In the spaceflight community, it can be fashionable to support one company or agency at the expense of others. Even well-known journalists often display favoritism towards SpaceX or Blue Origin; towards traditional defense contractors or entrepreneurial firms; or towards human or robotic missions. Aerospace is arguably a more tribal field now than at any point in its history to date. There is nothing inherently wrong with this trend; it is a natural consequence of the growth of the industry and the proliferation of alternative media. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that all of our favorite entities ultimately serve a larger cause – one which has grave implications for every single one of us. When Senior Editor Jim Hillhouse founded this outlet 18 years ago, he did not name it “OldSpace” or “NewSpace”; he named it AmericaSpace.
And America’s space program is in serious trouble.
While some experts are still loathe to recognize it, the United States’ leadership in space is being threatened for the first time in 60 years. While NASA’s flagship Artemis program has encountered delays, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has quietly advanced its own lunar architecture. Its Mengzhou crew capsule completed an uncrewed test flight in 2019, a full-scale prototype of its Lanyue lander is undergoing thermal and vacuum testing, and its Long March 10 Moon rocket is derived from the Long March 5, which has flown 14 times with just one failure.
China’s simple, disciplined approach has several advantages over the Artemis program of record. It requires just two launches, eliminating the need for orbital refueling. It uses hypergolic propellants, which were used in Apollo and are today used in Orion, rather than cryogenic fuel and oxidizer, which require refrigeration to avoid boil-off. Finally, it stages out of a low lunar orbit rather than a near-rectilinear halo orbit, which reduces the duration of the mission and leads to more frequent abort opportunities. CNSA’s stated goal is to land two of its taikonauts on the Moon prior to 2030, which implies that the landing will most likely take place in 2029.
Because of China’s progress, it is possible – perhaps even probable – that the next voice heard from the Moon will be speaking in Mandarin. This concerning state of affairs is now a subject of debate in the halls of Congress. During the confirmation hearing for NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman, Ted Cruz, the leader of the Senate Space Subcommittee, Maria Cantwell, his Democratic counterpart; and Isaacman himself recognized that winning the Moon race is NASA’s most important priority, even as the agency sets its sights on Mars [1].
Looking at the Artemis architecture, some elements of the program are in better shape than others. The SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are being considered for termination following Artemis 3, the program’s first lunar landing. It is true that these systems are expensive. But Orion and SLS are operational, and for the foreseeable future, they are the only way to send astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. Barring any serious issues with Artemis 2, there is no reason to expect that they will not be available in time for a lunar landing in 2028. Less information is available on Axiom Space’s AxEMU space suit, which the astronauts will wear on the lunar surface. However, prototypes of the suit are already being tested in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and the design heavily leverages NASA’s preexisting advanced space suit designs.
Instead, the pacing item appears to be the Human Landing System (HLS). Despite the fact that landing on the Moon is arguably the most challenging portion of the Artemis 3 mission profile, the lander is the element which received the latest start. The first HLS contract was awarded in 2021, which means that the vehicle must be operational within 7 years to ensure victory in the emerging Moon race.
To make matters worse, NASA did not select an ordinary lander for Artemis 3. On paper, SpaceX’s Starship promises extraordinary performance, as its manufacturer claims that it will be able to land up to 100 tons of cargo on the Moon. However, Starship’s development has progressed more gradually than NASA and SpaceX had hoped [2]. To be fair, the program has reached some impressive milestones. Most notably, SpaceX guided Starship’s first stage – the most powerful rocket booster ever built – back to its launch site and caught it with two mechanical arms on its gantry tower. It was an unforgettable moment.
Unfortunately, the development of the second stage, which will ultimately evolve into the lunar variant of Starship, has not kept pace. On Tuesday, May 27th, the V2 variant of Starship, which was supposed to rectify the system’s performance issues, failed for a third consecutive time. Shortly after its engines cut off, it tumbled out of control and reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Even after Starship reaches orbit (which was supposed to be the straightforward part of the development program), it must demonstrate the ability to transfer hundreds of tons of cryogenic propellant between ships in orbit; store that propellant without boil-off for up to 100 days; and land on the rugged lunar surface without tipping over.
