March 19, 2025 – SpaceX’s Starship program, critical to NASA’s lunar goals and Elon Musk’s Martian dreams, is at a crossroads, with experts offering starkly contrasting visions. While one leading engineer champions a smaller “Mini-Starship” to expedite human landings on the Moon and Mars, critics slam Starship for its repeated failures as evidence of a doomed design.
Dr. Robert Zubrin, a prominent aeronautical engineer and Mars Society founder, argues that a scaled-down “Starboat” could be the key to landing astronauts on the Moon by 2028, aligning with NASA’s Artemis timeline. “If you understand how to build Starships, you can build a Starboat. So we need to get working on that straight away,” Zubrin told the Mars Society’s Red Planet Live webcast. He envisions the Mini-Starship enabling lunar missions and robotic Mars expeditions within this decade, a proposal he’s pitched directly to Musk. SpaceX’s $4 billion NASA contracts for Artemis hinge on Starship’s success, amplifying the stakes.
Yet, independent journalist Will Lockett paints a bleaker picture, calling Starship’s track record “idiotic” and its iterative design process a failure. “After back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief… many are starting to question the viability of this machine,” Lockett wrote in Planet Earth & Beyond. He cites Tests 7 and 8, both derailed by aft-section fires—most recently in January 2025 when vibrations ruptured fuel lines, triggering an explosion over the Turks and Caicos Islands—as proof of unfixable flaws. “It becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go,” he asserts.
Common ground lies in the recognition of Starship’s bold scope. Zubrin praises SpaceX’s Silicon Valley-style prototyping—“crashing, and designing new generations”—as a strength, while Lockett acknowledges its initial promise, noting it “seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions.” Both see the spacecraft as central to Musk’s interplanetary vision, though their outlooks diverge sharply.
Zubrin remains optimistic, buoyed by SpaceX’s adoption of his Case for Mars strategies and its relentless testing. “By rapidly developing Starboats, SpaceX could be doing lunar missions actually in this 2028 time frame—that definitely could be done,” he said. Conversely, Lockett sees a pattern of futility, arguing that SpaceX’s pre-built Starships couldn’t incorporate fixes from prior failures, rendering the latest crash predictable. “So much for ‘iterative design,’” he quips.
The stakes are galactic. Congressman Mike Haridopolos, chairing the congressional space oversight committee, called the lunar landing “the most significant moment of America’s Space Program since Apollo,” urging victory in this “race to the Moon.” Yet, as SpaceX gears up for its next test, Lockett warns of a “pathetic excuse” in its latest failure analysis, while Zubrin bets on a nimbler craft to salvage the mission. Whether Starship soars or stalls, its fate will shape humanity’s extraterrestrial future.
Sources: Dr. Robert Zubrin, Mars Society’s Red Planet Live webcast; Will Lockett, Planet Earth & Beyond; Congressman Mike Haridopolos, Congressional hearing.
