NASA finally showed the inside of SpaceX’s Moon lander. At its “Artemis Acceleration” briefing at Kennedy Space Center on Friday, the agency released the first public images of “Cabin 1,” the crew cabin SpaceX is building for the Starship Human Landing System inside its Starfactory at Starbase, Texas, along with an updated quarter-by-quarter list of what SpaceX has to pull off before astronauts land in 2028.
The briefing ran at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT on Friday, Oct. 23 (3 AM JST Saturday) with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons.
The room
It’s small, and it’s very white. One shot shows a narrow, brightly lit space with padded white walls, a wood-toned ceiling panel and what looks like a padded bunk with tie-down straps, TeslaNorth describes. Another shows a row of window openings cut into a section of Starship’s steel hull, and a third catches workers fitting out the structure. NASA and SpaceX also released new renderings of the docking adapter for Artemis III, which Sawyer Merritt was quick to post. Until now, the public mostly had renders and mockups to go on. SpaceX said last year it had completed 49 milestones on the lander, much of it shown that way.
The checklist
NASA’s “SpaceX Development Milestones” chart, shared during the briefing, lays out the next year:
- Q4 2026: finish building Cabin 1.
- Q1 2027: ship-to-ship propellant transfer demo, and Cabin 1 operations testing.
- Q2 2027: landing leg demo, a Cabin 1 airlock demo, and the Artemis III ship barged to the Cape.
- Q3 2027: the Artemis III mission and uncrewed demo tanker flights.
- Late 2027: an uncrewed lunar landing.
- 2028: the crewed landing on Artemis IV.
The quarterly timeline itself first appeared at the International Astronautical Congress on Oct. 5, as Space.com reported, so the real news Friday was the hardware. NASA also shared a new concept of operations for the SpaceX lander on Artemis IV.
Parsons added detail on the refueling test: it will use two Starships, one launching from Launch Complex 39A in Florida and the other from Starbase. He said Starship Flight 15, the one where SpaceX plans to catch both the booster and the ship, is expected in November with Raptor engine improvements, and that the first Starship launch from Florida should follow in the coming months.
So how many tankers?
This is the number everyone wanted. A day earlier, at NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting, former astronaut Charlie Precourt said “the last estimate is around 22 flights” to fuel the lander for Artemis IV, Ars Technica reported. Elon Musk replied on X: “That’s way too high. Actual number will be more like 6 to 8.”
On Friday, Parsons split the difference without saying so. The early-2027 transfer demo will teach NASA and SpaceX a lot, he said, and efficiency gains should bring the tanker count closer to the high single digits. Isaacman added that a faster launch cadence, from every two weeks toward weekly, plus more mass delivered to low Earth orbit should cut the number further. SpaceX already told investors on its earnings call that it’s aiming for weekly Starship launches in 2027, and the FAA is reviewing a plan for up to 456 launches a year. A weekly rocket makes the tanker math a lot less scary.
Artemis III won’t land
A reminder on the plan since NASA’s February overhaul: Artemis III, targeted for mid-2027, keeps four astronauts in low Earth orbit, where Orion will rendezvous with test landers from both SpaceX and Blue Origin. The SpaceX vehicle will be a Starship V3 with a docking system on its nose, and NASA’s own mission page says the crew won’t go inside it. So Cabin 1 is really about Artemis IV and beyond, giving engineers hardware to test and astronauts a realistic place to train. Isaacman said NASA hasn’t decided which lander will carry the Artemis IV crew.
Japan has skin in that decision. Under its 2024 agreement with NASA, Japan is supplying a pressurized lunar rover and is due to fly two Japanese astronauts to the Moon’s surface on future Artemis missions, and the only ways down on offer are these two American landers. Cabin 1 may well be the first Moon lander a Japanese astronaut trains in.
Sources: NASA on X (briefing), TeslaNorth, Space.com, Ars Technica, Florida Today, NASA media advisory, Sawyer Merritt on X.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Inside “Cabin 1,” the crew cabin for SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander, under construction in Starfactory at Starbase, Texas. Image: NASA/SpaceX, from NASA’s Artemis Acceleration briefing, Oct. 23, 2026 (cropped to remove the slide caption).
