NASA’s next-generation spacesuits for Artemis lunar missions and the International Space Station may not be ready until 2031 or later, according to an April 20 report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General that directly contradicts NASA leadership’s public confidence in a 2028 lunar landing.
The report zeroes in on a problem that has quietly become one of the Artemis program’s largest schedule risks: the suits astronauts are supposed to wear on the Moon don’t exist yet, and the contracting strategy NASA chose to build them has already collapsed from a two-company competition into a sole-source arrangement with Axiom Space.
A commercial services model applied to a non-commercial problem
The Inspector General’s central finding is structural. NASA tried to buy spacesuits the way it buys cargo runs to the ISS — firm-fixed-price contracts where industry takes on development risk in exchange for future commercial revenue. That worked for SpaceX and Northrop Grumman hauling cargo. It has not worked for spacesuits.
According to the OIG report, NASA’s acquisition strategy for xEVAS using a firm-fixed-price, service-based contract approach was poorly suited to next-generation spacesuit development, citing the technical risks involved and the absence of any real non-NASA market for lunar-rated pressure suits.
That is the “so what” buried in the contracting language. Commercial services contracts depend on a second customer base existing, or at least being plausibly on the horizon. For Dragon and Cygnus, that meant other space station customers and eventual commercial LEO destinations. For lunar spacesuits, the second market is a PowerPoint slide. Axiom and Collins Aerospace were being asked to absorb development risk against revenue streams that may not materialize for a decade.
How Collins Aerospace got cut
NASA selected Axiom and Collins under the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services program, assigning Axiom the lunar suit task order and Collins the microgravity ISS suit. By 2024, Collins was effectively out.
The OIG’s account of how that happened is unflattering to NASA’s source selection process. Collins received an “Excellent” rating for past performance during the xEVAS proposal evaluation, despite concerns from NASA program managers about the company’s existing ISS suit maintenance work.
Performance on the new contract tracked the old one. Collins began missing milestones within a year of award. The company completed its preliminary design review a full year late before NASA and Collins agreed to descope the contract.
The competitive premise of xEVAS died with that decision. Axiom is now the sole contractor building the suit astronauts are expected to wear on the lunar surface.
The 8.7-year problem
Here is where the OIG’s math gets uncomfortable. Looking at recent NASA human spaceflight programs — commercial cargo, commercial crew, Orion, and the Space Launch System — the average time from contract award to first test flight was 8.7 years. Axiom’s xEVAS contract dates to 2022.
Apply the historical average, and first flight lands in 2031. NASA’s original schedule called for early spacesuit demonstrations. Both are already delayed by at least 18 months, according to the report.
The OIG is careful to say it is not formally predicting a 2031 slip. The OIG indicated its timeline projection was more realistic than the originally agreed-upon development schedule. That is auditor-speak for: the original plan was never credible.
NASA’s public position is unchanged
Agency leadership is not backing down from 2028. In an April 6 letter embedded in the OIG report, Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, pointed to testing progress at NASA facilities and said the work remained aligned with the 2028 lunar surface mission schedule.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman went further in an April 20 social media post, saying the agency was not taking a passive role in the return to the lunar surface and was inserting its own subject matter experts into Axiom’s development work. Isaacman expressed confidence that Axiom suits would be ready for the 2028 lunar landing.
Axiom echoes the confidence. Cirtain indicated at a Space Symposium briefing that Axiom plans to test the suit in 2026, either on the ISS or during an HLS mission.
The optimistic read: Axiom flies a demonstration suit in 2026 on either the ISS or an Artemis 3 low-Earth-orbit test. The skeptical read: a demonstration is not a qualified, crew-rated, lunar-surface suit, and the gap between the two is measured in years.
The ISS decommissioning squeeze
Spacesuits are not just an Artemis problem. The ISS is scheduled for decommissioning at the end of the decade, and the current EMU suits in service are decades old. If the microgravity version of Axiom’s suit slips past 2030, NASA faces a scenario in which the station runs out of operational spacesuits before a replacement is certified.
The OIG noted that there is decreasing margin before the ISS’s decommissioning. Unlike the lunar landing, which can slip without catastrophic consequence, the ISS suit timeline is bounded by hardware that physically wears out.
Artemis schedule pressure, meet Artemis schedule reality
The spacesuit report lands in a broader context of Artemis slippage. NASA’s Human Landing System contractors are already behind: a separate March OIG report found SpaceX’s lunar Starship at least two years late and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 at least eight months late, according to BBC reporting on the findings. Space Daily has previously covered NASA’s own formal lunar landing delays and the expanding scope of contractor dependencies across the program.
Every piece of the Artemis architecture — rocket, capsule, lander, suit — is on its own delayed schedule. The program’s critical path is not any single element. It is whichever one finishes last.
The 2028 date is politically load-bearing. It aligns with congressional appropriations language. It also sits roughly alongside China’s stated ambition to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030, a competitive pressure that has kept Artemis funded through multiple cost overruns.
What the report is really saying
The OIG does not accuse NASA of lying about the 2028 date. It does something more damaging in institutional terms: it documents that the acquisition strategy was wrong from the start, that the losing contractor was selected despite a documented performance record that should have disqualified it, and that the historical base rate for comparable programs points to 2031.
NASA’s response — more agency personnel inserted into Axiom’s work, more access to NASA testing facilities — is a tacit admission that the commercial services model has reverted to something closer to traditional cost-plus oversight, just without the contract structure that would normally accompany it. The agency is absorbing risk it originally tried to transfer to industry.
Whether Axiom delivers a flight-ready suit in 2026, 2028, or 2031 will determine more than Artemis 3’s schedule. It will test whether the commercial services model has limits — and whether NASA is willing to acknowledge them before the next contract is written the same way.
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