In multiple television appearances this week, Transportation Secretary and acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy confirmed that he would be re-opening the contract to build a crewed Moon lander for the Artemis missions. That’s a blow for SpaceX, which secured the contract back in 2021 to use its still-in-development Starship for the job. The trouble is, as Duffy notes, Starship is behind schedule, which is a polite way of saying it has blown up a lot of times.
In fairness, Starship is a massively ambitious endeavor, which takes a lot of time and failed prototypes. When it does work, it’s a pretty remarkable, reusable rocket. But time is something NASA doesn’t have. Duffy told CNBC that America is in a race to the Moon with China, so to win it, the Artemis program has got to get moving faster. The Artemis III mission, which aims to return American boots to the lunar surface, is scheduled for a 2027 launch. Starship currently seems unlikely to meet that timeframe.
Even beyond China, Duffy noted another race we’re in: one with U.S. President Donald Trump. “The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president’s term,” he told CNBC. So, that’s a priority, apparently. To meet it, NASA can’t rely on SpaceX’s timeline anymore. Duffy will therefore let other companies compete for the contract instead; SpaceX can also bid, though it will have to prove that something is changing for the faster. There’s just one small problem — how do you open a federal contract during a government shutdown?
Landing on the Moon (private sector edition)
NASA landed on the Moon back in the 1960s, but the current Artemis program is wildly more complex. We’ve written about this before, but briefly, the current plan is for a Starship to launch into Earth orbit, be refueled in orbit around 15 times, fly into lunar orbit, wait for the astronauts to arrive on a completely different spacecraft, land on the Moon, and then return the astronauts back to the other spacecraft. All by 2027! Thus far, Starship has accomplished… the first of those steps.
So, yeah, sounds like it has a ways to go before it’s ready. As former NASA executive Douglas Loverro told the New York Times, “In order to go ahead and build a lander in under five years, you can’t invent anything new… Anything you use has to already exist.” Sounds like Duffy has come around to that line of thinking, and is now hoping that another company might be able to make a lunar lander using tried-and-true, Apollo-style technology.
Who might that be? The most obvious choice, as Duffy himself noted, is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. That company is well into developing a lunar lander, since it’s already contracted to build one for the Artemis V mission. That said, it just laid off 10% of its workforce. Lockheed Martin has been working on some lander designs as well, so it could enter the mix too.
The race for space is gaining pace
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been characteristically gracious about all this. “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” he said on X, the social media platform he owns. “Useful payload,” he clarified, presumably after someone told him that Blue Origin had, in fact, done the former. He continued, “Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.” They are so marked, Mr Musk.
Meanwhile, you know who is deep into development of an Apollo-style lunar lander? China, which seeks to put taikonauts on the Moon by 2030. Under the surface here, there may be a pressure on America to do ‘more’ than what Apollo did 50 years ago or risk looking like it hasn’t progressed as a country. China has no such problems and just wants to get people on the Moon quickly. So, a race it is. At this point, it’s anyone’s game. That is, if the government ever reopens and funds it.
