Recent Starship delays, coupled with the amount of work ahead, have raised concerns that the Artemis program is falling behind China's initiative to land its own astronauts on the Moon. China's goal is to do this by 2030, timeline repeated in Chinese state media This week. The Chinese program relies on an architecture more reminiscent of NASA's older Apollo designs.
The official schedule for the first landing of the Artemis crew on Artemis 3 is scheduled for 2027, but this time frame is no longer achievable. The Starship and new lunar suits developed by Axiom Space will not be ready, in part because NASA did not award contracts to SpaceX and Axiom until 2021 and 2022.
All of this adds up to diminishing chances that the United States can beat China to the Moon, according to a growing chorus of voices in the space community. Last month, former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency during the first Trump administration, told Congress that the United States would likely lose a second lunar space race.
At a space conference earlier this week, Bridenstine suggested that the Trump administration use its powers to speed up the moon landing, even floating the idea of invoking the Defense Production Act, a law that gives the president the authority to mobilize industrial power to meet pressing national needs.
An executive order from President Donald Trump could authorize such an effort and make it “a national security imperative that we are going to beat China to the moon,” Bridenstine said at the American Astronautical Society's Von Braun Symposium on Space Exploration in Huntsville, Alabama.
Charlie Bolden, NASA administrator under former President Barack Obama, also expressed doubt that NASA could land men on the moon before China or the end of Trump's time in the White House. “Let's be honest, okay? Everyone in this room knows that saying we'll do it by the end of the deadline or we'll do it before the Chinese doesn't help the industry.”
