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Late last month, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced during a livestreamed press conference that the space agency would be making major changes to its Artemis program, downgrading its third mission from a human landing attempt to a test of its Human Landing Systems partners’ SpaceX and Blue Origin’s spacecraft sometime next year.
“We need to chunk it into achievable objectives,” Isaacman told reporters during the announcement, to increase “reliability and standardization” over several missions instead of jumping straight from a crewed trip around the Moon to a landing attempt.
That’s easier said than done. According to a new report about the human landing systems by the agency’s watchdog, the NASA Office of Inspector General — which, per Spaceflight Now, was completed before the latest changes to the Artemis program were announced — the missions will still suffer from the risks associated with extreme exploration.
For instance, while it’s “taking steps to prevent catastrophic events from occurring,” NASA “does not have the capability to rescue the stranded crew” from the lunar surface in case astronauts were to “encounter a life-threatening emergency.”
There’s historical precedent as well. In a document dated July 18, 1969, presidential speechwriter and columnist William Safire drafted a speech for president Richard Nixon, which was intended to be read on TV “in the event of a Moon disaster.”
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace,” he wrote. “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”
Fortunately, of course, both men made it back safely making it a notable “speech that never was” — but the letter goes to show that NASA had no backup plan in case the astronauts were stranded.
In all, despite the agency’s efforts to “mitigate and prevent hazards associated with the landers,” the report reads, “gaps still exist in the Agency’s risk reduction methodology.”
The OIG also noted that questions remain over SpaceX and Blue Origin’s manual control design, allowing crew members to take over in case of an emergency, which it framed as a “key element of HLS’s human-rating certification and part of an essential crew survival strategy.”
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