NASA panel points to 22 Starship flights for a lunar landing

Charlie Precourt, a former astronaut who now serves on NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during the panel's quarterly meeting that it would take 22 Starship launches to fuel a lunar lander for a mission to the Moon and back. That figure would be needed to supply a Starship-based lander in low-Earth orbit with enough liquid oxygen and methane propellant for a voyage to the lunar surface and a return to lunar orbit. The comment came as the panel discussed risks tied to the Artemis Program.

The estimate is notable because NASA has long declined to commit to a specific number. The agency has treated the launch count as a closely guarded detail, and officials have repeatedly declined to state it publicly. In 2023, Lisa Watson-Morgan, then director of NASA's Human Landing System program, said, "We have a general idea, but I'm reluctant to say exactly what that is." She later indicated the figure fell in the "high single digits to the low double digits," and other officials have referenced numbers in the high teens.

The arithmetic behind any such figure involves a depot Starship launched first, followed by a series of tanker Starships to fill it with propellant. The hope has been that improvements to Starship's lift capacity would shrink the number of tanker flights needed for a lunar mission. However, some NASA officials have expressed concern that such improvements are not materializing quickly enough to allow Starship to play a meaningful role in returning humans to the Moon for NASA within this decade.

Precourt's remarks mark a shift in how openly the launch requirement is being discussed, and a figure of 22 would represent a significant jump from earlier estimates. The number of tanker flights needed remains a central question for Artemis, since it bears directly on how quickly and reliably a mission to the lunar surface could be assembled in orbit. Whether that estimate holds, and how it affects the timeline for a crewed landing, are open questions as the program moves forward.