The United States will likely press ahead with at least one crewed lunar landing for the sake of the race with China. After that, however, the current Artemis and Moon Base architecture may be radically reconsidered.
The current American program to return to the Moon looks like a grand historical continuation of Apollo. Yet it has a weak point that is becoming increasingly visible: the political calendar is moving faster than space technology.
The key boundary here is 2029. In November 2028, the United States will elect a new president, and in January 2029, a new administration will take office. If Artemis fails to show a convincing result by then, the program will lose its main political protection precisely at the moment when its technical and financial problems become most visible.
NASA today directly links the new push toward the Moon with the task of carrying out the national space policy of the Donald Trump administration: returning the United States to the Moon, beginning the construction of Moon Base, and securing American leadership. This gives the program strong political momentum. At the same time, it makes it vulnerable. A program tied too closely to a presidential term enters a dangerous zone as soon as the administration changes.
Still, the current situation cannot be reduced to a simple prediction: “the whole program will be shut down in 2029.” Most likely, the reality will be more complicated. The United States may still secure at least one crewed landing even after Trump leaves office, even if that requires enormous spending, delays, technical compromises, and political pressure. The reason is obvious: America does not want to lose the symbolic race with China for the return of humans to the Moon.
After the first landing, however, the logic of the program may change sharply. The extremely rigid schedule, designed for political effect, will almost certainly become softer. Moon Base may be postponed, stretched out, renamed, or transformed into a far more cautious program. SLS and Orion, as an exceptionally expensive transitional system, may become the first candidates for reduction.
This is probably the real scenario: not an immediate shutdown before the first landing, but one crewed mission extracted from the existing system, followed by a deep review of the entire architecture.
History Shows That Lunar Dreams Often Do Not Survive the Political Cycle
Apollo was the greatest space program of the twentieth century, yet even Apollo quickly lost its political meaning after achieving its main goal. Formally, the Apollo program was born before John F. Kennedy’s presidency, but it was Kennedy who, in 1961, turned it into a national political mission: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. After his assassination, Lyndon Johnson carried the program through to real flight, as American primacy in space remained part of his larger political project.
Apollo 11 launched under President Richard Nixon. The United States had demonstrated its superiority in the Cold War, humans had set foot on the Moon, and the later expeditions no longer produced the same political effect. Their scientific value remained enormous, but the political necessity was fading.
Then the cuts began. Under the Nixon administration, Apollo 20 was canceled, and then Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 came under pressure. Apollo 17 became the last human landing on the Moon. This was the first major lesson: even a successful lunar program does not live by itself. It needs a political reason strong enough for the state to keep paying vast sums of money.
In 1989, George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative: an orbital station, a return to the Moon, a permanent presence, and then Mars. The plan was grand, but its cost buried it. Once Washington saw estimates running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the initiative quickly became politically toxic. After the administration changed, it disappeared from practical policy.
In 2004, George W. Bush launched the Vision for Space Exploration, from which the Constellation Program emerged. It was supposed to create Orion, the Ares rockets, and return humans to the Moon by 2020. Once again, however, the goals did not match real budgets. The Augustine Committee judged the U.S. human spaceflight program unsustainable, and the Barack Obama administration abandoned Constellation. In 2010, Obama signed a new NASA authorization law that removed a rapid return to the Moon from the agenda, but preserved Orion and laid the foundation for SLS, a new heavy-lift rocket for missions beyond low Earth orbit. The place of the lunar program was taken by a much less focused strategy: the ISS, commercial crew vehicles, technology demonstrations, an asteroid-oriented track, and Mars as a distant strategic goal.
In other words, Constellation did not die completely. Orion survived. The heavy rocket, in a different form, became SLS. This is how American space policy works: a program can be closed as an idea, while its contractors, production chains, jobs, and congressional interests continue to live on. As a result, the new program is often built from the fragments of the old one.
Artemis became exactly such a program: a new political goal placed on an old heavy foundation. Its modern political beginning is tied to Donald Trump, who in 2017 signed Space Policy Directive-1 on returning American astronauts to the Moon and then moving onward to Mars. In 2019, NASA formalized this course as the Artemis program. Yet the structure of Artemis shows the same pattern: each new administration can change the slogan, the schedule, and the architecture, while the expensive hardware inherited from previous programs continues to live on.
SLS and Orion: An Expensive Bridge, Not the Future of the Moon
At the beginning of Artemis, the SLS/Orion system could be seen as a necessary starting bridge. NASA already had Orion, SLS was already being developed, tens of billions of dollars had already been invested, and the architecture already had political protection. The logic was clear: the first missions could be flown on the government SLS + Orion system, and then NASA could gradually move toward cheaper, partly or fully reusable solutions.
But this bridge turned out to be incredibly expensive. NASA Inspector General estimates placed the cost of a single SLS/Orion flight for the first Artemis missions at roughly $4.1 billion. That is the price of a flight to the Moon and back to Earth, not the cost of a full landing on the lunar surface.
For a demonstration stage, such a price could still be politically tolerable. For a permanent lunar program, almost certainly not. If every crewed mission begins with an expendable rocket costing several billion dollars, the idea of a regular human presence on the Moon becomes economically weak.
SLS belongs to a transitional logic, not to the future lunar infrastructure. An expendable launch vehicle, a complex launch system, a low flight rate, and an enormous price fit poorly with a base that must be constantly supplied, repaired, and expanded.
SLS/Orion, however, is only part of the problem. The entire Artemis architecture depends on the Human Landing System, meaning the commercial landing vehicles of SpaceX and Blue Origin. They are the systems that must carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and return them. Without HLS, SLS and Orion can bring a crew only to an orbital rendezvous point, not to the Moon as a place of work.
