Why Is NASA's Boss Saying Taikonauts May Venture to the Moon Next Year?
Isaacman says taikonauats will fly around the Moon in 2027, which actually won’t happen until 2028, barring an impressive debut year cadence.
At a recent event in Washington D.C., NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman reportedly ‘warned’ the U.S. space industry and officials that the next people around the Moon will be Chinese, being quoted as saying:
“Just a few weeks ago … the Artemis-2 crew traveled farther into space than any humans in history. This was the opening act in America’s return to the lunar surface. We are already well on our way to what comes next.”
”And we must, because the next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the moon, which will likely be sometime in 2027, they will be taikonauts, and America will no longer be the exclusive power to send humans into the lunar environment.”
As someone following China’s human spacecraft program intensively, the Administrator’s comment on when a mission will take place is confusing. Looking at publicly available information, the Long March 10 Moon rocket is not set to fly in its Mengzhou configuration until 2028, after proving missions in low Earth orbit with the Long March 10A later this year. Alongside that, the Lanyue lunar lander can only perform limited testing of its systems floating in Earth orbit1, while the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft can prove everything but lunar orbit operations with free-flying missions and those to the Tiangong Space Station2. Therefore its more practical to dedicate the first few Long March 10’s to Lanyue, while Mengzhou can be proven with crewed and uncrewed missions launched atop of the Long March 10A. The only way Mengzhou ventures to the Moon with taikonauts next year is if the Long March 10 has a handful of launches in its debut year, which would be quite unrealistic.
Maybe Isaacman believes the first flight of the Long March 10 will start an Artemis-2-like mission, but putting people on the first flight of a new launch vehicle is illogical and unsafe, despite the amount of proving components have had elsewhere. It would also be poor optics if a launch abort occurred, with people on board, during the first flight.
Much more likely is that the comments are part of a political maneuver. For one, the Administrator knows he is part of a larger political game that he needs to consistently play to get NASA its yearly funding. Doing so involves frightening the egos of members of Congress, as none want to be seen as enabling the loss of the so-called ‘high-ground’ of space. Luckily for them, Isaacman has a solution, a Moon base on the surface, so long as they kill an existing lunar orbiting space station program.
Additionally, the comments from Isaacman reduces some future ‘drama’ in the U.S. media when, inevitably3, American astronauts won’t have been in lunar space since Artemis-2 due to program and hardware delays. Practically, there’s nothing stopping a repeat of that mission by the U.S. other than a lack of existing hardware for the Space Launch System rocket, which is needed for a crewed lunar landing mission later this decade. The recent comment is also a convenient thing Isaacman can use to claim he ‘warned’ about in interviews and possible congressional hearings when taikonauts reach lunar space.
This is not the first time Isaacman has used China for easy political gain, as in his second attempt to gain NASA’s leadership role as he vowed to be able to ‘win’ a one-sided race to the Moon. That enabled him to reorganize upcoming Artemis missions, to modify the design of the Space Launch System, and to restructure the makeup of NASA’s mission directorates.
Interestingly, during his time in the role, Administrator Isaacman has made little mention of the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission, a world’s first if successful and something the U.S. had an equivalent to for several years until the start of the year, and has only jokingly remarked about Tiangong.
Previous NASA leaders have used China as a convenient political excuse to a domestic audience before. Last year, the interim Sean Duffy said that the U.S. will place a nuclear reactor on the Moon to somehow, and probably illegally, ban China from exploring areas of the surface, keeping them for American astronauts. In the early 2020s, Bill Nelson, Administrator under Joe Biden, vowed to take action on China in space to maintain American preeminence.
All NASA Administrators have acted at the behest of the current president, while having to wrangle funding out of Congress simultaneously. Should they be ordered to, their view will change, as demonstrated when China was barred from cooperation4.
For example, demonstrating burns of its propulsion and crewed module, power-generating systems, and docking guidance. Proving landing guidance with real systems, end-to-end, will require uncrewed descents towards and landings on the surface.
See the U.S. Apollo program’s Lunar Module’s development flights.
While the U.S. did not have a space station during the development of the Apollo program’s Command and Service Module, it performed several low Earth orbit tests, crewed and uncrewed, before heading to the Moon.
See the following reports from NASA’s Office of Inspector General: