Bolden, Bridenstine Share Their Views on Artemis

Two former NASA administrators are weighing in on the Artemis program and whether the U.S. will get back to the Moon before Chinese taikonauts arrive. Charlie Bolden and his successor Jim Bridenstine agree that getting a new set of American footprints on the Moon by mid-2027, the most recent official target, or even January 2029, a date mentioned by Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, will be challenging. But they differ on the importance of beating China versus holding fast to the long-term goals set by the United States and its international partners. Meanwhile, SpaceX provided an update on the Starship Human Landing System, an essential element of the program as currently designed.

Speaking at the American Astronautical Society’s Von Braun Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, AL yesterday, the two men shared their thoughts on many NASA issues, chief among the state of the Artemis program.

Bolden headed the agency from July 2009-January 2017 when President Barack Obama canceled Artemis’s predecessor, Constellation. Started by President George W. Bush in 2004, the program was deemed unaffordable following the 2008 economic collapse. Obama didn’t abandon deep space human exploration, but focused on getting people to orbit Mars in the 2030s with an asteroid rendezvous mission as a steppingstone instead of the Moon.

Bridenstine was NASA Administrator from April 2018 to January 2021 when the first Trump Administration initiated Artemis. He embraced Public-Private Partnerships as a method to work faster than traditional cost-plus contracts and enable NASA to meet the Trump 1.0 goal of getting astronauts back on the Moon by 2024, a date chosen because they expected it would be the end of a second Trump term.

The deadline was set by Vice President Mike Pence as chair of the White House National Space Council in March 2019, giving NASA just five years to develop an architecture and the systems needed to execute the plan. They already were developing the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew spacecraft based on earlier plans, but not a lander. Obama’s plan didn’t require landing on either the Moon or Mars.

How to get at least one lunar Human Landing System (HLS) ready by 2024 became a compelling need. NASA wanted two dissimilar HLS systems built by different companies to ensure redundancy and competition. Congress supported Artemis, but was skeptical of the 2024 date and initially unwilling to fund two HLS systems.  In April 2021, after Bridenstine left and before Bill Nelson was confirmed as his successor, NASA selected SpaceX as the sole HLS provider for the first Artemis landing mission, Artemis III.  In 2023, SpaceX was assigned a second mission, Artemis IV, and Blue Origin was added as a second provider with Artemis V as its first flight at the end of the decade.

The date for Artemis III slipped repeatedly for a variety of reasons. By the end of Biden Administration, it was mid-2027, but delays in the development of Starship HLS as well as lunar spacesuits by Axiom Space make that date less and less likely. At the same time, China appears to be making steady progress towards their goal of landing taikonauts on the Moon in 2030.

During a September hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Bridenstine, who is now a lobbyist, raised the alarm that the United States was not likely to get back on the Moon before China, attributing it largely to Starship delays.

Duffy, who is the Secretary of Transportation and dual-hatted in his NASA role, initially pushed back, asserting confidence that mid-2027 was still the plan, but last week acknowledged the problem. He now has invited SpaceX and Blue Origin to provide “acceleration approaches” to get their landers ready sooner and is opening the contract to other companies through a Request for Information (RFI).

Yesterday Bridenstine gave Duffy credit for making hard decisions as Acting Administrator. Duffy is a former Republican Congressman from Wisconsin and served in the House alongside Bridenstine, who represented an Oklahoma district for three terms. Bridenstine called Duffy “a good friend” who “has come up to speed quickly and I think he’s starting to make the right decisions to get us where we need to go.”

Worry about getting U.S. astronauts back on the Moon before China gets there is growing. Bridenstine is arguing for the country to go “all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible.”

“And if the goal is to beat China to the Moon, we need to have a program that is, in fact, you know, dare I say, a Defense Production Act kind of program. We’re going all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible with a team that would be a small team with authorities — maybe authorities put together by an executive order from the President of the United States — that this is a national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon, and in order to get that done, we need to have a small Skunk Works-type organization that can be in charge and make that lander come to reality.” — Jim Bridenstine

Lockheed Martin is one company that thinks it might have some ideas, telling SpacePolicyOnline.com last week it’s been doing analyses with a cross-industry team to see what can be done to get astronauts to the Moon safely “as quickly as possible.”

Who can do it fast enough to beat China has become the overriding concern of the Trump Administration. But Bolden’s not so sure.  Pointing out that no one can beat America to the Moon — we landed six Apollo crews there between 1969 and 1972 — for him the key is sticking to our long term goal of sustainable lunar exploration and utilization with international partners, not whether China is second on the Moon.

He wants a reality check. Duffy’s current messaging is insisting it’ll be accomplished before Trump’s term ends in January 2029, but Bolden isn’t buying it. “We cannot make it if we say we’ve got to do it by the end of the term or we’re going to do it before the Chinese. That doesn’t help industry.” Instead the focus needs to be on what we’re trying to accomplish.

“We may not make it by 2030, but that’s OK with me as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have. That’s what’s most important. That we live up to what we said we were going to do and we deliver for the rest of the world. Because the Chinese are not going to bring the rest of the world with them to the Moon. They don’t operate that way.” — Charlie Bolden

Yesterday was the deadline NASA set for SpaceX and Blue Origin to submit their accelerated HLS approaches. A NASA spokesperson told SpacePolicyOnline.com that both did and the RFI for other companies will be issued after the ongoing government shutdown ends.

“NASA has received and is evaluating plans from both SpaceX and Blue Origin for acceleration of HLS production. Following the shutdown, the agency will issue an RFI to the broader aerospace industry for their proposals. A committee of NASA subject matter experts will be assembled to evaluate each proposal and determine the best path forward to win the second space race given the urgency of adversarial threats to peace and transparency on the Moon.” — NASA statement (updated October 31)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has passionately defended Starship on X in recent days including unkind remarks about Duffy, but the company posted a useful article on its website explaining their progress on Starship. Stressing that development of the core Starship is self-funded “representing over 90% of system costs,” they noted that the fixed-price contract with NASA is only for the HLS configuration and they are paid only when milestones are met. “American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs.” They’ve “completed 49 milestones tied to developing the subsystems, infrastructure, and operations needed to land astronauts on the Moon,” although they did not indicate what percentage that is of the total. They did concede that many of the remaining milestones are “tied to test flights” including “ship-to-ship propellant transfer.”

Starship has flown 11 test flights. Some failed, but others including the last two were successes. All have been suborbital, however. Starship has yet to reach orbit and when it does it can’t go further into space without being refueled at an orbiting fuel depot. Such depots don’t exist yet. The number of Starship launches required to fill the depot to compensate for boil-off of the cryogenic propellants and fill the Starship HLS for its trip to the Moon are unknown even to SpaceX.

Today they said they’re looking at a “simplified mission architecture and concept of operations” to get to the Moon faster.

“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities. In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.” — SpaceX

Update:  On October 31, SpaceX posted a long statement on X pointing out that Bridenstine is a lobbyist, not just a former NASA Administrator, and his “current campaign against Starship is either misguided or intentionally misleading” and his views are not the “unbiased thoughts of a former NASA Administrator.”

Update: On October 31, NASA revised its statement to say a committee of NASA subject matter experts “will be” instead of “is being” assembled to evaluate HLS proposals.