[Comments as prepared for delivery]. It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to Kennedy Space Center for an update on the Artemis Program. Thank you to [VIP acknowledgments] for joining us today, and to the extraordinary workforce here at Kennedy and across NASA, our industry and international partners, who are making everything we will discuss today possible.
Now, let us go back in time…some 58 years ago. It is October 1968 and just hours ago, the Apollo 7 astronauts splashed down from the first crewed mission of the Apollo program. Now, the Saturn V for Apollo 8 is already assembled and sitting out at Launch Complex 39A. And in less than two months, that mission will fly, sending Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders into lunar orbit. In the Vehicle Assembly Building, the Saturn V for Apollo 9 is already waiting, and the lunar module, the LEM for Apollo 10, has already been delivered. And in the midst of all that mission activity, nine months from now, the Eagle will land, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will walk on the Moon.
Now, of course, it is no secret that NASA was playing our part in a rivalry between two superpowers. It was a different time, with extraordinary national resources committed to the objective. But we also knew so very little, with so much less technology to aid in our efforts and no experience operating beyond low Earth orbit. And yet, in that remarkably short span of time, the ambitions of generations, once confined to the pages of science fiction became humanity’s greatest achievement. And for the first time in billions of years, life born on Earth would set foot upon another world.
Here we are today, very much in a new space race, and despite decades of accumulated knowledge and extraordinary advances in technology, this race will be much closer than it ever needed to be. And why is that? China achieved its John Glenn moment, its first solo orbital human spaceflight mission, just 23 years ago. At that point, not only had NASA won the first space race, we put our astronauts on the moon six times, and had flown 113 Space Shuttle missions before China put their first astronaut in space. And from there in 2003, a Chinese space program once in its infancy, has since deployed hundreds of communications, Earth observation, and military satellites, developed autonomous lunar landers and rovers, returned samples from the far side of the Moon, and is preparing, alongside Russia, to build a Moon Base of their own. China will soon have reusable rockets, spacecraft, landers, and infrastructure for a credible two-launch architecture to put its astronauts on the lunar surface in the next three years. It is a story as much about their discipline, focus, and urgency as it is about the weight of institutional inertia, misplaced priorities, and decades of decisions, some imposed upon us and others of our own making, that have held America’s space program back.
And that brings us to the moment we find ourselves in today. The appetite for tolerating and defending the status quo has reached its conclusion. No longer will we create programs too big to fail, too costly to succeed, in the hopes of making everyone happy. We will not compromise our architecture, performance, or capabilities to accommodate the lobby of suppliers or preserve technologies whose time has passed. We will not allow layers of process, bureaucratic inertia, and endless deliberation to take precedence over engineering progress and getting hardware built and flown. We will not outsource our expertise. And we will not delude ourselves into believing that more time, more money, and flying less somehow make our work safer or more achievable. We are here for the mission, and to deliver the outcomes the world expects of the most accomplished space agency in history.
What I am describing is not some long-overdue disruption. It is not entrepreneurial thinking, tech industry pixie dust, or some new management philosophy. It is revisiting our own history. It is a playbook this agency knows really well, the same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just nine months. And as extraordinary as those achievements were, they should not represent the upper limits of what NASA is capable of, but the standard we should continuously aspire to exceed. Which is why we are bringing that intensity, discipline, and engineering ownership back to NASA, because great nations do not remain great by being caretakers of history, but by continuously making history.
Soon, you will hear from NASA’s Associate Administrator and Chief Engineer, Amit Kshatriya, and the leader of the Artemis Program, Jeremy Parsons. They will tell you what we have gotten right, what we have gotten wrong, and the extremely hard work ahead on America’s return to the Moon. Because confronting our shortcomings, and doing something about them, is how confidence is earned, cultures are changed, and the might of a great space agency is once again unleashed.
Amit and Jeremy will talk to you about the Artemis III hardware being assembled here at Kennedy Space Center, what is on track, the outstanding performance of the workforce that has cut the assembly and integration schedule in half, and the work ahead toward a year-end tanking test and then a summer 2027 launch. And when Artemis III flies next year, we will have exercised the big rocket muscles we have strengthened, and in the process bring together three of the world’s most powerful rockets alongside the Orion spacecraft, and the two Human Landing Systems in development, to test the interoperability and capabilities we need before the next mission.
