A Chinese engineering analysis has identified what it describes as a 'glaring weakness' in NASA's Artemis programme, pointing to the Orion spacecraft's reliance on a single main descent engine as a potential life-threatening failure point. The study, published by researchers affiliated with Chinese space authorities, contrasts this design with China's alternative architecture that employs multiple smaller engines for redundancy.
The critique centers on the descent stage of the lunar lander. The American approach, tracing back to the Apollo Lunar Module, uses one powerful main engine to handle all deceleration and landing maneuvers. Should that engine fail, the analysis argues, the crew would have no backup propulsion system to abort the landing or return to orbit, creating a 'single point of failure' for the entire mission.
NASA, meanwhile, is pressing forward with revised plans for its Artemis lunar landers. New details released by the agency show Blue Origin and SpaceX are each iterating on their respective lander designs under accelerated schedules. SpaceX's Starship, with its multiple Raptor engines, would inherently share the Chinese design philosophy of engine redundancy, though NASA has not officially addressed the Chinese critique.
The Chinese team's warning arrives amid a renewed superpower competition in lunar exploration. Both China and the United States aim to land astronauts near the south pole later this decade, with China targeting 2030 and NASA's Artemis III currently planned for no earlier than late 2025. The contrasting engineering philosophies highlight deeper differences in safety culture and mission architecture between the two programs.
The analysis does not account for NASA's contingency planning, such as abort-to-orbit scenarios or the use of the Orion service module's engine for emergency maneuvers. Critics also note that system redundancy must be weighed against mass constraints and that the single-engine design has decades of heritage from the Apollo programme, which never experienced a catastrophic descent engine failure.