NASA safety panel recommends review of Artemis plans
NASA's safety advisers are recommending that the agency reconsider its Artemis lunar landing architecture as well as how it handles incidents such as the flawed Starliner test flight.
Members of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, held a public meeting Dec. 19 to discuss recommendations for their annual report, to be published early next year. The meeting was held in lieu of a quarterly public meeting that was canceled because of the government shutdown.
One recommendation reiterates concerns about NASA's architecture for Artemis missions to the moon, an issue the panel raised in its 2023 annual report. At the time, ASAP cited concerns about the large number of first-time activities planned for Artemis 3, the first crewed lunar landing.
"The panel recommends that NASA reexamine the mission objectives and potentially the architecture for Artemis 3 and subsequent missions to establish a more balanced approach to risk, prioritize objectives that have driven planning and maintain a consistent cadence of flight missions," said Bill Bray, a panel member.
The panel did not recommend specific changes to the Artemis architecture but again highlighted the number of activities that would be conducted for the first time on Artemis 3, including crewed operations of SpaceX's Starship lunar lander, docking with Orion in lunar orbit and landing on the challenging terrain of the moon's south polar region. ASAP concluded at its previous public meeting in September that development of the Starship lunar lander was "years late."
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"Each of these mission objectives poses significant challenges, and their combined complexity introduces substantial technical and safety risk to the mission as a whole," Bray said. "At present, the panel has not observed a comprehensive plan to address these objectives or fully mitigate the related risk."
Susan Helms, chair of the panel, said ASAP has had concerns about NASA's approach to Artemis missions for years, citing "risks that we see beginning to accumulate" for Artemis 3 and later missions. Those risks are now "notable," she said.
Helms added that she believes NASA would be open to considering the recommendation given the potential for changes to the overall architecture under the agency's new administrator, Jared Isaacman.
A second recommendation addresses the mix of contracting approaches NASA uses across its programs, including human spaceflight. Those approaches range from traditional cost-plus contracts to fixed-price awards and service agreements, all with varying degrees of government insight or oversight.
The concern, said panel member Katrina McFarland, is the application of commercial contracting mechanisms to development programs. "Reviews of the commercial crew, Human Landing System and Starliner efforts found that uneven technical oversight and overreliance on contractor assurance weakened safety accountability, schedule stability and engineering rigor," she said.
That, she added, reflects "broader institutional challenges such as fragmented oversight, declining internal technical capacity and inconsistent risk management practices" that pose risks to Artemis and other initiatives.
The panel recommended what McFarland described as an "agency-wide governance realignment" of acquisition strategies for human spaceflight programs "such that contract structures reflect appropriate technical oversight and human spaceflight safety oversight commensurate with NASA's risk management responsibilities."
"We have across Artemis the full spectrum of contracts," said panel member Charlie Precourt, who noted that this creates integration challenges. "It's integrating these various players who have different incentives, and so the focus ought to be on reviewing all of that with the contract mechanisms in mind."
The panel's third recommendation addresses how NASA handled the flawed CST-100 Starliner crewed test flight to the International Space Station in 2024. Thruster problems on that mission ultimately led NASA to return the spacecraft uncrewed and forced astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to remain on the station for nine months before returning on a Crew Dragon.
Precourt said the panel was not examining the technical causes of the flight issues, which remain under investigation, but instead focused on how NASA managed the situation. ASAP is concerned that NASA did not classify the incident as a mishap or "high-visibility close call," as outlined in agency procedures.
"As a result, there was confusion in parts of the organization as to the priorities, authorities and responsibilities of the various stakeholders to ensure a safe flight operation and optimum outcome," he said.
While the panel praised NASA senior leadership's focus on the issue as it unfolded, Precourt said discussions "continued unabated for an extended period of time - several months, in fact - with uncertainty at many junctures about who was the real decision-maker and what was the end goal."
That uncertainty, he said, stemmed in part from the lack of a declaration of a mishap or close call. "Had this been done in a timely fashion, after the docking of Starliner, the communication of these decision-making authorities and the primary path to resolution of the crew return question would have dramatically improved," he said.
The panel recommended that NASA review both the criteria and processes for handling such events to make it "unambiguous" that any incident involving NASA astronauts should be declared a mishap or close call, Precourt said.
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