Former Gov Officials Propose Conflicting Plans for Artemis

The US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing Wednesday aimed at shaping the fate of Artemis, NASA’s program to establish a long-term presence on the Moon. Though a formal roadmap for the program is a while off, the hearing allowed legislators and former government officials to air their concerns about NASA’s controversial Space Launch System (SLS), the private rocket that could replace it, and the country’s overarching lunar settlement strategy.
When the National Space Council drew its first Artemis sketch in 2017, it planned for NASA to use the SLS—and its complementary rocket, Orion—to send humans into lunar orbit and onto the Moon’s surface. Contracts with private aerospace companies would meanwhile be responsible for bringing those astronauts home, as well as for building the US portion of Gateway, an internationally collaborative lunar station. But Artemis has fallen behind in the years since. Concerns about SLS costs and long-term viability have led the next phase of the program, Artemis II, to slip from 2024 to 2025 and then to 2026. The program is meanwhile billions of dollars over budget, leading to criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Wednesday’s hearing attempted to iron out some of these wrinkles. At the hearing, Scott Pace, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and former executive secretary of the National Space Council, surprised the country by expressing wariness of the SLS for the first time. Pace has traditionally opposed commercial heavy lift rockets as replacements for the SLS. But according to Wednesday’s comments, he now believes it’s time to find “an off-ramp for reliance on the SLS.” He supplied reasoning for his argument in a separate statement this week.
“A primary concern is the Space Launch System, which is not reusable,” Pace said. “It is time to consider alternatives for going from the Earth to the Moon and returning….I was a supporter of SLS when it was created as NASA required heavy-lift vehicles to send humans to the Moon and Mars. At the time, it did not appear (to me) that a private sector heavy-lift vehicle would be feasible within two decades. Today, the situation is different, with heavy-lift options from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance.”
SpaceX’s Starship has long been considered a potential alternative to the SLS, thanks to its extra thrust, higher payload capacity, smaller cost, and reusability. But Dan Dumbacher, former deputy associate administrator for exploration systems at NASA, countered Pace’s concerns with skepticism of SpaceX. One of Dumbacher’s priorities is to get Americans back on the Moon before 2030, when China plans to step foot on the lunar surface, and according to his comments at the hearing, he doesn’t think SpaceX can pull that off.
“NASA’s current plan to return people to the Moon requires approximately 35 to 40 Starship launches to first demonstrate the capability on an uncrewed mission and then execute the first human mission, planned for Artemis 3,” Dumbacher said. “Can 40 launches, development and demonstration of the undeveloped and undemonstrated on-orbit rocket fuel station, and integration of a complex operational scenario across multiple systems all successfully occur by 2030? The probability of success for this plan is remote at best.”
Later in the hearing, Dumbacher called for the rapid creation of a smaller spacecraft that could bring Americans to the Moon within the next five years. In theory, this would resolve people’s broadest concerns regarding the SLS without requiring help from SpaceX. But Dumbacher didn’t dig into how NASA would get that “small, new lander” done.
Both former government officials agreed on the bare minimum, however: that a return to the Moon is a prerequisite for a crewed attempt to reach Mars. 
“We need to take the right thing at the right time: Moon first, then Mars,” Dumbacher said.
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