NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

If they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC), and sort out their space suit issues.

Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA, SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check, Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6 flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification from the original HLS bid.

Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I can't think of any component of Artemis that has any contractors delivering competently and on-time.

We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not due to a lack of spending.

Pretty much. Starship is a source of delays - but not the source of delays. Even if Starship HLS was ready to go yesterday, I would still expect Artemis 3 to schedule slip all the way to ~2030.

Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.

I wonder if we'll get a demonstration from China in the next few decades.

China wants to put the first woman on the Moon before 2030.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed by now, assuming that they don't get ravaged by war/internal strife, that China will have landed people on the Moon by the 2040s, and, to be fair, I'd say the same for the US having landed people there again, assuming that they stay on path instead of constantly canceling and replacing programs as they have been doing.

They should give the rights to Starliner IP to Blue Origin so the US can have a legitimate backup to the dragon capsule.

Blue seemed to be planning to use Boeing for their ISS-replacement proposal, but at this point I expect that they'd prefer to build on their New Shepard experience for a custom design. Starliner isn't really worth trying to fix (even the reliability issues aside, it's enough of a pain to do maintenance on that they couldn't just go in and replace valves on the ground).

China's stated goal is to get people on the moon by 2030. This may slip by a year or two, but probably not much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10

But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100

(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)

I’m still wanting a great explanation why we could do it in the 60s, but China can’t do it until 2030s.

The reason I’m told we don’t do it today, is that we don’t want to. OK, China does, so what is the hold up that applies now?

2030 is just a little over 4 years away. They have a lot of hardware to develop and test. It takes time to develop good hardware, as the US is also realizing (again). It was about 7 years between the first flight test of any Apollo related vehicle and Apollo 11.

Payload capacities to trans-lunar injection (source wikipedia):

SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)

SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)

SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)

Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)

New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)

Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).

Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.

1. It still took nearly 7 years to after JFK's speech in the 60s.

2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.

Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:

3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).

New Glenn at least claims to eventually be able to put 45,000kg to LEO. Once in orbit, refueling or docking boost stages can come into play. With Vulcan, I have mainly heard of proposals involving modifying Orion to dock the service module in orbit after separate launches.

Supposedly, as of a week ago, LM sees at least some possible routes to having Orion without SLS to not outright give up on the idea, but doesn't have specifics for now: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/once-unthinkable-nasa-...

Who's to say they haven't been working on this for years already? They basically spun up an entire silicon fab industry in the past 5-6 years.

Exactly.

No one is ever able to explain why now, and doubly so why when now is still in the future.