With SpaceX Behind Schedule, NASA Will Seek More Moon Lander Ideas

The acting administrator of NASA said on Monday that the agency was looking for a Plan B to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface because SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is behind schedule.

In appearances on CNBC and Fox News, Sean Duffy, the temporary leader of the space agency, said he would open bidding on a contract to build a new lunar lander to other companies. Mr. Duffy, who is also the secretary of transportation, cited urgency for NASA to beat China, which is aiming to send its astronauts to the moon by 2030.

“We’re not going to wait for one company,” Mr. Duffy said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”

Mr. Duffy identified another priority: that President Trump wanted the moon landing to occur before Jan. 20, 2029, the end of his second term as president. That would mean developing and building a new lunar lander in less than three and a half years, at a cost that would very likely add billions of dollars to what NASA has already budgeted.

Mr. Duffy named Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, as one possibility. Blue Origin is already developing a lunar lander for NASA. But that $3.4 billion contract is for the Artemis V mission, which is not set to take place until the 2030s.

Lockheed Martin and other companies could also make a play for the moon mission.

On X, Mr. Musk responded dismissively. “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” he wrote in one post. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

In another post, Mr. Musk noted that Mr. Bezos’s company had accomplished far less than his own. “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” he wrote. He subsequently clarified a “useful payload,” as the company launched a test spacecraft to orbit in January.

In 2021, SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to provide the lander for Artemis III, a NASA mission that aims to take two NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in the south polar region.

Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027, but no one expects that NASA can meet that date. The question is how far into the future it may slip.

For that mission, SpaceX plans to use a version of its gargantuan Starship rocket, which is as tall as a 17-story building. But that vehicle, ultimately intended to fulfill Mr. Musk’s dream of taking colonists to Mars, is much bigger and more complex than what is needed for a lunar mission carrying two astronauts.

“That architecture is extraordinarily complex,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator during Mr. Trump’s first administration, told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in September. “It, quite frankly, doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re trying to go first to the moon this time to beat China.”

Failures during three consecutive test flights of Starship this year have slowed SpaceX’s progress. Although test flights in the past few months were successful, additional launches are on pause until next year when an improved version of the rocket is ready.

SpaceX also has major technical hurdles to clear. Because of the spacecraft’s giant size and weight, it will not head directly to the moon. Instead, it will have to refill its propellant tanks while docked with other Starships while still in orbit around Earth. That procedure has yet to be demonstrated at that scale.

Under its contract, SpaceX is also required to land a Starship on the moon without any astronauts aboard before Artemis III can take place.

While even competitors praise SpaceX’s accomplishments and technical prowess, space industry experts are increasingly skeptical that all of the technical challenges of such a complex system can be solved quickly for a system that is safe enough for people.

NASA is now taking heed.

“I’m in the process of opening that contract up,” Mr. Duffy said on “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “I think we’ll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others.”

He said there would be a space race between American companies “competing to see who can actually get us back to the moon first.”

In an statement, Bethany Stevens, the press secretary for NASA, said the agency would issue a “request for information” from the commercial space industry “for how NASA can increase the cadence of our mission to the moon.”

Douglas Cooke, a former high-level NASA official who has been pushing for a new lander, said that this was the right move. “They need to get a start on the lander that will have a chance of getting there,” he said. “The path they were on was not going to beat the Chinese.”

In the limited time before January 2029, it might be possible to develop another lunar lander, but not from scratch.

Douglas Loverro, who briefly served as NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations in 2019 and 2020, said he had told Mr. Bridenstine and other NASA leaders that hiring a private company like SpaceX for the lunar lander would not work if the goal was speed.

He said he advocated, then and now, an alternative design that would cobble together existing technologies. “In order to go ahead and build a lander in under five years, you can’t invent anything new,” Mr. Loverro said in an interview. “Anything you use has to already exist.”

Officials at Lockheed Martin said they had been working with other aerospace companies on such a design for several months.

Rob Chambers, director of human spaceflight strategy at Lockheed Martin, said that meant using not just existing designs but also hardware that is already built and sitting in storage somewhere, including pulling pieces off other spacecraft.

Mr. Chambers likened the problem to a scene in the movie “Apollo 13,” when an engineer dumps a hodgepodge of items on a table and says they have to jury-rig a fix to the carbon dioxide filters.

The lander envisioned by Lockheed Martin would be smaller than the current SpaceX and Blue Origin designs. It would be a two-stage spacecraft, like the lunar lander used for NASA’s Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, but larger. The crew area, part of an ascent stage that would launch off the lunar surface, would use components from Orion, a Lockheed Martin capsule that will carry astronauts between Earth and lunar orbit.

There are several options for the descent stage, which will guide the lander to the surface of the moon. One possibility is a variation of Blue Moon Mark 1, a cargo-only lander being developed by Blue Origin to demonstrate technologies to be used for the larger crewed Artemis V lander. Mr. Chambers declined to say whether Blue Origin was one of the companies that Lockheed Martin is working with.

A Blue Origin spokesman did not directly respond to questions about whether it was working with Lockheed Martin. The spokesman said only, “Blue Origin is ready to support.”

Even a simple design and accelerated development schedule might not reach the moon as soon as Mr. Duffy would like.

“I’ll just be honest that that date that Secretary Duffy put out is one hell of a challenge for the industry,” Mr. Chambers said. “We’re quite confident that this is the fastest solution, and that it’s a safe solution that actually gives us some additional safety options.”

But he added, “We can’t commit to that date yet.”

A new lander for Artemis III could cost more than what NASA is paying SpaceX or Blue Origin. Those companies, led by two of the richest people in the world, are providing much of the financing of the development costs. Traditional aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin would most likely not pursue an unprofitable venture.

“It would not be cheap,” Mr. Chambers said.