NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Report highlights too many firsts in Artemis III mission

The latest report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) raises questions about the mission objectives for Artemis III.

Artemis III aims to land astronauts near the lunar South Pole, relying on SpaceX's Starship-derived Human Landing System (HLS) – a vehicle that has yet to achieve orbit, let alone venture anywhere near the Moon. It's an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, and one the ASAP report has formally classified as high risk.

The problem is that there are an awful lot of firsts associated with the mission. It'll be the first to depend on SpaceX's HLS, the first to need multiple in-space refuelings (the report estimates 15), the first time a crew will use the HLS, and so on.

ASAP's primary goal is to identify risks and mitigations. It says the solution here is to ease off from doing so much in one mission and consider a more stepwise approach, similar to the Apollo program.

The first Apollo crew was launched into orbit with Apollo 7, followed by a mission around the Moon with Apollo 8. Apollo 9 checked out the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, and Apollo 10 did pretty much everything except land. The first lunar landing happened with Apollo 11. Each mission was predicated on the success of the previous.

It makes sense from a technical perspective. However, elsewhere in the report is data that highlights other challenges faced by NASA, including resource constraints. It does not have the human resources it had during the Apollo era, when staffing exceeded 35,000 full-time employees. Today, that figure is dropping fast. According to the report, it neared 15,000 in 2025. The agency also has nowhere near the budget it had during the Apollo Moon missions, and so the desire to fit as much as possible into fewer missions is understandable, even if the report deems doing so in Artemis III "a high risk."

"Rebalancing objectives is thus essential to the safe achievement of the national objective – returning the United States to the Moon," it says.

The lengthy report also covers the Starliner fiasco, the aging ISS, and the obsolete spacesuits in which NASA expects astronauts to work outside the outpost,

Highlighting the challenges facing the Artemis III mission, however, will amplify calls for the agency to reconsider its objectives.

While there may be a political desire to return astronauts to the Moon within the current US administration, the report highlights the technical and resource realities that must also be considered. Better to rethink the objectives than try to cram too much into just one mission. ®