Washington, DC — The chorus urging a US return to the Moon “before decade’s end” is growing across party lines and the space community. But NASA’s current path hinges on SpaceX’s still-experimental Starship—and on solving first-of-its-kind in-space refueling at an unprecedented scale—while China accelerates its own lunar timeline.
At a recent rally opposing cuts to science funding, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye warned that China “will almost certainly walk on the moon in the next five years,” calling the moment “a key point in the history of space exploration.” That geopolitical clock is amplifying scrutiny of NASA’s Artemis III architecture, which relies on Starship as the lunar lander.
Starship, the largest launch system ever built, remains early in development. Components have failed dramatically in six of its 10 flight tests, and a prototype recently exploded during ground testing. SpaceX is targeting its next attempt—Flight 11—for Monday at 7:15 p.m. ET from South Texas.
Beyond basic flight reliability, Starship still must demonstrate several make-or-break milestones for a 2027 crewed landing. Chief among them: topping off a Starship in low Earth orbit via tanker spacecraft, something no program has ever attempted. The scale of that operation is hotly debated. A SpaceX executive in 2024 pegged the need at “roughly 10-ish” tanker flights; NASA engineers in Houston more recently modeled 40+ for a single landing using the current V2 vehicle, according to a former NASA official. SpaceX is expected to introduce an upgraded Starship after Monday’s test that could change those estimates, but even the low end implies a complex launch campaign with tight sequencing and high on-orbit reliability.
That complexity has drawn fire from veterans of the agency. “This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I’m aware of would have selected had they had the choice,” former administrator Jim Bridenstine told senators in September, noting the 2021 Starship selection occurred when NASA lacked a Senate-confirmed chief.
Acting administrator Sean Duffy pushed back in a September 4 town hall, calling the hearing “shade thrown on all of us.” He told employees, “I’ll be damned if that is the story that we write. We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon.” Current NASA leadership declined comment for this story, citing the government shutdown.
Artemis III’s roadmap is notably more convoluted than Apollo’s direct-ascent profile. Today’s plan layers multiple launches—NASA’s SLS/Orion to carry crew to lunar orbit and a separate commercial mega-lander that must be fueled in Earth orbit, cruise to the Moon, land and return to rendezvous. Each added step expands risk and schedule exposure. Any hiccup—launch weather, pad turnaround, cryogenic transfer losses, tanker or Depot anomalies—can cascade.
Program defenders argue the approach trades near-term complexity for long-term payoff: reusability, lower costs, and a sustainable cadence for later Artemis missions and a lunar economy. Critics counter that the near-term hurdles, plus a tight 2027 target, make a first US crewed landing vulnerable to slips—especially with China aiming for mid-decade milestones.
For now, the next data point arrives Monday night on the Texas coast. A clean Starship flight won’t solve orbital refueling, but it could steady nerves and buy time. A failure would sharpen the central question facing NASA and Congress: stick with a moonshot that could redefine space logistics—or pivot, at the risk of ceding the first new bootprints on the Moon to a rival.
