Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.
The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.
No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with the modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.
“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Drier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”
But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Drier says.
One sentence spent on blue origin despite the fact that glen lifter matched spacex recently and both landers are still in the running for Artemis 3 tests.
All while talking up spacex which is nothing but the leftovers of TRW. Shift a few key engineers and spacex hasn’t a leg to stand on.