As NASA keeps a close eye on Starship, here’s what the agency wants to see next

Few people were happier with the successful outcome of last week’s test flight of SpaceX’s Starship launch system than a NASA engineer named Catherine Koerner.

In remarks after the spaceflight, Koerner praised the “incredible” video of the Starship rocket and its superheavy booster returning to Earth, with each soft landing. “It was very promising and a very, very successful engineering test,” she added at the Space Studies Council meeting.

Koerner, a former flight director, now directs the development of the “exploratory systems” that will support NASA’s Artemis missions — a very influential position within the space agency. This includes the Space Launch System rocket, the NASA Orion spacecraft, spacesuits and the Starship rover that will land on the moon.

In recent months, NASA officials like Koerner have grappled with the reality that not all of this hardware is likely to be ready for the Artemis III mission’s planned launch date of September 2026. The agency is particularly concerned about the starship’s readiness as the “Human Landing System.” While SpaceX is rapidly pushing forward with the test campaign, much work remains to get the vehicle to the lunar surface and safely return to lunar orbit.

Spare tire

For these reasons, as previously reported by Ars, NASA and SpaceX are planning the possibility of modifying the Artemis III mission. Instead of landing on the moon, the crew would launch in the Orion spacecraft and rendezvous with the starship in low Earth orbit. It would essentially be a repeat of the Apollo 9 mission, reducing risk and providing a meaningful stepping stone between Artemis missions.

Officially, NASA says the agency will fly a crewed lunar landing, the Artemis III mission, in September 2026. But almost no one in the space community considers that launch date more than aspirational. Some of my best sources put the most likely date range for such a mission from 2028 to 2032. A modified Artemis III mission in low Earth orbit would therefore bridge the gap between Artemis II and an eventual landing.

Koerner declined interview requests from Ars to discuss it, but she acknowledged during the space studies board that she had seen these reports about the Artemis III modification. She was then asked directly if they had any validity. Here is her response in full:

So here’s what I’ll tell you, if you’ll allow me an analogy. I have a spare tire in my car, right? I don’t have a spare steering wheel. I don’t have spare wipers. I have a spare tire. And why? Why do we carry a spare tire? That someone at some point made an assessment and said that in order for this vehicle to do its job, there’s a certain probability that some things will fail, and a certain probability that other things may not fail, and it’s probably wise to have a spare wheel. I don’t necessarily need to have a spare steering wheel, do I?

We at NASA do many such assessments. What happens if this is not available? What happens if it’s not available? Do we have backup plans for this? We always make backup plans like that. Do we have backup plans? It is essential for me to see what happens when the Orion spacecraft is not ready for a mission. What happens if I don’t have the SLS ready for the mission? What happens if I don’t have the Human Landing System available to complete the mission? What happens if I don’t have the Gateway I planned the mission for?

So we’re always looking at backup plans. There are many different opportunities for this. We have not made any changes to the current plan as I outlined and talked about it here today. But we have a lot of people looking at a lot of different backup plans, so we do our due diligence and make sure we have a spare tire if we need it. That’s why, for example, we have two systems that we’re developing now for the Human Landing System, one for SpaceX and one from Blue Origin. This is why we have two providers that make the hardware for the spacesuits. Collins as well as Axiom, right? So we always do things like that.

This means that if the SpaceX spacecraft is not ready in 2026, NASA is actively considering alternative plans. (The most likely of these would be an Orion-Starship docked in low Earth orbit.) NASA has not made any final plans and is waiting to see how Artemis II progresses and what happens with starship and spacesuit development.

What SpaceX needs to demonstrate

During her remarks, Koerner was also asked what SpaceX’s next major milestone is and when it will need to be completed to keep NASA on track to land on the moon in 2026. “Their next big milestone from a contract perspective is the cryogenic transfer test,” she said . “That will be early next year.

That timeline is consistent with what NASA’s Human Landing System program manager Lisa Watson-Morgan recently told Ars. It provides a useful benchmark for evaluating a starship’s progress in the eyes of NASA. The “Prop Move Demo” is a fairly complex mission that involves launching a “starship target” from a Starbase facility in South Texas. It then launches a second vehicle, the “Starship Chaser”, and reaches the orbital and rendezvous target. The chaser then transfers a quantity of propellant to the target spacecraft.

The test will include a lot of technology, including docking mechanisms, navigation sensors, quick disconnect and more. If SpaceX completes this test during the first quarter of 2025, NASA will at least theoretically have a path forward to landing a crew on the moon in 2026.