What has long been recognised by many who follow the US-led Project Artemis programme to return humans to the Moon now appears to be becoming recognised within the upper echelons of NASA’s management. Namely, that the biggest hold-up to the programme’s primary goal of safely landing a crew on the surface of the Moon and returning them to lunar orbit remains the inability of SpaceX to meet NASA’s – or even its own – time frames and deadlines in the development its Starship-derived Human Landing System (HLS) vehicle.
SpaceX was awarded the contract to develop the initial vehicle intended to deliver crews from cislunar space to the Moon’s South Pole and then return them back to cislunar space over five years ago, in May 2020. At the time, the announcement was controversial for a numbers of reasons:
- It was both a last-minute entry into the competition to provide NASA with a suitable HLS vehicle, and the most technically complex of the three major proposal which went forward to the final selection process, requiring up to 14 launches of the SpaceX Starship / Superheavy system just to get it to lunar orbit.
- Despite NASA stating two options for the initial HLS would be selected, only the SpaceX option was carried forward in the so-called “Option A” contract, with NASA providing SpaceX with an initial US $2.89 billion for vehicle development, with both Blue Origin and Dynetics effectively being frozen out.
- The driving force behind the decision to go exclusively with SpaceX was NASA associate Administrator Kathryn Lueders, who had a long-standing relationship with SpaceX, and who subsequently retired from NASA in 2023 to join SpaceX. Whilst highly speculative in nature, there have been fingers pointed towards this chain of events as being more than coincidental.
- The decision to go with SpaceX alone for at least the Artemis 3 mission (the first planned crewed landing) was upheld by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in July 2021 after both Blue Origin and Dynetics filed complaints about the handling of the contract on NASA’s part. This decision came in spite of NASA’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) having already reporting that the agency’s own estimates for the development time frame for HLS (four years) was entirely unrealistic, and that due to its complexity the SpaceX HLS approach would potentially result in the most severe of anticipated delays in HLS development, requiring up to 4 additional years of development and testing in order to be flight-ready.
- In December 2023, a NASA Key Decision Point (KDP) review for Artemis 3, intended to assess whether or not the programme was on course to meet its intended targets, rated SpaceX as having only a 70% of achieving a required uncrewed demonstration test flight of their HLS vehicle (including landing it on the Moon and returning it to lunar orbit) by February 2028, some two years behind the Option A contract goal of flying this mission in mid-2026.
Oddly, both SpaceX and NASA placed part of the blame for the delay to the demonstration test with on-going (at the time) issues with the Orion crew capsule heat shield – even though Orion is an entirely separate vehicle to HLS, and does not form part of the contracted SpaceX HLS demonstration flight.
Further, while SpaceX has pointed to the 30 HLS development milestones it has achieved, these relate to hardware needed for power generation, communications, guidance and navigation, propulsion, life support, and space environments protection, rather than the vehicle as a whole, with some of these milestones either relating purely to the definition of some of this hardware, rather than any form of development and / or integrated testing.
By the start of 2024, concerns around SpaceX’s ability to actually deliver on their promises for their HLS vehicle were such that Jim Free, the man then at NASA charged with overseeing the Artemis programme, was openly talking in terms of potentially swapping the Artemis 3 and Artemis 5 missions, the latter intended to be the first use of the Blue Moon HLS system in development by Blue Origin, and which at the time was seen as much further along in its development cycle than the SpaceX system.
Whilst Free has since retired from NASA, the acting administrator for the agency, Sean Duffy, echoed Free’s point of view on October 20th, 2025, indicating that he is now open to reviewing the Artemis 3 HLS contract. In particular, he has also suggested shifting to using Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander on the basis of growing scepticism that SpaceX will have their HLS system ready for Artemis 3 by 2028/29.
Unsurprisingly in this age of politics by insult, Duffy’s comments were met with childish name-calling on the part of the SpaceX CEO. To be sure, Duffy is perhaps not the best qualified to be leading NASA even on an interim basis (and has made a fair number of gaffes as head of the Department of Transportation); but as per the reasons noted above, there is good reason to question whether SpaceX can meet its obligations for HLS even within the revised times frame for the Artemis 3 mission (which is now looking to a possible 2028 launch).
Nor did the SpaceX CEO limit his scorn to Duffy; in the same string of social media posts he took aim at Blue Origin, claiming the company “has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon” (which he later refined to mean “useful payload”). Given that the launch vehicle for Blue Moon – Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket – both successfully achieved Earth orbit and deployed a payload demonstrator on its maiden flight, both of which Starship has yet to do in a single launch despite (at the time of writing) 11 flights, this critique came over as little more than a petulant outburst than a reasoned defence of Starship HLS.
Following Duffy’s statements – which appear to also be driven in part by concerns over China’s stated aim to place taikonauts on the Moon by 2030 – speculation was rife in some circles as to whether NASA might seek to an alternative to SpaceX and Blue Origin as the Artemis 3 HLS provider. This speculation encapsulated both the idea that NASA might try for a “home-grown” HLS, or bring-in another company – such as Lockheed Martin (which has made no secret of its desire to supply an HLS alongside of its Orion crew vehicle) – to provide a suitable HLS.
However, given the lead-times involved in seriously moving forward with either of these options (which would likely see Artemis 3 pushed back well beyond a 2029), coupled with the costs involved when the Trump Administration is aggressively trying to reduce NASA’s budget, it would seem unlikely that either of these options would be seriously taken-up. As it stands and in the wake of Duffy’s comments, NASA has confirmed that both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been given until October 29th, 2025 to submit “accelerated proposals” for HLS development, but no other proposals for “alternate” HLS vehicles are currently being sought.
Exactly where this will all lead is also open to debate. As does, ironically enough, the overall leadership of NASA. Whilst only appointed Acting Administrator for the agency, Duffy has spent some of his time in the role floating the idea that NASA should be folded into his Department of Transportation. Were this to happen, it would effectively cement his position as the person in overall charge of the agency and its budget – although the idea has already received widespread pushback from the US space industry as a whole. At the same time, the White House has indicated it is possibly going to re-nominate Jared Isaacman for the role of NASA Administrator.
As I reported at the time in this pages, Isaacman was on the verge of being confirmed to the role earlier in 2025, when Trump’s White House abruptly withdrew his name as their nominee following a public spat between Trump and the SpaceX CEO (with whom Isaacman has had a close working relationship for several years), who at the time was coming to the end of his tenure as a “special advisor” to the White House. However, on October 14th, it was revealed that the Trump Administration has again been in talks with Isaacman about a potential resumption of his nomination to lead NASA, which he apparently is still interested in doing.
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