Starship HLS

Starship HLS

Rendering of Starship HLS on the Moon
Manufacturer	SpaceX
Country of origin	United States
Operator	SpaceX
Applications	Lunar lander
Specifications
Spacecraft type	Crewed, reusable
Crew capacity	2 (Artemis III) 4 (Artemis IV)
Regime	Cislunar space
Dimensions
Height	~52.3 m (172 ft)
Diameter	9 m (30 ft)
Capacity
Payload to lunar surface
Mass	100,000 kg (220,000 lb)[1]
Production
Status	In development
Maiden launch	2025 (planned)[2]
Related spacecraft
Derived from	SpaceX Starship (spacecraft)
Flown with	SpaceX Super Heavy
Starship HLS
Powered by	3 Raptor engines 3 Raptor vacuum engines RCS thrusters
Propellant	CH4 / LOX

Starship HLS (Human Landing System) is a lunar lander variant of the Starship spacecraft that is slated to transfer astronauts from a lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back. It is being designed and built by SpaceX under the Human Landing System contract to NASA as a critical element of NASA's Artemis program to land a crew on the Moon.

The mission plan calls for a Starship launch vehicle to launch a Starship HLS into Earth orbit, where it will be refueled by multiple Starship tanker spacecraft before boosting itself into a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). There, it will rendezvous with a crewed Orion spacecraft that will be launched from Earth by a NASA Space Launch System (SLS) launcher. A crew of two astronauts will transfer from Orion to HLS, which will then descend to the lunar surface for a stay of approximately seven days, including at least five EVAs. It will then return the crew to Orion in NRHO.

In the third phase of its HLS procurement process, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract in April 2021 to develop, produce, and demonstrate Starship HLS. An uncrewed test flight is planned for 2025 to demonstrate a successful landing on the Moon. Following that test, a crewed flight is expected to occur as part of the Artemis III mission, no earlier than mid-2027.^[3] NASA later contracted for an upgraded version of Starship HLS to be used on the Artemis IV mission.^[4]

Starship itself has been in privately funded development by SpaceX since the mid-2010s, but development of the HLS variant is being funded under NASA's Human Landing System contracts.^[5]