NASA Reopens Human Landing System (HLS) Competition
NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy announced a dramatic policy reversal regarding the Artemis lunar landing program, opening the competition for the critical Artemis III mission to companies beyond SpaceX. In his appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on 20 October 2025, Duffy acknowledged what many space policy experts had warned about for years, stating plainly that SpaceX is "behind" on its Starship lunar lander development. "We're not going to wait for one company," Duffy told CNBC. "We're going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese."[1] The acting administrator emphasized the urgency of the situation, explaining that President Trump wants Americans back on the Moon before the end of his term in January 2029, and that China's ambitious goal of landing taikonauts by 2030 has created an existential pressure on NASA's timeline.
Duffy's comments represent a remarkable acknowledgment that SpaceX's development was lagging, with the acting administrator telling CNBC that the company "push their timelines out, and we're in a race against China."[2] This marks the first time NASA leadership has publicly admitted that the SpaceX Starship Human Landing System, awarded a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 and later expanded to $4.4 billion, faces serious schedule difficulties that could jeopardize America's return to the lunar surface. Duffy made clear the stakes involved, saying "Whatever one can get us there first, to the moon, we're going to take. And if SpaceX is behind, but Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin."[3]
Blue Origin Emerges as Leading Alternative
The reopening of competition has immediately focused attention on Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander program. Duffy specifically highlighted Blue Origin as a frontrunner, not for its complex Mark 2 lander which requires orbital refueling like Starship, but for the simpler, uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1.[4] This smaller vehicle, larger than the Apollo Lunar Module and critically not dependent on the unproven orbital refueling technology that has become Starship's Achilles heel, was already in advanced production and testing. The first Mark 1 unit was fully assembled as of October 2025 and was slated for vacuum chamber testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center, with launches planned for early 2026 and 2027.[5] Space industry experts suggest that modifications could enable Mark 1 to carry a crew, potentially expediting America's return to the Moon compared to waiting for Starship's numerous technical challenges to be resolved.
Beyond Blue Origin, other major aerospace contractors are positioning themselves to compete. Lockheed Martin indicated it would convene an industry team to respond to NASA's call, with the company's statement noting it has been conducting "significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers" throughout 2025.[6] NASA has requested that both SpaceX and Blue Origin present "acceleration approaches" by October 29th, and the agency plans to issue a broader Request for Information to the entire commercial space industry to solicit plans for increasing the cadence of lunar missions. This multi-pronged approach reflects NASA's desperation to find viable alternatives to the increasingly troubled Starship program.
The Fundamental Flaws in Starship's Architecture
The fundamental problems with SpaceX's Starship plan have been hiding in plain sight for years, yet NASA's space policy apparatus failed to adequately weigh these risks when making the original 2021 selection. The Starship Human Landing System architecture requires an unprecedented and extraordinarily complex orbital refueling operation that has never been attempted at this scale. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine testified before Congress in stark terms about the plan's complexity, explaining that NASA must "launch Starship over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…dozens of times, no delays, no explosions to refuel the first Starship."[7] The architecture requires launching a propellant depot to low Earth orbit, followed by between ten and twenty tanker Starships that must transfer approximately 1,200 tons of cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen to the Human Landing System vehicle.
Bridenstine emphasized the untested nature of this plan: "We are talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space, never been done before, and we're going to do it dozens of times, and then we're going to have a human rated Starship that is refueled that goes all the way to the Moon."[8] The complexity doesn't end there. Once refueled, the Starship HLS must travel to lunar orbit and maintain its cryogenic propellants despite constant boil-off while waiting for the Orion spacecraft to arrive. The timing window was extraordinarily narrow, requiring perfect synchronization between the SLS launch, Orion's arrival, crew transfer in lunar orbit, descent to the surface, and return—all while propellants continuously evaporate from the vehicle's tanks.
Early Warnings Ignored
The Government Accountability Office identified these exact problems years ago, yet NASA proceeded anyway. In November 2023, the GAO noted that SpaceX had made limited progress maturing the technologies needed for in-orbit refueling and cryogenic propellant storage, and identified Raptor engine development as a "top risk" for the program.[9] The GAO concluded that the Artemis III crewed lunar landing was unlikely to occur in 2025 and that a launch date in early 2027 was more realistic—and even that timeline now appears optimistic. By September 2023, the HLS program had delayed eight out of thirteen key events by at least six months, with two events being pushed to 2025, the year the mission was supposed to launch.[10]
The scale of the refueling challenge alone should have raised red flags. Estimates for the number of tanker launches required have varied wildly, from SpaceX's optimistic projection of "10-ish" flights to NASA and GAO assessments ranging from sixteen to nineteen flights—and some analyses suggest it could require up to thirty launches if SpaceX can only deliver fifty tons of propellant per tanker rather than the advertised one hundred tons. These launches must occur in rapid succession to minimize propellant boil-off, creating what one expert described as requiring "anywhere from a dozen to maybe 20 refueling launches within a month."[11] This unprecedented launch cadence, combined with the never-before-demonstrated technology of large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer in orbit, represents a compound probability problem where the failure of any single element cascades through the entire mission architecture.
