For example, on September 3, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing that it is “highly unlikely” for the agency to return astronauts to the Moon before China lands its taikonauts there. He added, among other things, that selecting SpaceX’s Starship as the lunar lander puts NASA at risk of the US falling behind China in lunar exploration.
Indeed, it is entirely possible that China’s red flag could be flying over the lunar South Pole before Musk’s Starship lands American astronauts there for the first time in roughly 55 years.
In sharp testimony before senators at a hearing titled “A Bad Moon on the Horizon,” the former administrator (who served from 2018 to 2021) expressed deep concerns about the complexity and feasibility of NASA’s Artemis program.
“Look at the architecture that we have developed to land American astronauts on the Moon,” said Bridenstine, who now works as a managing partner at The Artemis Group, describing it as highly complex, partly due to challenges with on-orbit refueling. “It is highly unlikely that we will land on the Moon before China does,” he concluded.
Admittedly, his words sparked outrage from the current Acting NASA Administrator, Sean Duffy. “I’m angry about it. That would be a shadow cast over all of NASA,” he declared at an internal meeting on September 4, quickly adding: “I’ll be damned if that’s the story we write. We will beat the Chinese to the Moon! I assure you, we will do it safely. We will do it quickly. We will do it right.” Duffy then reiterated his earlier comments to the media that NASA would return astronauts to the Moon before China’s first crewed landing. “We will not allow this glorious history of NASA to be written as us losing a second space race,” Duffy concluded.
Fine words, perhaps. But they ring somewhat hollow. The arguments from Bridenstine, a man who was at the helm of the Artemis project’s inception from April 2018 to January 20, 2021, during the first Trump administration, appear very compelling.
Criticism Hits the Mark
“Starship is an important asset for the United States,” Bridenstine told the Senate, “but NASA made a mistake when it selected it for the Human Landing System (HLS) program in early 2021. This is a problem that needs to be solved, and it puts us as a nation at risk. I don’t know how it happened, but the most important decision in NASA’s history, at least since I’ve been paying attention, was made in the absence of a proper NASA administrator,” Bridenstine stated. He continued: “This is an architecture that no NASA administrator I know of would have chosen if they had a choice.”
Incidentally, the NASA official responsible for the HLS procurement decision was Kathy Lueders, then the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations. She justified the decision based on the significantly lower price SpaceX offered compared to its competitors, Blue Origin and Dynetics. As a side note – do you know where you can find the “retired” Ms. Lueders now? At SpaceX. She joined the company on May 15, 2023, just two months after leaving NASA, as a general manager working on the Starship program at Starbase…
Bridenstine is not alone in his criticism of the Artemis program. John Shaw, a retired Lieutenant General of the U.S. Space Force who has advocated for a “unified grand strategy for space” for the United States, put it in military terms:
“It is clear to me,” he stated, “that the Chinese Communist Party is already implementing its own grand, integrated strategy for the Earth-Moon system. If we do not unify and synchronize our efforts, we may find ourselves playing catch-up rather than leading.”
“I think the Chinese space program that will get them to the Moon is way ahead of the United States right now,” said Bill Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society, in an interview after the congressional hearing. He placed much of the blame on a White House proposal to cut NASA’s overall budget for fiscal year 2026 by a quarter, with science slated for a nearly 50% reduction. “This is a recipe for being left behind. China will put its flag on the south pole of the Moon, and it will be in every paper and on every TV in the world. That’s going to be very discouraging,” Nye concluded.
From the Moon to Mars?
Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of the Mars Society, is even more direct. He argues that instead of implementing a clear plan, the Artemis program has funded a haphazard set of expensive projects for an assortment of flight systems. According to him, these include the hyper-expensive Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, cobbled together from 80% legacy hardware from the Space Shuttle and Saturn rockets; the oversized Orion capsule; the unnecessary Gateway station (which is currently at risk of cancellation); the methane/oxygen-powered Starship; and the expendable hydrogen/oxygen Blue Moon lander, built by the so-called “National Team” led by Blue Origin (with Lockheed Martin, Draper Labs, and others).
“These systems simply do not fit together to create any kind of coherent mission capability,” Zubrin writes in the August 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine, as republished on spacenews.com.
“Starship would be an excellent choice for Artemis’s primary launch vehicle. But NASA has not assigned it this role, instead funding it to serve as the human lunar landing and ascent system, a task for which its 100-ton dry mass (compared to the Apollo Lunar Module’s 2 tons) is a significant complication. (Editor’s note: moreover, landing a 50-meter colossus on the uneven lunar surface is quite risky.)”
