What is pending for SpaceX Starship to be a Moonship for NASA astronauts? Nearly everything.

First launch of SpaceX’s Starship V3 launch vehicle. Image: SpaceXSpaceX’s latest suborbital test flight of its two-stage Starship rocket on May 22, debuting a refined V3 version, was successful in its liftoff, stage separation, mock satellite deployment test, and the upper stage’s soft oceanic splashdown while its heat shield remained intact through atmospheric reentry. However, the flight failed in even attempting a soft splashdown of the large booster, which impacted somewhere unstated in the waters of Gulf of Mexico. The flight also did not test the planned reignition of an upper stage Raptor engine in space because one of the engines had failed early in flight. This means SpaceX will likely have to delay an orbital test flight of Starship until an upper stage engine relight is demonstrated in a future flight.In 2021, NASA selected Starship’s lunar variant for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon in 2024 for almost $3 billion, a price proposed by SpaceX itself. Starship’s early…