NASA’s Office of Inspector General identified development delays and gaps in testing and crew survival planning for SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander as NASA targets a crewed Moon landing in 2028. The audit also raised concerns about Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.
The report, released March 10, said Starship would not be ready for NASA’s earlier June 2027 lunar landing target. NASA was assessing proposals to accelerate both companies’ lander development for a 2028 landing, but the OIG said it was too early to determine the proposals’ technical feasibility, financial implications and schedule effects.
NASA announced a revised mission sequence on February 27, assigning Artemis III to a low Earth orbit test flight in 2027 ahead of an Artemis IV lunar landing targeted for 2028. NASA said the test mission would seek to include rendezvous and docking with one or both commercial landers. Its detailed objectives remained subject to further reviews.
The audit work preceded that announcement, and the report retained the earlier mission numbering used in the lander contracts. An addendum described the revised plan but said the OIG had not evaluated its cost, schedule or technical effects.
Refueling challenges and delayed reviews
The audit identified transferring cryogenic propellant between spacecraft as a significant technical challenge. SpaceX’s mission concept requires tanker vehicles to deliver propellant to an orbiting storage depot, where the Starship lander would refuel before traveling to the Moon.
For the follow-on Starship lander, designated for Artemis IV under the earlier mission sequence, the audit said NASA and SpaceX expected the preliminary design review to move to August 2026 and the critical design review to June 2027. Each represented a delay of at least a year.
Blue Origin’s lander development had slipped by at least eight months, the OIG found. The company was also working to address design shortcomings identified during its preliminary design review, including propulsion maturity, vehicle mass and propellant margins.
Manual controls, testing and crew rescue
NASA and SpaceX disagreed over whether Starship’s proposed landing approach met the intent of NASA’s manual control requirement, the audit said. That requirement calls for astronauts to be able to take control during all phases of flight, including descent and landing.
The OIG warned that leaving the disagreement unresolved before the critical design review could leave automation as the only landing method or require substantial late design changes. Key decisions about Blue Origin’s manual control design also remained outstanding.
The audit also questioned the scope of the required uncrewed demonstration flights. Those missions would not have to include life support systems or airlocks, or Starship’s elevator, limiting opportunities to test equipment in the lunar environment before astronauts use it.
Although NASA was taking steps to prevent catastrophic events, the OIG found gaps in its crew survival analyses. It said NASA lacked the capability to rescue Artemis astronauts stranded in space or on the lunar surface during a life-threatening emergency.
Both providers hold multibillion-dollar Human Landing System contracts to develop spacecraft that transport astronauts between lunar orbit and the Moon’s surface. The OIG found that NASA’s fixed-price contracting approach had effectively controlled contract costs, with SpaceX’s potential contract value increasing by 6 percent and Blue Origin’s by less than 1 percent.
NASA concurred with four of the audit’s five recommendations and partially concurred with a recommendation concerning contract provisions for government resources. The safety recommendations called for reviewing lessons from the Commercial Crew Program’s manual control waiver and updating analyses to include strategies for extended crew survival.
