What SpaceX Starship’s successful flight means for NASA’s goal to land astronauts on the Moon
SpaceX’s fifth launch of its fully integrated Starship Super Heavy rocket on October 13 was a resounding success, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage completing their flight as well as soft return objectives. With this mission, SpaceX has demonstrated returning the Starship Booster straight to the launchpad and performed a precise soft splashdown of the Starship upper stage, clearing another milestone in the long path for the US to put humans on the Moon again with Artemis for which NASA has selected Starship’s lunar variant.
Much like the biggest of Starship ambitions, the Lunar Starship needs a high launch cadence for adequate in-orbit refueling. A key element of that is how well SpaceX can get the heat shield to perform on the upper stage. And with this flight, the company’s engineers seem to have resolved most such issues faced on the previous flight. Next up, we need to see over a year or two how fast SpaceX refurbishes Starships, operationalizes more launchpads, and delivers payloads to Earth orbit. These ships will also need to dock with one other and exchange cryogenic fuel so as to then sufficiently fill up a Lunar Starship to go to the Moon and come back. Lori Glaze, who heads aspects of Artemis efforts at NASA, said:
