Starship HLS Update: 49 Milestones and a Simplified Artemis 3 Plan

How do you land astronauts on the Moon with a vehicle roughly 50 m tall and 9 m wide? In a press release covered live by Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut on 30 October 2025, SpaceX gave its most significant update on the Starship Human Landing System (HLS) for NASA's Artemis program since the 2021 contract. It came with new renders and photographs of hardware, including an airlock and a cockpit interface.

Scale of the lander

SpaceX states that a single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, roughly two-thirds of the pressurized volume of the International Space Station. Dodd notes that earlier discussion had put it nearer 1,000 cubic meters. Each of Starship's two airlocks has about 13 cubic meters of habitable volume, which SpaceX says is more than double the space in the Apollo lunar lander. Cargo variants are described as able to land up to 100 metric tons directly on the surface, including rovers, nuclear reactors and lunar habitats. Dodd's comparison: that is the equivalent of five Apollo landers, or 20 Apollo ascent modules, as payload.

A fixed-price contract and two development paths

SpaceX describes two paths: the core Starship system and its infrastructure, which SpaceX self-funds and which it says is over 90% of system costs, and the HLS-specific configuration that modifies the core vehicle to meet NASA's crew landing requirements. The HLS work is under a fixed-price contract, so the company is paid only after milestones are completed. Dodd points out this is why a Starship test flight failure does not mean taxpayer money is lost. SpaceX also shares flight data with NASA from flights not funded under HLS.

The release cites 11 Starship-only flight tests and 11 integrated Starship and Super Heavy flights, more than three dozen Starships built, 600 Raptor engines, and more than 226,000 seconds of runtime on Raptor 2 and more than 40,000 seconds on Raptor 3. It also cites a transfer of about five metric tons of cryogenic propellant between tanks in space. Dodd could not reconcile the "Starship-only" count with his own tally of 10.

49 milestones

SpaceX says its HLS team has completed 49 milestones, mostly on time or early. The highlights include:

• A full-scale cabin module, inhabited by multiple people, tested for oxygen and nitrogen injection, air distribution, sanitation, humidity, thermal control and acoustics.
• Qualification of an androgynous docking system, based on the Dragon 2 active docking system, to link Starship and Orion.
• A full-scale landing leg drop test at flight energies on simulated lunar regolith. Dodd notes lunar gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, yet the legs will still need to be beefier than Falcon 9's.
• A Raptor lunar landing throttle test showing a thrust profile for landing. Dodd still expects a ring of landing thrusters near the top, probably pressure-fed methalox, for the final descent; he counts about six packs of three.
• Micrometeoroid and orbital debris testing of shielding, insulation and window panels.
• Landing software, sensor and radar demonstrations, and a software architecture review covering fault detection, caution and warning alerts.
• A Raptor cold start demonstration with sea-level and vacuum engines pre-chilled to simulate conditions after an extended time in space.
• A depot power module demonstration for the propellant depot variant. Dodd guesses it relates to boil-off prevention.
• An elevator and airlock demonstration with Axiom, using flight-representative pressurized suits, for moving crew and cargo between ship and surface. Dodd notes the airlock height is over 120 ft and wonders what the backup is if the elevator jams.
• Medical system and telemedicine tests, and a hardware-in-the-loop test bed for the propellant transfer flight test.

SpaceX has also started fabricating a flight article HLS cabin with avionics, power, crew systems, life support and thermal control. Dodd says it is unclear whether this means a test flight or a ground-test article.

Refueling in orbit

The next HLS-specific flight milestones are a long-duration flight test and an in-space propellant transfer test, both targeted for 2026, with timing driven by the debut of Starship version 3. The first ship would spend an extended time on orbit gathering data on propulsion, thermal behavior and boil-off; a second would rendezvous for ship-to-ship transfer. Version 3 ships have docking ports and can act as tankers with added docking probes. They will use Dragon Eye navigation systems, and SpaceX has flown experimental radio-frequency propellant gauging sensors on recent flights to measure propellant in microgravity. Dodd says SpaceX is betting everything on orbital refueling.

A simplified mission

NASA selected Starship in 2021 as lander for Artemis 3, followed by a second selection for Artemis 4. The release says SpaceX has shared and is formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that it believes would give a faster return while improving crew safety. Dodd calls this significant, reads it as a response to the aim of beating China, and speculates it could mean a "stubby" Starship. He notes it is likely a response to acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy's push to return humans in 30 months. The details were not given.

In viewer questions, Dodd says the HLS version cannot return to low Earth orbit by his delta-v numbers, since it has no heat shield or flaps, and that it would refuel in lunar orbit, in the Artemis case a near-rectilinear halo orbit.