The race to the moon is back — NASA needs to get serious to beat the Chinese

Just before my final, 2001 shuttle mission to help build the International Space Station, I asked the NASA chief of human spaceflight when he thought we’d return to the moon. "Oh, probably not until 2010," he answered. I was floored — how could it possibly take that long to jump from the shuttle and ISS to the moon? After all, we’d landed there six times between 1969 and 1972.

NASA’s efforts to return to the moon, home to valuable space resources, have been repeatedly stalled by shifting space policies and failures in leadership. Finally, 25 years after my question, NASA is ready to make that giant leap. It rolled its giant Space Launch System booster to the launch pad and is poised to send the Artemis II crew of four astronauts on a looping path nearly 5,000 miles beyond our celestial neighbor.

President Donald Trump’s first administration directed NASA to lead an international return to the moon with the Artemis program, but progress has been delayed by halting technical progress and anemic funding. Artemis II will launch the first Orion spacecraft crew on a key, 10-day test flight to wring out their ship’s systems, and test astronauts and mission controllers in the harsh environment 240,000 miles from Earth. A successful flight — the first piloted moon journey since 1972’s Apollo 17, will pave the way for the next Artemis crew to try a harrowing touchdown on the lunar surface.

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Though Artemis II won’t try to land, it’s still a risky and challenging flight. Their Orion, "Integrity," will venture into the extreme environment of cislunar space, a thousand times farther from Earth than the space station’s orbiting astronauts. Orion’s four astronauts will rely on its new life support system for 10 days, and if there’s a problem, an emergency abort to Earth might take as long as three or four days. Crew and mission control must navigate precisely around the moon to safely target their Earth return, where Orion’s heat shield must survive a searing, 5,000˚ F plunge through the atmosphere to splashdown.

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During Artemis I’s uncrewed reentry in 2022, Orion’s heat shield, instead of charring and eroding smoothly away, shed palm-sized chunks of its resin-like Avcoat ablator material. That worrisome cracking behavior, caused by trapped, superheated gas within the heat shield, has taken three years to analyze and understand. To minimize gas generation and spalling of the heat shield, mission planners have altered Artemis II’s reentry path. NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, praised the heat shield plan after a review, and cleared Artemis II to fly.

A solid Artemis II success is vital for NASA; proving technical competence is vital to maintaining congressional and presidential funding for the lunar landing challenge to come. Isaacman and his mission managers must not only ensure the success and safety of Artemis II, but make a critical decision in the weeks ahead: how best to field a lander that can get future Artemis crews down to the moon’s rocky terrain.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket was chosen by NASA to serve as Artemis III’s lander, but Starship has progressed slowly in test launches, suffering several major setbacks. Each Starship lander launch from Earth will require 15 or more other Starship launches to fuel it for its lunar mission, and SpaceX is nowhere near attempting its promised robotic demo mission to the moon.

Isaacman has re-opened the lander design to other concepts, perhaps from Blue Origin or other industry partnerships; one workable approach was outlined before Congress last year by former administrator Mike Griffin. But time is running out for NASA to decide on a lander that will do the job within two or three years — China is forging ahead with its own plans to send its taikonauts to the moon by 2030.

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China won’t take that long. The CCP is far along in testing its own heavy-lift moon rocket, command ship and lander. Merely by repeating our Apollo 11 moon feat — something NASA can’t do today — China will celebrate a deep space propaganda victory and lay claim to the Moon’s polar ice — hundreds of millions of tons of water and potential rocket fuel.

Competing for those resources calls for bold NASA leadership, lately in short supply. To lead its partners back to the moon, that probably means putting SpaceX on the back burner while choosing a more practical lander design in the near term.

Artemis II will take three Americans and a Canadian around the moon for the first time in 54 years. Establishing a permanent human presence on the moon will be even more challenging. Building on Artemis II’s bold leap moonward, NASA must direct a new, workable plan for the Artemis III lander. Only then will NASA prove it has the "Right Stuff" to lead to the moon and beyond.