Former NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin believes that America’s current plan to go back to the Moon is “highly unlikely” to succeed on schedule and fears losing a new space race to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Mr. Griffin told the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics on Jan. 17 that: “The Artemis program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced,” and “compromises crew safety.”
He added it is highly unlikely that the program—which is projected to reach total costs of $93 billion in 2025—will complete its objective on time “even if successful.” Its first four missions will carry production and operating costs of at least $4.2 billion per launch.
And he stressed the importance of beating the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the Moon.
“This matters because our self-declared adversary—adversaries—the Chinese Communist Party, together with their Russian partner, fully understand the role that being on the space frontier has in the world of global power politics,” he said.
The subcommittee hearing comes one week after NASA announced a 10-month delay in its first manned flight around the Moon in more than 50 years and a postponement of any moonwalking until 2026.
Meanwhile, the CCP’s current goal is to put its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030.
Mr. Griffin was the 11th NASA administrator from 2005–2009, as well as the former Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and is now the president and co-founder of the scientific and technical consulting firm LogiQ Inc.
He was one of four key witnesses, appearing alongside NASA’s Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, Catherine Koerner; Director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, William Russell; and NASA’s acting Inspector General, George A. Scott.
But Mr. Griffin was the only one to address the threat of the CCP’s space ambitions.
“The Chinese Communist Party fully understands and frequently says that their goal is to be the world’s great power,” he said.
“They regard the Western democracies as decadent and outmoded and ineffective and efficient. China’s ... Xi [Jinping] bullies neighboring countries, presumes to take control of international waterways, [and] supervises a military establishment that has recently sunk other people’s ships fishing in their own waters.
“Everything about the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party suggests that they are the adversary, and they say so.
“To allow a situation to develop where the human frontier is populated by our adversary and we are not there should be unacceptable to this nation and to our Western and Asian partners.
“We are not on a path to recognize that the rest of the world looks—and will always look—to the nations that occupy the frontier. And exploit the frontier and extend the frontier as leaders of the world.
“I believe that’s the position that the United States should occupy in preference to our adversaries.”
Ms. Koerner, who only mentioned the CCP once when pressed to explain the importance of Artemis, said that the program timeline’s pushback was related to the supply chain and solving technical problems with the spacecraft—from the functionality of the life support systems on the Orion crew capsule to the readiness of SpaceX’s starship, a variant of which has been selected to be the lunar lander.
NASA’s Artemis program was designed to set the stage for a permanent presence on the moon and lunar orbit with the help of a multi-national partnership, as well as contracts with private companies.
One of those partnerships is with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which, the subcommittee pointed out, is also reportedly pursuing other space partnerships with the CCP.
Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), pointed out that the UAE has a history of partnering with China on lunar efforts, including “an agreement to include a rover on the Chinese mission to the lunar South Pole.
“When we are partnering with people who are partnering with others, how do we ensure that the technology shared through a partnership doesn’t, shall we say inadvertently, contribute to someone else’s space or capacities,” he asked.
“We have a fairly rigorous export control process that monitors and manages our interactions with our international partners at every level to ensure that exactly what you just said does not happen,” Ms. Koerner replied.
NASA launched the unmanned Artemis I mission around the Moon in 2022 and had the first manned mission, Artemis II scheduled for Nov. 2024.
That mission has now been postponed to Sept. 2025.
Artemis III, which is set to land Americans on the Lunar South Pole, has been pushed back to September 2026.
It previously had the goal of landing the next man and first woman on the Moon by 2024.
