Starship will push Orion to the moon

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**SPEAKER_4** (1:26)
NASA completely rewrote the blueprint for returning humans to the lunar surface. Yeah. They took a highly anticipated moon landing mission and turned it into a low Earth orbit traffic jam involving multiple separate vehicles.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:42)
Yeah. I mean, imagine buying a ticket for the ultimate road trip, but instead of actually driving to your destination, you spend a week practicing parallel parking in your driveway. Right. Like instead of walking on the moon, the astronauts will just be conducting this multi-day docking practice session with a blue origin lander and a SpaceX Starship just above Earth.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:00)
They stay right in orbit.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:01)
So the question you really have to ask is, how does removing the actual moon landing from this mission reduce the risk of eventually getting you to the lunar surface?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:09)
Well, we start with the launch vehicle that sends the crew up. The Orion capsule will fly on the Space Launch System rocket, the SLS, but it flies without a functional upper stage.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:20)
Wait, normally a rocket relies on that final propulsion stage to push the capsule out of Earth's gravity well and point toward the moon.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:28)
Exactly.
But for this specific flight, they're using a non-propulsive spacer instead. It's essentially this structural dummy bolted right into the middle of the rocket stack.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:39)
If you were only going to low Earth orbit to practice docking, carrying dead weight seems, well, counterproductive. You would think they could just remove the upper stage entirely, mount the capsule directly on the core stage and save the mass.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:52)
I mean, you would think so.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:54)
Rockets are built around weight optimization. Flying a heavy hollow tube on purpose sounds like an error in physics.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:01)
You have to look at the rocket as a continuous physical structure. It's almost like a giant tuning fork.
The flight computers on the SLS are programmed to expect a highly specific weight distribution, center of gravity, and resonance frequency during ascent.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:16)
Oh, I see.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:17)
So if you remove a huge segment like the upper stage, the aerodynamic profile of the entire vehicle changes.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:21)
So the rocket gets shorter.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:23)
Yeah, and the vibration modes shift. As the vehicle hits max Q, which is the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure in the lower atmosphere, those altered physical vibrations could exceed the structural limits of the frame. Wow. The stress could literally tear the rocket apart in flight.
So engineers insert this spacer. It is carefully engineered to mimic the exact mass and external dimensions of the real upper stage. It tricks the rocket's guidance and structural systems into flying as if the full intact vehicle is there.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:56)
That decision changes the physical inventory for the actual landing mission later on, though. Upper stages are not mass-produced commodities.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:03)
They're not at all.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:03)
They are highly complex, custom-built pieces of propulsion hardware that require years of fabrication, welding, pressure testing. By deciding to fly a deadweight spacer on this test flight, you preserve the last remaining functional upper stage hardware for the future landing mission.