Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Former NASA boss Jim Bridenstine has warned that the space agency's plan to land astronauts on the Moon risks becoming too complicated for its own good. Bridenstine, who ran NASA during the first Trump administration and departed in 2021 before the Artemis I launch, told This Week In Space that the current lunar lander architecture looks worryingly elaborate compared with Apollo. It is not Bridenstine's first intervention on the matter. In 2025, he questioned the architecture NASA selected - particularly SpaceX's Starship - to return astronauts to the Moon. NASA has since reshuffled the Artemis plan. Artemis III is now set to be an Earth orbit test of lunar lander technologies, broadly in the style of Apollo 9, while the first crewed landing has slipped to Artemis IV, still optimistically penciled in for 2028. Bridenstine praised NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman for the shakeup. The lander, however, continues to trouble him. Although complimentary about the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, which sent the Artemis II crew around the Moon, Bridenstine said: "What we don't have, and this is the challenge, we still don't have a lander. And without a lander, you can't land on the Moon. It's really that simple." Blue Origin and SpaceX are working on landers, components of which are planned to be launched for a rendezvous with Artemis III. At present, Blue Origin plans to launch a vehicle that astronauts will be able to enter after docking. SpaceX is planning to test the docking mechanism, which will be mounted at the end of a Starship. The mission profile for both vehicles is "extraordinarily complicated," Bridenstine said. SpaceX's lunar Starship, for example, will depend on multiple tanker launches and in-orbit propellant transfer before it can head for the Moon. Apollo, by contrast, launched the crew, command/service module, and lunar module on a single Saturn V rocket. "The genius of Apollo was simplicity," he said. "They designed that thing to be as simple as you could possibly make it." It was also not designed to last. By the final Apollo missions, the lunar module supported two astronauts on the surface for roughly three days, while the Artemis program anticipates far longer stays. Bridenstine also noted that the proportion of the US federal budget allocated to Apollo was considerably larger than that of Artemis. Even allowing for that budget gap, Bridenstine's concern is straightforward. At the moment, NASA has a rocket capable of transporting a crew to the Moon, but it does not have a way of getting a crew down to the surface - and the clock is ticking. "Whatever it takes to build a lander soonest is what we ought to be doing as a country," Bridenstine said. (R)