America’s next moon mission depends on Elon Musk, for better or worse

Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.

The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.

No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with the modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.

NASA has always relied on partnerships with private companies, but the number of unique contractors has dropped by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024 as contracts with SpaceX ballooned. According to a Washington Post investigation, Musk’s company has received nearly $15 billion from the agency all told, with contract values doubling at the inception of Artemis.

“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Drier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”

But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Drier says.

The technologies that allowed SpaceX to leap ahead were developed using federal funds, yet Musk owns the rights to them. “Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches to space, something previously only the domain of national superpowers,” Drier says. “The government, by policy, concentrated immense power in the hands of a single individual.”

The value of the Artemis contracts have grown over the last year as NASA, like other federal scientific agencies, finds itself in a tricky position. Because Congress rejected the president’s proposed budget cuts, NASA has the funding to carry out its missions—a $24.4 billion annual budget, plus a bump of nearly $10 billion over the next six years from the One Big Beautiful Bill. But their staff took a large hit at the hands of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The agency lost about 20 percent of its workforce, including many senior and specialized employees trained to support highly technical missions like getting back to the moon. This scenario “almost certainly will increase reliance on contractors,” Drier says—though DOGE ended many NASA contracts as well.

In the name of efficiency, the Trump administration also eliminated NASA’s entire Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, whose economists analyzed and managed NASA’s relationship with the space technology market. This included assessing contracts, which typically cost taxpayers more than in-house work—especially when there’s no competition.

This doesn’t leave NASA many places to turn when the company of a billionaire who famously overpromises doesn’t deliver. An analysis from the NASA Office of the Inspector General expressed concerns that SpaceX would not even be able to meet the already extended deadlines for the moon lander, especially as there is “little margin for error in completing the remaining work.”

To keep the Artemis III mission on track for mid-2027, NASA is “exploring options for accelerating lander development,” per the IG report. So far, this has meant soliciting proposals from the only two companies with the capacity to work on such gear. One is SpaceX. The other is Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, which is already two years behind on its contracts for Artemis V.