As SpaceX’s Starship rocket thundered into the South Texas sky this week, a crowd of employees outside mission control began to chant, “U-S-A, U-S-A!”
It was the second successful test flight after a string of fiery failures for Starship, bringing Elon Musk’s rocket company a step closer to its goal of carrying NASA astronauts back to the moon. Yet, the hurdles ahead seem as large and daunting as the 400-foot-tall launch system.
The employees’ zeal was, in part, an acknowledgment of the space race that has heated up between the United States and China. NASA chose SpaceX for an upcoming moon mission the agency bills as “humanity’s first return to the lunar surface in more than 50 years,” which is scheduled for 2027. But China is jockeying to secure that milestone for itself and has pledged to put boots on the moon by 2030.
SpaceX is significantly behind where it should be if the United States wants to beat China. Although the company has made major strides since Starship debuted in 2023, a spate of four failures marred its progress this year, including two explosions that rained debris over parts of the Caribbean.
The pressure on each Starship launch belies a larger problem: NASA has found itself reliant on a single commercial company to deliver the future of America’s space program.
“If this is truly a space race, we’re setting out our national goal and saying, ‘Well, we hope this company pulls it off,’” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration. “The stated national priority of the United States is actually in the hands of a private company now, rather than the government.”
That was not NASA’s goal when it started partnering with commercial spaceflight companies. Rather, the idea was to spur competitiveness in the private sector to drive down costs and give rise to multiple, redundant options to minimize risk. But so far, no other competitors — including Boeing and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — have been able to offer anything close to what SpaceX has. The stakes are only getting higher as NASA faces the possibility of steep funding cuts amid the Trump administration’s attempts to gut government spending.
NASA has already shed around one-fifth of its staff, including more than 2,000 senior-level employees, since President Donald Trump returned to office. Just this week, its Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that it will cut 550 jobs, around 10% of its workforce.
SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
NASA’s communications office is closed because of the government shutdown, and a spokesperson for its acting administrator, Sean Duffy, pointed NBC News to his past statements.
Duffy has repeatedly pushed back against doubts that the United States could be ceding ground in the new space race.
“We are going to beat the Chinese to the moon. We are going to make sure that we do this safely. We’re going to do it fast. We’re going to do it right,” Duffy told NASA employees last month in an internal town hall, according to a recording obtained by NBC News.
Some experts worry that if China gets there first, however, it could claim valuable resources on the moon, among other risks.
To avoid that, NASA needs SpaceX to quickly deliver a working Starship.
But the rocket system, the most powerful ever developed, still needs to conduct orbital flights around Earth — thus far, the tests have been to suborbital space. That hinges on an upgraded prototype that SpaceX plans to roll out by early next year. And before Starship can launch with any astronauts on board, SpaceX officials have said, hundreds of test missions are necessary.
Starship consists of a first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, and an upper-stage spacecraft. For the 2027 moon mission, dubbed Artemis III, the system is meant to work in tandem with NASA’s own space vehicles (which themselves have suffered long delays and cost overruns).
The plan calls for astronauts to blast off atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. Once their capsule, called Orion, enters orbit around the moon, the crew members would then transfer to Starship to land. After roughly a week on the lunar surface, the astronauts would fly Starship back into lunar orbit and reboard Orion for the return trip to Earth.
The elaborate and complex sequence hinges on a number of unproven technologies; chief among them is the need to refuel Starship as it waits in space. Dreier said that it is not yet clear how many launches will be needed to transport the necessary fuel but that they would have to occur in rapid succession.
“Anywhere from a dozen to maybe 20 refueling launches within a month would be needed to refill Starship’s tanks in order for it to have enough energy to send itself to the moon and come back,” he said. “That’s never been done before.”
Refueling in space alone would require “huge advancements” from where Starship is now, he added.
“It’s a massive, massive challenge,” Dreier said. “And without all that, you don’t get to the moon.”
The Starship lander is expected to tower nearly 150 feet over the stout, spidery-looking moon landers NASA used in its Apollo program. The taller design enables Starship to haul more passengers and cargo, but it could also make the spacecraft less stable than its Apollo counterpart.
Still, it would not have made much sense for NASA to fall back on old technologies, Dreier said, in part because of cost. A single liftoff of the Saturn V rocket NASA used for the Apollo flights would cost about $2 billion today. SpaceX, on the other hand, aims to make Starship fully reusable, which would lower costs and shorten turnaround times between launches.
The next step for the company is to roll out its upgraded Starship prototype, which will be around 5 feet taller and have new docking mechanisms, greater energy storage and software upgrades to prepare it for long-duration flights.
The new version will be used for Starship’s first orbital flights and will help SpaceX test key procedures, such as transferring fuel and carrying payloads into space, SpaceX officials wrote in a post following Monday’s test.
Future flights, like the one this week, will be closely watched as China’s 2030 goal approaches.
“Four years in the space world is almost no time at all,” Dreier said. “These are incredibly complex and demanding things, because space is trying to kill you all the time.”
