Two former NASA administrators express wildly different opinions on NASA’s Artemis lunar program
At a symposium yesterday in Alabama, former NASA administrators Charles Bolden and Jim Bridenstine expressed strong opinions about the state of NASA’s Artemis lunar program and the chances of it getting humans back to Moon before the end of Trump’s term in office and before China.
What was surprising was how different those opinions were, and who said what. Strangely, the two men took positions that appeared to be fundamentally different than the presidents they represented.
Charles Bolden
Charles Bolden was administrator during Barack Obama’s presidency. Though that administration supported the transition to capitalism, it also was generally unenthusiastic about space exploration. Obama tasked Bolden with making NASA a Muslim outreach program, and in proposing a new goal for NASA he picked going to an asteroid, something no one in NASA or the space industry thought sensible. Not surprisingly, it never happened.
Bolden’s comments about Artemis however was surprisingly in line with what I have been proposing since December 2024, de-emphasize any effort to get back to the Moon and instead work to build up a thriving and very robust competitive space industry in low Earth orbit:
Duffy’s current messaging is insisting it’ll be accomplished before Trump’s term ends in January 2029, but Bolden isn’t buying it. “We cannot make it if we say we’ve got to do it by the end of the term or we’re going to do it before the Chinese. That doesn’t help industry.”
Instead the focus needs to be on what we’re trying to accomplish. “We may not make it by 2030, but that’s okay with me as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have. That’s what’s most important. That we live up to what we said we were going to do and we deliver for the rest of the world. Because the Chinese are not going to bring the rest of the world with them to the Moon. They don’t operate that way.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, the federal government should focus on helping that space industry grow, because a vibrant space industry will make colonizing the Moon and Mars far easier. And forget about fake deadlines. They don’t happen, and only act to distort what you are trying to accomplish.
Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator during Trump’s first term, continued to lambast SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander contract, saying it wasn’t getting the job done on time, and in order to beat the Chinese he demanded instead that the government begin a big government-controlled project to build a lander instead.
Jim Bridenstine
Bridenstine is arguing for the country to go “all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible. … And if the goal is to beat China to the Moon, we need to have a program that is, in fact, you know, dare I say, a Defense Production Act kind of program. We’re going all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible with a team that would be a small team with authorities — maybe authorities put together by an executive order from the President of the United States — that this is a national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon, and in order to get that done, we need to have a small Skunk Works-type organization that can be in charge and make that lander come to reality.”
To put it more succinctly, private enterprise on its own can’t do it. What we need is another big budget “Manhattan Project”, run by the government (with lots of cash).
This is the exact opposite of the capitalism model that Bridenstine accelerated with great energy during Trump’s first term. It also makes no sense, especially because we have decades of evidence that such government big projects never happen on time, and go significantly over budget as they do so.
It appears the opinions of both men are based on their present status in the industry. Bolden is essentially retired, so he can say anything. When I met him at an event a few years ago and gave him a copy of my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, he said he was aware of it and liked its ideas. His comments yesterday confirm that stance.
Bridenstine meanwhile is another kettle of fish. After leaving NASA, he formed a lobbying company dubbed The Artemis Group, with ULA its biggest donor. It appears he is now touting policy ideas to help those donors, even if the ideas he is pushing make no sense.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
At a symposium yesterday in Alabama, former NASA administrators Charles Bolden and Jim Bridenstine expressed strong opinions about the state of NASA’s Artemis lunar program and the chances of it getting humans back to Moon before the end of Trump’s term in office and before China.
What was surprising was how different those opinions were, and who said what. Strangely, the two men took positions that appeared to be fundamentally different than the presidents they represented.
Charles Bolden
Charles Bolden was administrator during Barack Obama’s presidency. Though that administration supported the transition to capitalism, it also was generally unenthusiastic about space exploration. Obama tasked Bolden with making NASA a Muslim outreach program, and in proposing a new goal for NASA he picked going to an asteroid, something no one in NASA or the space industry thought sensible. Not surprisingly, it never happened.
Bolden’s comments about Artemis however was surprisingly in line with what I have been proposing since December 2024, de-emphasize any effort to get back to the Moon and instead work to build up a thriving and very robust competitive space industry in low Earth orbit:
Duffy’s current messaging is insisting it’ll be accomplished before Trump’s term ends in January 2029, but Bolden isn’t buying it. “We cannot make it if we say we’ve got to do it by the end of the term or we’re going to do it before the Chinese. That doesn’t help industry.”
Instead the focus needs to be on what we’re trying to accomplish. “We may not make it by 2030, but that’s okay with me as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have. That’s what’s most important. That we live up to what we said we were going to do and we deliver for the rest of the world. Because the Chinese are not going to bring the rest of the world with them to the Moon. They don’t operate that way.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, the federal government should focus on helping that space industry grow, because a vibrant space industry will make colonizing the Moon and Mars far easier. And forget about fake deadlines. They don’t happen, and only act to distort what you are trying to accomplish.
Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator during Trump’s first term, continued to lambast SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander contract, saying it wasn’t getting the job done on time, and in order to beat the Chinese he demanded instead that the government begin a big government-controlled project to build a lander instead.
Jim Bridenstine
Bridenstine is arguing for the country to go “all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible. … And if the goal is to beat China to the Moon, we need to have a program that is, in fact, you know, dare I say, a Defense Production Act kind of program. We’re going all-in to build a landing system as quickly as possible with a team that would be a small team with authorities — maybe authorities put together by an executive order from the President of the United States — that this is a national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon, and in order to get that done, we need to have a small Skunk Works-type organization that can be in charge and make that lander come to reality.”
To put it more succinctly, private enterprise on its own can’t do it. What we need is another big budget “Manhattan Project”, run by the government (with lots of cash).
This is the exact opposite of the capitalism model that Bridenstine accelerated with great energy during Trump’s first term. It also makes no sense, especially because we have decades of evidence that such government big projects never happen on time, and go significantly over budget as they do so.
It appears the opinions of both men are based on their present status in the industry. Bolden is essentially retired, so he can say anything. When I met him at an event a few years ago and gave him a copy of my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, he said he was aware of it and liked its ideas. His comments yesterday confirm that stance.
Bridenstine meanwhile is another kettle of fish. After leaving NASA, he formed a lobbying company dubbed The Artemis Group, with ULA its biggest donor. It appears he is now touting policy ideas to help those donors, even if the ideas he is pushing make no sense.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Once again, you are letting Ayn Rand do your thinking for you.
Over at NSF we read about a difference between Shuttle and Starship tiles:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50748.msg2730574#msg2730574
Do the tiles on Starship have 65x worse thermal conductivity than the Space Shuttle?
all units are (W/m-K)
Space Shuttle Tiles: https://tpsx.arc.nasa.gov/MaterialProperty?id=1&property=4
.013 at 255K
.289 at 1533K
TUFI: https://tpsx.arc.nasa.gov/MaterialProperty?id=8&property=3
.843 at 255K
1.6 at 1505K
I find it hard to believe the Starship tiles have 65x worse thermal conductivity than the Space shuttle tiles at cold-ish temperatures and 5.5x worse at 1500K?
“Are we sure the TUFI (material #8) is really what’s on the Starship?”
–Now, that is either true or it isn’t.
If it isn’t true—maybe you could get away with Lunar Starship one day.
It is not ready to go to the Moon.
Orion and SLS are fully stacked.
Once again, your Libertarian bias has blinded you.
Once again, you are letting your reflexive statism show.
The thermal conductivity of TPS tiles at “cold-ish” temperatures doesn’t really matter much.
Very low thermal conductivity at very high temperatures was pretty much mandatory for the Shuttle given its aluminum airframe. Starship’s stainless steel hull can stand a lot more heat so there is more latitude to trade thermal conductivity for other desirable TPS tile properties such as, say, durability.
Dick and Jeff: There is also the manufacturing component. NASA never could manufacture its tiles efficiently or cheaply or quickly. Replacing the tiles was difficult and slow.
SpaceX now has a factory producing tiles quickly in the thousands.
Robert Zimmerman,
SpaceX’s ability to mass-produce TPS tiles is also related to its having designed Starship to employ mostly three or four standard tile sizes and shapes with the number of uniquely-shaped tiles kept to a minimum. Each of Shuttle’s tiles, in contrast, was pretty much unique.
Jeff Wright: As Dick Eagleson points out it doesn’t really matter what the thermal conductivity of Space Shuttle tiles versus Starship tiles is. The only question is “Will the Starship TPS system allow a rapidly reusable system?” The original idea SpaceX had was to vent very cold methane through thousands of holes on the “hot” side to provide thermal protection; there would have been no tiles.
Just because Orion and SLS are stacked doesn’t mean squat. There are so many things that could go wrong that the projected February 2026 launch date most probably will not happen. With the status of the Orion heat shield, NASA is betting the lives of 4 astronauts on a very definite unknown. If things go wrong Artemis will go away. In most respects Artemis is just a redo of the Apollo. And despite Duffy’s bluster, there will be no Blue Origen lander before 2030.
As long as SpaceX is not hampered by government or legal abuse, they will have a proven lander by 2028 for Artemis. And if Starship is man-rated by then, they may fly their own Moon mission. And if Artemis III is delayed, SpaceX may go ahead and beat both the U.S. and Chinese governments to the Moon.
Dick Eagleson: Yup. What a concept! Standardize the tile design! By jove, its so radical no wonder no NASA person could conceive it!
