No, Starship’s latest success doesn’t favor the US over China in landing humans on Luna | Moon Monday #240
Plus mission updates.
A note before we start: A warm welcome to the new wave of subscribers coming from Fraser Cain’s recommendation of my blog & newsletter on his YouTube channel. It made my day—especially because I’ve been reading and inspired by Universe Today since I was in college. I hope you find my writings on space exploration and our Moon useful. You may want to start here. 💫
Following three back-to-back failures this year and an explosion of a test pad, SpaceX finally had a largely successful integrated test flight (IFT) of Starship on August 26. Called IFT-10, the flight achieved all of its primary goals across deployment of simulated Starlink satellites, heat shield tests, and precise core & upper stage splashdowns.
In 2021, NASA selected Starship’s lunar variant for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon in 2024. Over and above previous delays, this year’s failures of Starship have significantly slowed down progress along the long road ahead for NASA to put humans on the Moon on Artemis III. But now the success of IFT-10 has somehow led many in the US space industry to hope that said Moon moment will take place before China lands crew as its own goal by 2030. In fact, Stephen Clark reports NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy confidently noting SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell as saying that Starship won’t be the holdup for Artemis III.
However, the fact is no other system involved in either Artemis or China’s architecture is nearly as complex as Starship. While the Artemis Moonsuits from Axiom Space have been facing its own delays, the technological advances needed there over existing spacesuits aren’t as wide as Starship’s would be compared to traditional rockets. It’s only now that SpaceX has managed to get the upper stage heat shield to perform well enough. It’s no doubt a challenging task but nevertheless only one of the many key milestones needed to achieve the goal of landing humans on the Moon. Next up, SpaceX also needs to be able to:
- have lofted Starships return to launchpads by default
- refurbish Starships fast enough
- consistently deploy payloads in Earth orbit
- perform cryogenic fuel transfers between upper stages in Earth orbit
- and, later during Moon missions, avoid having that cryogenic fuel boil off in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface while waiting for and hosting astronauts.
That’s why Lunar Starship needs a high launch cadence for adequate in-orbit refueling. But it will take several more Starship test launches before we can even get a baseline demonstration of in-orbit fuel transfer, a milestone already delayed by a year since its previously intended target. In July 2024, Jeff Foust had reported that an internal confirmation review conducted by NASA on Lunar Starship’s readiness gave Artemis III a 70% chance of launch by February 2028. It’s been over a year since, and with the earlier failures of Starship this year, the launch target has already moved to the right even if NASA may stick to calling 2027 as the official year. In fact, we don’t even have a firm launch target for the uncrewed Starship lunar landing demonstration, which needs to be successful before SpaceX is allowed to carry Artemis astronauts. Simply put, NASA’s road to the Moon has been inching through Starship.
In the meanwhile, China has bagged a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected across its Moon rocket, the crew capsule, the lander, and supporting navigation and communications infrastructure. China’s track record this century of nearly no failures despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions has been exceptional. Barring a major failure or technical holdup in any of China’s crewed lunar landing components, there’s little reason to doubt a Sino success.
Given the numerous milestones left for Starship to land humans on the Moon compared to the relatively fewer gaps for China to fill, the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. Either way, it’ll be great to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system can apparently only do better under a competitive mindset and internal fear-mongering.
Related articles:
- How China has an edge over the US in sustaining future crewed Moon missions
- How Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent
More Artemis updates
- NASA continues preparations to launch the crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission in early 2026, with the latest update being the completion of the new “Mission Evaluation Room” to complement flight control. Said team will consist of about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of subsystems comprising the crew’s Orion spacecraft. They will analyze technical data from the 10-day mission as it unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as during any anomalies. In the lead up to the Artemis II launch, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.
- NASA has built a new system to test hardware components in a simulated environment which replicates the frigid vacuum conditions of the harsh lunar night and many permanently shadowed regions. Uniquely combining cryocoolers and vacuum setups, the system called the Lunar Environment Structural Test Rig (LESTR) allows testing components—like small rover wheels—at temperatures as low as -233° C amid a dry vacuum similar to what hardware will experience on the Moon. NASA says LESTR’s architecture is scalable, meaning it lays the groundwork for advancing testing of technologies for future, increasingly complex Artemis missions.
- Related articles:
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More Moon
- On August 29, teams led by the Prime Ministers of India and Japan respectively signed the implementing arrangement for the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX Moon mission intended to launch by the end of the decade. This phase follows the mission’s financial approval by India in March [Japan approved years ago] and the third in-person technical interface meeting between mission members from the two agencies in May. The Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission will drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole and be a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA. It can also provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
- The NASA-supporting-and-enabled Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) is looking for volunteers for multiple positions in its Executive Committee and related roles.
Even more Moon!
Last week I published a linked list of unique ways in which our Moon is valuable even beyond itself. In there, I also asked if any aspect is missing, and that was indeed the case. I’ve updated the post with two more points:
- The lunar regolith has a layered record of our dynamic Sun over the last 2+ billion years, and the interstellar mediums and environments our Solar System passed through in that time
- Studying moonquakes and the lunar interior helps us understand the origin and evolution of solid surface planets & moons across our Solar System and beyond
Many thanks to planetary scientists Ian Crawford and Clive Neal for these suggestions. 🌙