Thousands of talented engineers are working long hours to help Starship realize its potential, and it remains possible that it will mature into a reliable system. However, it is simply unreasonable to expect any team, however capable, to pull off a miracle and land a Starship-class vehicle on the Moon before Lanyue is ready to fly. Testimony by Dr. Brian Dunbacher and Dr. Scott Pace in a hearing on February 26, 2025 before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics left little doubt that the Chinese will beat the United States to the Moon. Under questioning by Rep. Keith Self, Pace and Dumbacher expressed skepticism that SpaceX will meet its HLS contract obligations to land astronauts on the Moon in 2027, or even by 2030 [3].
In a typical NASA commercial program, a second provider is supposed to take over and complete the mission if the industry leader flounders. A shining example is how SpaceX’s Crew Dragon covered for Boeing’s Starliner, which encountered a range of issues after it received the highest rating of any Commercial Crew proposal. However, the second HLS contractor, Blue Origin, was only awarded funding in 2023, two years after SpaceX.
Like SpaceX, Blue Origin has reached some noteworthy milestones. During an interview an interview on 60 Minutes in March 2024, John Couluris, Blue Origin’s Senior Vice President of Lunar Permanence, said that a subscale Mark 1 Blue Moon prototype would be ready to land on the Moon in 12-16 months [4]. Many in the aerospace community were skeptical of such an aggressive claim at the time, but lately, it appears that Blue Moon will be ready to fly by August or September of this year.
However, the human-scale Blue Moon Mark 2 shares Starship’s architectural complexity, as it heavily leverages orbital refueling. Blue Moon’s hydrogen and oxygen propellants, which must be launched by at least four tankers, will be delivered to lunar orbit by a reusable Cislunar Transporter. Prior to its first lunar mission, Blue Origin must develop a lander, a tanker, and the Cislunar Transporter itself. In the long term, Blue Origin’s architecture could enable a range of missions, but it is, once again, unlikely to be ready by 2029.
In short, NASA and its contractors need to find a way to simplify the HLS architecture and bring a crewed lander into service at an earlier date. As NASA’s encyclopedia of lunar lander concept studies demonstrates, there are many strategies which could result in a positive outcome [5]. In this article, we will present an “existence proof” for an HLS-derived vehicle which could accomplish a lunar landing by the end of 2028. While it may not be the only option, we believe this to be the most straightforward path towards preventing a crushing geopolitical defeat for America in space.
1. The Architecture:
Over a period of nine months, we assessed several alternative HLS concepts, ranging from the current program of record to an entirely new lander design. At this moment, the concept presented in this article appears to be the most feasible from both technical and budgetary perspectives. The design principles used to select this solution are described below.
1. The lander must be available by the end of 2028. CNSA has not published a date for its first crewed landing; therefore, until we hear otherwise, we must assume that it could take place at any point within 2029.
2. The architecture should maximize the use of hardware which either exists or is in development. This minimizes the potential for delays, and it lowers the cost of what will be, by definition, an interim solution for lunar landings. Securing funding for a “clean-sheet” lander is unlikely in the current budgetary environment.
3. The lander should be capable of completing its mission with a single launch. In-space assembly and orbital refueling both require significant complexity and high launch cadences, which place a 2028 landing at risk.
When we survey the commercial space industry with these requirements in mind, a handful of observations become apparent. SpaceX has a large, cheap launch vehicle, but no lander to put on top of it. Blue Origin has a small lander, but no rocket which can send it directly to the Moon. United Launch Alliance (ULA) has an extremely efficient upper stage, but when it flies on the standard Vulcan rocket, it consumes most of its propellant before reaching orbit.
With these precepts in mind, a feasible architecture comes into focus. A pictorial depiction of the mission profile is available at the beginning of this section. As the launch date for Artemis 3 approaches, an expendable variant of SpaceX’s Starship will place a lunar lander stack into a stable low Earth orbit. The stack consists of a fully-fueled Centaur V, acting as an Earth Departure Stage, and a Blue Moon Mark 2 lander. The Blue Moon has been stripped of 3 tons of dry mass so that it can be propelled directly to the Moon by the Centaur V while still completing its mission without refueling.
