Elon Musk's SpaceX on Thursday said it proposed to NASA a simplified plan to send humans to the moon using its Starship rocket, as the agency presses its contractors to move more quickly toward beating China to the lunar surface this decade.
"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," SpaceX wrote in a lengthy blog post on its website describing Starship progress.
NASA faces intense competition from China in its effort to return astronauts to the moon, where no humans have gone since the final U.S. Apollo mission in 1972. NASA tapped SpaceX in 2021 to use Starship for the first two Artemis moon landing missions, with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin later winning an award for other Artemis missions.
But the U.S. space agency this year has been entangled in political chaos over concerns that its moon landing contractors are not moving quickly enough, the Trump administration's plans to reduce the agency's workforce and NASA's vacancy of a permanent administrator.
That role is currently held on a temporary basis by Sean Duffy, also head of the Transportation Department. Last week, Duffy said in TV remarks that SpaceX was lagging in Starship development and that the agency would open up the company's Artemis contract to rival companies who can pitch a faster plan to land humans on the lunar surface.
SpaceX, in its blog post, said it has accomplished dozens of milestones associated with its Starship moon lander contract and that it plans to execute key future milestones next year, including a long-duration flight test.
SpaceX has launched 11 Starship tests so far in its test-to-failure development campaign.
Another key milestone SpaceX expects in 2026 is executing a complex in-space refueling demonstration, a tricky process that has never been done before but is required for Starship to have enough fuel to reach the lunar surface. Multiple Starship "tanker" flights will take place to fill up the moon-bound Starship in space, per the architecture.
NASA had been expecting such a demonstration to occur as early as 2024, but SpaceX's whirlwind development and test-launches of Starship have hit snags. Later this year or early next year, the company plans to begin launching an upgraded Starship prototype outfitted with features designed for in-space refueling.
SpaceX said the timing of the in-space refueling test "will be driven by how upcoming flight tests debuting the new Starship V3 architecture progress, but both of these tests are targeted to take place in 2026."
