Long-term objectives and verified accomplishments that define WSA's progress toward sustainable spaceflight.
These long-term goals guide WSA's engineering work:
Develop reusable boosters that routinely survive descent, land on target, and return to service. Not just surviving—consistently landing safely and protecting vehicle integrity for reflight.
Build guidance systems capable of landing spacecraft at designated locations with minimal landing error, gentle touchdown speeds, and no pilot intervention required.
Establish persistent orbital infrastructure and capability for regular crew rotation, logistics, docking, fuel transfer, and on-orbit assembly without ground support for every maneuver.
Extend landing capability to the Mun, Minmus, and Duna. Develop systems for surface operations, return capability, and increasingly ambitious mission profiles.
Reliably transport crew to orbit and beyond. Provide safe return, rescue capability, and redundant systems for human missions. Make crewed spaceflight routine and safe.
Build WSA's own guidance systems, control algorithms, and mission-planning tools. Understand the principles behind reliable spaceflight rather than outsourcing complex decisions.
WSA's engineering progression, organised by development stage rather than date. Select a milestone for its description, status and project page. Order is exact within each program (for example AutoLand V1.6 → A1–A4 → V2.x) and approximate between programs.
WSA uses these labels to distinguish the maturity and confirmation status of achievements and programs: