Elon Musk’s Insane Starship Moon Landing Method Shocked NASA: Skip Legs!
0:00 No Legs Starship
2:47 The Skirt Lander
6:07 Landing Sideways
8:32 The Hidden Trade-Offs
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Elon Musk’s Insane Starship Moon Landing Method Shocked NASA: Skip Legs!
In the standard version of Starship, the biggest technical challenge lies in its heat shield tiles. But for the HLS version, the toughest part isn’t about heat, it’s the landing legs.
Sure, SpaceX already has experience designing and landing rockets using legs, just look at the Falcon 9. But the HLS is a whole different beast. It’s five times heavier and far more complex, making a reliable landing system a whole new challenge.
That raises a big question: if it’s so hard, why not just get rid of the legs altogether? As Musk once said, “The best part is no part.”
That’s right, the HLS might actually be designed without landing legs. But how would it land on the Moon?
Let’s find out in today’s episode of Alpha Tech.
Elon Musk’s Insane Starship Moon Landing Method Shocked NASA: Skip Legs!
Throughout history, every lunar lander, from the Soviet Luna 9 in 1966, to NASA’s Apollo Lunar Module, and even Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1, has relied on landing legs. Not a single lander has ever touched down on the Moon without them. Their purpose is simple but critical: to absorb the impact on touchdown and keep the vehicle stable on the Moon’s rough, uneven surface, blanketed with fine, powdery regolith that can easily give way.
The same idea applies to SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System. According to the company’s early design concepts, it should also have landing legs, but here’s the strange part: to this day, SpaceX has never revealed any official design, diagram, or even a 3D concept of what those legs might look like.
Elon Musk’s Insane Starship Moon Landing Method Shocked NASA: Skip Legs!
That’s led many to wonder, is designing landing legs for the HLS really that difficult? Well, yes. It actually is.
The main problem comes down to scale. Starship HLS is enormous, 9 meters wide, 52 meters tall, and weighing around 300 tons at landing. Now imagine trying to safely set that down on the Moon’s surface, a world full of craters, rocks, and soft dust. If you use traditional legs, they’d have to be extremely long and strong, adding several tons of dry mass to the vehicle. They’d also need special systems to prevent one leg from sinking into a soft patch of regolith, which could instantly tip the whole lander over.
Even SpaceX’s experience with Falcon 9 doesn’t help much here. Falcon 9 only uses four legs, lands on flat surfaces, and deals with Earth’s gravity, plus it weighs just about 22 to 25 tons during landing. By comparison, the HLS under lunar gravity would weigh the equivalent of about 50 tons on Earth. But the landing site itself is far more dangerous, especially considering that HLS has a completely different design from traditional lunar landers. It’s much taller, which means its center of gravity is also much higher, making it far more susceptible to tipping over if anything goes wrong during touchdown.
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Credit to : ALPHA TECH