Starship's Incredible Landing Could finally Solve NASA's Biggest Trouble! Legs GONE...

Starship's Incredible Landing Could finally Solve NASA's Biggest Trouble! Legs GONE...
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#techmap #techmaps #elonmusk #starshipspacex
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Starship's Incredible Landing Could finally Solve NASA's Biggest Trouble! Legs GONE...
What if the biggest breakthrough in lunar exploration isn't a more advanced landing system—but getting rid of landing legs altogether? After Starship Flight 13 floated intact in the ocean for hundreds of hours without a single leg, many began asking an unexpected question: if it can survive that, why couldn't it land directly on the Moon the same way? The surprising part is that SpaceX actually tried this idea years ago. NASA rejected it almost immediately. So what did they see that everyone else missed? And why is SpaceX now building massive landing legs again despite Musk's obsession with eliminating unnecessary hardware?
Initial design
Starship's Incredible Landing Could finally Solve NASA's Biggest Trouble! Legs GONE...
Everything probably started off with the initial illustration of SpaceX's Starship on the moon. As you can see, it doesn't have landing legs, a weird design compared to the other lunar vehicles like the Soviet Luna 9, the Apollo landers, or the 2024 Odysseus mission. In fact, that is SpaceX's deliberate design following the core principle: The best part is no part. Instead of the heavy and complex landing gear, Starship HLS would touch down directly on its belly, using the spacecraft's own steel hull as the landing gear.
The design was wild. A 9-meter-wide steel base, reinforced with an 8-millimeter titanium ring, sat above a crushable skirt made of 3D-printed aluminum mesh. That mesh would deform on impact, absorbing up to 70% of the landing shock. During the final ten seconds before touchdown, the Raptor engines would throttle down to just 5–8% of their power, slowing the Starship to a gentle descent speed of less than one meter per second.
Starship's Incredible Landing Could finally Solve NASA's Biggest Trouble! Legs GONE...
The case against legs comes down to one simple truth: the bigger and more complex a piece of hardware gets, the more ways it has to fail. And landing legs are about as complex as spacecraft hardware gets — folding mechanisms, hydraulics, sensors, actuators, all wired into a control system that has to work perfectly on the first try, every time. For a vehicle the size of Starship, that means big, heavy gear with a lot of moving parts, any one of which could fail to deploy, fail to lock into place, or simply buckle under the force of landing. And this isn't just about shaving off weight — it's a safety problem. Every extra part is one more thing that can go wrong at the worst possible moment.
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