SpaceX’s Brilliant Solutions to Land new Starship on the Moon in 2026, Sooner than China

Can you believe it? In just two years, or maybe even less, NASA aims to return humans to the moon after decades away. That's the agency's promise, but many critical pieces of the plan are still uncertain. The good news is that NASA's push for a faster, more efficient lunar journey has inspired a wave of innovative proposals, some of which look genuinely promising. The big question is, does NASA finally have a realistic path to put humans back on the moon? And if so, what does it actually look like? First, since the Lunar Lander is a variant of SpaceX's Starship, and since it has to be ready for Artemis III, or there simply is no lunar surface mission, it's only fair to start by looking at SpaceX's options for getting us back to the moon faster. In a recent update related to the mission, the company said, Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities, the update reads. It also includes a new render of the interior of a crewed Starship Lunar Lander. 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. So what does that actually mean? Are they literally developing a different system? When you're looking for a simpler path, the idea is usually to strip away the hardest parts and see if the rest still works. One of the biggest challenges with the current plan is refueling in low Earth orbit. Basically, SpaceX has to launch a depot version of Starship and then fill it up using multiple tanker Starships. Once the depot is full, the Lunar Lander version of Starship launches, gets refueled, and then heads to the moon. It waits in lunar orbit for a crew aboard Orion, lands them on the surface, and then returns them back to orbit. How many tanker launches does that take? Estimates are all over the place. And honestly, no one will really know until there's a mature Starship design with real-world performance data and proven propellant transfer and storage in space. There is a relatively straightforward way to cut down the number of tanker launches, though. One of the main reasons Starship needs so much fuel is that it's designed to be fully reusable. What if it didn't have to be? An expendable version of Starship would be much simpler to build. Think about everything you could remove. No flaps, no heat shield tiles, no header tanks, and a much simpler guidance and control system. This wouldn't mean giving up on reusability entirely, either. SpaceX could still recover the booster, which is both easier to reuse and where the most expensive engines are. They could have started with a straightforward, expendable upper stage, gotten payloads to orbit sooner, and then circled back later to develop the fully reusable version of Starship. In other words, they might have saved a lot of development time and been much further along by not trying to make the entire system reusable right out of the gate. Using an optimized, expendable Starship could potentially cut the number of tanker missions by as much as 50%. There are downsides, mainly higher costs from throwing hardware away more often, but that's exactly how every other rocket system has worked so far. The second best idea we've seen so far is almost the opposite of the first one. Instead of going fully expendable and trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of this giant vehicle, what if we went smaller and made things more manageable? One of the main criticisms of SpaceX's original Starship HLS concept is that part of it is still pretty inefficient. You only really need all those Raptor engines and roughly 20 to 30 tons of dry tankage to perform the Translunar Injection TLI burn. After that, they're no longer necessary. Yet Starship ends up carrying around 30 to 40 tons of dead, dry mass through lunar descent, ascent, and the return to NRHO, dragging down efficiency at every step. The core idea here is simple. Starship HLS should not do its own TLI. The TLI burn forces HLS to carry a huge amount of extra propellant and structural mass that's only used once. Estimates put that at roughly 20 to 25 tons of additional tankage and structure. Once the TLI burn is complete, all of that becomes dead weight for the rest of the mission. So instead, the proposal is to split up the responsibilities. You design a stubby version of Starship HLS that doesn't perform TLI. This lander would launch into low Earth orbit and dock with a separate translunar tug, or propulsion stage, that handles the TLI burn. After reaching NRHO, the stubby HLS only needs enough propellant to descend to the lunar surface and return, on the order of about 400 tons of methalox. By removing all the hardware and tankage needed for TLI, the lander's dry mass drops significantly, and that creates a bunch of cascading benefits. The vehicle becomes shorter, with a lower center of gravity, which improves landing stability and simplifies systems like the crew elevator. Its round-trip delta-v margin between NRHO and the lunar surface jumps to nearly 700 meters per second, giving much more operational flexibility. Most importantly, the total propellant required per mission drops dramatically, which means fewer tanker launches in Earth orbit and a much simpler overall logistics chain. That said, this architecture isn't free of challenges. You now have to perform a high-energy TLI burn while the stubby HLS is docked to the translunar tug. That means two massive spacecraft flying and burning together, something that's never been done before. It would require a very robust nose-to-nose docking system capable of handling multi-minute, high-thrust burns, along with extremely precise guidance and control software to keep everything stable. Still, if you develop a smaller lander based on the Starship architecture, you end up with a very practical shuttle for moving crews between lunar orbit and the surface, and potentially a variation of the