In recent months, it has begun dawning on US lawmakers that, absent significant intervention, China will land humans on the Moon before the United States can return there with the Artemis Program.
So far, legislators have yet to take meaningful action on this—a $10 billion infusion into NASA’s budget this summer essentially provided zero funding for efforts needed to land humans on the Moon this decade. But now a subcommittee of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology has begun reviewing the space agency’s policy, expressing concerns about Chinese competition in civil spaceflight.
During a hearing on Thursday in Washington, DC, the subcommittee members asked a panel of experts how NASA could maintain its global leadership in space over China in general, and more specifically, how to improve the Artemis Program to reach the Moon more quickly.
“It cannot work”
The most stringent criticism of the Artemis Program was offered by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. He has long been a critic of NASA’s approach toward establishing what the space agency views as a “sustainable” path back to the Moon, which relies on reusable lunar landers that are refueled in space.
Griffin reiterated that criticism on Thursday, without naming SpaceX or Blue Origin, and their Starship and Blue Moon Mk 2 landers.
“The bottom line is that an architecture which requires a high number of refueling flights in low-Earth orbit, no one really knows how many, uses a technology that has not yet ever been demonstrated in space, is very unlikely to work—unlikely to the point where I will say it cannot work,” Griffin said.
As they asked questions, some House members noted that China has done a better job of establishing long-term plans for space exploration and then sticking to them. NASA, by contrast, has been whipsawed by changing leadership in the White House and Congress over its programs and their aims. Would it not be better to stay the course?
“Sticking to a plan is important when the plan makes sense,” Griffin said. “China is sticking to a plan that makes sense. It looks a lot, in fact, like what the United States did for Apollo. Provably, that worked. Sticking to a plan that will not work for Artemis III and beyond makes no sense.”