Kshatriya Hints NASA May Reconsider South Pole for Initial Artemis Landings

NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said today that to be as agile as possible, the agency is opening up the specifications for early Artemis landings while keeping their sights on the South Pole. He also expanded on recent comments by Administrator Jared Isaacman on quickly establishing a Moon Base using robotic spacecraft as the first steps. Isaacman has said he wants monthly robotic landings at the South Pole starting next year.

Speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Kshatriya expanded on recent changes to the Artemis program intended to make it “more achievable.”

On February 27, Isaacman announced significant changes for the next three years. With Artemis II getting ready to launch as early as April 1, Artemis III now will be an earth-orbiting mission in 2027, not a lunar landing. Artemis IV will be the first U.S. lunar landing since Apollo. That is still planned for 2028 and a second landing that year is also a possibility. That would increase the cadence of Space Launch System (SLS) launches to every 10 months instead of every three years or so, avoiding what Isaacman calls a loss of “muscle memory” for the launch teams and making the system more reliable.

The driving goal is to get American astronauts back on the lunar surface before China lands taikonauts there and doing it before President Trump leaves office on January 20, 2029.  The increased launch cadence and addition of an earth-orbiting test flight address part of the problem, but another factor is delays in development of SpaceX’s Human Landing System (HLS) required to get astronauts from lunar orbit down to and back from the surface. NASA is incentivizing SpaceX and its competitor, Blue Origin, to accelerate HLS development. Blue Origin was awarded an HLS contract two years after SpaceX and its debut wasn’t expected until the end of the decade, but both companies are assessing what it would take to get U.S. astronauts on the Moon in 2028.

Relaxing some of the requirements could help. The Moon’s South Pole was chosen as the landing site when the program began in 2019 during Trump’s first term. The South Pole is of scientific interest and water ice that could someday support human outposts is thought to exist in permanently shadowed craters there.

The South Pole is difficult to access, however, and the heavily cratered, mountainous terrain is far more dangerous than closer to the equator where the Apollo missions landed. The Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) NASA chose for the Artemis South Pole missions means crews must remain on the surface for at least 6.5 days.

Kshatriya suggested NASA is relooking at that for the initial landings.

“The whole point is to get down to the South Pole. I think we agree, still, hopefully, that that’s the right place to go. We are going to keep our sights there.

“We have opened up the, I would say, the performance specification for the early landing missions in as many ways as we can, in terms of different lunar orbits we want to take, or different other constraints … to make it as agile as possible, to recognize performance limitations in some of the machines we have and let our providers tell us, hey, if you took these constraints out of the way, how could we go faster? So we’re going to do that.

“But we’re not yet giving up on the South Pole, and I don’t think we will, because I think that’s a place … we need to go. We need to challenge ourselves and we need to go to some place that we’ve never been.” — Amit Kshatriya

Indeed, Isaacman recently told Spaceflightnow that he wants robotic landers at the South Pole on a monthly cadence beginning early in 2027. In that and an interview with LATMG’s Catherine Herridge, he talks about those robotic landings as the first steps to a Moon Base.

Kshatriya added today that NASA wants “to do surface aggregation and build a Moon Base as quickly as we can, as effectively as we can” starting with robotic landers. “We’re not just going to plop down a magic bubble dome that everybody lives in and has plants and amazing things. We know that’s not credible.”  Instead, robotic precursors will provide critical data about the thermal environment, the multi-path communications environment, and soil constituents to “give ourselves a credible shot at aggregating a lunar base in the right spot.”

LPSC is the annual meeting of planetary scientists and Kshatriya was there to ask for their help. Acknowledging the science community and the human spaceflight community are sometimes at odds, he said that’s not a useful construct.  “I don’t need you to endorse the program, I need you to own it” and help shape it to get the best scientific value with astronauts and robots working in tandem.