Jeff Wright,
The actual thermal conductivity does not matter. What matters is whether the tiles do the job. We have seen that they do. This is what engineers care about.
Now what matters is whether the company can keep them in place and whether there is damage that would be fatal or harmful to a crew if they should fall off.
If you insist upon perfection, then you will be waiting until someone finds or invents unobtanium. You also would not fly Artemis II crewed.
Bill B. – “If things go wrong Artemis will go away.”
And NASA will go away too.
In real life, politics is more often about interests than ideals. In his first term, Trump needed Republican senators and red state voters. That would involve continued funding for government programs based in those states…such as SLS. Obama wanted to spread the money around to innovators from Silicon Valley. These people tended to come from blue states and support democrats. At the time, that included Elon Musk. It is a natural form of hypocrisy. It’s the same sort of thing that makes democrats love people like George Soros and Republicans support farm subsidies. It’s built into human nature, like gravity is built into the universe. It can be overcome, but you cannot get anything done in government (or really, anywhere else) by just lamenting that it exists.
BillB,
Entirely correct – and I do mean entirely.
There were all sorts of shenanigans with Artemis 1 between completion of stacking and the actual launch, including failed wet dress rehearsals, multiple GSE bothers and anguishing over whether or not to have the thing hide in the VAB from a hurricane. Starships are much tougher and far easier to move around as they are moved empty – The SLS-Orion stacks include massive tonnages of solid propellant. Hence the need for what amounts to world-class mining equipment to move them around. Starships travel much more quickly on commodity multi-axle transporters. Whisking a Starship stack off the pad and back to shelter in the event of approaching bad weather is a no-brainer because running it back to cover, then out again after the wind passes is no big deal.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that at least some of the same sorts of delays will afflict Artemis 2. If it goes in 1Q 2026 I will be very surprised.
Everything else you say is true too. Duffy has publicly called Elon out and SpaceX will now proceed Moonward at flank speed using entirely its own hardware, if necessary – and it likely will be – to shorten the schedule. There will now be a Starship-based substitute for the SLS-Orion stack – a subset of the Mars armada crew carrier – that will be able to meet HLS Starship in a much closer lunar orbit than NRHO. HLS Starship won’t have to mooch around waiting for its partner Starship like it would for Orion either. My guess is that the two Starships will fill up in LEO from two different depots, then travel Moonward in formation.
Fun times ahead. I hope the first earnest of future intent SpaceX shows us is an IFT-12 flight of a V3 Starship stack from Starbase Pad 2 before the end of this year.
Per Dick’s comment, “My guess is that the two Starships will fill up in LEO from two different depots, then travel Moonward in formation,” is anyone else seeing the Chesley Bonestell painting of this in their mind’s eye? 75 years later, it’s about to become fact, and capitalism in space is fast becoming a reality.
The troubling thing, though, is that the kind of informed discussion about going back to the moon on this and other forums never quite seems to percolate to the decision makers in Congress or in the White House. When, short of Richard Feynman and the Challenger post mortem, have we ever witnessed such a substantive, reality-based hearing in committee? Granted, Mr. Musk and his colleagues may end up going back to the moon on their own anyway, but I still believe that we would be better off if our thinking about such things were more congruent with reality and more reflective of some kind of shared vision about our future*. Including the vision that, yes, we are that kind of country and culture, and we are going to let *capitalism and individual initiative* do what they do best.
*This is from the Google AI overview, and I find little to disagree with:
“The phrase ‘without vision, the people perish’ is a biblical proverb from Proverbs 29:18 that means a lack of foresight, goals, or direction leads to a society or individual becoming aimless and failing. This proverb is often interpreted in a few ways: that a lack of goals leads to stagnation and a loss of purpose, or in a more literal sense that it refers to a need for divine or prophetic guidance for a society to avoid moral decay and unrestrained behavior.”
Both Kennedy’s New Frontier (even if wrongheaded from Robert’s POV) and the flight of Apollo VIII were inspirational in times of darkness and doubt, and most of us need such things. And a few (reality-based) Fireside Chats wouldn’t hurt, either.
Jeff,
“Orion and SLS are fully stacked.”
Well, almost, but not quite “fully” yet.
But that’s not the problem for you in this context. Orion and SLS can take astronauts around the Moon, but they cannot take them to the Moon’s surface. You need a lander for that.
NASA has already contracted two landers through the HLS program. They may have run into delays, just like the Grumman Apollo LM did; but there ain’t no way, Jeff, that a new lander can be developed and delivered before one of them is ready, let alone before 2030.
Are you sure your name is not Gary Church?
I used to wonder if the forced error of nearly every tile being unique on the STS prevented any serious attempt to improve them. Effort had to be spent on recreating and replacing the missing tiles rather than engaging in the R&D to improve the product.
” And if the goal is to beat China to the Moon” – Jim Bridenstine
Uhm… we already did. In 1969.
