Elon Musk's Starship flight to determine Nasa's moon mission success

Elon Musk's SpaceX is playing an important role in Nasa's moon landing mission since 1972 — scheduled to lift off in late 2024.

Tech billionaire said, "SpaceX is targeting April for the first launch of its huge Starship mega-rocket system, the world's most powerful rocket designed to transport cargo and crew to the moon, Mars, and beyond."

The rocket is comprised of a spacecraft and a booster, called the "Super Heavy," already tested successfully by SpaceX.

Nasa gave the commercial space company a contract of $2.9 billion in 2021 to help Nasa land its crew on the moon using the Starship. Its launch will be key in determining whether the Nasa moon landing mission

The highly anticipated Starship launch will determine Nasa's bets on the company. SpaceX’s starship was also included in the contract for the Artemis IV mission in November last year worth $1.2bn.

Brendan Rosseau, a teaching fellow of space economy at Harvard Business School while talking with Business Insider said: As it will be a test flight for the company’s space vehicle, it will also be a test of NASA's gamble to incorporate commercial actors into the heart of their development process.

He also said: "Woven into Artemis are the Starship plans and all these other different components."

Nasa counting on Starship for moon landing

Like previous Nasa missions, its ships will not take the astronauts to the moon.

The space crew — aboard Nasa' Orion spacecraft — will be launched into the moon’s orbit which will be attached at the top of Nasa’s new Space Launch System (SLS). The Starship, will be launched separately, and help the crew land on the moon.

After the conclusion of the mission, the Starship will transport the astronauts to the Orion before they head back to Earth.

Referring to Nasa's dependence on Calafornia-based company he noted: "I think it shows NASA's confidence in SpaceX's ability to get Starship up and running by then. Obviously, it is pretty remarkable, considering that we haven't even had a full orbital flight test of the system."

Nasa wants SpaceX to succeed

During his interview, he noted that SpaceX's success was part of NASA's grand design to bring commercial actors into the heart of its upcoming missions.

Rosseau noted that as Nasa's shuttle program ended in 2011, it changed its approach. Instead of investing all its energy into engineering a rocket from start to launch, the agency started pushing more investment into private companies that could take on the burden of development while competing for lower prices and higher efficiency, he added.

Nasa's risky bets birthed companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and other companies. This Nasa as an investor and customer is the only reason why they exist today, he noted.

Apart from Elon Musk's SpaceX, there are 14 other private companies for which Nasa is in the contract for carrying a variety of payloads for its moon mission.

Cutting cost with Starship

Elon Musk had said that within a few years, each launch could cost less than $10 million. Although the estimated cost of Starship is not made public. Musk’s company is also working to make spaceships useable.

"It fundamentally could change the economics of space dramatically and how much we can put up in space and why," the teaching fellow said.

On the other hand, Nasa’s SLS program cost $50bn of taxpayer’s money since 2006 — launched six years after its initial launch date in 2016.

Each SLS launch costs more than $4 billion because Nasa builds it every time it launches. The costs make SpaceX an attractive company to do business with.

In response to Nasa’s insistence on SLS, Rosseau said NASA's mega-rocket was a bit of an anomaly in its grand shift toward commercial partnerships.

Despite criticism, he said SLS is likely to remain Nasa's workhorse, at least for the Artemis missions. It was built to do this job he said.

Starship dependence

But Greg Autry, a visiting professor at Imperial College London's Institute for Security, Science, and Technology, believes that "We must have more than one way to get on and off the moon."

As it is regarded as promising, he believed that there are a lot of hurdles to get over before it makes its first orbital flight which are refuelling the lander in orbit, getting life-support hardware on the spacecraft, and perfecting the dust-mitigation strategy for landing on the moon.

He said: Nasa has to ensure a backup apart from Starship for "mission assurance, system redundancy and eventually to guarantee economic competition."