SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Friday slammed former NASA administrator Michael Griffin‘s plans for returning to the Moon as a “worse version of Apollo.”
What Happened: “His plan makes no sense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Just a worse version of Apollo.”
The CEO’s comments come on the heels of Griffin’s criticisms of the Artemis program to a House of Representatives subcommittee on Wednesday. At the hearing, Griffin called for a cancellation of existing contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin under the Artemis program alleging that they will not succeed in landing Americans to the Moon.
The cost of the contracts to SpaceX and Blue Origin to carry out lunar landings is merely 1.5% of the Apollo program from 1960-1973, Griffin said. Terming the cost “grossly unrealistic,” Griffin alleged that the low price on the contracts proves that the United States is not serious about landing humans back on the Moon.
The former administrator also posed concerns about crew safety, high mission execution risk, unreliability, and increased complexity. “The fundamental flaw in the Artemis acquisition approach is the assumption that the U.S. government can and should leverage so-called ‘commercial space’ for national purposes, and
that this paradigm is applicable to human spaceflight,” Griffin said.
If Not Artemis? The former NASA administrator is of the opinion that early lunar return missions can be achieved using existing technology and systems and can enable the return of the U.S. to the moon starting in 2029.
According to Griffin, a return to the Moon requires none of the complex processes being developed by commercial space companies. Instead, it only requires two SLS Block 2 heavy lift launches, each carrying a Centaur III upper stage, an Orion command and service module, and a yet-to-designed two-stage storable-propellant lunar lander.
The United States is currently expecting to send astronauts to the surface of the moon by September 2026 with the Artemis III mission. The last time humans set foot on the Moon was in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
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