schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: SpaceX is going to take this manned spacecraft to the Moon, whether NASA’s SLS and Orion are ready or not. And even if those expensive, cumbersome, poorly designed boondoggles are in place for those first two Artemis landings, SpaceX will likely quickly surpass them with many other private missions to the Moon, outside of NASA. You have the funds to do it and you know you have customers willing to buy the flights. The news comes from a detailed update SpaceX launched the Starship lunar lander today. Here’s the section where SpaceX “made it clear that it views Starship and Superheavy as its own space effort, irrelevant to NASA”: “To return Americans to the Moon, SpaceX aligned Starship development along two paths: development of the Starship core system and supporting infrastructure, including production facilities, test facilities, and launch sites, which SpaceX self-funds and accounts for more than 90% of system costs, and development of the HLS-specific Starship configuration, which leverages and modifies the vehicle’s core capability to support NASA’s requirements for landing and crew return to the Moon. SpaceX is working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, ensuring that the company is only paid after successfully completing progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not responsible for SpaceX’s increased costs. SpaceX provides meaningful information to NASA at every stage of the development process along both paths, including access to flight data from missions not funded under the HLS contract.
Both paths are necessary and made possible by SpaceX’s substantial self-investments to enable high-speed production, launch and testing of Starship for missions to the Moon and other purposes. “Starship will bring the United States back to the Moon before any other nation and will enable sustainable lunar operations by being completely and rapidly reusable, cost-effective, and capable of high-frequency lunar missions with over 100 tons of payload capacity.”
