With its metaphorical feet held over the allegorical fire by NASA, SpaceX has released a new, simplified plan to build a lander to put US astronauts back on the Moon now that the competition for the spacecraft has been reopened due to delays.
NASA's Artemis program to establish a permanent US human presence on the Moon is ambitious beyond any doubt. However, like previous American efforts, it's been fraught with cost overruns, delays and technical problems. One of the most aggravating of these bottlenecks has been building the lunar lander because if you don't have a way to actually put astronauts on the actual Moon, you're pretty much wasting your time.
SpaceX's original plan was to build a lander based on its still-experimental Starship rocket – more than just based on it, the craft would essentially be a complete, baseline Starship complete with airfoils and heat shields. The goal was to land up to 100 tonnes of supplies on the Moon or enough to establish a complete, sustainable base.
This would require much more than just the lander to accomplish. It would also mean between 15 and 30 Starship launches to rendezvous with the lander in space in a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) and the transfer of 1,200 tonnes of volatile cryogenic fuels for the landing and to compensate for losses due to fuel boiling away before or during the mission. Each tanker was to be made fully reusable and able to return to Earth for powered landing.
That's all well and good, but it hasn't sat very well with NASA, which has been dealing with political pressures as well as setbacks with the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew spacecraft. A particularly irksome factor is that the SpaceX project has fallen behind, with the on-orbit cryogenic propellant transfer demonstration delayed until 2026.
In light of this, in October 2025 NASA's Acting Administrator Sean Duffy called for a major speed up of the lander program that included direct competition between SpaceX, which previously was the sole contractor, and Blue Origin. This included a demand for revised plans to be submitted to the space agency by October 29.
As a result, SpaceX has come up with a simplified lander plan. It's based on a stripped-down version of Starship that has an emphasis on speed and crew safety over full cargo capacity. This means losing a lot of equipment from the craft as well as making refueling tankers that include expendable tanks, and eliminating airfoils, heat shields components to save weight. In addition, the NRHO rendezvous would be abandoned in favor of one in low-lunar orbit, which has a lower energy requirement and is safer if a mission abort is needed.
The purpose of all this is to simplify the hardware and to impose milestones to speed up approval of the various onboard systems, as well as modifications to Starship that include installation of a pair of new airlocks – each of which will have more volume than that of an Apollo Lunar Module – and a hoist to lower astronauts to the surface instead of climbing down a 100-ft (30-m) ladder. In addition, this new plan would drastically cut down the number of fueling trips required for a landing mission to less than 10.
"Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface," said the company in a statement. "SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program."
Source: SpaceX
Editor's note (Nov. 10, 2025): The above article originally stated that the lander version of Starship includes expendable fuel tanks. This was incorrect and the text has been altered to reflect this. We sincerely apologize for the error and thank the readers who brought this to our attention.