An Architecture No Administrator Would Choose
Perhaps most damningly, the space policy apparatus failed to heed warnings about the architectural unsuitability of Starship for lunar missions. Bridenstine stated bluntly in his Congressional testimony: "This is an architecture that no NASA Administrator that I'm aware of would have selected had they had the choice."[12] The former administrator was referring to the decision-making constraints imposed by inadequate Congressional funding—NASA requested $3.3 billion for the Human Landing System program but received only $850 million, forcing the agency to select a single provider rather than maintaining competition through parallel development of multiple landers as originally planned.
Blue Origin's 2021 protest of NASA's decision argued that the agency had "executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute," and that NASA had made a "high risk" selection by choosing only SpaceX.[13] Blue Origin's National Team bid $5.99 billion for the contract—roughly double SpaceX's bid—but critically, their architecture utilized only three launches and employed heritage systems with flight-proven technology, in stark contrast to Starship's requirement for dozens of launches and multiple unproven technologies. Blue Origin argued that NASA "unreasonably favored SpaceX's evaluation by minimizing significant risks in SpaceX's design and schedule, while maximizing the same or similar risks in Blue Origin's proposal."[14]
Years of Suppressed Concerns
The failure of NASA's space policy apparatus becomes even more evident when examining how long concerns about Starship's readiness have been suppressed or ignored. As early as June 2023, NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free expressed concerns at a National Academies meeting, stating that Artemis III was in danger of delay due to the "number of launches of Starship that SpaceX has to carry out to be ready."[15] Free acknowledged the difficulties SpaceX was encountering but noted that the fixed-price contract structure meant NASA wouldn't pay more—missing the point that schedule delays matter just as much as cost overruns when competing against China's lunar ambitions. Yet as late as July 2025, Duffy was publicly maintaining that SpaceX was on schedule, telling social media influencers that SpaceX executives "feel very comfortable on Starship" and that "if there's a holdup for Artemis 3, it's not going to be them."[16]
The technical reality was that Starship remained fundamentally unprepared for its lunar mission. As of 2025, the vehicle remains suborbital, and SpaceX has yet to demonstrate the critical on-orbit refueling technology required for lunar missions.[17] The company has experienced multiple Version 2 test flight failures, and while recent flights have shown improvement, achieving human-rating certification for a vehicle that must execute such complex operations with near-perfect reliability represents years of additional development work. The critical design review of the Starship HLS has been repeatedly delayed, most recently pushed back until after SpaceX completes a cryogenic refueling demonstration in Earth orbit—a demonstration that itself has slipped from mid-2025 to sometime in 2026 at the earliest.
The Systemic Policy Failure
What makes this policy failure particularly egregious was that the warning signs were apparent from the beginning. The GAO's analysis of NASA's development timelines showed that achieving the 2025 target would require the HLS program to complete development in seventy-nine months—thirteen months faster than the ninety-two month average for NASA major projects. For a human spaceflight program requiring multiple groundbreaking technologies, expecting faster-than-average development was wishful thinking at best and willful blindness at worst. The reality was that comparable SpaceX programs took far longer: Cargo Dragon required eight years of development, and Crew Dragon took sixteen years from initial development to safely carrying astronauts.
The space policy establishment's failure extends beyond NASA to include Congressional appropriators who chronically underfunded the program, creating the budget constraints that forced NASA into a single-provider strategy. It includes the aerospace community that largely remained silent as the problems mounted, perhaps hoping SpaceX's reputation for rapid innovation would somehow overcome fundamental physics and engineering challenges. It includes media coverage that too often celebrated Starship's dramatic test flights while glossing over the immense gap between achieving orbit and executing the far more demanding lunar mission profile. China's lunar program, meanwhile, has made significant strides, with recent analyses of lunar samples revealing differences between the Moon's near and far sides, and preparations advancing for crewed landings by 2030.[18]
Conclusion: Too Little, Too Late?
The blindingly obvious fact that should have been detected years ago was that an architecture requiring dozens of perfect launches, untested cryogenic propellant transfers at scale, uncertain boil-off management, and narrow timing windows—all for a vehicle still struggling to achieve basic orbital flight—was never a credible path to beating China back to the Moon. The 2021 decision to proceed with only SpaceX, driven by budget constraints rather than technical merit, has cost America years of progress and potentially handed China the symbolic victory of being the next nation to land humans on the lunar surface. Duffy's reopening of competition, while necessary, comes painfully late and faces the challenge of bringing alternative systems to readiness on a compressed timeline. The policy failure was not in choosing SpaceX—it was in choosing only SpaceX, in ignoring the warnings about architectural complexity, and in allowing optimistic projections to override engineering reality.