Artemis Stuff

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NASA just held an Artemis press conference, in which outgoing NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that due to ongoing concerns about the Orion heat shield (see posts above) Artemis II (the crewed loop around the Moon without landing) is being pushed back to April 2026, with Artemis III (the crewed lunar landing) no earlier than the middle of 2027.

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Eric Berger says that it's good that NASA admitted that Artemis II won't fly next year. What they didn't say is that whenever it does fly, it probably won't be atop an SLS rocket.

https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/186473685575894236

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Boeing is the prime contractor for NASA's huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

And Eric Berger is reporting that today (Friday February 7, 2025) David Dutcher, Boeing Program Manager for SLS held an all-hands meeting of ever 800 employees warning them that SLS might be cancelled in March and if it is, to expect mass layoffs. The meeting only lasted six minutes, appeared to be scripted, and Dutcher took no questions.

Berger notes that federal labor law requires companies with more than 100 employees to give those employees 60 days notice in the case of mass layoffs or plant closures. This appears to be that.

It's starting to look grim for SLS.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/bo...contracts/

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Artemis II is officially NET (no earlier than) February 5, 2026. This one will carry four astronauts (one is Christina, another is Canadian, eh?) around the Moon, for the first time since 1972.

And yes, they will be atop an SLS.

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Lockheed says this:

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Acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy made some waves this morning. Eric Berger breaks it down:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/na...ouncement/

NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News... Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back...

..."So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”...

...SpaceX won a contract from NASA, worth $2.9 billion, in April 2021 to develop and modify its ambitious Starship rocket to serve as a “human landing system” (HLS)... Two years later Blue Origin, a rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, won a second contract, worth $3.4 billion to develop a second lander...

...When Duffy says “companies like Blue” may get involved, he is not referring to the existing contract, in which Blue Origin will not deliver a ready-to-go lunar lander until the 2030s. Rather he is almost certainly referring to a plan developed by Blue Origin that uses multiple Mk 1 landers, a smaller vehicle originally designed for cargo only. Ars reported on this new lunar architecture three weeks ago, which company engineers have been quietly developing. This plan would not require in-space refueling, and the Mk 1 vehicle is nearing its debut flight early next year.

Duffy also cites “maybe others” getting involved...

...On Monday, in a statement to Ars, a Lockheed Martin official confirmed that the company was ready if NASA called upon them.

“Throughout this year, Lockheed Martin has been performing significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers that would provide options to NASA for a safe solution to return humans to the Moon as quickly as possible,” said Bob Behnken, vice president of Exploration and Technology Strategy at Lockheed Martin Space. “We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy’s request to meet our country’s lunar objectives.”...

And yes, Lockheed's Bob Behnken is the Bob Behnken, the former NASA astronaut who flew the SpaceX dragon first crewed test flight. His presence lends Lockheed's lander effort credibility in my mind.

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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_30snxwJUPY

[Yazata]

Speaking on Fox News... Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander... Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back...

In response, SpaceX has issued a fairly detailed account of where the HLS lander program stands:

https://www.spacex.com/updates#moon-and-beyond

Apollo lunar lander (interior volume less than an HLS airlock):

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HLS lunar lander:

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They say that they have completed just about all of NASA's milestones prior to flight testing.

Lots of software work. Lunar landing leg design and landing engine throttling. Life support design and ground testing. Complete cabin mockups. Micrometeorite resistance testing of skin and windows. Docking adapter qualification. Flight rules and procedures development. Airlock and elevator development. Communications testing. Development of telemedicine procedures for crew emergencies.

The next milestones involve flight testing. They have already started construction of a flight HLS cabin with functional life support and environmental, power and avionics. The next flight milestones will be a long duration flight test and the in-space propellant transfer test. Both of these are planned for 2026. For orbital rondezvous, HLS will use the same Dragon's Eye system the Dragon capsules use to routinely dock with the ISS.