Starship HLS

A lander, not a rocket

The Only Starship Designed Never to Re-enter Earth

HLS is a Block 3 ship with the Earth-return hardware removed and lunar landing hardware added.

The Human Landing System is a lunar-lander variant of Starship, contracted by NASA under the Artemis program to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back. It stands about 52 m, carries a crew of two to four, and is quoted at roughly 100 t to the lunar surface — the largest crewed lunar lander ever contracted, with two 13 m³ airlocks, double the internal volume of the Apollo Lunar Module, and an elevator to lower crew to the ground.

NASA selected SpaceX as sole Artemis III lander provider in April 2021 for $2.89 billion, added an Artemis IV award of $1.15 billion in 2022, for about $4.04 billion in HLS contracts. Its architecture is the reason it is hard: Super Heavy launch, then multiple tanker refueling flights in LEO, transit to a near-rectilinear halo orbit, and rendezvous with Orion. It cannot leave low Earth orbit until it is refueled. Building

The subvariants

Crew, Cargo and Large Cargo

One lander airframe, three payload fits — and a fourth question the contracts do not answer.

What is stripped out

No Tiles, No Flaps, and Thrusters That Miss the Ground

Every difference from the standard ship follows from one fact: it lands on the Moon, not on Earth.

Because HLS never re-enters an atmosphere, it omits the heat-shield tiles, the aerodynamic flaps and the tower-catch hardware — mass that only a returning vehicle needs. In their place it adds a solar array on the nose below a docking port, a docking system compatible with Orion, and a set of high-thrust methalox landing thrusters mounted mid-body. Those thrusters exist because firing the main Raptors close to the lunar surface would blast regolith in all directions; the mid-body thrusters take over for terminal descent. The result is a vehicle optimized for one leg — lunar orbit down to the surface and back — and useless for any other.

Artemis slip

The Landing Moved From Artemis III to Artemis IV

The refueling dependency, not the lander hardware, drove the schedule change.

After NASA’s February 2026 restructure, the first crewed landing moved to Artemis IV. The gating item is not the lander but the tanker campaign that has to fuel it — see Tanker, Depot & Propellant Transfer. NASA’s Office of Inspector General has also flagged crew-rescue capability as an open risk. SpaceX has been fabricating a flight-article HLS cabin at Starbase with life support, avionics and crew systems.

The cargo question

NASA Buys Delivery; It Does Not Say What Happens to the Hull

The Large Cargo lander is framed as a delivery vehicle. Its disposition after landing is unstated.

The one lunar lander quoted both ways is Blue Origin’s Blue Moon cargo variant: up to 20 t to the surface reusable, 30 t one-way. That is the industry’s only public reusable-versus-expendable figure, and it points at the same logic applied here to a landed Starship hull — that a one-way cargo lander leaves tens of tonnes of steel, tanks and engines on the surface as an asset. Neither SpaceX nor NASA has published a plan for that hull. The full argument is on One-Way Cargo Hulls.

Contested

Deliberately Not Claimed

The load-bearing uncertainties, tagged with the confidence they actually earn.

Record

Provenance and Data Sources