NASA watchdog says SpaceX moon landing is in trouble | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

The U.S. government’s own space watchdog is raising serious doubts about whether SpaceX can pull off a moon landing on schedule. And the concerns go deeper than just another missed deadline.

A new audit from NASA’s Office of Inspector General released Tuesday, March 10, found that SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander has racked up at least two years of development delays since NASA selected it as its primary astronaut moon lander in 2021.

The report warns that Starship’s ability to meet even the revised 2028 target is far from guaranteed.

The original goal was a moon landing in 2024. That became 2026, then 2027, and now 2028. Each time, the goalposts have moved. The inspector general is now raising the prospect that 2028 could slip, too, with the report pointing to a shrinking schedule buffer and a string of unresolved technical milestones still ahead.

NASA has invested roughly $4.4 billion in SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System contract alone, making the stakes of continued delays not just a scheduling problem, but also a financial and political one.

The SpaceX orbital refueling problem nobody has solved yet

At the heart of the audit’s concerns is a technical challenge unlike anything NASA has faced previously. To land astronauts on the moon, SpaceX must first launch more than 11 other Starships into Earth’s orbit to act as refueling tankers.

One of those Starships will serve as a propellant storage depot, requiring more than 10 additional Starships to fill it before transferring fuel to the moon-bound vehicle.

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This kind of large-scale orbital refueling has never been done before. Starship runs on roughly 1,200 metric tons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, both of which must be kept at cryogenic temperatures below minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit.

Managing that process across multiple spacecraft in zero gravity is an enormous engineering challenge with no real precedent in spaceflight history.

To put it in perspective, the Apollo program used a single Saturn V rocket that carried all its fuel from the ground. Starship’s architecture requires assembling its full fuel load in orbit through a chain of tanker flights, each of which must launch, dock, and transfer propellant without a single critical failure before the mission can proceed.

“NASA is tracking a top risk that some of the cryogenic technologies and capabilities SpaceX is developing will not be adequately mature” ahead of a 2028 moon landing, the report said.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is also falling behind

SpaceX is not the only contractor in trouble. The audit also flagged that Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is running at least eight months behind schedule and still has several unresolved design issues, TipRanks noted.

Both companies hold multibillion-dollar fixed-price contracts with NASA to develop lunar landers capable of carrying astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

Fixed-price contracts mean the companies, not NASA, absorb cost overruns when milestones are missed. That structure was designed to protect taxpayers, but it also means NASA has limited levers to pull when a contractor falls behind. The agency cannot simply inject more money to speed things up.

The audit noted that if something goes seriously wrong during a mission, NASA currently has very limited rescue options for astronauts on the surface. That gap in contingency planning is itself a concern the inspector general flagged explicitly.

Key findings from the NASA OIG audit

Starship has accumulated at least two years of delays since NASA selected it in 2021.
A major design review for the Starship lander has been pushed back to August, shrinking the remaining schedule buffer.
Orbital refueling, the most complex step in Starship’s moon mission, has never been attempted at this scale.
Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is at least eight months behind schedule with unresolved design problems.
NASA has limited rescue options if something goes wrong with astronauts on the lunar surface.

NASA is already restructuring its moon-landing mission plan

Facing these pressures, NASA moved last month to restructure its Artemis program. The mission previously known as Artemis III, which had been designated as the first crewed moon landing, will now be a lower-Earth orbit rehearsal, CNN reported. Instead, it will test docking between NASA’s Orion capsule and at least one lunar lander prototype.

NASA has retooled its Artemis moon-landing program in response to logistical hurdles and delays.

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The actual moon landing has been reassigned to Artemis IV, now targeted for 2028. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency is in fact pursuing up to two moon landings that year, though the inspector general’s report casts significant doubt on whether either is achievable on that timeline.

Looming over all of it is China. NASA and the broader U.S. space program are operating under pressure to put boots on the moon before China reaches the lunar surface, with Beijing targeting its own crewed landing by around 2030.

What this means for the U.S.-China moon race

The inspector general’s audit lands at a delicate moment. Every delay in Starship’s development narrows the window between a U.S. moon landing and China’s own timeline. NASA has made clear that the competitive pressure is real and that it factors directly into the urgency behind the Artemis program.

China and Russia are jointly working toward a crewed lunar landing, with Beijing targeting a mission by around 2030. If U.S. delays push Artemis IV into 2029 or beyond, the gap between the two programs could close to a matter of months.

For NASA, whose entire Artemis narrative is built around American leadership in space, that prospect carries significant weight in Congress, where the program’s funding is decided.

SpaceX has now launched Starship more than 11 times since 2023. The program has made genuine technical progress on reusability and vehicle recovery.

But the gap between where the rocket is today and what it needs to accomplish to land humans on the moon remains wide, and the government’s own watchdog is now saying so in writing.