During a recent press conference, NASA representatives revealed the agency told SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin working on cargo versions of their crew lunar lander spacecrafts for future Artemis missions.

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Under the Artemis program, both companies are developing their Human Landing System (HLS) to land astronauts on the Moon. Blue Origin is developing its “Blue Moon” lander and SpaceX is developing a lunar-optimized Starship without the aerodynamic fins, as pictured above. “In the last few months, we’ve asked both of our Human Landing System providers, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to being applying the work they’re doing on the human-rated versions of the landing vehicles to develop a cargo variant that can land large cargo on the surface,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program at NASA, said during the press conference on January 9.

The work, conducted under options to Blue Origin’s HLS contract awarded in May 2023 and SpaceX’s “Option B” modification in November 2022, doesn’t require additional funding beyond the existing contracts—$3.4 billion for Blue Origin and $1.15 billion for SpaceX’s Option B. NASA expects these cargo landers to share commonalities with the human-rated versions, with adjustments to payload interfaces and deployment mechanisms.

As of today, no specific payloads to transport to the Moon have been revealed, the agency just shared that the preliminary design requirements outline the capability to deliver 12 to 15 metric tons to the lunar surface. The cargo landers are anticipated to be deployed for the Artemis VII (seven) mission until the year 2030. SpaceX officials had previously said Starship will be capable of delivering up to 100 metric tons to the lunar surface.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently highlighted the potential of the Starship vehicle in landing large payloads on the Moon, expressing a desire to surpass NASA’s requirements. “We want to far exceed what NASA’s asked us to do. We want to go far beyond the NASA requirements and actually be able to put enough payload on the moon with enough frequency that you could actually have a permanently occupied moon base,” he said in a company presentation video posted on January 12th. VIDEO: Watch SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Deliver A Company Update

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NASA’s Artemis program faces delays in its crewed missions. The original plan included launching Artemis II, a crewed lunar flyby mission by NASA Orion, in November 2024, but due to hardware development delays, the mission is now postponed to September 2025. Subsequently, Artemis III, the first crewed lunar landing by SpaceX’s Starship HLS, is rescheduled for September 2026. Despite setbacks, Artemis IV, another crewed landing, is still expected to launch in 2028 according to NASA officials.

“We are returning to the Moon in a way we never have before, and the safety of our astronauts is NASA’s top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We’ve learned a lot since Artemis I, and the success of these early missions relies on our commercial and international partnerships to further our reach and understanding of humanity’s place in our solar system. Artemis represents what we can accomplish as a nation – and as a global coalition. When we set our sights on what is hard, together, we can achieve what is great,” he said.

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