NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a House committee that shortening the SpaceX Starship test flight was not a major setback for plans to use the vehicle to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. Testifying before the House Science Committee on April 27 about the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, Nelson said SpaceX expects to be ready for another Starship launch attempt in just two months.

“The explosion isn’t too big,” he said of the April 20 test flight of the Starship/Super Heavy integrated spacecraft from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas test site. Suffering from multiple engine failures, the aircraft began somersaulting minutes after takeoff and was destroyed by the flight termination system four minutes after its planned 90-minute suborbital flight.

He explained SpaceX’s “hardware-rich” approach to vehicle development, with several Starships and Super Heavys in production. “That’s the way they work. They jump out, and if something goes wrong, they figure out what’s wrong and come back and throw it again.”

Nelson said NASA is in contact with SpaceX and that the company expects it to be able to launch again soon. “As of today, SpaceX says they believe it will take at least two months to rebuild the launch pad, as well as about two months to prepare its second ship for launch.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has publicly proposed similar programs. But SpaceX’s relaunch depends not only on repairing the launch pad and assembling the next vehicle, but also on the completion of the April 20 launch investigation and approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which issued the license to launch the flight.

NASA has been closely monitoring Starship’s progress since selecting the vehicle for its Human Landing System (HLS) program two years ago. NASA will use a variant of the Starship lunar lander to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface during the Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 missions for a total reward of $4 billion. The machine will also qualify for landings in subsequent missions.

When asked about his confidence in the future mission schedules of the committee chair, Representative Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Nelson said he expects Artemis 2 to launch “late 2024” and Artemis 3 about a year later. A mission manifest released by NASA in March stated that Artemis 2 would launch in November 2024 and Artemis 3 in December 2025.

“I’m pretty confident about the schedule of these missions, but there’s still a lot to be done,” he said.

The same manifesto pushed Artemis 4 back one year, from 2027 to September 2028. Nelson said the development of the research upper stage for the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System being built by Boeing was the driving factor behind the miss. “Some additional funds could help fix this partially,” he suggested.

Democratic members of the committee asked Nelson about the possible consequences of budget cuts should a general spending plan, similar to the one approved by the House on April 26, come into effect, aimed at cutting discretionary spending to reduce the budget deficit. These members argued that such a plan could cut NASA’s budget by as much as 22%.

“It would have been a disaster. We were late,” Nelson said. The same would be true if Congress passed a one-year resolution keeping funding at 2023 levels instead of the proposed 7 percent increase for 2024. “This won’t be good either.”

Such cuts would thwart attempts to get Artemis 4 back to 2027, he said. It will also replace the Artemis 5, which will use a second vendor-developed lander that NASA is preparing to choose this summer by joining SpaceX. “You look like 29, 30, 31 without any additional funding,” he said. Artemis 5 is currently scheduled for 2029.

Nelson said he was willing to choose a second supplier, graciously criticizing NASA’s decision to select only SpaceX for the HLS program prior to joining the agency; this decision was driven by available funding and SpaceX’s offer, which is much lower than its competitors. “We don’t want to leave all of our eggs in one basket of the SpaceX lander. We want to have another lander.”

This was a relief for Congressman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the committee’s senior member. “I must say, when I saw the rocket explode, I thought thank God there was no one on the plane. Sometimes the lowest price is not always the best choice.”