Elon Musk holds the keys to the moon because SpaceX's Starship megarocket launch is crucial to NASA's return

• SpaceX plans to launch its flagship megarocket Starship for the first time in April. 
• The rocket, which NASA has tagged for upcoming missions, is crucial to NASA's return to the moon.
• As NASA moves away from building its own rockets, commercial players will be central to missions.

NASA is inching ever closer to returning to the moon after 50 years — and SpaceX is playing a vital role in the mission.

Elon Musk said SpaceX is targeting April for the first launch of its huge Starship megarocket system, the world's most powerful rocket designed to transport cargo and crew to the moon, Mars, and beyond. It's comprised of a spacecraft and a booster, called the "Super Heavy," that SpaceX has successfully tested.

The highly anticipated Starship launch will determine whether NASA's Artemis moon program is on track for success. In 2021 NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use Starship to help the agency land the first humans on the moon since 1972. Starship also landed a contract to be a part of the Artemis IV mission last November. 

It won't only be a trial of the company's flagship vehicle, but also a key test of NASA's gamble to incorporate commercial actors into the heart of their development process, according to Brendan Rosseau, a teaching fellow of space economy at Harvard Business School.

"Woven into Artemis are the Starship plans and all these other different components," he told Insider in an interview. 

NASA's SLS relies on Starship for the moon landing

Unlike the Apollo missions, NASA's rockets will not take astronauts all the way down to the moon.

The crew will launch to the moon's orbit aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, strapped to the top of its new Space Launch System, or SLS, while a Starship, which will launch separately, will act as the mission's lunar lander.

Once the mission is finished, Starship will bring the crew back to Orion on their way back to Earth before the crew abandons Starship in lunar orbit, Space.com reported.

That means NASA plans for a SpaceX-built rocket, which the agency commissioned, to be the rocket putting boots on the moon for the first time since 1972.

"If you're Bill Nelson, NASA's administrator, you're really looking closely at the test launches of Starship because Starship is now a critical part of your infrastructure," Rosseau said. 

NASA's dependence on Starship was evident when Nelson asked Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, whether Musk's Twitter acquisition would affect the company's mission with the agency, NBC reported. Shotwell assured him that he had "nothing to worry about."

NASA's backing of SpaceX doesn't stop at Artemis III. The agency has tagged SpaceX to design the lander for Artemis IV, extending NASA's investment by another $1.2 billion to design a system for the rocket to dock at NASA's planned lunar Gateway.

"I think it shows NASA's confidence in SpaceX's ability to get Starship up and running by then. Obviously, it is pretty remarkable, considering that we haven't even had a full orbital flight test of the system," Rosseau said. 

SpaceX's success was always NASA's plan

SpaceX's success was part of NASA's grand design to bring commercial actors into the heart of its upcoming missions, Rosseau said.

After the shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA changed its approach to its development program. Instead of investing all its energy into engineering a rocket from start to launch, the agency started pushing more investment into private companies that could take on the burden of development while competing for lower prices and higher efficiency, Rosseau said. 

He said this strategy was risky, but has now paid off "extremely well." He added that "it birthed companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and all these other companies. This NASA investment and having NASA as a customer is the only reason why they exist today."

SpaceX isn't the only beneficiary of this strategy. NASA has tasked 14 private companies with carrying a variety of payloads to the moon in coming years. Three of these companies are due to deliver a payload this year.

Musk promises Starship will be cheaper and better than SLS

There's no good estimate for Starship's cost, but Musk has previously said that within a few years, each launch could cost less than $10 million. 

SpaceX also aims to make Starship fully reusable, which means it could potentially launch several times a year.

"It fundamentally could change the economics of space dramatically and how much we can put up in space and why," Rosseau said. 

If SpaceX were able to achieve just 50 launches "in one year, they would put more mass into space than has ever been put up into space since Sputnik," Rosseau said. This is only a third of the yearly launches SpaceX has set as a goal. 

NASA's SLS rocket, by contrast, has a high price tag for the taxpayer: The project has cost $50 billion in development since the program's inception in 2006. And the 23-story rocket only launched six years after its initial projected launch date in 2016.

And with each SLS launch costing more than $4 billion — with NASA having to build it every time it launches — it isn't going to get cheaper anytime soon.

All of this makes NASA's SLS a poor competitor to SpaceX's shiny new rocket.

SLS was 'a bit of an anomaly' for NASA

If NASA believes SpaceX can deliver on its promises, then why did it keep backing its own SLS rocket? 

Rosseau said the NASA's megarocket was a "bit of an anomaly" in its grand shift toward commercial partnerships. 

"If you look at the price tag and how long it's taken to develop and the problems that it's had, maybe it's evidence that buying services from the commercial sector really is the way to go," he said. 

It may have been a political gambit, rather than a business decision, that drove SLS's continued investment, Rosseau said. 

"Some cynics would say that it was congressional appropriators and senators with parochial interests who really wanted NASA to be building a giant rocket just for the jobs in their districts," he said. 

Still, SLS is likely to remain NASA's workhorse, at least for the Artemis missions, Rosseau said. 

"The advantage of SLS for Artemis is that, frankly, it was built for the Artemis mission. It was built to be compatible with the Orion spacecraft. It was built to do this job," he said. 

"NASA's worked really hard on it. It seems like they're going to stick with this for a while now."

Nevertheless, if SpaceX is able to prove that Starship is less costly and more efficient, there may be "increasing pressure" for NASA to prioritize using their rockets more heavily in missions beyond Artemis, Rosseau said.

NASA doesn't want to rely only on Starship

Starship is the only vehicle that is likely to let NASA land on the moon.

But Greg Autry, a visiting professor at Imperial College London's Institute for Security, Science, and Technology, told Insider: "We must have more than one way to get on and off the moon."

He called Starship "amazingly promising," but warned that there are a lot of hurdles to get over before it makes its first orbital flight. These include refueling the lander in orbit, getting life-support hardware on the spacecraft, and perfecting the dust-mitigation strategy for landing on the moon.

"If any company can do it, SpaceX can, but given the usual programmatic delays, which Starship has not been immune from, it is a real concern in the critical path to landing," Autry said.

NASA has to ensure it has another lunar lander, as well as Starship, for "mission assurance, system redundancy and eventually to guarantee economic competition," he said.

"NASA is, as a policy, pretty adverse to having one winner," Rosseau agreed.

The agency moved last September to open a contract for acquiring a second lunar lander from competitors for future missions.

There's space for several competitors in the market, Rosseau said, adding that he'll be keeping a close watch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Relativity Space's Terran R rocket in the near future. 

"You want healthy competition in this sector so that people have to keep innovating and don't get complacent," he said.