Once Blue Moon arrives in a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), the Artemis 3 crew will depart for the Moon inside an Orion capsule. Orion will dock directly to Blue Moon instead of using the Gateway space station (which is proposed for cancellation) as an intermediary. From this point onwards, the mission profile is essentially identical to the current Artemis 5 mission concept, with Blue Moon landing two astronauts on the lunar surface and returning them safely to Orion following the conclusion of the mission.
All of the math which describes this mission profile is included below. If you wish to skip ahead, you should just be aware that this architecture closes without incorporating unrealistic assumptions or defying the laws of physics.
2. Centaur V Payload Capacity:
Surprisingly, the maneuver which wound up dictating the design of the architecture was in the middle of the mission profile. Even with a full load of fuel, the Centaur V Earth Departure Stage (EDS) can only send a limited quantity of mass to the Moon. This, in turn, dictates the total mas of the lander, which is directly correlated with its dry (unfueled) mass.
Throughout the remainder of this article, we will make heavy use of the Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation. This is one of the most famous mathematical formulas in the field of aerospace engineering, as it dictates how much delta-V a rocket with a given payload possesses. A rocket’s delta-V dictates how much its velocity will increase during flight, which in turn dictates the orbits which it can reach. It is broadly similar to your car’s range, which depends on both the size of its gas tank and the efficiency of its engine. If you add more fuel or buy a more efficient car, you can drive further. Here is the rocket equation:
ISP is short for specific impulse. Essentially, it describes the efficiency of a rocket engine, which varies based on which propellant is used. g is Earth’s gravitational constant. If you ever took an introductory physics class, its value, 9.8 m/s2, is probably seared into your memory. In this equation, it just converts a vehicle’s weight on Earth into its absolute mass, which does not depend upon gravity. A rocket’s dry mass describes its weight without propellant, while its wet mass includes fuel and oxidizer in addition to its primary structure.
To determine the feasibility of our alternative lunar lander architecture (or any other interplanetary mission, for that matter), we also need a table of delta-V values. At its core, space travel revolves around the concept of moving into and out of gravity wells. Regardless of the design of a rocket or a spacecraft, it needs a fixed amount of delta-V to reach any given destination, whether it be an orbit or a planetary surface. These numbers vary depending on which resource you consult, but here, we will refer to a delta-V diagram presented in a NASA white paper on Artemis staging orbits [6].
In our architecture, the Centaur V only needs to perform the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn, which requires 3,200 m/s of delta-V. Its RL-10 engines may be 60 years old, but they still have one of the highest ISPs in the industry: 465.5 seconds. The stage has a dry mass of 5,470 kg, and it carries 54,000 kg of propellant. That is why the Centaur is such an effective upper stage: over 90% of its mass is propellant! When we plug these numbers into the rocket equation, this is what the formula looks like.
When we solve for the mass of the lander, we can see that Blue Moon will have 47,643 kg of mass to work with. The Centaur V itself will require minimal modifications for this mission, although its structure may need to be reinforced since Blue Moon is more massive than its normal 27-ton payloads.
3. Blue Moon Dry Mass:
In Blue Origin’s current HLS proposal, the company’s crewed lunar lander has an unfueled mass of 16,000 kg, with a 6,000-kg crew cabin. During each Artemis mission, it will need to travel from NRHO to the surface of the Moon and back again. When you add in the propellant required to complete that mission, the lander has a total mass of 54,000 kg, which makes it too heavy for the Centaur V.
Therefore, the lander will need to go on a diet in order to fit our alternative single-launch architecture. The majority of its mass is propellant, and the only way to reduce propellant is to reduce dry mass. Blue Moon’s BE-7 engines have an ISP of 453 seconds. In the mission profile which we are analyzing, it must insert itself into NRHO and then perform the round trip to the lunar surface. These maneuvers are equivalent to 5,860 m/s of delta-V. Here is the rocket equation for Blue Moon:
Assuming that all of these numbers are correct, Blue Moon’s dry mass can be no greater than 12,727 kg. In other words, its mass must be reduced by 3.3 kg for the mission concept to close. This is certainly challenging, but not implausible. Since it will not require refueling, all of its propellant transfer interfaces, as well as the navigation aids for the Cislunar Transporter, can be removed. During Artemis 3, two astronauts will land on the Moon instead of a full crew of four, and they will only stay on the surface for 6 days rather than a month. Therefore, there are also ample opportunities to reduce the mass of the crew cabin. Even the lander’s airlock could be removed for an initial sortie mission; instead, the entire cabin could be depressurized, as it was during Apollo.