They will then talk about Artemis IV, and the optionality we are preserving to give both of our lunar landing partners the greatest opportunity for readiness in advance of astronauts landing on the Moon in 2028. We have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so.
You will learn how the Moon Base missions, especially Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and Mark 1 landers, share important commonality with the transfer stages and crewed landers that will follow. These missions will do far more than lay the first figurative bricks of an American Moon Base. Every mission will provide invaluable engineering data, reduce risk, and build confidence in the crewed landings ahead. And when American astronauts take their first steps on the lunar surface in 2028, a rover and the first elements of an enduring human presence on the Moon will already be waiting for them.
Like the space race of the 1960s, we are hardly in a position to ‘set it and forget it’ with respect to our planning. We will never stop listening to the data, and adapt as circumstances require. Just as we did during Gemini and just as we did during Apollo. That means simplifying and dramatically reducing the mass of our lunar spacesuits, improving upper-stage performance to get Orion closer to the Moon, and modifying Orion to accommodate different lander requirements. In the incredibly demanding and dangerous business of putting astronauts on the Moon, NASA must own the near-impossible, rather than shifting the burden to our partners. That is how we give Artemis IV the greatest possible chance of safely and successfully returning Americans to the lunar surface in 2028.
And to be clear, there are real engineering challenges ahead. Getting Orion to low lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long. Advancing two very different landing systems requires demonstrating capabilities ranging from complex launch campaigns and large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer to the aggregation of stages in orbit. These are not trivial matters to solve, and no amount of my enthusiasm or schedule pressure changes the laws of physics. What we are undertaking is ambitious, extraordinarily difficult, and years of decisions, both within and beyond the walls of this agency, have cost us time and resources we never had to spare.
But the agency we are reinvigorating, and the extraordinary vehicles our industry partners are building, are worth every bit of that effort. This will not be a repeat of the flags and footprints. These vehicles are being designed to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering mass to orbit and to the Moon, to support longer surface operations, enable more frequent astronaut missions, and transform what begins as a small scientific outpost into something that may one day resemble a city on the lunar surface. This mountain of an effort is our opportunity to potentially spark a lunar economy, unleash scientific discovery, learn to live and work beyond our home planet, and mature the technologies we will need for the day when NASA astronauts embark on humanity’s next giant leap to Mars.
We will never compromise on testing and qualifying the hardware that our astronauts, and frankly America’s space program, will depend upon. And we will never launch until we are ready. But we will not accept that great achievements simply require more time and more money, nor will NASA sit idly by and watch one of the most consequential moments of this new century pass to our overseas competitor. We are rebuilding the workforce and core competencies that eroded over decades, restoring our ability to design, build, test, and fly the hardware our missions and industry partners depend upon. We are deploying talent from across NASA Centers and throughout the supply chain to attack the critical path. Every vendor and partner should understand that when a schedule is broken, NASA personnel will be knocking on the door. Not to observe, write a paper, or convene a committee, but to roll up their sleeves and solve problems. This is what extreme ownership looks like, and the capabilities we are rebuilding today will serve America long after the first Artemis astronauts return from the Moon.
This is a very energized NASA, and the updates you hear today are only a small part of the story. I am beyond proud of how the team has responded since our Ignition event earlier this year. You can see it here at Kennedy, in the Vehicle Assembly Building, in our machine shops running nearly around the clock, across our Centers, and throughout our industry partners. But there is of course, much to do.
And that brings us where this all began, when the men and women of this agency were in the home stretch of a great race, with extraordinary challenges still ahead. We find ourselves at a similar moment, under very different circumstances, with perhaps even more at stake. And just as the Apollo generation rose to the occasion, so too will the young engineers working late into the night on Orion, the welders helping to modify Centaur and the mobile launcher, the technicians in the machine shops, the flight controllers preparing for Artemis III, and the intern getting that first glimpse of what it means to be part of NASA. The work they do from here, the obstacles they overcome, the culture they create, and the agency they reinvigorate will make possible the dreams of tomorrow. And my hope is that when history looks back on this time, the politics over which rockets and landers carried us to the Moon, how long it took, and at what cost, will be a footnote compared to all that followed. That when the time came, the Artemis generation chose to go, and we went.
Thank you, and now ill turn it over to__________
