Musk disputes NASA panel's 'around 22 flights' figure for Starship Moon landing
NASA safety panel member Charlie Precourt says fuelling SpaceX's lunar lander may take around 22 Starship flights — Elon Musk says the real number is 'more like 6 to 8'.
Elon Musk is disputing a new estimate from NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel of how many Starship flights will be needed to land astronauts on the Moon.
At the panel’s quarterly public meeting on Thursday, former NASA astronaut Charlie Precourt said fuelling SpaceX’s lunar lander was a major risk for Artemis IV, the crewed Moon mission planned for 2028. “I think the last estimate is around 22 flights,” Precourt said, according to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger.
Berger posted Precourt’s comment on X, and Musk replied within hours. “That’s way too high,” Musk wrote. “Actual number will be more like 6 to 8.”
The figure matters because Starship burns nearly all its propellant reaching Earth orbit, so the lunar lander must be refuelled in orbit: a depot Starship is launched first, then tanker Starships dock one by one to fill it, each tanker counting as a full launch.
The estimate has shifted over the years. In November 2023 NASA officials cited “high teens” figures, according to SpaceNews, while then-Human Landing System director Lisa Watson-Morgan said “high single digits to the low double digits”.
Separately, the FAA has opened an environmental review of SpaceX’s request to fly up to 456 Starship launches a year from Starbase, a sharp increase on the current cap.
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