4. Starship Payload Mass:
Determining the total payload mass which Starship will need to carry is comparatively straightforward. The combined mass of the Centaur V and the modified Blue Moon is 107,113 kg. While this is larger than the rocket’s baseline 100-ton payload capacity, it should be relatively easy to increase its capacity by 7%. Since it will be launching in an expendable configuration, the second stage can be stripped of its aerodynamic control flaps and its heat shield tiles. If needed, the booster can also be expended, which would increase Starship’s total performance by around 30%.
Like Blue Moon, Starship will require a handful of modifications for this proposed mission. The lander will need to be encapsulated inside an expendable payload fairing, and the launch pad infrastructure will need to be modified to distribute liquid hydrogen to the Centaur V and Blue Moon. SpaceX has already demonstrated the ability to load payloads with a dedicated supply of fuel during Intuitive Machines’ lunar missions, so handling three types of propellant is within the company’s expertise.
Alternatively, an SLS Block 2 could send a lander with a mass of around 45 tons directly to the Moon, without needing an Earth Departure Stage. However, this upgraded variant of the rocket would require a new launch tower, upper stage, and boosters; all of these elements are currently proposed for cancellation.
5. Conclusions:
In recent months, the United States’ defeat in the new space race has been treated as a fait accompli. Fortunately, this outcome is not yet inevitable. NASA still has several key advantages over CNSA, including a five-year head start and the availability of key mission elements, such as SLS and Orion. As we have shown in this article, there is at least one architecture which can place Americans on the Moon before 2029 without requiring a new program or an Apollo-like increase in funding. Other options may exist, but NASA and its political stakeholders will need to act quickly to take advantage of them. The window for action is closing, and as little as four years remain before the first crewed Chinese lunar landing.
Funding is always a concern, but the marginal cost of this simplified HLS architecture should be minimal. Since it uses vehicles which are already under development, such as Starship and Blue Moon, NASA could potentially clear space in the budget for it by delaying development milestones for the more capable HLS landers. Alternatively, given Congress’ vested interest in completing a lunar landing ahead of China, the odds of securing small quantities of additional funding for the mission are relatively high.
Success will require the best from both NASA and private industry. Blue Origin, SpaceX, ULA, and potentially other companies have the hardware needed to complete Artemis 3 on schedule. However, all of these companies are rivals in the launch industry. Strong leadership will be required to convince them to work together and to manage any conflicts which arise. Only NASA can provide that. Thus far, NASA has been content to shift the responsibility (and the blame) for HLS’s progress to its commercial partners. The agency will need to assume a larger role and work hand-in-hand with the private sector to maximize the probability of mission success. Only by working together as one nation will we be able to win the Moon race and preserve our future amongst the stars.
By 2030, nuclear rockets will be the more realistic option for reaching Mars, and possibly even the moon if a large payload is required for setting up permanent lunar colonies. Just yesterday, a new more efficient, in terms of ISP, nuclear rocket design was announced by the Angry Astronaut: https://youtu.be/q5Nrl5kSXyM?si=xMTK08bETkF5KTVz.
Also, by 2030, Elon Musk will be 58 years old, well into the age in which tech titans typically step back from their duties: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or die: Steve Jobs. Without Elon Musk, or even with him most likely, Starship will have no leader unless by some miracle it has fixed all its terminal explosion issues (most probably a systemic fault for ultra-large rockets and vibration), refueling in space (never been done before), deca-ton payloads (never been done either), large crews, etc.
China will be landing humans on the Moon by then. They have the discipline and direction and spending of the Apollo era, if not more. America has lost that and descended into political squabbles and financial schemes with no real production values anymore. It may not be able to survive past the current administration, which can’t even pick a NASA leader.