“Gateway to Mars,” the unofficial moniker for SpaceX’s Boca Chica/Starbase complex, sometimes extended to Brownsville itself, may need to be amended to “Gateway to Mars — Maybe, Eventually” or something along those lines.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s focus on establishing a human presence on Mars in order to save the species has long been well known. Musk had pegged his hopes on Starship, the massive space vehicle under development at Boca Chica/Starbase, to get humanity to the red planet.
At the same time, SpaceX has a $4.4 billion contract with NASA — the first chunk, $2.9 billion, awarded in 2021 — to develop Starship as the Human Landing System (HLS) for the Artemis III mission, which aimed to land U.S. astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972 as part of the space agency’s Artemis moon program.
Last November, SpaceX was hit with criticism that Starship development was taking too long and that China was likely to land astronauts on the moon before the United States. Among the critics was former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, who spearheaded creation of the Artemis program.
Musk fired back, accusing Bridenstine of “revisionist history from a paid lobbyist.”
Still, on Feb. 8, Musk posted that Mars is on the back burner, while establishing a settlement on the moon is now SpaceX’s first priority as it relates to Starship.
“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20-plus years,” he posted.
But in the latest twist, NASA on Feb. 27 announced major changes to the Artemis program, including cancellation of the Artemis III crewed moon landing, a mission that had been pushed back repeatedly and wasn’t scheduled to happen before mid-2027.
NASA said it will reconfigure Artemis III — still scheduled for 2027 — “to test out systems and operational capabilities in low Earth orbit to prepare for an Artemis IV landing in 2028,” according to the space agency.
The redesigned mission will attempt to include “rendezvous and docking with one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin,” NASA said, adding that the new mission also will include “in-space tests of the docked vehicles, integrated checkout of life support, communications, and propulsion systems.”
Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is a competitor to SpaceX.
The agency’s Artemis shake-up comes on the heels of last month’s release of the 2025 NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Report (ASAP), which observed that Starship development “struggled during most of 2025, although the last two flights of the year were successful and met the major goals that SpaceX had set for the developmental Starship version 2 (V2), a suborbital prototype of the Starship orbital version 3 (V3).”
The ASAP report notes that achieving the necessary progress in developing and testing “a version of Starship that has not yet flown in time to support a human lunar landing mission within the next few years appears daunting and … (is) probably not achievable.
“Beyond this, the physics of landing a six-to-one height-to-width ratio vehicle on the uneven, poorly lit polar lunar surface seems questionable at best.”
The latter statement refers to the fact that Starship is 171 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
According to the report, ASAP has requested a meeting with SpaceX’s senior engineering team for a deeper discussion on things like HLS design, cryogenic fuel transfer, and “other critical aspects of the overall Concept of Operations for the HLS mission.” The meeting was to be scheduled for early 2026, according to the report.
“In sum, an uncrewed demonstration flight of the HLS is required prior to the Artemis III mission and should provide additional risk reduction,” ASAP said. “These are major contributing concerns to the Panel’s formal recommendation (to delay a crewed lunar landing attempt).
“That said, at this time it is difficult to imagine another NASA contractor capable of meeting a challenge of this scale and pace as SpaceX,” according to the report.
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