Allegedly, purportedly, America plans to send NASA astronauts back to the Moon sometime in early 2028 as part of its historic Artemis 4 mission. But at the moment, critical details like what kind of spacesuits those explorers might actually wear and what lunar lander might actually deliver them down to the Moon’s South Pole remain just a little bit vague.

The situation behind the scenes now sounds like it might be shifting from merely concerning to almost farcical, judging from comments made last Thursday by former NASA astronaut Charlie Precourt, a member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). Speaking at ASAP’s quarterly meeting, Precourt got into some of the unresolved variables with the so-called Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles now being developed by NASA’s competing private contractors, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

To recap, the latter of these two mega-billionaire-led projects, SpaceX’s Starship HLS, requires an untested orbital refueling depot where cryogenically stored propellant will be kept for the lander, but not before that depot is itself replenished due to this volatile fuel’s tendency to seep out into space. According to Precourt, the current calculations for just how many SpaceX flights will be needed to keep this low-Earth-orbit (LEO) fuel depot topped off for Artemis 4—well, it sounds preposterously high.

“We need to keep our eyes on numerous required fuelings for the lander,” Precourt noted, according to Ars Technica. “I think the last estimate is around 22 flights.”

SpaceX founder, sometime trillionaire, and full-time poster Elon Musk pushed back on Precourt’s statements on this estimate almost immediately after Ars Technica’s senior space editor Eric Berger began posting about it on the Musk-owned social media site X.

Source link