ORLANDO, Fla. — A safety panel is calling on NASA to reassess to plans for upcoming Artemis missions, arguing that the agency is packing too many objectives into each mission.
At a Jan. 30 public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), members reiterated past concerns about the number of first-time objectives planned for Artemis 3, the first crewed lunar landing of the overall campaign, and later missions.
“Each first milestone carries its own individual risk and, as these risks are compounded and aggregated, it only increases the overall risk posture for any individual flight mission,” said Bill Bray, a member of the panel. “It really begs the question, is it time for the agency to reassess the current mission objectives and its approach for Artemis 3 and beyond, with the goal to better balance the risks across all those flight tests?”
ASAP has previously expressed its concerns about the number of firsts on Artemis 3, such as in its most recent annual report released in early 2024. That report listed 13 separate firsts for the mission, mostly tied to the Starship lunar lander and new spacesuits being developed by Axiom Space.
That list has only grown since then, he noted, with changes to the heat shield for Orion. NASA announced in December that it would reformulate the Avcoat material used in the heat shield for Artemis 3 and later missions to prevent the heat shield erosion seen on the Artemis 1 reentry.
Those concerns extend beyond Artemis 3, Bray said, with later missions incorporating the lunar Gateway, the Blue Moon crewed lunar lander and a lunar rover. “Each of these elements under development and delivery requires a near-perfect program execution across a complex set of tests and milestones and, frankly, there’s very little room for failure.”
Problems with a single key element, he concluded, “will result in continued launch delays and an irregular and erratic cadence of mission flights,” an issue ASAP has also previously raised. It also creates “an increased risk posture” for Artemis missions.
Bray said that ASAP discussed the issue with Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, at recent meetings. The panel urged NASA to “treat each launch as a test objective, like the Apollo program, with clear test objectives that could be balanced across all launch events” and ensure a more regular cadence of missions.
He didn’t disclose NASA’s response to those concerns but said that ASAP will continue to press NASA to reexamine its Artemis mission plans “and consider reallocation of test objectives to achieve a more regular launch cadence with a more balanced risk exposure.”
Gateway and HLS progress
The ASAP meeting took place a day after a panel at the SpaceCom conference here on aspects of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign. That included some changes to aspects of the overall architecture, although not in response to concerns by ASAP.
Mark Wiese, manager of NASA’s Deep Space Logistics program, said that the agency did, as previously planned, give SpaceX an authorization to proceed on the first mission of the Gateway Logistics Services program in late 2023. SpaceX received a contract in 2020 to transport cargo to and from the Gateway using Dragon XL, a version of its Dragon cargo spacecraft.
“We spent all of last year working very collaboratively with SpaceX,” he said, but noted that Gateway’s logistics needs have “evolved” since the contract was awarded, creating unspecified constraints.
That has resulted in changes in SpaceX’s approach to delivering cargo. “They’re starting to retool their architecture,” Wiese said, with the agency in the final phases of a contract modification. “I’m going to leave it to them to unveil some of the changes that are coming, but we’ve worked through some significant changes on what this logistics module and logistics spacecraft looks like.”
SpaceX has not disclosed any changes to its architecture of the Dragon XL spacecraft and has said little publicly about the program. Wiese said NASA and SpaceX are working towards a system requirements review later this year as part of plans for an initial mission to support Artemis 4, the first crewed mission to the Gateway, current scheduled for 2028.
On the same panel, Kent Chojnacki, deputy manager of NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program, said both Blue Origin and SpaceX were making good progress on their contracts to develop crewed lunar landers.
“SpaceX is not shy about advertising their success,” he said, referring to the series of Starship/Super Heavy test flights. “The flight demonstrations they have been doing have been phenomenal.” He added the company has been making progress on other aspects of the Starship HLS design, such as tests of the Starship airlock and elevator using crews wearing prototypes of Axiom’s lunar spacesuits.
The same is true of Blue Origin, he said, noting both the successful first launch of the company’s New Glenn rocket in January as well as testing of landing legs for its Blue Moon lander.
For the year ahead, Chojnacki said after the panel that a key milestone will be an in-space propellant transfer demonstration by SpaceX, a key technology needed for sending Starship to the moon. “They have shown us a plan to get to a propellant transfer this year,” he said, a schedule that could be affected by the Starship anomaly on its most recent test flight Jan. 16.
For Blue Origin, a key milestone will be a critical design review for Blue Moon. “Blue looks more like NASA in that we do a lot of design and development first, then we go build a lot of hardware and test it,” he said. “SpaceX is a little different.”
