In recent months, it has begun dawning on US lawmakers that, absent significant intervention, China will land humans on the Moon before the United States can return there with the Artemis Program.
So far, legislators have yet to take meaningful action on this—a $10 billion infusion into NASA’s budget this summer essentially provided zero funding for efforts needed to land humans on the Moon this decade. But now a subcommittee of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology has begun reviewing the space agency’s policy, expressing concerns about Chinese competition in civil spaceflight.
That demonstration was planned but didn’t work. Details are obfuscated by SpaceX, but I’d imagine if it did work they would share a lot more about it. From people close to the source, the message off the record is it did not work. Media reporting around this is very spotty, as most report on what they were intending to do on the test flight, not what actually happened. There was a 2024 test flight where they did do some transfer between tanks, which met NASAs requirements at that time. But the amount of data collected was minimal and the vehicle was lost. It is unclear how representative this test was or how successful it actually was. Technical data of this test has not been made public, other than NASA saying it satisfied the contract requirement.
Also note that there hasn’t been 5 Starship launches in 2025. There have been in fact 0 launches as Starship doesn’t exist at the moment. SpaceX has had 5 test flights of prototypes, which are nothing close to the real thing. And these test flights have been mainly demonstrating the booster, which is very impressive. But the Starship part wasn’t very successful and is no where near a finished vehicle.
It’s exactly this sort of bullshitting that annoys me to no end, Musk is famous for this and his fans love to repeat it. He claims his products can do something today, where in fact all they have is a prototype that kinda sorta does the thing poorly. And often the claims being made vastly exaggerate capabilities of the planned product at that time. Which again to repeat they do not have.
I’m addressing the headline that says the plan “cannot work”. Starship is really shoehorned into this role, and I think a more appropriately sized lander like Blue Moon is a better option if they can get it up and running, but I don’t see anything about Starship that makes this impossible, just clunky.
If NASA called the internal cryogenic fuel transfer demo a success and paid SpaceX for it, then I’m inclined to call it a success. I would love to see anything other than hearsay that says otherwise.
5 prototype launches, with design changes and fixes in between, is already a better cadence than New Glenn, Vulcan, Ariane 6, or H3. Atlas 5 can tie it if they get another Amazon launch off this month. The Starship cadence should only go up as the design matures and they start actually launching Starlinks and Tankers.