Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander
Jim Bridenstine says Artemis 'extraordinarily complicated' compared to the days of Apollo and the Saturn V
Former NASA boss Jim Bridenstine has warned that the space agency's plan to land astronauts on the Moon risks becoming too complicated for its own good.
Bridenstine, who ran NASA during the first Trump administration and departed in 2021 before the Artemis I launch, told This Week In Space that the current lunar lander architecture looks worryingly elaborate compared with Apollo.
It is not Bridenstine's first intervention on the matter. In 2025, he questioned the architecture NASA selected – particularly SpaceX's Starship – to return astronauts to the Moon.
NASA has since reshuffled the Artemis plan. Artemis III is now set to be an Earth orbit test of lunar lander technologies, broadly in the style of Apollo 9, while the first crewed landing has slipped to Artemis IV, still optimistically penciled in for...
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