NASA Shows First Look Inside Starship Moon Cabin Ahead of 2027 Tests

Credit: NASA/SpaceX

NASA gave the public its first look at the crew cabin SpaceX is building for its Starship moon lander on Friday, during an Artemis Acceleration briefing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The images show Cabin 1, which is under construction inside SpaceX’s Starfactory at Starbase, Texas, and they arrived alongside an updated SpaceX milestones chart that runs all the way to the crewed Moon landing NASA is targeting for 2028.

Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, led the update with Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons, who walked through SpaceX’s progress on the lander. One Cabin 1 shot shows a narrow, brightly lit room with padded white walls, a wood-toned ceiling panel and what looks like a padded bed with tie-down straps. Another shows a row of window openings cut into a section of Starship’s steel hull, while a third catches workers fitting out the structure.

Credit: NASA/SpaceX

LIVE: @NASAAdmin and agency leaders are sharing the latest updates on next year’s Artemis III mission and our plans to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon by 2028.

— NASA (@NASA) October 23, 2026

According to the milestones chart, Cabin 1 should be fully built this quarter, with operations testing in the first quarter of 2027 and an airlock demonstration in the second quarter. The same chart puts SpaceX’s ship-to-ship propellant transfer demo in the first quarter of 2027, followed by a landing leg demo in the spring. Uncrewed demo tanker flights are slated for the third quarter, ahead of an uncrewed lunar landing mission late in 2027. NASA notes that some images on the chart are representative of flight hardware and courtesy of SpaceX.

Credit: NASA/SpaceX

Parsons said the propellant transfer demo will use two Starships, one launching from Launch Complex 39A in Florida and the other from Starbase. He also said Starship Flight 15 is expected in November with Raptor engine improvements, and that SpaceX’s first Starship launch from Florida should follow in the coming months. Flight 15 is the mission where SpaceX plans to catch both the booster and the ship.

Refueling came up as well, one day after Charlie Precourt of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said a Starship landing could take around 22 refueling launches and Elon Musk pushed back with an estimate of 6 to 8. Parsons said the early 2027 transfer demo will teach NASA and SpaceX a lot, and that efficiency gains should bring the tanker count closer to the high single digits. Isaacman added that a faster launch cadence, moving from every two weeks toward weekly, plus more mass delivered to low Earth orbit, should cut the number of flights further.

For Artemis III, the mission is a crewed test in low Earth orbit next year rather than a landing. NASA plans to rehearse its 2028 Moon landing in orbit, with Orion meeting test landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. The SpaceX vehicle will be a Starship V3 fitted with a docking system on its nose, and NASA says on its Artemis III lander test page that astronauts will not go inside it. That means Cabin 1 is really about Artemis IV and beyond, giving engineers hardware to test and giving crews a realistic place to train.

The quarterly timeline itself was first shown at the International Astronautical Congress on October 5, so Friday’s real news is the hardware. Last year, SpaceX said it had completed 49 milestones for the Starship moon lander, and much of that work was shown through renderings and mockups. Isaacman also said NASA hasn’t made a final call on which lander will carry the Artemis IV crew.

Would you want to call a cabin like this home on a trip to the Moon?