Moon Monday #257: NASA preps to send astronauts to Luna

Artemis updates galore

• The US Senate voted and confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator on December 17, 2025, closing a long drawn process of having the entrepreneur, pilot, astronaut, and Trump’s original but later withdrawn nominee be the person leading NASA.
• In parallel, the US White House issued an Executive Order, effectively yet another national policy directive from the country, to try landing humans on the Moon before China. In 2025, due to three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship, an explosion during testing, and another booster lost, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon significantly slowed down, making Lunar Starship the pacing item. As such, the executive order formally pushes the Artemis III crewed lunar landing target from 2027 to 2028, hoping that the reopening of the mission’s contract for accelerated proposals—which was done last year by Isaacman’s predecessor Sean Duffy as Acting Administrator—would help the US achieve the feat before the next Presidential elections more so than before China lands humans on Luna. The optimistic executive order also calls for the US to work towards a “permanent lunar outpost by 2030”, and continues the decision to reinvest in nuclear power on the Moon.
• NASA is targeting a Q1 launch this year to fly four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back. The agency is executing the final string of tests only after the successes of which can it safely liftoff the SLS rocket carrying the crew’s Orion spacecraft. The latest of these tests involved the crew donning their spacesuits and entering Orion as a pre-launch countdown demonstration test in tandem with ground teams to verify mission procedures. Next up, NASA is preparing to roll out the SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the complex’s Launchpad 39B no earlier than January 17. The agency also identified and fixed some problems in the process:

During final checkouts before rollout, technicians found a cable involved in the flight termination system was bent out of specifications. Teams are replacing it and will test the new cable over the weekend. Additionally, a valve associated with Orion’s hatch pressurization exhibited issues leading up to a Dec. 20 countdown demonstration test. On Jan. 5, the team successfully replaced and tested it. Engineers also worked to resolve leaky ground support hardware required to load gaseous oxygen into Orion for breathing air.

• In the meanwhile, Isaacman’s first priority after becoming the NASA administrator has been to review the Orion capsule’s heat shield and its effectiveness in saving the lives of Artemis II astronauts during atmospheric reentry on Earth at the end of the mission. Previously, two independent investigations by NASA analyzed the unexpected damage caused to Orion’s shield during reentry in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission. The agency concluded that the heat shield’s ablative Avcoat material was not porous enough to vent and dissipate hot gas buildup during its bounced atmospheric reentry, which led to cracks and loss of entire chunks. NASA then decided to change Orion’s reentry profile for Artemis II to manage the heat buildup, deeming it a safe measure for astronauts. Following the latest shield review led by Isaacman, wherein two specific reporters were (preferentially?) allowed to attend, NASA has decided to continue with the changed reentry profile proposal. Eric Berger, one of the two reporters with access to the meeting, noted the worst case scenario as follows:

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Not all experts seated in the meeting are convinced, with one publicly citing limitations of the tools used for said analyses. Here’s hoping the Artemis II astronauts fly and get back to Earth safely.

On the other hand, there’s poignant irony in unequivocally debating so much about saving the lives of astronauts but not of those on the ground too, including not only ensuring protective measures for launch teams but also looking out for the safety of passengers in flight against rocket debris, engineers on ground testing hardware, and simply caring about lives of people at large. The pursuit of space does not place us above human life.

More mission updates

• US-based Firefly Aerospace has tested and qualified through NASA a structural model of its upcoming second Blue Ghost CLPS Mooncraft for launch vibrations and acoustic stress at JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory.

A structural qualification model of the full stack was clamped to a “shaker table” inside a clean room at JPL and repeatedly rattled in three directions while hundreds of sensors monitored the rapid movement. Then, inside a separate acoustic testing chamber, giant horns blared at it from openings built into the room’s 16-inch-thick (41-centimeter-thick) concrete walls. The horns use compressed nitrogen gas to pummel spacecraft with up to 153 decibels, noise loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in a human.

• Relatedly, the company announced recently that the mission’s lander will host Volta Space’s CSA-funded wireless power receiver aboard. It’s a technology demonstrator ahead of building receivers for a planned lunar power network and service called LightGrid. It’s unclear when will Firefly launch in 2026 since the spacecraft stack’s flight model hasn’t been built yet.
• Slow but some progress continues on the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat as the agency has shared that it successfully tested powering on the station’s critical Power and Propulsion Element at some unspecified time last year. This element’s solar-electric propulsion system will not only maneuver and attitude-control the Gateway but also provide power and communications for astronauts aboard the station. Gateway’s initiating launch is targeted around 2028.
• Jack Congram reports that the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) trained 28 taikonauts in cave training exercises in Wulong, Chongqing last month to mentally prepare them for upcoming crewed missions, which are aimed to begin from the end of this decade. Wu Bin, the deputy chief designer of astronaut systems at the China Astronautic Scientific Research and Training Center (CARTC), stated the training’s rationale as follows for an official state release:

The training was designed to sharpen astronauts’ capabilities in hazard response, autonomous operation, teamwork, emergency decision making and scientific survey, as well as to improve physical endurance and mental toughness in extreme environments. It was also a comprehensive evaluation of them.

More Moon

• US-based Intuitive Machines and Europe-based Leonardo & Telespazio have agreed to have interoperability between their future communications and navigation orbiters, a welcome move since Moon missions can be cheaper, safer, and better if more countries share navigation and timing infrastructure.
• NASA is soliciting industry-wide feedback for considering a v2 of its CLPS program.
• Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) is hiring a Development Director to support the non-profit’s building of policy infrastructure blocks, like the Lunar Ledger, for peaceful and cooperative global exploration of the Moon.