01 / The cargo door

SpaceX pushes cargo out of the bay

Starship carries satellites in a slot along the side of the payload bay and pushes them out one at a time, which is why the mechanism is widely called the Pez dispenser. Flight 13 on July 24, 2026 put that door to work with real spacecraft. The ship survived its own splashdown in the Indian Ocean intact, so SpaceX recovered it, read the heat shield tiles, and built changes into the next vehicle.

Flight 14 changes the one thing that matters for cargo: the satellites stay. Reaching orbit before the door opens means the payload separates onto a trajectory of its own. It does not follow the ship down. Every lunar delivery inherits that requirement.

NASA sizes the large cargo landers it is buying from SpaceX and Blue Origin at roughly 26,000 to 33,000 pounds onto the surface. Flight 14 answers the first question, which is whether the vehicle can let go of mass in orbit and keep flying its own plan.

02 / The Earth floor

HDR, Lerch Bates, and Thompson build the hall the ships come from

Before a Starship can do any of that, someone has to build it. Gigabay is the next Starship production hall at Starbase, Texas. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation project TABS2025022205 registers it at 700,000 square feet and $250 million. It names HDR as design firm of record and runs from July 1, 2025 to a December 31, 2026 target. SpaceX is the owner builder.

Two more firms name their own scope on it. Lerch Bates lists enclosure, building logistics, facade access, and vertical transportation on SpaceX Gigabays at Starbase and Cape Canaveral, with HDR as its client. Thompson Construction Group lists the foundations: about 161,000 square feet of shallow foundations, plus grading, earthwork, piles, baseplate grouting, cast in place anchors, and the finished slab.

SpaceX builds most of Starship in house and publishes very few lunar tier two suppliers. The outside record here is thickest around the buildings rather than the vehicle. Southern Steel Engineers names steel connection design, stairs, and shop drawing review on a 2024 Starbase office job of about 329,493 square feet. These four firms are on paper for the place Starship hardware is made, so they sit on the same flight record as the lander.

03 / The propellant gate

SpaceX has to fill Starship in orbit

In the public Human Landing System architecture, HLS for short, Starship reaches Earth orbit with far less propellant than a Moon trip needs. Tanker Starships fill a depot. The lander loads liquid methane and liquid oxygen there, and only then leaves for the Moon. SpaceX names two flight tests as the next HLS milestones. One is a long duration flight that returns propulsion and thermal data. The other is a propellant transfer between two docked Starships. Both are targeted 2026 and paced by Starship Version 3, the generation flying on September 28.

The tanker count and any per tanker price stay unpublished. The public money here is the program award. Option A is about $2.89 billion from 2021 and Option B about $1.15 billion from 2022, roughly $4.04 billion stacked. Those are firm fixed price development packages. They are not the price of a seat, a ton of cargo, or a tanker flight.

04 / The Orion dock

Lockheed Martin holds the other side of the hatch

NASA published the Artemis III plan on July 15, 2026. It is a demonstration in low Earth orbit ahead of crewed landings in 2028, and it flies in a set order. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon test lander launches first and can hold in orbit up to 30 days. Then SLS launches four crew in Orion from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy.

Blue Moon docks side on. Up to two crew go inside and test the life support system, cabin, and avionics, with an instrumented spacesuit mass simulator reading the cabin environment. A Starship Version 3 test article launches last. It docks nose to nose with Orion to test controllability and communications, and the crew stays in Orion.

Jeremy Parsons, the Artemis program manager, called it “a highly choreographed dance with a demanding launch sequence across multiple launch pads.” The Starship hardware is SpaceX’s own docking adapter, based on the Dragon 2 system and able to act as either the active or the passive side. NASA and SpaceX ran it through more than 200 docking scenarios at the Johnson Space Center. Lockheed Martin holds the Orion side of that rendezvous and docking.

05 / Surface access

Axiom Space builds the suits for the ride down

A Starship standing on the Moon puts its crew deck tens of meters above the ground. People and cargo reach the surface by elevator. On April 30, 2024, NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock and Axiom Space astronaut Peggy Whitson spent a day on that problem at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, working with Starship HLS development hardware. They walked from the airlock deck to a test elevator in fully pressurized AxEMU suits, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, each carrying a full-scale model of its life support backpack.

Axiom’s part here is the suit, not the elevator. The elevator is SpaceX hardware and its manufacturer is not public. The suit is what makes the rehearsal real, because pressurizing it changes how a person fits through a hatch and how much they can carry.

This step turns a lander into a delivery. The door, the propellant, and the dock put a vehicle at the pole. The elevator puts people and hardware on the regolith, and it decides how much of a load can come off once it arrives. Artemis IV is the first mission planned to set crew down on the surface.

06 / The cargo assignment

Toyota and JAXA build the rover NASA plans to send on Starship

NASA wrote on November 19, 2024 that it intends for SpaceX’s Starship cargo lander to deliver a pressurized rover to the lunar surface. The rover is in development by JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The delivery is set no earlier than fiscal year 2032, for Artemis VII and later. Blue Origin holds the other assignment on the same release, a lunar surface habitat, no earlier than fiscal year 2033.

The rover is the Lunar Cruiser, a JAXA and Toyota vehicle with a supplier list of its own. Yokogawa Electric is named on the control platform and battery measurement, Konica Minolta on dust removal, JAMSS on the crew system and habitability. NASA’s assignment covers the delivery, not the rover, and the program cost is not public. It is the most concrete Starship cargo job on the public record: a Japanese pressurized rover, built by named shops on Earth, riding an American lander to the surface.