leadership of SpaceX, including founder Elon Musk. Officials there do not believe the space industry has fully digested how Starship will transform the launch industry.

“You don’t yet understand how many Starship launches will happen,” a senior SpaceX source told Ars.

The company is aiming to launch 1 million tons of payload to orbit per year, the majority of which will be propellant. SpaceX simply believes that once it locks in on Starship operations, launching a dozen or many more rockets per month won’t be a big deal. So why waste time on expendable rockets? That era is over.

Enter the Dragon

A second option would be to rely solely on SpaceX hardware.

I don’t expect NASA to be interested in this idea, but it’s worth discussing. Nearly a year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election, Republican space officials were considering canceling Artemis and substituting a “competition” similar to the Commercial Cargo program. It was thought that both SpaceX and Blue Origin would bid plans to land humans on the Moon and that NASA would fund both.

These plans have largely fallen by the wayside in the last 12 months, though. NASA (and perhaps most importantly, paymasters in Congress) prefer to stick with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the initial Artemis missions.

But if pressed, SpaceX could come up with a simplified Moon landing architecture that requires fewer refuelings. There are multiple ways this could be done, so I’ll offer just one variant here:

SpaceX launches the “lunar” variant of Starship into low-Earth orbit, uncrewed
SpaceX launches two “depot” variants of Starship into orbit
Both depots are fueled (perhaps requiring 3-5 “tanker” launches each)
One of these depots flies out to low-lunar orbit, the other fuels the Lunar starship previously launched into low-Earth orbit
A crew of four astronauts launches on Crew Dragon, which docks with the Lunar Starship
Crew transfers to Starship, which undocks from Dragon, flies to the Moon, and lands
After days on the surface, this Starship launches from the Moon and refuels from the second depot in lunar orbit
Starship flies back to low-Earth orbit, docks with Dragon, and Dragon returns to Earth

Does that sound complicated? Sure. But it’s arguably not as complicated as an Orion-based mission, and it would likely necessitate fewer refuelings. This is because Starship does not need to rendezvous with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, and there is no 100-day loiter requirement for a fully fueled Starship at the Moon.

This solution, however, would likely be viewed as toxic by NASA’s safety community due to the need to refuel in lunar orbit with crew on board. A decade ago, when SpaceX proposed fueling the Falcon 9 vehicle on the ground with astronauts on board—a procedure known as load-and-go—engineers tasked with the crew’s safety went berserk.

“When SpaceX came to us and said we want to load the crew first, and then the propellant, mushroom clouds went off in our safety community,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s then-chief of commercial spaceflight, told me when I was writing the book Reentry. “I mean, hair-on-fire stuff. It was just conventional wisdom that you load the propellant first and get it thermally stable. Fueling is a very dynamic operation. The vehicle is popping and hissing. The safety community was adamantly against this.”

It’s probably safe to say that SpaceX would be unhappy with the first solution offered here, and NASA would be unhappy with the second one. For these reasons, SpaceX’s current architecture may well remain the default one for Artemis III.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight

artemis, Commercial space, hls, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 8, super heavy, texas / Shannon Garcia / March 1, 2025

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch Starship’s eighth test flight as soon as Monday.

Ship 34, destined to launch on the next Starship test flight, test-fired its engines in South Texas on February 12. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight’s goals, such as testing Starship’s satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.

Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5: 30 pm CST (6: 30 pm EST; 23: 30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket’s Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.

The fully stacked rocket will tower 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. Like the test flight on January 16, this launch will use a second-generation, Block 2, version of Starship with larger propellant tanks with 25 percent more volume than previous vehicle iterations. The payload compartment near the ship’s top is somewhat smaller than the payload bay on Block 1 Starships.

This block upgrade moves SpaceX closer to attempting more challenging things with Starship, such as returning the ship, or upper stage, back to the launch site from orbit. It will be caught with the launch tower at Starbase, just like SpaceX accomplished last year with the Super Heavy booster. Officials also want to bring Starship into service to launch Starlink Internet satellites and demonstrate in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for future Starship flights to the Moon and Mars.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a Starship spinoff as a human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis lunar program. The mega-rocket is central to Elon Musk’s ambition to create a human settlement on Mars.

