Space X månlandare riskerar fler förseningar – svårt att tanka i rymden

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 of astronauts 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 was planned for 2025 to demonstrate a successful landing on the Moon which has since been delayed. Following that test, a crewed flight is expected to occur as part of the Artemis IV mission, no earlier than mid-2027. 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.