Human Landing System

The Human Landing System (HLS) is the spacecraft in NASA's Artemis program that is expected to land humans on the Moon. It is being designed to convey astronauts from the Lunar Gateway space station in lunar orbit to the lunar surface, sustain them there, and then return them to the Gateway station.

Rather than leading the HLS development effort internally, NASA provided a reference design and asked commercial vendors compete to design, develop and deliver a system based on a NASA-produced set of requirements. Each selected vendor is required to deliver two landers: one for an uncrewed test lunar landing, and one to be used as the first Artemis crewed lander. NASA started the competition process in 2019 with the Starship HLS selected as the winner in 2021. The original timeline called for an uncrewed test flight before a crewed flight in 2024 as part of the Artemis 3 mission, but the crewed flight has been delayed to at least 2025.

In addition to the initial contract, NASA awarded two rounds of separate contracts in May 2019 and September 2021 on aspects of the HLS to encourage alternative designs, separately from the initial HLS development effort. It announced in March 2022 that it was developing new sustainability rules and pursuing both a Starship HLS upgrade and a new competing alternative design that would comply with the rules. In May 2023, Blue Origin was selected as the second provider for lunar lander services.