Delays With SpaceX's Starship Might Sandbag NASA's Planned Lunar Landing

Of course, Elon Musk's flagship space vehicle is slated to be the vehicle on which NASA astronauts touch town on the surface of the Moon for the first time since the early 1970s. But with the future of the Starship program now up in the air after its first launch failure, some in the industry are fearful that SpaceX could wind up holding up NASA's plans to put humans on the Moon by late 2025. All these perfectly valid concerns came to a head at a meeting between the National Space Studies Board and the National Academy of Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board on June 7th.

At this meeting, as first reported by spacenews.com and streamed on Vimeo, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems and development Jim Free expressed concerns that Artemis III's tentative launch date could be considerably delayed at the hands of SpaceX's recent foibles. Furthermore, Free expressed how Starship's fleet of support vehicles, Low Earth Orbit fuel tankers, and general non-NASA logistics problems could delay proceeding even further if dramatic leaps in progress aren't made promptly. "That's a lot of launches to get those missions done," Free said regarding Starship's requirement to launch massive fuel tankers into LEO to support the craft in deep space. "They have a significant number of launches to go, and that, of course, gives me concern about the December of 2025 date for Artemis III."

But even if SpaceX managed to accelerate Starship's development process, there's no guarantee it would spur the novel spaceship's second attempt at an orbital flight to happen any sooner. The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which holds jurisdiction over all commercial space launches over American soil, has frequently stood in the way of certifying Starship for launch. Only after several failed bids by the company to achieve FAA flight certification did SpaceX finally obtain credentials for up to 20 launches per year. The FAA rescinded this certification after the April 20th test flight explosion.

All the while, NASA and their own super-heavy carrier vehicle, the SLS, stand waiting in the wind, unable to proceed with the planning for the Artemis III lunar landing until SpaceX demonstrates that Starship and its fleet of tankers can complete an LEO rendezvous and complete an orbital refueling. Only when this vital step is achieved can NASA and SpaceX coordinate the more intricate details of Artemis III's transit to the Moon and subsequent rendezvous with NASA's Gateway Space Station in Lunar orbit before a transit in Starship down to the surface.

In a vacuum, the only thing lost by SpaceX's prolonged development cycle would be time and money. These expenditures are given with modern spaceflight. It's almost unheard of for any space program to strictly adhere to the same schedule they set out with from the start. But in the context of the ever-advancing CNSA Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, NASA and SpaceX aren't in a one-horse race with themselves to be the first back to the Moon this century. The prospects of being beaten to the Moon by the Chinese at the hands of Starship's development delays would be dire for NASA's reputation as the premiere national space agency.

In the meantime, NASA has already begun handing out service contracts for non-SpaceX vehicles to take on Moon-landing duty on subsequent missions in the Artemis program. Most notably, SpaceX's rivals at Blue Origin and their Blue Moon lunar lander are slated to bring four astronauts, plus the upcoming Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), down to the Lunar South Pole for the Artemis V mission in 2029. Meanwhile, Starship's HLS variant is only contracted for the third and fourth Artemis missions. But until SpaceX can prove Starship is the capable space-faring platform its founder claims it to be, the launch dates for Artemis III and IV remain in the realm of tentative.

It'd be a tragedy if the blood, sweat, and tears of the tens of thousands of personnel working on the Artemis program across the globe resulted in only coming in second place in the second great space race. Suppose this nightmare scenario does come to pass, whether at the hands of the Chinese or some other adversarial space agency. In that case, we'll likely look back on NASA's decision to pick Starship over some other, more traditional take on a Lunar landing vehicle as the moment things took a turn for the worse. But, for the sake of being a "glass-half-full" kind of person, the Artemis program is still ostensibly leading the current space race by a comfortable margin.