It will be quite amusing if Duffy has goaded him into beating SLS/Orion to the Moon.
I’m glad that he’s realized it was politically stupid to say that the Moon “is a distraction.”
[Update a while later]
HLS interior. A true spaceship. But here's my mindblowing take. This is by far the worst Starship interior we will ever see. I think this is a very bare bones cladding that will be blown out of the water by their LETS lander, and standard crew variant.
— Ken Kirtland IV (@KenKirtland17) October 30, 2025
🧵 pic.twitter.com/JEf9xGw03m
Reverse psychology at work?
That was my initial thought too. But I have come to believe that that explanation gives Duffy way too much credit. The practical effect will be the same – SpaceX upshifting to Ludicrous Speed and building a complete lunar logistics architecture on its own. But I think Duffy’s little tantrum was motivated more by his uncritical acceptance of conventional DC “wisdom” about the PRC and resultant unwarranted panic about how failing to Beat the Chinese[tm] would look on his resume.
Yeah none of that makes any sense to me. We already beat China to the Moon.
Yeah, but have we Beat the Chinese[tm] to the Moon recently?
People with common sense realize that, but the world is filled with people lacking that supposedly “common” quality.
NASA to let contracts to explore Ceres, but excludes SpaceX…
Do you have a link to share?
Kind of an amusing concept “excluding” SpaceX from exploring Ceres. If Elon sees any point in doing so, SpaceX will go to Ceres. Might be an interesting project to undertake once the Mars thing is well enough along. It would actually make reasonable sense to mount such an effort from Mars rather than from Earth anyway.
lol. No. Just exploring the reverse psychology angle a bit more…
Gotcha. Thing is, Elon’s not a cat. He won’t chase after just any random laser pointer spot on the floor.
I really hope they switch to horizontal landing, if nothing else for the sake of sanity.
Landing on one Raptor is going to be tricky, as a Raptor 3 at 40% throttle still might be more of a slam landing, depending on the landing weight of the ship. That means they have to kill the engine as the ship touches down, before they know if it’s going to start tipping over. If it is tipping, they’ll need to have a second engine pre-chilled and spooling up or they’re not going to have an abort option.
And then there’s the problem of the giant external elevator, along with a giant ladder in case the elevator jams.
Based on the renders that accompanied SpaceX’s latest update, it looks as though the plan is still to land using the ring of “high-pockets” thrusters with the Raptors shutting down after managing most of the powered descent.
I don’t think the elevator is really a problem. SpaceX has been testing it out for at lest two years. The only way it would jam is if there was a hard enough landing to tweak the whole ship. It that happens, a stuck elevator is the least of your concerns.
I forgot about those. I think I try to forget about most of their design.
The current renders more resemble penthouse apartments. I’m nto sure the interior designers are running their concepts past any engineers. The big windows continue to be featured, even though they’re a catastrophic failure mode, a large weight component, a structural weakness, and serve no purpose.
The whole concept just makes no sense to me.
Patience Geoge, patience… 🙂
But it makes sense to Elon. He’s got more than a bit of P.T. Barnum about him as well as Delos D. Harriman. Big windows with Gee Whiz views from on-high are salable. There are a great many architectural features on cruise ships one does not find on battleships and for similar reasons. Freighter HLSes won’t have the windows, but the people-carriers will.
I do think that there needs to be a backup for that elevator. I don’t think it needs to be a ladder though. At 1/6 G, a rope would be fine.
The problem is designing and certifying the rope. Nasa could do it, if we’ve got a few spare years and billions. Or SpaceX could just send somebody to Walmart for a packaged coils of rope.
SpaceX has been using 3 raptor engines for final descent and landing of the Ship for every test flight. Things are slightly more complicated for Booster, but I believe they actually have enough throttlability to hover, not slam. They already have that part figured out.
The Moon’s gravity is only 1/6th that of the Earth. I doubt they can throttle the Raptors to thrust low enough to land on the Moon. Even if the could, that would erode the landing surface, making it even harder to prevent Ship from tipping over.
Their rendering shows a ring of thrusters high on the landing vehicle. They can be properly sized for a lunar landing and are high enough to minimize surface erosion.
Not a big fan of the elevator option either. If you are going with nose base thrusters why not just make that mechanism your primary engine and move the plumbing forward a bit as well. If you can maintain stability (operating in a vacuum after all), freeing the lower half for cargo for roll-on / roll-off. I suppose it becomes a question of maintaining the proper Center of Gravity for thrust vectoring? Center of Pressure isn’t the issue.
I suspect we will see roll-off in some subsequent cargo variant anyway. It’s just way more efficient.
Oh. You meant lunar landing. My bad.