![]() ![]() It doesn’t look like the traditional landers that we’ve all seen in the past, so it can be hard to reconcile that mentally,” Watson-Morgan said. That includes one of the unique attributes of Starship, the elevator required to go from the crew cabin to the surface. NASA, in turn, has its personnel, including astronauts, visiting SpaceX facilities for reviews and hardware tests. SpaceX has been involved in the Artemis 3 landing site selection process to ensure potential landing regions are compatible with Starship. She said SpaceX has been a “fantastic partner” on HLS so far, with close cooperation between the company and the agency. “We’re going to leverage all that we can on this mission to try and take up and down as much as we can, using the size of their system,” Watson-Morgan said. While the original HLS competition had a requirement to carry only 100 kilograms of cargo to the surface and back in addition to two astronauts, said Logan Kennedy, HLS surface lead at NASA, the later “sustained” missions will increase that to 182 kilograms to the surface and 160 kilograms back, with a goal of 1,000 kilograms down and back. However, she and others said they want to maximize the performance that Starship offers on lunar landings, with the potential to carry large payloads. The types of payloads NASA were interested in flying include those “that don’t require a tremendous amount of upkeep.” That includes flying a suite of sensors and imagers “and potentially one payload,” she said, but didn’t specify what kinds of sensors or payloads might fly. There will be an opportunity to do science on the uncrewed demo landing. One factor in choosing a landing site, she said, was to “preserve science in the future” by not disrupting any Artemis 3 landing sites. 19 would be considered for the Artemis 3 mission. Watson-Morgan said that the uncrewed landing will take place in the south polar regions of the moon, but no decisions have been made on a landing site, including whether it will be one of the 13 regions NASA announced Aug. That uncrewed landing, scheduled for no earlier than 2024, is a key test ahead of the crewed Artemis 3 mission. “Clearly we want it to,” she added, referring to a takeoff, “but the requirements are for it to land.” It’s going to be a skeleton because it just has to land. “The uncrewed demo is not necessarily planned to be the same Starship that you see for the crewed demo. “For the uncrewed demo, the goal is to have a safe landing,” she said. 23, Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager of the Human Landing System (HLS) program, said the Starship that performs that uncrewed landing demo mission won’t necessarily be identical to the vehicle that is used to transport astronauts to and from the surface of the moon on Artemis 3 as soon as 2025. In a presentation at the annual meeting of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) here Aug. A SpaceX Starship that will land on the moon an on uncrewed test flight may only be a “skeleton” of the version of that will carry people on the Artemis 3 mission, NASA says.
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