SpaceX Starship Faces Herculean Tech Hurdles In Race To Moon Landing

After acing a flight test of its newest generation Starship super-capsule, SpaceX still has to speed through an obstacle course of tech challenges, stretching out across 380,000 kilometers, to win the race to land astronauts around the impact craters of the Moon. (Photo by Sergio FLORES / AFP) (Photo by SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images)

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Despite acing a flight test of its newest generation Starship super-capsule, SpaceX still has to speed through an obstacle course of tech challenges, stretching out across 380,000 kilometers, to win the race to land astronauts around the impact craters of the Moon, say leading North American space scholars.

Stepping up pressure on SpaceX to whizz through a progression of Herculean-level leaps in space technology, the White House has issued an executive order that mandates “returning Americans to the Moon by 2028.”

And while SpaceX once held an exclusive commission from NASA to shuttle its astronauts down to the lunar surface, originally by 2024, delays in perfecting the Starship have triggered the space agency to reopen the Moon landing competition.

SpaceX is now vying with Blue Origin to complete its Moon lander first, with both American spacecraft designers keeping close tabs on China’s parallel quest to speed its taikonauts to the silver and black orb before the end of the decade.

The clock is ticking on this three-power competition, a curious redux of the first race to the Moon by the rival American and Soviet Russian space superpowers.

Since SpaceX founder Elon Musk webcast the sensational 12th flight test of the Starship, aerospace engineers forming Blue Origin’s lunar lander division, and their counterparts across China, are undoubtedly replaying the flight, frame by frame, to measure up their competing advances, says Brian Hurley, a world-leading expert who chronicles the rapid-fire expansion of the modern space sector, and its rippling effects across the spheres of national security and international affairs.

Blue Origin’s lunar teams “would not be watching as spectators,” says Hurley, founder of the influential think tank New Space Economy, which also publishes a digital magazine. “They would be watching as competitors, engineers, and strategic planners.”

“Every Starship test provides public information about SpaceX’s progress, weak points, cadence, risk tolerance, and likely schedule pressure,” Hurley told me in an interview. “Blue Origin’s lander architecture is different, but SpaceX’s pace matters to Blue Origin because it shapes NASA expectations, political expectations, and the perceived race between commercial lunar-lander providers.”

China’s spacecraft developers, he adds, are just as likely to parse the Starship flight footage for clues and details on the ship’s next-generation design and engineering.

“A Starship test is not only a U.S. commercial event; it is also open-source technical intelligence.”

“Chinese teams working on crewed lunar landing systems, heavy-lift launchers, reusable boosters, and new crew spacecraft would almost certainly study the flight to assess both the promise and the remaining weaknesses of the Starship approach.”

“That does not mean China would change its architecture based on one flight,” Hurley says, “but it would feed into their assessment of U.S. progress toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface.”

Blue Origin, which like SpaceX has received a NASA commission to develop a Moon lander, and its counterparts across the Chinese government’s spacecraft development sector, are also racing to perfect their own lunar modules, patterned after the Apollo program’s of a generation ago, and tiny compared to SpaceX’s Titan-size Starship.

The Starship is not just the most powerful spacecraft ever designed on Planet Earth, configured to hold 100 astronauts on every future flight to Mars, but also features world-leading technologies that place it uniquely in a new class of hyper-ship.

With constant, iterative changes in the design of every spacecraft, Elon Musk, a dot-com tycoon before creating SpaceX, and his army of engineers are all driven by the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things.”

But even as the starting gun is fired on the new-millennium Moon marathon, SpaceX still has to ace a succession of space-tech breakthroughs that have never before been tested, ranging from refilling the Starship with cryogenic fuel while the ship and tanker are speeding around the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour, and then again in orbit around the Moon, and touching down amid the meteor strike-created craters near the orb’s South Pole.

Did the new demo flight of the Starship, with the picture-perfect soft splashdown of its capsule in the Indian Ocean, position SpaceX to take the lead in rocketing NASA spacefarers to the gleaming globe by 2028, ahead of their Chinese rivals?

“I think that schedule is optimistic,” says Robert Zubrin, the pre-eminent American aerospace engineer who designed an early prototype of NASA’s Space Launch System, the cutting-edge rocket that just sent four Allied astronauts on a flight around the Moon.

“But I do think Starship will be operational as a fully reusable heavy lift Earth to orbit system by that time [2028], with revolutionary implications for the exploration and development of space,” Dr. Zubrin told me in an interview.

But the design and tech wizards at SpaceX, he says, “face a number of engineering challenges.”

“First is development of refueling tankers.”

“Then is orbital refueling of Starship to leave LEO,” or low Earth orbit.

“Then is orbital refueling of tankers to refuel Starship in lunar orbit.”

“Then is doing all this at a fast enough tempo (they will need 10 to 15 Starship launches to do all this) so that the propellant does not boil away before they can get the mission done,” Zubrin says.

Besides designing vanguard American spacecraft, Dr. Zubrin has created the globe’s foremost masterplan to terraform Mars, or generate an Earth-like biosphere around the Red Planet while restoring its original oceans and atmosphere.

SpaceX has incorporated vast portions of the designs and strategies sketched out in Zubrin’s masterwork book “The Case for Mars,” on transforming Mars onto a second foundation for civilization, into its grand schemes for Mars, including tapping Martian resources to produce rocket propellants for its Starship capsule.