We own the moon. China can rent a couple acres from us if they want.
Artist’s illustration of a big government moon lander:
https://tinyurl.com/3cn4hfwe
Rain and moisture worry me with respect to tiles.
I hope one day they become obsolete.
Until then, spacecraft will resemble something from THIS OLD HOUSE
ugh
Currently Orion can ONLY take astronauts AROUND the moon, they lack the propulsion model to go into even the silly NRHO much less go into an LLO for 10 orbits like Apollo 8 did FIFTY SEVEN years ago.
It is a complete mess. Any sane organization would stop and regroup.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/
sippin_bourbon,
The Shuttle tiles did actually get a reformulation after some years in service to make the tiles more damage-resistant. The original formulation was soft enough that a significant number of tiles were damaged to the point of flight-unreadiness after the 747 carrier aircraft encountered some rain on an approach during one of its Shuttle transport flights.
Nothing was ever done to rationalize the circumstance that nearly every Shuttle tile had a bespoke shape. Where Shuttle was concerned, Eli Whitney died in vain.
Jeff Wright,
I wouldn’t worry about rain and Starship TPS tiles. They have an impermeable glassy surface on their tops and sides, unlike Shuttle tiles. The Shuttle tiles could, and did, absorb water. Starship tiles, with the “crunch-wrap” sealing their interstices, make for a water-repellant skin.
I could be wrong but didn’t NASA experiment with the idea of tile sheets instead of individual tiles? Nothing came of it.
Yet another example of the institutional constraints the Shuttle was developed under, and had to operate under. Funding limitations and political realities meant freezing so many design decisions early, and cutting off nearly all opportunities for any iteration. NASA could eventually tweak the tile design, but that only improved performance and turnaround at the margins.
Even so, we learned from the Shuttle, and SpaceX is the beneficiary of the lessons of its thermal protection systems. But SpaceX is clearly in position to learn a lot more, and implement those new lessons. NASA only built five flight article Shuttles; SpaceX will end up building hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Starships, and they’ll keep improving as they go along building them.
Doubting Thomas,
Well, now…as I understand it, the Artemis II Orion has as much delta-v and the necessary software to enter into and exit out of NRHO. But NASA has chosen not to do so on this mission in order to lower the risk profile of the mission. They made that decision pretty early on in the program.
Now, what this Orion CANNOT do is to dock with anything. Because the docking adapter and docking software are not ready yet….and anyway, it’s not necessary for this mission, since there is nothing for the Orion to dock *to*. I think this was a mistake — it means that the first lunar landing mission will also be testing all the docking systems for the very first time — but it’s yet one more example of the constraints this program operates under.
P.S. Thanks for the link to Casey’s new blog post. I had not seen it yet.
Saville: NASA actually did replace whole sections of tiles on the shuttle with carbon thermal blankets, a definite improvement. The problem as always however was that NASA treated the shuttle as an operational airplane, not a prototype development vehicle that should have been revised and upgraded significantly after every flight.
Just like SpaceX is doing with Starship.
Postscript: I finally read that new Casey Handmer blog post that Doubting Thomas linked regarding Orion. And having done so, I recommend it highly to everyone here.. It’s a nuclear-level takedown of Orion on par with his critique of SLS (also linked by Thomas), and perhaps the most comprehensive (and current for 2025) one I have ever seen.
There isn’t too much that will be new to regulars here, least of all our host, Mr Zimmerman, who has written critiques of Orion’s failures numerous times, as have many others, up to and including NASA’s own OIG. But because it is so thorough (clocking in at 13,000+ words!) and because we know that Casey’s treatments like this now get read by NASA center heads and White House staff, I recommend it for your attention. There are a few factual niggles — it took SpaceX about a billion dollars for the full development of Falcon 9 with the reusability capability on the booster (that is, through Block 5) included, not just $400 million — but nothing that mitigates the savagery of his indictment of Orion. (Lockheed’s Orion team has probably spent a billion bucks just on software licenses and upgrades alone since 2006, after all.) In summary:
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Post-postscript: Important people are commenting on Casey’s essay now, including Elon Musk, Jack Kuhr, Jim Cantrell, Charlie Camarda, and Lori Garver. Garver comments with personal anecdotes:
https://x.com/Lori_Garver/status/1985147604121092154
We should all be triggered. What an utter fiasco SLS and Orion are.
Richard M – I stand corrected. I thought Art 2 was flying with interim module flown on Art 1, NOT European propulsion module. So, yes, Art 2 COULD go into that silly NRHO and after waving at the moon from as far away as 71,000 km and as close as 3,500 km, over a one week period, they could then, I guess, burn for TEI.
Having watched Apollo 8 Christmas Eve and all the moon landings on Apollo, the whole Artemis thing is just too bizarre to believe and NASA acts like it is an amazing step forward.