ORLANDO, Fla. — Companies involved in the Artemis lunar exploration campaign urged the new administration to retain the current architecture, arguing it still offers the fastest way to return humans to the moon.
The Trump administration has not made any public changes to Artemis since taking office Jan. 20. However, administration advisers like Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, have been critical of the existing approach, with Musk stating in December that it was “a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program” and that “something entirely new is needed.”
During a panel about the upcoming Artemis 2 mission at the SpaceCom conference here Jan. 29, Kirk Shireman, Orion program manager at Lockheed Martin, said he’s familiar with the uncertainty that comes with changes in administrations, and urged employees to tune out the distraction. “The best thing we can do is keep your head down and work as hard as you can.”
He said NASA’s current approach to Artemis, which uses the Orion spacecraft launched on the Space Launch System rocket, as well as the lunar Gateway and landers being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX, remained effective despite criticism about costs and delays.
“What we need to do is tell the people in the new administration and anyone we can talk to this about is, hey, the fastest way to get humans back on the moon is to stay the course,” he said. “Things take a long time to build and certify and, if you throw them away every four years and start over, that’s probably the slowest and most expensive thing we could do.”
“Stay the course. Let’s put humans back on the moon and let’s go do the things that we’ve been tasked to go do,” he concluded. Others on the panel, including officials from NASA, Boeing, and ground systems contractor Amentum, agreed, but did not add to his comments.
The panel emphasized the progress being made on the Artemis 2 mission, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, including preparations of the rocket, spacecraft and ground systems. However, that mission, once set to launch in late 2024, has slipped by more than a year. NASA announced Dec. 5 it was postponing the launch to April 2026 after completing analysis of erosion of the heat shield on the Orion capsule flown on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in 2022.
April 2026 is a no-later-than date for the mission, Matt Ramsay, Artemis 2 mission manager at NASA, said during the panel. “The agency has challenged us to do better and we’re in the process of figuring out what better looks like,” he said, with a “work-to” launch date coming in the next few weeks.
With the heat shield issue resolved, he said the key factors driving the launch date will be work assembling the vehicle. Crews are currently stacking segments of the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters, a process that should be complete in the next two to three weeks, said Brad McCain, deputy program manager for ground operations at Amentum.
Once the vehicle is fully assembled, it will be rolled out to Launch Complex 39B for a tanking test. The schedule for that tanking test “is a little bit variable,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director, but would be no earlier than the fall.
There are also the routine issues that occur daily on the program, Ramsay added. “There’s a whac-a-mole every day where we find problems, fix problems and move on to the next day.”