Under the current accelerated schedule, Artemis III is supposed to become an orbital test of Orion docking with landing systems in 2027. Artemis IV is supposed to perform the first new landing in 2028. Artemis V, under the most aggressive scenario, is supposed to take place before the end of 2028 and already move into the initial logic of Moon Base. This means that only a few years are effectively left for the entire sequence of critical tests: orbital docking, uncrewed demonstrations, landing, ascent from the Moon, redocking, and crew certification.
The problem is that neither of the two landing architectures has yet reached a full flight demonstration of a lunar mission. Starship HLS depends on the super-heavy Starship system, reusability, orbital refueling, cryogenic fluid management in space, the flight to the Moon, landing, ascent, and docking with Orion. The first Starship V3 tests remain a stage in developing the rocket itself, not a ready crewed lunar system.
Blue Origin has its own weak link. Blue Moon Mk2 depends on New Glenn, while New Glenn, after the 2026 ground-test accident, needs the launch complex restored and regular flights resumed. Even if Blue Origin really does restore launches by the end of 2026, that does not mean the lander will be ready to carry out an uncrewed lunar demonstration, pass NASA certification, and carrya crew within a compressed political deadline.
The main weakness of Artemis, therefore, lies not only in the price of SLS/Orion. The government rocket and spacecraft are already extremely expensive on their own, while the landing part of the program is even less mature. In 2026, the United States has a calendar that demands a result before the end of Donald Trump’s presidential term, while the technology is moving more slowly than the political schedule.
Even if Artemis developed without a political crisis, SLS and Orion would still sooner or later come under pressure. If fully reusable systems from SpaceX and Blue Origin emerge, the unavoidable question will be: why preserve an ultra-expensive government launcher if lunar logistics is supposed to shift toward more frequent and cheaper commercial flights?
SLS/Orion can therefore be seen as a temporary system for the first missions. Perhaps it will survive until the first new landing. Perhaps it will survive for one or two more missions, if Congress protects jobs and existing contracts. As a long-term foundation for lunar infrastructure, however, it looks almost doomed.
Why the United States May Still Secure One Landing
Despite all these weak points, the current program has one very strong protective factor: China.
China’s lunar program is developing differently. It looks less noisy, less dependent on public political bursts of urgency, and more methodical. China is consistently working through robotic missions, sample return, lunar orbital and landing technologies, the future Mengzhou spacecraft, the Lanyue lunar lander, the Long March 10 rocket, and plans to land humans before 2030.
This program does not look improvised. It resembles a sustained, methodical engineering effort focused on a single objective. China is slowly, systematically, and persistently moving closer to human landings on the Moon. That is exactly what creates an irresistible political incentive for the United States: America cannot allow a situation in which China is the first country in the twenty-first century to land humans on the Moon.
That is why the first crewed landing will almost certainly be pushed to completion. Even if schedules slip. Even if cost overruns have to be overlooked. Even if the timetable becomes extremely tense. Even if the first landing is more a symbolic return than the beginning of a real base.
For the United States, this is not only a question of science and not only a question of spaceflight. It is a question of status. If China lands its taikonauts on the Moon before the American return, it will be the strongest symbolic blow to the image of the United States as the leading space power. For more than half a century after Apollo, America has remained the only country whose people have walked on the Moon. Washington will not want to lose the initiative in the new lunar race.
The most likely scenario, therefore, is not early refusal, but a maximum-effort push: to squeeze out one landing after all.
After the First Landing, a Completely Different Story Begins
But a first landing and a sustainable lunar program are different things.
A first landing can be a political event. A lunar base is infrastructure. It requires regular cargo deliveries, power, communications, repairs, spare parts, rovers, landing pads, crew protection, life-support systems, storage facilities, navigation, and constant maintenance. It is not a flag, not a photograph, and not a single heroic flight.
That is why the schedule will almost certainly be reviewed after the first landing. Today’s logic looks like emergency acceleration: make it in time, show it, prove it, outrun China, satisfy Trump’s ambitions. Once the reputational goal has been reached, part of the political pressure will disappear. Then a more sober conversation will begin about cost, risk, flight frequency, and the actual value of Moon Base.
At that point, the program may become much softer and more stretched out. Instead of a series of rapid landings, there may be rare, justified, carefully designed missions. Instead of a rushed base construction effort, technology demonstrations. Instead of promises of a permanent presence, a cautious accumulation of experience. Instead of SLS/Orion as the core of the program, a gradual transition to commercial reusable systems, if they have truly matured by then.
This scenario looks even more likely than a complete shutdown. First, the United States achieves a symbolic result. Then a new administration or a new Congress is forced to adopt the obvious, economically justified, rational decision: the goal of return has been achieved; the program must be made sustainable, costs must be reduced, excess elements must be removed, and the impossible schedule must be abandoned.
The wiser decision would be to “return to Earth” — in both the literal and figurative sense: to end incredibly expensive and inefficient crewed flights beyond near-Earth orbit and finally give way to intelligent, highly capable spacecraft and their distributed networks.
Still, we should remain realistic. Humanity’s desire to tread dusty paths on other worlds is unlikely to be defeated by reason. The political decision will probably be much softer and will lead not to a scaling back, which would amount to an admission of defeat, but to a substantial revision of the current Moon Base.
The history of human exploration of the Moon moves in a spiral. At every turn, it enters a state of closure or serious degradation, each time at a higher scientific and technological level. Most of the new engineering and design solutions embodied in hardware do not survive the crisis, but the technological and scientific breakthroughs remain and serve the further development of civilization, and not only in the field of human space exploration. Yet, keeping the spiral of development in mind, in another decade we can expect a new surge of intense activity. And so on…
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