NASA Will Re-Open Contract For Moon Lander As Starship Falls Behind Schedule

In multiple television appearances this week, Transportation Secretary and acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy confirmed that he could be re-opening the contract to construct a crewed Moon lander for the Artemis missions. That is a blow for SpaceX, which secured the contract back in 2021 to make use of its still-in-development Starship for the job. The difficulty is, as Duffy notes, Starship is behind schedule, which is a polite way of claiming it has blown up lots of times.

In fairness, Starship is a massively ambitious endeavor, which takes lots of time and failed prototypes. When it does work, it’s a fairly 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 goals to return American boots to the lunar surface, is scheduled for a 2027 launch. Starship currently seems unlikely to satisfy that timeframe.

Even beyond China, Duffy noted one other race we’re in: one with U.S. President Donald Trump. “The president and I would like to get to the Moon on this president’s term,” he told CNBC. So, that is a priority, apparently. To satisfy it, NASA cannot depend on SpaceX’s timeline anymore. Duffy will due to this fact let other firms compete for the contract as a substitute; SpaceX can even bid, though it should should prove that something is changing for the faster. There’s only one small problem — how do you open a federal contract during a government shutdown?

NASA landed on the Moon back within the Nineteen Sixties, but the present Artemis program is wildly more complex. We have written about this before, but briefly, the present 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 reach on a totally different spacecraft, land on the Moon, after which return the astronauts back to the opposite spacecraft. All by 2027! To date, Starship has completed… the primary of those steps.

So, yeah, appears like it has a ways to go before it’s ready. As former NASA executive Douglas Loverro told the Recent York Times, “As a way to go ahead and construct a lander in under five years, you’ll be able to’t invent anything recent… Anything you utilize has to exist already.” Seems like Duffy has come around to that line of pondering, and is now hoping that one other company might give you the option to make a lunar lander using tried-and-true, Apollo-style technology.

Who might that be? Essentially the most obvious selection, as Duffy himself noted, is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. That company is well into developing a lunar lander, because it’s already contracted to construct 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 combination too.

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, actually, done the previous. He continued, “Starship will find yourself doing the entire Moon mission. Mark my words.” They’re so marked, Mr Musk.

Meanwhile, who’s deep into development of an Apollo-style lunar lander? China, which seeks to place taikonauts on the Moon by 2030. Under the surface here, there could also be a pressure on America to do ‘more’ than what Apollo did 50 years ago or risk looking prefer it hasn’t progressed as a rustic. China has no such problems and just desires to get people on the Moon quickly. So, a race it’s. At this point, it’s anyone’s game. That’s, if the federal government ever reopens and funds it.