NASA’s working masterplan for the upcoming lunar landings has a massive fundamental flaw that could prove fatal to the first American astronauts set to touch down on the Moon in 2028, say experts at the NASA Office of Inspector General, an independent watchdog empowered by Congress to oversee the space agency.
During the race to explore the South Pole of the Moon, these inspectors say, “While NASA is taking steps to prevent catastrophic events from occurring during the Artemis [Moon] missions, at some point in the future, astronauts will likely encounter a life-threatening emergency in space.”
But under NASA’s landing blueprints now in place, they warn, “Ultimately, should the astronauts encounter a life-threatening emergency in space or on the lunar surface, NASA does not have the capability to rescue the stranded crew.”
NASA’s high-risk plan at present envisions astronauts spearheading the exploration of the Moon descending onto a perilous, cratered region, strewn with massive boulders, with no landing pad to touch down on.
If their lander capsized, there would be no back-up emergency spacecraft prepositioned at the site to lift off on, or even an oxygen-filled habitat or rover to shelter in.
So far, NASA has not even required either spacecraft outfit commissioned to ferry its astronauts from lunar orbit down to the southern tip of the satellite, Blue Origin and SpaceX, to produce a second, back-up lander that could be instantly launched from Earth and sped to a lunar crash site to save the lives of its aeronauts.
To prevent martyring the first Americans sent to scout out the Moon in the new millennium, NASA could completely redesign its touchdown architecture to build rescue operations into the entire scheme, partly by spending billions of dollars to station at least one standby lander on the lunar surface, says a world-leading space scholar.
“A prepositioned backup lander could provide one of the strongest forms of lunar rescue capability because it could potentially serve as both an emergency shelter and an independent ascent vehicle,” says Brian Hurley, the Canada-based founder of the influential think tank New Space Economy.
The space agency could also delay the first lunar landing, at the risk of losing Moon Race II to Chinese taikonauts, until SpaceX and Blue Origin were each independently capable of speeding a spacecraft-ambulance to the scene of a Moon crash landing, Hurley told me in an interview.
NASA’s operating plan now in place is to commission the first lander developed by either outfit to lead the lunar landing expedition, regardless of the other rocket maker’s ability to speedily launch a rescue flight.
The rush to complete a touchdown on the Moon, in defiance of the risks of failing to construct a rescue safety net around the entire venture, is driven by two factors: China’s parallel drive to speed its astronauts to the Moon before 2030, and the White House Executive Order aimed at achieving an even earlier landing.
That order, issued just months ago, calls for the U.S. “leading the world in space exploration and expanding human reach and American presence in space by returning Americans to the Moon by 2028 through the Artemis Program.”
Space scholar Brian Hurley chronicles this Moon Race redux via his New Space Economy digital magazine, which charts the advances and setbacks of NASA and the Chinese space agency, and of space-tech titans SpaceX and Blue Origin, as they rush to loft spacefarers to survey the silver and black orb.
Monitoring the safety of this lunar race course, and its American pilots, falls under the remit of NASA’s Office of Inspector General, which was established under an act of Congress.
This high-power inspectorate has the authority to conduct in-depth investigations on virtually every aspect of the space agency’s operations and mission planning, and reports back to NASA’s top directors and to the most powerful leaders across the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in charge of overseeing NASA.
The dangers awaiting NASA astronauts and their lunar landers, these inspectors warn, are everywhere.
Unlike the smooth plains of the Moon’s equator that the lunar astronauts of a generation ago explored, the South Pole features a wild terrain, with meteor-created impact craters that pockmark the moonscape.
“Shackleton Crater, a prevalent feature of the lunar South Pole, is more than two times deeper than the Grand Canyon,” the inspectors say.
“Landers may also encounter hazards such as boulders or mounds that are too large or depressions that are too deep for the landing legs and stability design” of the astronauts’ lunar module to survive a botched touchdown intact.
“Steep slopes of up to 20 degrees on the lunar South Pole present navigation and landing challenges.”
To shuttle its explorers from an orbiting Orion capsule down to the polar region, NASA has awarded SpaceX, with its colossal Starship spacecraft, $4 billion-plus to stage this leg of the journey.
Blue Origin, with its more compact Blue Moon lander, is being awarded $3.1 billion to transport astronauts to the Moon’s version of Antarctica.
Each of these twin giants in the new lunar matchup must first stage a demo lunar landing, without any spacefarers aboard, to show it can navigate the orb’s treacherous topography, and land upright.
“Given Starship’s height of 171 feet, about the equivalent of a 14-story tall commercial building, there is a risk that its momentum will continue after landing causing it to tip over,” the independent space inspectors warn.
“Blue Moon, standing at 53 feet tall, also faces landing risks, including exceeding the lander’s tilt tolerance for safe and effective execution of critical crew functions.”
In contrast, they add, the Apollo landers deployed during Moon Race I, at 23 feet tall, were much more stable, and alighted on a more pacific surface.
“The identification of catastrophic hazards and crew survival gaps are crucial,” the inspectors pointed out, “considering the lander is the top loss of crew contributor” for the upcoming Artemis Moon missions.
Under the current contracts, Hurley says, NASA is requiring Blue Origin and SpaceX to demo only skeleton versions of their spacecraft to land and then take off again, without testing out their power and life support operations on the surface.
