In 2019 NASA started a design competition for the HLS (Human Landing System) lander, the spacecraft which will take the astronauts of the Artemis mission to the Lunar surface for the first time in half a century. Multiple aerospace companies participated in this competition: Boeing, Vivace, Dynetics, a National Team, and SpaceX.
Each company was able to produce their own uniquely impressive design, but SpaceX stuck with Elon’s favorite passion project: Starship. Starship is designed to be fully reusable, similar to the Falcon 9, both the booster and payload stages will both perform powered landings to bring them back home in one piece. That’s the goal, at least.
On April 20th, 2023, Starship performed its first integrated flight test of the full stack. The mission was a failure, multiple engines failed/exploded, the second stage failed to separate at its designated time, and the rocket began tumbling in the atmosphere before exploding about four minutes into the flight. The mission failure was because SpaceX did not build its launchpad to the industry standard, which caused Starship to kick up dirt and debris which caused multiple engines to fail on launch, and more to fail later during the flight.
Not all hope was lost from this flight, SpaceX hopes to launch another test with a newly built launchpad, which will hopefully be able to handle the load of Starship’s monstrous engines.
Starship is specially designed to be able to hold 100 crew members, and utilize an elevator in order to lower astronauts to the surface of the moon in order to perform multiple EVAs (Extravehicular Activities), while the Artemis mission will only utilize a grand total of 4 crew members.
What is the purpose of bringing an abnormally large spacecraft to the moon, that is designed for way more than the mission itself entails? The other companies that submitted their designs had much more reasonable landers, which fit the parameters of the mission quite well.
Additionally, there has not been near enough evidence to believe that the starship vehicle will even be ready to launch by the time that Artemis has planned its mission. Starship’s full stack has only launched once, and its launch was disappointing to say the least.
Starship is far too ambitious for a mission of Artemis’ magnitude, but only time will tell if SpaceX is able to pull it off.
