Blue Origin Explosion Will Set Back NASA’s Moon Mission

“NASA has planned Artemis on a ‘success-oriented’ schedule. That’s NASA speak for setting very ambitious target dates for various milestones,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and the founder and long-time director of the school’s Space Policy Institute, in an email to TIME. “This incident certainly throws a monkey wrench in the Artemis schedule, which was probably not achievable even before the explosion.”

In 2021, NASA tapped SpaceX to adapt the towering 150-ft. upper stage of its 407-ft Starship rocket to serve as the program’s lunar landing craft—a vehicle prosaically named the Human Landing System (HLS). The entire Starship program, however, is far behind schedule, with 12 launches of the rocket in the past three years—some successful, some not, none qualifying the giant machine as anywhere close to operational. The HLS upper stage, meantime, has not yet been fully designed or built. That’s a problem, since shortly before the rousingly successful April flight of Artemis II—during which four astronauts visited the lunar neighborhood for the first time in nearly 54 years—Isaacman announced that Artemis III would fly late next year, testing SpaceX’s HLS with a crew in low-Earth orbit. But if Starship’s first stage isn’t flight-worthy yet, its landing craft will never get off the ground.