same concept for Mars. You naturally arrive at a two-vehicle system, a lightweight, reusable crew shuttle, and a heavy, one-way cargo ship. That fits nicely with a long-term Moon and Mars strategy. It reduces the amount of refueling required, and propellant in space is going to remain one of the most expensive metrics, even if Starship itself becomes very cheap. Best of all, this approach could be built using the same components and production lines SpaceX already has online. It strengthens the overall architecture instead of patching it with a one-off vehicle that's only useful for a handful of early scouting missions. The other piece I find really interesting is something they call the StarKicker. Think of it as a second stage without a nose cone, or even a proper payload section. Instead, it has a staging adapter that lets you mount either a full Starship or a more compact crew shuttle on top. That effectively adds a third building block to the architecture, and opens up a lot more flexibility. Starship is so large and so modular that you can start treating it like Lego, rather than a single, fixed rocket. Once you're willing to refuel in space, all kinds of weird, but technically possible, mission designs suddenly become viable. The StarKicker is basically a stripped-down Starship. No nose cone, no payload bay, just engines and propellant tanks, with another spacecraft sitting directly on top. Its only job is to act like a giant in-space booster. It doesn't land, it doesn't come back cleanly, it just burns everything it has to give the rest of the stack a massive push. In this scenario, you first launch the Lunar Starship, HLS, into low Earth orbit and fully refuel it. Separately, you launch the StarKicker and fill that up too. Once both vehicles are topped off, you dock them together with the StarKicker underneath the Lunar Lander. Basically, an extra stage, but assembled in orbit instead of on the launch pad. When the crew is on board and everything is connected, the StarKicker lights its engines and sends the entire stack on a direct trajectory toward the Moon, potentially all the way down to lunar orbit, or even toward descent. After that burn, the StarKicker is essentially spent. It's not broken, just stranded in an awkward orbit. So for that mission, it's treated as expendable. From there, the Lunar Starship does the normal Moon stuff. Astronauts land, step outside, do their thing, and then the same vehicle flies all the way back to low Earth orbit using only its own engines. No ascent stage, no separate return vehicle, just brute force propulsion and a lot of fuel. Now, it wouldn't be fair to talk only about SpaceX. Other companies, most notably Blue Origin, have also said they're planning a different approach to getting back to the Moon. Although, for now, a lot of the details are still being kept under wraps. What we do know about Blue Origin's thinking actually makes a lot of sense. To be fair, it's still ambitious. It still requires refueling, and it still relies on a lunar tug. But everything is happening at a much more manageable scale. It feels a lot more normal, for lack of a better word. Still way bigger and more capable than Apollo's lunar lander, especially in terms of downmass and habitable volume, but more feasible overall, at least from a scaling perspective. That said, the human-scale Blue Moon Mark 2 ends up sharing some of Starship's architectural complexity, mainly because it also leans heavily on orbital refueling. Blue Moon uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which would need to be launched by at least four tanker flights and delivered to lunar orbit by a reusable cislunar transporter. Before its first crewed landing, Blue Origin has to develop not just the lander, but also a tanker and the cislunar transporter itself. Luckily for us, there's a proposed workaround that could fill in some of those gaps and make the Blue Moon architecture much more viable in the near term. As Artemis III approaches, an expendable variant of SpaceX's Starship could place a complete lunar lander stack into a stable, low-Earth orbit. That stack would consist of a fully-fueled Centaur V acting as an Earth departure stage with a Blue Moon Mark 2 lander mounted on top. In this concept, Blue Moon is stripped of roughly three tons of dry mass, allowing Centaur V to push it directly to the Moon while still letting the lander complete its mission without any additional refueling. Once Blue Moon arrives in a near-rectilinear halo orbit in RHO, the Artemis III crew would depart for the Moon aboard Orion. Instead of docking with Gateway, which has been proposed for cancellation, Orion would dock directly with Blue Moon. From that point on, the mission looks almost identical to the current Artemis V concept. Blue Moon lands two astronauts on the lunar surface, supports surface operations, and then returns them safely to Orion at the end of the mission. There's also the idea of modifying the Blue Moon Mark 1 to carry a crew, but so far, Blue hasn't shared many details. NASA has two main objectives. First, to plant boots and flags on the lunar south pole, and second, to establish a permanent human presence. Honestly, the first goal might end up going to China. U.S. politics and internal gridlock make it difficult to execute quickly. But the real prize is the second objective, maintaining a continuous presence on the Moon year after year. Strategically, the most efficient path could be to ditch SLS, Orion, Gateway, NRHO, and all the other moving parts and focus solely on SpaceX, whether or not Dragon is involved. A SpaceX blog post on the Moon doesn't provide much detail on a potential simplified Artemis III architecture, but Elon Musk may have dropped a hint in one of his reactions to Michael Duffy. SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry, he wrote. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.