NASA\u2019s interim administrator, Sean Duffy, said Thursday he has heard the recent talk about how some people are starting to believe that China will land humans on the Moon before NASA can return there with the Artemis Program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had testimony that said NASA will not beat China to the Moon,\u201d Duffy remarked during an all-hands meeting with NASA employees. \u201cThat was shade thrown on all of NASA. I heard it, and I gotta tell you what, maybe I am competitive, I was angry about it. I can tell you what, I\u2019ll be damned if that is the story that we write. We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duffy\u2019s remarks followed a Congressional hearing on Wednesday during which former Congressman Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA administrator during President Trump\u2019s first term, said China had pulled ahead of NASA and the United States in the second space race.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China\u2019s projected timeline to the Moon\u2019s surface,\u201d said Bridenstine, who led the creation of the Artemis Program in 2019. China has said multiple times that it intends to land taikonuats on the Moon before the year 2030.<\/p>\n
Duffy\u2019s remarks were characteristic of his tenure since his appointment two months ago by Trump to serve as interim administrator of the space agency. He has made frequent appearances on Fox News and offered generally upbeat views of NASA\u2019s position in its competition with China for supremacy in space. And on Friday, in a slickly produced video, he said, \u201cI\u2019m committed to getting us back to the Moon before President Trump leaves office.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sources have said Duffy, already a cabinet member as the secretary of transportation, is also angling to remove the \u201cinterim\u201d from his NASA administrator title. Like Bridenstine, he has a capable political background and politics that align with the Trump administration. He is an excellent public speaker and knows the value of speaking to the president through Fox News. To date, however, he has shown limited recognition of the reality of the current competition with China.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
It is not just Bridenstine who is concerned about NASA losing to China in space. Respected China analyst Dean Cheng recently told Ars, \u201cAt the rate things are going, sadly, it seems quite likely that the Chinese will land on the Moon before NASA can return to the Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n
NASA is on track to conduct a lunar flyby mission in early 2026 (the agency is currently working toward a February launch date for Artemis II), and the administration will undoubtedly seek to promote this as evidence of success. It\u2019s not, though.<\/p>\n
The key elements of this mission, including the Orion spacecraft (begun in 2005) and Space Launch System rocket (begun in 2011), have been in development for decades and cost more than $50 billion. At one time, Artemis II was slated to fly in 2021. Nothing should be taken away from the bravery of the astronauts flying the mission, but it is not even as ambitious as Apollo 8 in 1968, which flew into lunar orbit rather than going out to the Moon and directly back.<\/p>\n
To actually land on the Moon with Artemis III, NASA will need SpaceX to deliver a human-rated Starship vehicle, Axiom to complete spacesuits, and its own engineers to piece together and sign off on a complex plan that will be fraught with risk. The current, nominal target for such a mission is 2027, but no reasonable observer believes that is possible. For Duffy to make good on his promise of \u201cgetting us back to the Moon\u201d before the president leaves office would require a landing by January 2029 or for Trump to violate the 22nd Amendment.<\/p>\n
One way in which NASA might speed up a lunar landing is by cutting through some of the agency\u2019s safety culture, which has multiple layers. For some people within the agency, the multiple safety reviews for NASA missions are a necessary safeguard after the space shuttle Challenger<\/em> and Columbia<\/em> tragedies. For others, they are an overgrown bureaucracy that hampers progress. During his meeting with employees on Thursday, Duffy expressed the latter viewpoint.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cWe are safety-driven, and we should be safety-driven,\u201d Duffy said during the all-hands meeting. \u201cBut sometimes we can let safety be the enemy of making progress. We have to be able to take some leaps. We have to jump forward in our innovation and drive this mission. And there is always a balance to that. But we can\u2019t side on the side of doing nothing because we are too afraid of taking risk. We have to push forward.\u201d<\/p>\n In truth, NASA will probably need to relax its safety culture and also see SpaceX, with the ambitious Starship vehicle, deliver a number of miracles in the next few years for US astronauts to land on the Moon before 2030. Given SpaceX\u2019s history of achievement, this should not be ruled out. But the company still has a long way to go.<\/p>\n To date, Duffy has talked a big game about the space race. The key question: Is this all high-minded political talk from people who will be gone when Mandarin becomes the lingua franca on the Moon?<\/p>\n A little more than five years ago, Vice President Mike Pence gave a rousing speech in Alabama, setting a goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2024 and laying the political groundwork for the Artemis Program and all that has followed. He said NASA had to change to be successful. \u201cIf our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will,\u201d Pence said at the time.<\/p>\n The year is 2025, and the contractors are still the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA\u2019s interim administrator, Sean Duffy, said Thursday he has heard the recent talk about how some people are starting to believe that China will land humans on the Moon before NASA can return there with the Artemis Program. \u201cWe had testimony that said NASA will not beat China to the Moon,\u201d Duffy remarked during an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}