As SpaceX gears up for the big sixth test flight of its Starship vehicle, NASA has announced its longer term plans for the next generation of SpaceX craft. The company is in the process of developing a human lander for the moon, which NASA intends to use along with a lander from Blue Origin to potentially carry astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program.
But NASA won’t just be carrying people in its two shiny new spacecraft. The agency announced today that it also intends to use the vehicles to carry cargo such as equipment and infrastructure to the moon.
“NASA is planning for both crewed missions and future services missions to the Moon beyond Artemis V,” said Stephen D. Creech, assistant deputy associate administrator for technical at the NASA Moon to Mars Program Office. “The Artemis campaign is a collaborative effort with international and industry partners. Having two lunar lander providers with different approaches for crew and cargo landing capability provides mission flexibility while ensuring a regular cadence of Moon landings for continued discovery and scientific opportunity.”
For NASA to succeed in its ambitious plans to create a moon base where astronauts can live for periods of weeks or even months, it will need to create a large amount of infrastructure such as habitats, water filtration systems, and scientific research laboratories on the lunar surface.
The current plan is for at least two cargo missions to drop off large pieces of equipment including a pressurized rover, carried by the SpaceX Starship cargo lander, and a habitat, carried by the Blue Origin Blue Moon lander. These cargo drop-offs can act as a kind of test for whether the landers are capable of carrying humans on future missions.
“Based on current design and development progress for both crew and cargo landers and the Artemis mission schedules for the crew lander versions, NASA assigned a pressurized rover mission for SpaceX and a lunar habitat delivery for Blue Origin,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA program manager of the Human Landing System. “These large cargo lander demonstration missions aim to optimize our NASA and industry technical expertise, resources, and funding as we prepare for the future of deep space exploration.”
Both companies are in the process of developing their landers, with SpaceX intending to use a variant of the Starship vehicle it is currently testing for this task. The current timeline puts the Starship carrying the rover to the moon in 2032, and the Blue Moon delivering the habitat in 2033.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.