SpaceX to Tell NASA the Moon Will Have to Wait
A leaked internal document suggests SpaceX could miss NASA’s Artemis 3 deadline by over a year.
November 17, 2025
SpaceX has fallen behind in developing a crewed lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, prompting the agency to reopen the contract to other providers. The added pressure has pushed SpaceX to revise its strategy, but the new approach still appears insufficient to meet NASA’s target date, leaked proprietary information suggests.
An internal SpaceX document obtained by Politico lays out a new timeline for the Starship Human Landing System (HLS)—one that would put the Artemis 3 astronauts on the Moon by September 2028 at the earliest. That’s more than a year past NASA’s mid-2027 target.
Even hitting this revised target will be a tall order given Starship’s enormous size, complex design, and the major milestones it has yet to achieve. An anonymous congressional aide told Politico that SpaceX’s 2028 objectives are still “very aggressive” given the current state of the rocket’s development.
As SpaceX’s rivals step forward with their own proposals for the Artemis 3 HLS contract, the company’s revised timeline does not bode well for its bid. Gizmodo reached out to SpaceX and NASA but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
NASA tapped SpaceX to provide the first crewed lander for the Artemis program in 2021. To fill that need, the company designed Starship HLS—a modified version of Starship’s upper stage designed to deliver astronauts to and from the lunar surface. Its development is intrinsically linked to that of the core Starship system, which hit several snags this year.
https://gizmodo.com/spacex-to-tell-nasa ... 2000686982
Credit: NASA
