Is the 2028 Moon landing achievable?published at 16:05 BST
Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent
Image source, NASAImage caption,
The half-illuminated Moon is seen from the Artemis II mission in the foreground, with the crescent Earth visible in the background
Yes, according to Nasa. Probably not, according to everyone else.
The official Nasa line is that American astronauts will be back on the Moon by 2028 and that “initial base elements” will be in place by 2030. China is targeting a crewed landing of its own by 2030. The race is real, and the Americans want to win it.
Whether they can is a different question. But there is a large gulf between Nasa’s claims and the actual state of the rockets it will need. The lander that is supposed to take astronauts down to the surface – SpaceX’s Starship – is too heavy to reach the Moon on a single tank. To get there, it must be refuelled in orbit by a fleet of roughly ten tanker Starships, transferring cryogenic methane and oxygen between docked spacecraft. Nobody has ever done this. The first demonstration is, optimistically, late this year. In March, Congress’s own auditors said SpaceX had made only “limited progress” on the technology. Then Blue Origin’s pad blew up.
For the first crewed landing – now Artemis IV in early 2028 – every one of those things has to work, in sequence, for the first time, on a schedule with no slack.
Most independent experts I speak to think 2028 is heroic. Dr Simeon Barber, a lunar scientist at The Open University, put it more bluntly when we talked last month. “It would not surprise me at all if China gets there first.” 2028 is also President Trump’s last full year in office.