The perils awaiting SpaceX on the Earth’s ancient silver satellite, Zubrin says, include its shifting topography and sparsely explored surface features.

“There is the issue of avoiding blowing a crater in the Moon and shooting up tons of high velocity dust as they land,” he says.

“Then there is the issue of leveling the lander.”

“Then there is the issue of moving payloads up and down from the tall Starship to the surface.”

“Then there are issues associated with the takeoff from the Moon.”

The very first flight test of the Starship, three years ago at the Starbase center, blasted the launch pad, transforming it into a crater, and there are fears that a landing or takeoff on the Moon’s variable surface could trigger a similar catastrophe.

The Moon’s surface conditions, combined with the extraordinary height of the SpaceX capsule, represent “one of the more important technical risks for using Starship as a lunar lander,” says space scholar Brian Hurley.

“The concern is not only that the lunar surface may be uneven. It is the combination of Starship’s size, landing-leg loads, possible surface slope, loose regolith, rocks, and the effect of engine plumes on the surface.”

“Apollo’s Lunar Module was a much smaller vehicle,” he says. “Starship HLS [Human Landing System] is a very different class of lander, so the margin for unexpected surface interaction becomes an important issue.”

“A very large lander can blast dust, sand-sized particles, and rocks away from the landing zone at high speed. That can affect visibility, sensors, nearby hardware, and potentially the surface under the vehicle itself.”

“If the landing site is soft, rocky, sloped, or uneven,” he warns, “there is also the possibility of uneven leg loading or an excessive tilt after touchdown.”

Yet there’s an array of technology approaches to reduce the danger.

“The first is conservative landing-site selection: using high-resolution orbital mapping to pick very flat, relatively rock-free areas.”

“The second is autonomous hazard detection and avoidance, so the vehicle can identify unsafe terrain during descent and adjust its touchdown point.”

NASA and SpaceX can also mitigate the dangers by minimizing the touchdown velocity.

“Starship HLS has been expected to use design features different from the Earth-return Starship,” Hurley explains, “because landing on the Moon creates a very different set of problems.”

“Landing without a prepared pad is not necessarily a show-stopper,” Hurley predicts, as a one-time solution.

“If Artemis becomes a continuing program rather than a series of isolated sorties, prepared landing zones become much more important.”

For a sustained lunar base, landing pads will likely shift from being optional to absolutely essential infrastructure.

SpaceX could use its first, uncrewed landing demo on the Moon to deploy a team of autonomous robots to build a landing zone or to position a prefabricated landing pad for the next human flight, Hurley says.

In a fascinating paper that he co-authored with other spaceflight visionaries across NASA and inside SpaceX, titled “Accelerating Martian and Lunar Science through SpaceX Starship Missions,” Professor Kip Hodges says: “SpaceX is developing the Starship vehicle for both human and robotic flights to the surface of the Moon and Mars.”

Flotillas of massive Starships will enable the delivery of fleets of mobile robots, adds Hodges, one of the top space scholars in the U.S. and founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.

While SpaceX’s longstanding focus has been fixed on Mars, he says, “flights to the Moon provide the opportunity to test and demonstrate Starship systems closer to Earth prior to the longer journey to Mars.”

“More frequent flights to the Moon than to Mars are feasible due to orbital dynamics, and thus significant capabilities can be developed and tested at the Moon prior to Mars missions.”

Besides speeding brigades of robots to off-world destinations, Hodges says, Starships “will also carry hardware needed to support the human base including equipment for increased power production, water extraction, LOX/methane [rocket fuel] production [and] pre-prepared landing pads.”

Upon landing, Professor Hodges and the SpaceX engineers say, spacefarers could live on the Starship, the first of identical spacecraft-turned-skyscrapers that ultimately spread out across the solar system.

Brian Hurley says that means the first experimental touchdown of the robotically piloted Starship on the Moon could carry a prefabricated landing platform, to be positioned by a squad of robots, while the ship provides living spaces for scores of future astronauts.

Professor Hodges tells me in an interview that, in light of the rush to triumph in Moon Race II, NASA might even delay the assembly of lunar landing platforms until after the first American astronauts reach the crater-surrounded finishing line.

“I don’t think they absolutely need a landing pad for Starship or Blue’s lander,” says Hodges, who has teamed up with NASA to help train Allied astronauts on surface operations.

“I think there is enough urgency to not be beaten to the Moon by the Chinese that they want to get Americans there as quickly as they can.”

Spacecraft designer Zubrin says that SpaceX could completely avoid the looming dangers and complexity of landing a Starship on the alien terrain of the Moon by rapidly prototyping and launching a miniature version of the Starship.

This mini-Starship, which he calls a Starboat, would feature just one-fifth the mass of the mothership, and act as a shuttle to transport astronauts from an orbiting Starship down to the surreal polar region of the Moon.

Many of the Herculean tech challenges now facing a Starship descent onto the Moon “would be much, much, easier to solve if the Starship were coupled with a mini-Starship, or Starboat, that could serve the function of lunar orbit to surface ferry.”

“The big Starship would never have to land.”

“Instead it could be used to refuel the Starboat from orbit.”

In the future, Dr. Zubrin says, “A similar Starboat could also serve as a ferry from Mars orbit to the surface.”