After acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy this month called out SpaceX for Starship delays, Elon Musk’s company has come back with an update defending its progress and offering a speedier plan to get astronauts back on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

“Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface,” reads a statement published to SpaceX’s website on Thursday.

Duffy said he would open back up a contract that SpaceX had won in 2021 to be the human landing system for the Artemis III mission that looks to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972

See Full Page