Safety, progress, and the need for Artemis 2.0

At an all-hands meeting on Friday September 5, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy found himself on the defensive regarding former Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s recent comments about NASA’s failure to move quickly enough to “beat” China back to the Moon. This part of Duffy’s response was telling, regarding current NASA culture: “Sometimes we can let safety be the enemy of making progress.”

I’ve written three pieces in this publication since December outlining how the United States could get this right: how to compete with China, lay the foundations for a sustainable Earth–LEO–moon economy and even pave the way to Mars. The concepts I’ve presented as Artemis 2.0 and All of the Above aren’t mine alone; they’re drawn from decades of shared, common-sense frontier-enabling ideas by very smart and experienced people. But the NASA/White House/Congress triangle has proven unable to hear them — let alone grok them.

So it falls to us — those who know the realities of spaceflight — to speak plainly.

Duffy’s invocation of “safety” is just a symptom. I am sure he is well-intentioned, but he doesn’t appear to understand the agency he leads, the race we are in or the alternatives available. And who inside NASA HQ would dare tell him (or his boss)?

At the center of this box lies an outmoded anchor of a system — in this case, a 1960s heritage, single-use ICBM-based launch vehicle.

Let’s be clear: Delays around use of NASA’s Senate Launch Scam (SLS) are not about safety — unless one means the safety of contractors, centers and Senators profiting from delay.

Real spaceflight teams build safety by flying. They learn from mistakes, they fix them and they improve both their technology and their skills through rapid repetition.

SLS, on the other hand, is too expensive to risk breaking, too fragile to test aggressively and too politically protected to be challenged. Instead, it sits, generating paperwork until it is launched once and discarded, only to be replaced by another pad queen a year later as teams forget what they had just learned. That isn’t progress. That’s bureaucracy masquerading as engineering.

And even if SLS works, it is only the first link in a fragile, unsustainable chain. (I am leaving out lots of details for simplicity.)

• First stop: the Gateway to nowhere.
• Then a transfer to a version of Starship that, unlike the current one, will not have been fully tested on location and will need to have been refuelled in orbit.
• Next, shuttling astronauts between three separate systems: SLS, Gateway and Starship.
• Then, attempting to land Starship on an uneven lunar surface, hoping it doesn’t topple with its towering center of gravity.
• Then EVAs.
• Then launching back off the moon.
• Then re-berthing with Gateway.
• Then, yet another transfer into Orion.
• And finally — if nothing goes wrong — getting astronauts safely back to Earth via an old-school splashdown in the middle of the ocean, or a lightly tested balloon bounce on the ground.

This tortured architecture is so complex, so fragile and so costly that it will only be attempted a handful of times before being abandoned. The Congressional Budget Office has already said it plainly: Artemis 1.0 is unsupportable.

It is time for Artemis 2.0.

That means appointing a real NASA Administrator from outside the agency’s groupthink culture. It means embracing, supporting and enabling the greatest space machine ever created — America’s commercial space industry, born in part from NASA itself but now outpacing it. And of course, adopting the Artemis 2.0/All of the Above strategy and roadmap.

What is Artemis 2.0?

We must pursue LEO, the moon and Mars together with an “all of the above” strategy, rather than choosing one at the expense of the others. Each builds capacity for the next — and all create more demand for each other.

The space industry should treat cislunar space as an economic ecosystem with endless growth potential. Commercial stations, propellant depots and lunar resources form the foundation for staying, not just planting flags.

NASA should finally and forever make a “commercial first” shift from owning bespoke rockets to buying rides on rocketships. SpaceX, Blue Origin and others can provide transportation and logistics more efficiently and cost-effectively. It also helps grow the space version of a civilian “maritime” fleet.

We should also invest in reusable launch, on-orbit assembly, and surface systems designed to be expanded and upgraded — not thrown away after a single use. Not only does this benefit the private sector, it will also dramatically lower the cost of science — permanently.

The U.S. must show the world a credible, sustained path outward — not just a stunt mission — if we are to lead the new space race with China. This is not just a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. It is the beginning of a whole new game, one that is ours to win in the name of freedom and democracy.

We can return to the moon. We can stay on the moon. We can develop the moon. We can build a town in orbit. We can go to Mars. We can do all of the above.

But only if we start leading like a nation that intends to win.

The universe is waiting. America can lead us into it.

Rick Tumlinson Founded the EarthLight Foundation and SpaceFund, a venture capital firm. He Co-Founded The Space Frontier Foundation, was a founding board member of the XPrize, and hosts “The Space Revolution” on iRoc Space Radio, part of the iHeart Radio Network.

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