To bolster an all-encompassing rescue system, he says, the American space agency should amend those contracts to ensure both spacecraft operators equip their demonstration landers with an abundance of oxygen, water, food, power and Moon-to-Earth communications equipment, and then test out all of these systems on the Moon’s surface.
“For a demonstration Starship to become a recurring haven, NASA would have to redesign the demonstration mission around that objective, intentionally leave the vehicle in place, equip it with the necessary crew systems and consumables, maintain it remotely and arrange for later missions to land within a reachable distance.”
These demo landers could, in turn, act as emergency sanctuaries for astronauts endangered by a troubled landing, and as secondary back-ups to the standby lunar modules positioned in advance of the first touchdowns, he says.
NASA created “in-space rescue plans for its Skylab missions in the 1970s and for the Space Shuttle missions following the loss of Columbia and its crew in 2003,” the NASA inspectors say in their captivating report.
But, inexplicably, they add, the world’s supreme space agency “has not required in-space crew rescue capabilities since the Shuttle’s retirement in 2011.”
“Without a rescue capability for the Artemis missions, the crew will be lost should the HLS [human landing system] become disabled on the lunar surface.”
The agency’s rationale for not creating a multi-tiered Moon astronaut rescue architecture, the inspectors say, included the expense of stationing “a spare HLS [lander] resting on the lunar surface should the primary lander fail.”
Yet Paul Martin, then NASA’s Inspector General, told the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology back in 2023 that “NASA is projected to spend $93 billion on the Artemis effort from FY 2012 through FY 2025.”
The NASA awards to SpaceX and Blue Origin for their landers bring total outlays for the Artemis Moon flights beyond $100 billion.
In comparison, investing an additional $3-5 billion to deploy one or two lifeboat/landers on the selected touchdown site could help ensure that the fantastical NASA investment in the overall Moon discovery quest did not end with the deaths of the new-generation American explorers.
This relatively modest investment would also help protect NASA’s reputation and longevity into the future.
The high-level decisions made not to incorporate a web of rescue strategies into NASA’s overarching Moon rendezvous missions were made long before Jared Isaacman, a sensational space pilot and icon of the NewSpace sector, was confirmed by a super-majority in the U.S. Senate to become the agency’s newest administrator in the run-up to Christmas of 2025.
Isaacman, who’s been hailed as one of the most popular and adroit heads of NASA ever, inside the agency and across America, has already moved to streamline and rationalize the U.S. Moon quest, in part by cancelling the superfluous $5.3 billion Gateway space station set to orbit the Moon in favor of building much more economical habitats on the surface that could, in the 2030s, double as havens for astronauts seeking post-disaster shelters.
Isaacman might channel part of the Gateway investment saved into commissioning rescue spacecraft to be stationed on the periphery of the landing site for the first American aeronauts to trek across the Moon in the 21st century.
The scholars heading NASA’s Office of Inspector General revealed they have counseled the space agency “to update crew survival analyses, including decision packages, to include strategies for extended crew survival,” and added that NASA’s leadership agreed to do so.
If NASA delays incorporating pre-emptive rescue spacecraft and technologies and training throughout the overall Moon landing program, and one of the first flights ends in disaster, that would instantly and fundamentally change NASA’s image across America and around the world.
“Astronauts being stranded on the Moon with no possibility of rescue would be devastating for NASA, the Artemis program and its international partners,” says space scholar Hurley.
“It would probably lead to an extended investigation [and] a suspension of subsequent landings.”
“The consequences would be especially serious if an investigation concluded that a practical refuge or survival capability had been technically achievable but had been rejected primarily because of cost or schedule pressure.”
“A crew stranded alive on the Moon without any practical means of rescue,” Hurley told me, “would almost certainly rank among the most consequential and publicly traumatic events in NASA’s history.”
“The backlash would likely be immense.”
“The OIG [NASA Office of Inspector General] warning would become central to congressional hearings and any investigation, with attention focused on whether NASA had adequately evaluated and funded reasonable rescue options.”
If NASA were to stage the first lunar landing in 2028 or 2029 or 2030, without having positioned in advance a standby rescue spacecraft near the touchdown site, and the crewed American lander toppled over on hitting a boulder, is there even a remote chance that NASA and/or the White House could resort to a Hail Mary strategy by asking the Chinese space agency to rescue the American astronauts?
The Chinese Manned Space Engineering group, Beijing’s counterpart to NASA, has already begun testing out its new Long March 10 Moon rocket and Lanyue lander while vowing to reach the Moon’s South Pole by 2029.
So technically it is feasible that China could launch a sensational world-watched rescue mission that saved the lives of the American astronauts, and that instantly transformed ties between the space superpowers in the process.
“The Chinese lunar lander could likely perform most of its ascent and rendezvous autonomously under mission-control supervision,” says Hurley, who closely tracks China’s space breakthroughs and its race to the Moon with NASA.
The Lanyue module might carry the astronauts to the still-orbiting Orion capsule above the Moon.
In the future, he adds, one of the American Moon Race leaders, SpaceX or Blue Origin, could return the favor by retrieving “stranded Chinese taikonauts from the lunar surface,” lofting them to rendezvous with their own Earth-bound capsule.
“Neither Elon Musk nor Jeff Bezos could authorize such a mission independently,” space savant Hurley says. “It would require U.S. government approval, Chinese cooperation and agreement on national-security, foreign-policy and export-control issues.”