NASA could have insisted that the lander’s design be changed to a reusable system using methane and oxygen propellant, functioning as a small, refuelable ferry to shuttle astronauts down to and up from the lunar surface from a Starship tanker positioned in low lunar orbit. This would have increased the number of lunar exploration missions supported by Starship by an order of magnitude. However, NASA chose to prioritize contractor satisfaction over hardware utility and is now paying billions for an incompatible landing module.
While the individual decisions of the Artemis program may seem to have been made in a random fashion, there is an identifiable pathology underlying the entire mess. Artemis is not a purpose-driven program. It is a contractor-driven program. The Apollo program spent money to do things. The Artemis program does things to spend money. If we want to get people to the Moon and Mars, we must take a different path.
America has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to launch a sustained program of crewed exploration beyond just the Moon. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship system may soon be operational, offering the ability to deliver payloads comparable to the Saturn V moon rocket at about 5% of the cost. But President Trump (admittedly, influenced by Elon Musk) announced a plan to send people to Mars.
How can this be achieved?
“It cannot be done by evolving from the current Artemis program, which is in a state of utter disarray,” continues Robert Zubrin.
We are not going to Mars to give NASA something to do, to provide a pretext for funding an existing assortment of technology development programs, or to plant a flag on the red surface. We are going to Mars for the science, for the challenge, and for the future. To achieve this goal, we must implement a bold, effective, and efficient program of field exploration. This understanding must be the foundation of all aspects of mission design.
While all mission hardware used in a human Mars exploration program should be fairly competed, it is a foregone conclusion at this point that the best launch system for this endeavor will be the SpaceX Starship. Even under the worst assumptions, it will offer comparable lift capacity to the SLS, but with at least ten times the launch rate and at two orders of magnitude lower cost.
After delivering its payload to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), SpaceX has proposed that Starship will fly to LEO with 100 tons of cargo and then be refueled with 600 tons of propellant delivered to orbit by approximately six Starship tankers. This would provide enough propellant to fly to Mars on a six-month trajectory, aerobrake into Mars orbit, and then land. After unloading its cargo, the Starship could serve as a habitat for a very large crew for a year and a half, during which time it would be refueled with about 600 tons of methane and oxygen produced from Martian CO2 and water. This would be sufficient to return the ship to Earth on a six-month trajectory with its crew and ten tons of cargo.
A Starship for Mars
But Starship is too heavy to serve as an optimal vehicle for Earth return. If we wanted to produce 600 tons of propellant in 500 days, we would need a power source capable of generating an average of 600 kilowatts. This would require solar panels covering an area the size of 13 football fields, or a nuclear reactor. From a technical standpoint, the second option would certainly be preferable, but its development could cause major delays in the program.
“The solution to this problem would be to develop another flight element, which I call the Starboat,” Zubrin continues his reflections. This could be a vehicle of a similar type to SpaceX’s current Starship but scaled down by a factor of five. It could play a number of roles that would rectify the weaknesses in SpaceX’s plan. For example, it could perform a direct return from the surface of Mars to Earth using just 120 tons of propellant or perform a rendezvous in low Mars orbit using only 50 tons of propellant. This would reduce the power requirement on the Martian surface by an order of magnitude.
Incidentally, the Starboat would need only 40 tons of propellant for a round trip to low lunar orbit and back, compared to the standard Starship, which requires 200 tons.
Mars cannot be explored from a single base using slow-moving, limited-range ground vehicles, Zubrin believes. “Because it requires substantially less propellant to reach orbit, the use of a Starboat would allow a single base to explore areas thousands of kilometers in diameter. The same system, used on the Moon, would allow for round-trip transportation to and from the base to any other location on the lunar surface.”
Without the Starboat, explorers at bases on the Moon or Mars would be confined to an area the size of Brooklyn. With it, they would have the freedom to roam areas the size of continents.
Reusability and interoperability of elements are key. Instead of an incoherent and ineffectual lunar program based on five incompatible major hardware elements with no utility for reaching Mars, we can create a highly capable flight system requiring only two elements—the Starship and the Starboat—to give us repeated, low-cost, global access to two new worlds.
“The scientific return from such a program would be beyond calculation. The future it would open up would be limitless,” believes Robert Zubrin.
*
(P.S. Robert Zubrin is the president of the Mars Society and the author of 14 books, including “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must” and “The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.”)
Sources: spacenews, nasaspaceflight
