NASA selects SpaceX as its sole provider for a lunar lander

In an extraordinary announcement on Friday, NASA said that it has selected SpaceX and its Starship vehicle to serve as the lunar lander for its Artemis Program. This is NASA’s plan to return humans to the Moon later this decade.

About a year ago, NASA gave initial study and preliminary development contracts for Moon landers to SpaceX, Dynetics, and a team of aerospace heavyweights led by Blue Origin. The cost of SpaceX’s bid was about half that of Dynetics, and one-fourth the amount received by Blue Origin. That frugality, at least in part, led NASA on Friday to choose SpaceX as the sole provider of landing services during the down-select phase.

“We looked at what’s the best value to the government,” said Kathy Lueders, chief of the human exploration program for NASA, during a teleconference with reporters on Friday.

NASA said it will award SpaceX $2.89 billion for development of the Starship vehicle and two flights. One of these missions will be an uncrewed flight test of Starship down to the lunar surface and back. The second mission will be a crewed flight—the first one of the Artemis program—down to the Moon.

Starship offered several advantages, NASA officials said. It has a spacious cabin for astronauts, two airlocks, and ample payload capability to bring large numbers of experiments to the Moon and return samples to Earth. Significantly, the NASA engineers also praised the vehicle’s innovative design and future-looking technology that might also one day be used on Mars.

Ultimately, the selection criteria were based on a company’s technical proficiency, management, and cost. SpaceX scored well in all three. But budget appears to have been the biggest factor. The space agency has had difficulty securing funding from Congress for the lunar lander aspect of the program. For the current fiscal year, NASA said it needed $3.3 billion in funding to meet the goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2024. Congress provided just $850 million, and as a result, NASA acknowledged that 2024 was no longer a realistic target.

Making Artemis affordable

At the direction of the Trump administration, NASA formally created the Artemis Program about two years ago to send humans back to the Moon in a sustainable way and establish a base there. The goal was to move beyond the flags-and-footprints forays of the Apollo Program and gain the knowledge needed to eventually send humans to Mars. The Biden administration has endorsed this basic goal, and it’s working to update the Artemis Program with a more realistic timeline given the budget predilections of Congress.

Friday’s announcement is part of that process of making Artemis more affordable. A sole-source award to SpaceX for the Human Landing System will certainly not be particularly popular in Congress, where traditional space companies such as Lockheed Martin and newer entrants like Blue Origin have more established lobbying power. But it sends a clear message from NASA and the White House to budget writers in the House and Senate.

This award effectively says that NASA is serious about getting to the Moon with the funding it has. And if Congress were to fully fund the Human Landing System program, NASA could bring on a competitor. Ideally, of course, there should be competition. This approach has worked well for NASA’s commercial cargo and crew programs. But NASA is getting a small fraction of what it needs to run a lunar lander competition.

In addition to this development award, NASA said it would soon move to procure “recurring landing services” from industry. This contract will be for operational missions to the lunar surface, and it seems like SpaceX would have a significant advantage in winning the award. However, there may be an opening here, if Congress provides more funding for the Human Landing System, for either Dynetics or the Blue Origin-led team to play a role in human landings.

Self-funding Starship

SpaceX has largely self-funded development of the large Starship vehicle for about five years, with the intent of using it to settle humans on Mars one day. Starship is a fully reusable upper stage that will launch atop the Super Heavy rocket. SpaceX is in various states of testing and developing both of these vehicles at its facility in South Texas.

As part of the Artemis Program, SpaceX has proposed launching a modified version of its Starship vehicle to lunar orbit. Shortly afterward, a crew of NASA astronauts would launch inside an Orion spacecraft on top of a Space Launch System rocket, both of which were developed by NASA. Orion would rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit, board the vehicle, and go down to the surface. Starship would then lift off from the lunar surface and link back up with Orion, and the crew would come back to Earth in the smaller capsule.

Left unsaid is the reality that SpaceX is also planning to launch humans on Starship from Earth. It does not seem like all that much of a stretch to question the need for the much more costly Orion and Space Launch System rocket, when lunar crews could simply launch in a Starship into low-Earth orbit, undergo refueling there from another Starship, and then go to the Moon and back. But NASA knows that Congress—which is heavily invested in Orion and the SLS rocket, and their jobs across all 50 states—would not support a SpaceX-only program.

The choice of SpaceX was applauded by some industry officials on Friday. “The selection of SpaceX as the sole-source developer of the Human Lander System is a sign of how far both the company and their relationship with NASA has come over the last ten-years,” said Lori Garver, a deputy administrator for NASA under President Obama. “SpaceX’s involvement in Artemis is sure to elevate public interest and will hopefully lead to our soonest possible return to the Moon.”

For years, space industry leaders like Garver have advocated for NASA to increase support for commercial space companies that have sought to drive down the costs of spaceflight. After all, SpaceX’s bid for the entirety of its Human Landing System, $2.9 billion, is about what NASA spends each year on the Space Launch System and associated ground systems development. Now, the space agency appears to be boldly embracing such a future.