Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Tuesday, November 18, 2025

NASA may have no choice but to postpone the launch of its next mission to land astronauts on the moon by more than a year. Growing pains for SpaceX's massive Starship rocket over the past year have stunted the timeline for the still-developing launch vehicle and spacecraft, which is contracted to land astronauts on the lunar surface as a part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission. The space agency is targeting 2027 for that launch, but SpaceX's own timeline seems to contradict that, reinforcing concerns previously voiced by NASA officials over Starship's readiness.

More

Alternate links: Google News | Twitter

According to an internal SpaceX document obtained by Politico, the company is targeting June 2026 for the first orbital refueling demonstration between Starship vehicles, and an uncrewed lunar landing in June 2027. If Starship manages to breeze through those qualification tests and stick to its current timeline, SpaceX estimates the earliest first attempt to complete a crewed mission to the surface of the moon could take place in September 2028

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

The following HTML tags are allowed in comments: a href, b, i, p, br, ul, ol, li and blockquote. Others will be stripped out. Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

Anyone can join this site and make comments. To post this comment, you must sign it with your Drudge Retort username. If you can't remember your username or password, use the lost password form to request it.
Username:
Password:

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy

Drudge Retort