Social media posts are not rocket fuel, but if they were, Elon Musk would be on the moon today. Over the summer, Musk famously got into an online feud with President Donald Trump about everything from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, to Musk’s threats to form a new political party, to the Jeffrey Epstein files.
On Oct. 20, Musk was at it again—this time going to war against Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and the acting administrator of NASA.
The casus belli occurred when Duffy appeared on CNBC and spoke about NASA’s push to get astronauts back on the moon before the end of Trump’s term. In 2021, the space agency awarded SpaceX, Musk’s company, a $2.89 billion contract to develop the spacecraft that would take astronauts down to the surface on the first two lunar landings—Artemis III and Artemis IV. But SpaceX is not remotely ready to deliver, with serial failures of its mammoth Starship rocket delaying development of the lander. That’s putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in its race with China to have astronauts—or, in the case of China, taikonauts—on the moon before 2030, and Duffy had seen enough.
“I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX,” Duffy said. “We’re not going to wait for one company. We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”
Musk was having none of it, firing off a series of online howitzers the next day.
“Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA,” he posted on X. “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ,” he added. Musk also took a swipe at Duffy’s status as a world champion lumberjack speed climber. “Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America’s space program?” he asked.
But the fact is, Duffy has a point, and Musk, for all his online bluster, has the weaker hand. Starship was always a poor choice as a lunar lander. The Apollo era’s lunar module was a low-slung, four-legged, insectile affair, standing just shy of 23 feet tall. Its light weight—32,500 pounds with propellant and crew—and splayed stance made it both nimble and stable. The Starship lander, by contrast is a silo-like cylinder with a tapered nose cone, measuring 165 feet tall, weighing more than 200,000 pounds and calling to mind less an actual spacecraft than the 1953 illustrated book about Tintin’s adventures on the moon. Apollo astronauts used a nine-rung ladder to get down to the lunar surface. Artemis astronauts will use an elevator.
The reason for Starship’s super-sized dimensions is that it is being designed not just for lunar flights but for crewed trips to and from Earth orbit and later to Mars. On those missions, SpaceX claims, the spacecraft could carry up to 100 people. That is entirely too much machine for the comparatively modest and focused goal of getting two astronauts down from lunar orbit, onto the moon, and back up again.
“That architecture is extraordinarily complex,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during Senate testimony in September. “It, quite frankly, doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re trying to go first to the moon, this time to beat China.”
The other critical problem with the whale-like Starship involves fuel. The spacecraft runs on supercold liquid methane and liquid oxygen—a lot of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, too much for the first stage of the rocket to muscle off the ground. For that reason, Starship will first park in Earth orbit where SpaceX tankers would fly up and refuel it. Just how many refueling trips that would take is open to question. In a 2021 post on X, Musk claimed it would be a “max of 8 to fill 1200 ton tanks of lunar Starship.”
But that’s open to question. Liquid oxygen has to be stored at a temperature no greater than -297°F; for liquid methane it’s -259°F. Even in the deep freeze of low-Earth orbit, temperatures are higher than that, meaning that no sooner do you partially fill Starship’s tanks than that fuel begins boiling away, necessitating more refueling missions to top the tanks back off. Every day spent between refueling flights is a day that more fuel is lost.
“Elon says it’s eight to 10 refueling missions,” says Mike Griffin, NASA’s administrator from 2005 to 2009. “Most professionals who look at it say it’s 20. While the fuel is sitting there on orbit waiting for the next tanker, it’s boiling off. So you get into a tail chase where you can’t refuel it fast enough.”
However many flights it takes to fill Starship’s tanks, SpaceX has not yet even figured out how to fly those refill missions. “It’s multiple refueling flights using a technology we don’t have,” says Griffin. “Human beings are eventually going to solve the refueling problem. I’m not saying these things are undoable. I’m saying we don’t have the technology for it today.”
A somewhat simpler alternative does exist—even if it is further in the future than Starship. In 2023, NASA issued a second, $3.4 billion contract to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s Kent, Wash.-based company, to build its own lander—dubbed Blue Moon—for use on the Artemis V mission and beyond. Blue Moon is significantly smaller than Starship, standing 52 feet tall, with the capability to support four astronauts for up to 30 days. The ship would require refueling too, but in this case it would first settle into lunar orbit and wait there until a tanker from Earth could catch up with it. Blue Origin, like SpaceX, would have to figure out the problem of fuel boiling off, but the company is working with NASA on developing a so-called zero-boiloff tank that employs mixing and cooling of the propellant to keep it stable and liquid.
Blue Moon has not progressed as far down the R&D line as Starship has, and Musk took more online shots at both the spacecraft and Blue Origin as a whole. “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” he posted on X in the course of his Oct. 20 spat with Duffy. (Musk’s claim is not true; in January, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket did place a test module in orbit, and Musk amended his original post by adding, “Useful payload.”)
There’s also a third, late entrant in the lunar lander race that just might lap both of the leaders. In recent months, Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion orbiter that will be the mothership for any lunar landing, has been mobilizing to put together a group of a dozen other industry players who would build a lunar lander from, essentially, off-the-shelf parts. Both Starship and Blue Moon are single stage vehicles that would fly down to the lunar surface and lift off in one piece. That simplifies the design but requires the ship to lug the extra weight of all of its fuel down and back.
The Apollo-era lunar module was a two-part spacecraft—a descent stage that landed the astronauts on the surface, and an ascent stage, containing the crew compartment, that lifted back off, leaving the bottom half of the vehicle on the moon. That meant a much lighter ascent stage that needed to carry only its own supply of fuel and none of the hardware of the landing portion. Lockheed Martin envisions going back to that model.
For the ascent stage it would crib and modify the hardware from the Orion spacecraft, building a lunar landing cockpit. “We want to use stuff from the Orion pantry that already exists,” says Rob Chambers, Lockheed’s senior director for human spaceflight strategy. For the descent stage, Lockheed would go shopping.
“We call it ‘design for inventory,’” says Chambers. “We’re sitting down with industry partners and saying not ‘What part can I order out of your catalogue?’ but what serial number exists today, even if it’s on another spacecraft. If this is an American imperative, then NASA could choose to take that thing off an unlaunched spacecraft and send it to this address.”
Lockheed Martin does not say who the industry partners are, but does cite Blue Origin as one candidate. The descent stage for the new multi-company ship would be “right in line with the development they’re already doing.” For this lander too refueling would be required, though Lockheed envisions just six tankers, delivering the fuel to the spacecraft in lunar orbit. What’s more, 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 boil-off.
For now, the work goes on with new urgency—and with some answers expected before the end of the month. On Oct. 20, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens issued a statement saying, “NASA’s Human Landing System program has given both SpaceX and Blue Origin the opportunity to present acceleration approaches by Oct. 29. NASA is also going to request plans from the entire commercial space industry—through an RFI [request for information] for how NASA can increase the cadence of our mission to the moon.”
The 1960s space race with the Soviet Union was a bracing global competition that energized both nations’ space programs—with the U.S. starting well behind, but eventually winning by many furlongs. The U.S.-China race presents a contest with similar odds—but with no certainty at all of similar results.
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