SpaceX’s most important customer is officially unhappy with the company’s trajectory toward returning American astronauts to the Moon, which may lead to one of Elon Musk’s most hated rivals getting that business instead.
In TV appearances on Monday morning, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the space agency is reopening the contract to build a crewed lunar lander for Artemis III, the mission that’s set to return American astronauts to the Moon’s surface for the first time since 1972 and which President Trump wants to see happen by 2028.
Duffy only named one company as a possible alternative: Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned space firm that Musk has spent years mocking as a pretender.
“SpaceX, an amazing company, they do remarkable things, but they’re behind schedule,” Duffy said during an appearance on Fox & Friends after reminding viewers that China continues to advance toward landing its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030.
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“The president wants to make sure that we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said. “I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others.”
That $2.89 billion contract was awarded in 2021 and later revised to $4 billion. It calls for SpaceX to develop a Human Landing System version of the upper stage of its giant, fully reusable Starship rocket to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back.
But with $2.7 billion paid so far, Starship has yet to reach orbit after a test-flight campaign that began in April 2023 and has seen a series of upper-stage explosions. The 11th launch last month saw Starship’s booster and upper stage both splash down intact—with that second stage looking a little cooked from the heat of reentry—but the company now has to flight-qualify a new, more powerful Block 3 design.
And things only get harder from there: SpaceX will need to get a version of Starship to orbit, demonstrate orbital refueling from one upper stage to another, repeat that for however many times are required to put enough fuel into a second stage to get it to lunar orbit, and land a test HLS on the Moon.
SpaceX has an outstanding record with its Falcon 9 rocket, which has been sending astronauts to and from the International Space Station since 2020. But Starship is a profoundly more complex design than that partly reusable launch vehicle, in part because Musk’s ultimate ambition for Starship is to use it to colonize Mars.
Duffy repeated his critique of SpaceX later Monday morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box, in which he brushed aside NASA’s April 2026 projection for an Artemis III launch. Instead, that mission won’t happen until “a couple years after” after Artemis II, a crewed lunar flyby NASA hopes to launch in February on the Space Launch System rocket it debuted in November 2022.
“The problem is, they’re behind,” he said of SpaceX. “They’ve pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China.”
Again, the only alternative that Duffy name-checked was Blue Origin. “I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin,” he said. “If SpaceX is behind and if Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin.”
The confusing part is that NASA already inked a $3.4 billion lunar lander contract with Blue Origin in 2023 after Blue protested the earlier SpaceX contract. And that doesn’t envisage a first crewed landing for the Bezos-owned firm’s Blue Moon Mark 2 vehicle until Artemis V.
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That large lunar lander would be launched on Blue’s New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, which reached orbit on its debut launch in January, but would then require its own complicated in-orbit refueling.
Blue’s Plan B, as Ars Technica’s space journalist Eric Berger reported in early October, could involve developing a crewed version of its smaller Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander. That spacecraft, with a design that does not require refueling after launch, is due to have its first test mission in early 2026.
Or NASA could award a contract to a more established aerospace company to develop and build a crewed lunar lander from scratch. It is profoundly unclear how that approach would yield an American flag and American bootprints on the Moon before 2030, when Trump already plans to slash NASA’s budget. However, Lockheed Martin has been providing statements to news outlets like Ars Technica and The New York Times, declaring its willingness to step up.
‘SpaceX Is Moving Like Lightning’
Musk has not been taking this well, judging from his rage-posting on X over the last two days. He replied dismissively to a post from Duffy on Monday in which the acting administrator wrote that “competition and innovation are the keys to our dominance in space.” Musk wrote: “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” before clarifying in a second post, “(Useful payload).”
In a later reply to a supportive post from a fan, Musk said no other company could get to the Moon first. “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” he wrote. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”
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(Duly marked.)
In yet another post, Musk suggested that China landing people on the Moon before America could return people there as long as the US came to stay: “A permanently crewed lunar science base would be far more impressive than a repeat of what was already done incredibly well by Apollo in 1969.”
Given Trump’s feelings about China, that seems likely to go over as well as suggesting that the president work the gender-neutral demographic buzzword “Latinx” into his speeches.
One plot twist that clearly did not go over well with Musk himself: A Wall Street Journal report Monday that said Duffy hopes to become NASA’s permanent administrator instead of a possible renomination of payments billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, a Musk favorite whom Trump un-nominated in May.
The WSJ piece also suggested that Duffy is seeking to move NASA into the Department of Transportation, where he already has what is theoretically a full-time job as secretary.
Musk posted a poll asking “Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America’s space program? 🤔”, with the possible answers “Yezz, chimps skillz rūl!” or “Noo, he need moar brainz!”
(Duffy won a tree-climbing competition in his twenties during a stint as a professional lumberjack before starring in two reality-TV series, getting a law degree, and serving as a prosecutor and then representing Wisconsin’s seventh congressional district from 2011 through 2019.)
Through Tuesday morning, Musk pursued this novel notion of customer relationship management with such further insults as “Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA!” and “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ. And then he returned to one of his other online obsessions with a string of posts denouncing “anti-White racism.”
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.