That just sound like he's not optimistic Starship can even make orbit with useful payload this year, which looks reasonable considering what happened today with V2, lolView attachment 146802
Wow. I knew NASA's expectations of orbital propellant transfer this Spring were unrealistic, but I still expected it to happen before year-end in 2025. Pushing that out to >2026 means even an unmanned HLS landing demo can't really happen before 2027 at the earliest, and 2028 more likely (as there's also the intermediate step involved of developing, testing, and deploying the orbital propellant depot). Then, Artemis 3 is really NET 2029 - and that's assuming the first-ever unmanned demo of HLS lunar landing, loiter, and liftoff completes without any major problems and achieves all test objectives. Perhaps Artemis 3 realistically isn't likely to fly until 2030... This is 'Elon Time' we're talking about
@iewgnem @Xiongmao @taxiya good call
Whatever they do, they should probably do before 2028, because if Trump gets deposed, Elon might not have a good time.