You Don't Understand Just How Big Of A Leap Starship V3 Needs To Be
Time is running out.
Did you know Starship was meant to land on the Moon two years ago? Yet here we are in 2026, and Starship has not even reached orbit. This rocket is so far behind, it’s beyond a joke. With SpaceX’s IPO rapidly approaching and NASA’s crewed Artemis III mission (which requires Starship) just on the horizon, SpaceX desperately needs to take a monumental leap forward. Well, that is what Starship V3 (version 3) is expected to deliver, and Musk recently announced that the first fully V3 Starship will launch in May. So, the big question is: what does V3 need to accomplish, and by when, to get this car crash of a program back on track?
The Goal Posts
Let’s start with what the actual goal is and how Starship needs to operate to achieve it. Considering how much cash NASA has poured into Starship, Artemis III is arguably Starship’s biggest objective. This mission is supposed to use the Human Landing System variant of Starship to shuttle crew between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. The mission was originally slated to happen last year, but because Starship is so far behind, it has been significantly delayed to late 2028. Indeed, NASA’s Watchdog is now concerned that Starship development is progressing so slowly that this mission will be even further delayed.
So, what does Starship have to do to fulfil this mission?
Well, the crew of Artemis III will take off on board a NASA SLS rocket and travel to lunar orbit in a NASA Orion spacecraft, where they will rendezvous with HLS and use it as a lunar lander shuttle. The HLS is essentially just a modified Starship upper stage, so SpaceX has to be able to launch a Starship upper stage, plus all the HLS gubbins and fuel, to the Moon in two years’ time.
But Starship can’t go straight to the Moon; it needs refuelling in orbit first. The current idea is that a “tanker” variant of the Starship upper stage will be placed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). It will be refuelled by multiple Starship launches, which will dock with the tanker and transfer their cryogenic propellant into the tanker before coming back down. Once the tanker is full, the HLS will launch, dock with the tanker, fully refuel, and then head to the Moon.
Now, here is the thing: NASA wants SpaceX to demonstrate all of this, as well as lunar landing and ascent with an uncrewed mission, before they conduct a crewed Artemis III mission using HLS.
For some context, the outgoing Starship V2 never made orbit and only ever carried 16 tons, or 16% of its promised payload, on a “successful” suborbital flight. Because it never made orbit, it never even attempted orbital refuelling. It also never successfully landed its upper stage.
So, what needs to be changed in Starship V3 to make it suitable for Artemis III?
Increased Payload to Orbit
Let’s start with the main factor: increasing the payload. As I mentioned previously, the V2 Starship only ever carried 16 tons on suborbital flights, but SpaceX claims it can carry 35 tons to LEO, which might be a bit of an exaggeration, to say the least. Either way, it falls severely short of the promised 100+ ton payload to LEO that is required to make this orbital refuelling shenanigans possible.
Firstly, it needs to successfully reach orbit with a payload, which might be more challenging than you think. The extra fuel required to take Starship to LEO is roughly 20 tonnes (as calculated by Thunderf00t), which suggests that Starship V2 can reach only the lowest possible orbit if it carries no payload!
So, how is Musk solving this horrific problem?
Well, I covered this topic before. The V3 has been fitted with SpaceX’s new Raptor 3 engines. By removing heat shielding and instead using more ablative cooling (which is when cryogenic fuel is used to cool the engine before it is burned), the Raptor 3 is 105 kg lighter than the previous Raptor 2, saving over four tonnes of weight per rocket. The Raptor 3 has also increased its power, delivering 9% more overall thrust. Additionally, the V3 Booster has 12% more propellant than the V2, and the V3 upper stage has 6% more. To accommodate this, the V3 is noticeably longer than the V2, yet its dry mass is reported to be a huge 20% to 30% lower than the V2’s, or 100 tonnes less.
This should increase the payload of Starship, but is it enough to go from a 16 ton payload on a suborbital flight to 100 tons to orbit? I very much doubt it.
There is also the issue of reliability. The Starship V2 upper stage failures were the result of engine flash events (caused by premature propellant ignition, which methods like ablative cooling can induce) and lack of structural integrity. So, increasing the rocket engines’ power, removing the rocket engine heat shields, making the rockets carry far more propellant mass, and transforming the rocket structure to be larger, yet lighter, could very well dramatically increase the risk of catastrophic failure. There is no point in increasing orbital payload if the chances of actually getting to orbit are minimal.
Starship V3 needs to prove that these changes can not only increase payload capacity by over 600% to 100 tons, but that it can achieve this feat reliably. I cannot exaggerate enough how gargantuan a task that is from Starship V2’s currently horrifically low baseline.
Refuelling
Starship V3 has so little time to test and prove it is capable of orbital refuelling that it basically has to do it straight out of the gate. This creates four major challenges.