Another shot at glory

Other changes introduced on Starship Version 2 include redesigned forward flaps, which are smaller and closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Technicians also removed some of the ship’s thermal protection tiles to “stress-test vulnerable areas” of the vehicle during descent. SpaceX is experimenting with metallic tile designs, including one with active cooling, that might be less brittle than the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship.

Engineers also installed rudimentary catch fittings on the ship to evaluate how they respond to the heat of reentry, when temperatures outside the vehicle climb to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Read more about Starship Version in this previous story from Ars.

It will take about 1 hour and 6 minutes for Starship to fly from the launch pad in South Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines for two-and-a-half minutes as it climbs east from the Texas coastline, then jettison from the Starship upper stage and reverse course to return to Starbase for another catch with mechanical arms on the launch tower.

Meanwhile, Starship will ignite six Raptor engines and accelerate to a speed just shy of orbital velocity, putting the ship on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after soaring about halfway around the world.

Booster 15 perched on the launch mount at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

If you’ve watched the last few Starship flights, this profile probably sounds familiar. SpaceX achieved successful splashdowns after three Starship test flights last year, and hoped to do it again before the premature end of Flight 7 in January. Instead, the accident was the most significant technical setback for the Starship program since the first full-scale test flight in 2023, which damaged the launch pad before the rocket spun out of control in the upper atmosphere.

Now, SpaceX hopes to get back on track. At the end of last year, company officials said they targeted as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. Two months in, SpaceX is about to launch its second Starship of the year.

The breakup of Starship last month prevented SpaceX from evaluating the performance of the ship’s Pez-like satellite deployer and upgraded heat shield. Engineers are eager to see how those perform on Monday’s flight. Once in space, the ship will release four simulators replicating the approximate size and mass of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. They will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

That will be followed by a restart of a Raptor engine on Starship in space, repeating a feat first achieved on Flight 6 in November. Officials want to ensure Raptor engines can reignite reliably in space before actually launching Starship into a stable orbit, where the ship must burn an engine to guide itself back into the atmosphere for a controlled reentry. With another suborbital flight on tap Monday, the engine relight is purely a confidence-building demonstration and not critical for a safe return to Earth.

The flight plan for Starship’s next launch includes another attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower, a satellite deployment demonstration, and an important test of its heat shield. Credit: SpaceX

Then, about 47 minutes into the mission, Starship will plunge back into the atmosphere. If this flight is like the previous few, expect to see live high-definition video streaming back from Starship as super-heated plasma envelops the vehicle in a cloak of pink and orange. Finally, air resistance will slow the ship below the speed of sound, and just 20 seconds before reaching the ocean, the rocket will flip to a vertical orientation and reignite its Raptor engines again to brake for splashdown.

This is where SpaceX hopes Starship Version 2 will shine. Although three Starships have made it to the ocean intact, the scorching temperatures of reentry damaged parts of their heat shields and flaps. That won’t do for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing Starship with minimal or no refurbishment. Heat shield repairs slowed down the turnaround time between NASA’s space shuttle missions, and officials hope the upgraded heat shield on Starship Version 2 will decrease the downtime.

FAA’s green light

The FAA confirmed Friday it issued a launch license earlier this week for Starship Flight 8.

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement.

The federal regulator oversaw a SpaceX-led investigation into the failure of Flight 7. SpaceX said NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Space Force also participated in the investigation, which determined that propellant leaks and fires in an aft compartment, or attic, of Starship led to the shutdown of its engines and eventual breakup.

Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight.

“To address flammability potential in the attic section on Starship, additional vents and a new purge system utilizing gaseous nitrogen are being added to the current generation of ships to make the area more robust to propellant leakage,” SpaceX said. “Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing the attic volume and eliminating the majority of joints that can leak into this volume.”

FAA officials were apparently satisfied with all of this. The agency’s commercial spaceflight division completed a “comprehensive safety review” and determined Starship can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Flight 7 failure remains open. This isn’t new. The FAA also used this safety determination to expedite SpaceX launch license approvals last year as officials investigated mishaps on Starship and Falcon 9 rocket flights.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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