China is coming for the moon. NASAs answer: a faster, leaner plan

A faster, simpler plan can still put astronauts on the moon in 2028, despite a space rehearsal ahead of that landing running three months behind schedule, NASA leaders said Friday. 

Administrator Jared Isaacman made the case at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where crews have already started stacking the mega moon rocket for the expedited Artemis III mission. The two-week spaceflight around Earth would see four astronauts — Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio, and Luca Parmitano — in the Orion spacecraft, connecting with two landers built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk‘s SpaceX in orbit. 

Their new plan for the moon-landing mission, Artemis IV, scraps a distant orbit around the moon where the landers were once expected to pick up the crew, and it also cuts the number of rocket launches each landing needs. But NASA’s timeline leaves almost no margin for error. 

The stakes reach beyond science. Isaacman warned that NASA is in a new space race with China, which could land its own people on the moon within about three years. 

“This is a story as much about their discipline, focus, and urgency, [as] it is about the weight of [NASA’s] institutional inertia and displaced priorities and decades of decisions — some imposed upon us, and others of our own making — that have held America’s space program back,” Isaacman told reporters at a news conference. 

The new plan to return to the moon depends on unproven technology. SpaceX’s Starship lander burns so much fuel climbing to orbit that it can’t reach the moon unless it fills up again in space. Other Starships would fly up as tankers and pump fuel into it, much like a fighter jet refueling in midair. Nobody has moved rocket fuel between spaceships on that scale. 

SpaceX plans its first full attempt early next year, and that test should show how many tanker flights each moon trip takes. Once fueled, Starship would meet the astronauts near Earth and push their capsule to the moon. Starship only entered orbit for the first time last month.

Blue Origin, on the other hand, skips the refueling but takes on a first of its own. It plans to launch three smaller spacecraft that work like tugboats. They would link up with the lander in orbit around Earth, then take turns hauling it to an easier lunar orbit than the one NASA originally conceived. 

First, though, the company has to get flying again. Its New Glenn rocket hasn’t launched since a catastrophic mishap in May that destroyed its launch pad. 

Previously, NASA had chosen SpaceX’s lander for its first two moon landings. Now the agency will keep both companies in the running before picking which one carries astronauts down first. 

“Regardless of who goes first, both providers are planning for lunar landing missions in 2028,” said Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager.

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NASA attributes most of the Artemis III delay to late electronics parts for Blue Origin’s lander. To claw back time, NASA has planted its own engineers inside suppliers’ factories and requires daily progress reports from its major contractors. When a huge piece of Blue Origin’s lander needed to cross the country fast, the agency borrowed a military cargo jet to fly it there, officials said.

NASA also has started building more of its own hardware instead of outsourcing it to the private sector. A connection that feeds super-cold hydrogen into the Space Launch System rocket has had leaking issues in the past. The original fix would have taken years and tens of millions of dollars, Parsons said. NASA engineers redesigned and built a new one themselves for a fraction of the price in less than five months, he said. At a NASA center in Alabama, engineers also designed and built a part for the Artemis III rocket without hiring a contractor at all.

That push comes from an unlikely source. The administrator is a tech billionaire, who made his fortune building a payments company. Business leaders usually argue that private companies beat the government on speed and cost. But when it comes to NASA, Isaacman argued nearly the opposite on Friday. He blamed bloated programs and a lobby of suppliers for slowing the agency down. The solution, he said, was more designing, welding, and machining performed in house.  

“It’s not entrepreneurial thinking or tech industry pixie dust or some new management philosophy,” Isaacman said. “It’s a playbook this agency knows really well — the same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just nine months.”

To save time, NASA also has trimmed its own ambitions. NASA and its contractor, Axiom Space, are developing a pared-down spacesuit for the first short moonwalks that would weigh about 250 pounds, roughly half as much as the original. The agency also scrapped an expensive, delayed new top section for its rocket, the part that gives the capsule its final shove toward the moon, and picked a stretched version of one that United Launch Alliance already builds for its own rockets.

Speed makes some people nervous, and with reason. In 1967, a fire during a launch pad test killed three Apollo astronauts. Isaacman and Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, argued that moving fast doesn’t mean cutting corners. 

“Speed and rigor are not the same dial. They’re just not,” Kshatriya said. “We can dial them separately. Just because we go fast doesn’t mean we’re not doing the right things.”

All three rockets in NASA’s plan head back to the launch pad within months. SpaceX could fly Starship again as soon as November, and Blue Origin hopes to return New Glenn to flight around the turn of the year. Before the close of 2026, NASA plans to load its own rocket with fuel at the launch pad. 

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