Social media posts aren’t rocket fuel, but if they were, Elon Musk would be on the moon today. Over the summer, Musk engaged in an online feud with President Donald Trump over everything from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to Musk’s threats to form a new political party to Jeffrey Epstein’s records.
On October 20, Musk was back, this time at war with Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation and acting NASA administrator.
The casus belli occurred when Duffy appeared on CNBC and spoke about NASA’s efforts to return astronauts to the Moon before Trump’s term ends. In 2021, the space agency awarded Musk’s company SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to develop the spacecraft that would take astronauts to the surface in the first two lunar landings: Artemis III and Artemis IV. But SpaceX is not at all ready to keep its promises, the serial failures of its gigantic Starship rocket delaying the development of the lander. This puts the United States at a disadvantage in its race against China to get astronauts – or, in China’s case, taikonauts – on the Moon before 2030, and Duffy has seen enough.
“I’m going to open the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX,” Duffy said. “We’re not going to wait for just one company. We’re going to go ahead and win the second space race against the Chinese.”
Musk was having none of it and fired a series of howitzers in a line the next day.
“Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA,” he posted on X. “The person in charge of America’s space program can’t have a 2-digit IQ,” he added. Musk also criticized Duffy’s status as a world champion lumberjack speed climber. “Should someone whose greatest claim to fame is climbing trees run America’s space program? he asked.
But the fact is, Duffy is right, and Musk, for all his online bluster, has the weaker hand. Starship was always a poor choice for landing on the Moon. The Apollo-era lunar module was a low-slung, four-legged insect, measuring just under 23 feet tall. Its light weight (32,500 pounds with propeller and crew) and flared stance made it both agile and stable. The Starship lander, by contrast, is a silo-shaped cylinder with a tapered nose cone, measuring 165 feet tall, weighing more than 200,000 pounds and less reminiscent of a real spaceship than the 1953 illustrated book about Tintin’s adventures on the moon. The Apollo astronauts used a nine-rung ladder to descend to the lunar surface. Artemis astronauts will use an elevator.
The reason for the Starship’s oversized dimensions is that it is designed not only for lunar flights, but also for crewed travel to and from Earth orbit and later to Mars. On these missions, SpaceX claims, the spacecraft could carry up to 100 people. That’s way too much machine for the relatively modest and focused goal of getting two astronauts down from lunar orbit, onto the Moon, and back up again.
“This architecture is extraordinarily complex,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in Senate testimony in September. “Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense if you’re trying to go to the Moon first, this time to beat China.”
The other critical problem of the whale-like spacecraft concerns fuel. The spacecraft runs on very cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen—a lot of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, too much for the first stage of the rocket to lift off the ground. For this reason, Starship will first park in Earth’s orbit where SpaceX tankers will fly in and refuel it. How many resupply trips this would take is questionable. In a 2021 article on
But this is questionable. Liquid oxygen should be stored at a temperature no higher than -297°F; for liquid methane, it is -259°F. Even in the deep cold of low Earth orbit, temperatures are higher than this, meaning that no sooner than partially fill the Starship’s tanks does the fuel begin to boil, requiring more refueling missions to refill the tanks. Every day between refueling flights is a day more fuel is lost.
“Elon says it’s eight to 10 refueling missions,” says Mike Griffin, NASA administrator from 2005 to 2009. “Most professionals who look at it say it’s 20. While the fuel sits in orbit waiting for the next tanker, it boils. So you get into a chase where you can’t refuel it fast enough.”
No matter how many flights it takes to fill Starship’s tanks, SpaceX hasn’t even figured out how to do those filling missions yet. “These are multiple resupply flights using technology we don’t have,” Griffin says. “Human beings will eventually solve the refueling problem. I’m not saying these things are unachievable. I’m saying we don’t have the technology for this today.”
A slightly simpler alternative exists, even if it is further away than Starship. In 2023, NASA awarded a second $3.4 billion contract to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company based in Kent, Washington, to build its own lander, dubbed Blue Moon, for use on the Artemis V mission and beyond. Blue Moon is significantly smaller than Starship, measuring 52 feet tall, with the capacity to accommodate four astronauts for up to 30 days. The ship would also need to be refueled, but in this case it would first have to settle into lunar orbit and wait there until a tanker from Earth could catch up. Blue Origin, like SpaceX, is expected to solve the fuel boiling problem, but the company is working with NASA to develop a so-called zero-evaporation tank that uses propellant mixing and cooling to keep it stable and liquid.
Blue Moon hasn’t progressed as far in research and development as Starship, and Musk has taken more photos online of the spacecraft and Blue Origin as a whole. “Blue Origin has never put a payload in orbit, much less on the Moon,” he posted on X during his October 20 argument with Duffy. (Musk’s claim is not true; in January, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket actually placed a test module into orbit, and Musk changed his original message to add “Useful payload.”)
There is also a third late entrant in the lunar lander race who could well overtake the two leaders. In recent months, Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion orbiter that will be the mothership of any moon landing, has mobilized to put together a group of a dozen other industry players who would build a lunar lander, mostly from commercially available parts. Starship and Blue Moon are single-stage vehicles that would fly to the lunar surface and take off in one piece. This simplifies the design but requires the ship to carry the added weight of all its fuel down and aft.
The Apollo-era Lunar Module was a two-part spacecraft: a descent stage that landed astronauts on the surface and an ascent stage, containing the crew compartment, that took off, leaving the lower half of the vehicle on the moon. This meant a much lighter ascent stage that had to carry only its own fuel reserve and no equipment from the landing portion. Lockheed Martin plans to return to this model.
For the ascent stage, this would involve modifying and modifying the hardware of the Orion spacecraft, building a lunar landing cockpit. “We want to use elements of Orion’s pantry that already exist,” says Rob Chambers, senior director of human spaceflight strategy at Lockheed. For the descent leg, Lockheed was going shopping.
“We call it ‘design for inventory,’” Chambers says. “We sit down with industry partners and don’t say, ‘What part can I order from your catalog?’ » but which serial number exists today, even if it is on another spacecraft. If this is a US imperative, then NASA could choose to remove this object from a not-yet-launched spacecraft and send it to this address. »
Lockheed Martin does not specify who the industrial partners are, but cites Blue Origin as a candidate. The lowering stage of the new multi-company vessel would be “perfectly in line with the development they are already carrying out”. For this lander, refueling would also be required, although Lockheed envisions only six tankers, delivering fuel to the spacecraft in lunar orbit. Additionally, the ship would not use cryogenic fuel but simpler hypergolics – two fuels that ignite in the presence of each other without the need for a combustion chamber – eliminating the problem of evaporation.
For now, the work continues with new urgency and with answers expected before the end of the month. On October 20, NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens released a statement saying, “NASA’s Human Landing System program has given SpaceX and Blue Origin the opportunity to demonstrate acceleration approaches by October 29. NASA will also request plans from the entire commercial space industry, through a Request for Information. [request for information] on how NASA can increase the pace of our mission to the Moon.
The 1960s space race with the Soviet Union was an invigorating global competition that energized both countries’ space programs – with the United States starting far behind, but ultimately winning by a wide margin. The race between the United States and China presents similar chances, but without any certainty of similar results.
