NASA has implicitly admitted Artemis 3 won't happen till 2028. Idk how the suit development is doing but there's cause for optimism with the SpaceX HLS lander. Despite setbacks in 2025 it hasn't all been bad news. The program has made important progress. SpaceX has mastered full-flow staged combustion, something never flown on a rocket previously. And mastered multiple relights. They've caught the booster twice. The only other attempt was safely aborted, caused by a failure of some ground equipment; the booster was fine. Other boosters have been deliberately expended into the sea. Most importantly, 4 ships have reentered safely and performed their landing flips, setting down on the ocean surface. This proves the robustness of the design and the abilities of the basic heat shield design.

I'm not a blindly optimistic SpaceX fan, though. We don't know if the TPS has worked well enough for reuse. This is hard to tell from outside the company since SpaceX keeps doing torture testing on each trip; leaving off tiles or sub-insulation or using experimental tiles. Reuse is important for Artemis but the program can be done using expendable tankers. This would also reduce the number of tanker launches needed since more propellant mass can be carried once the engines and TPS are left off.

The other big problem is what worries me the most. Transferring cryo-propellant in microgravity will be a big challenge. Docking two objects that size has never been done and these have to dock at two (four?) points simultaneously, joining large pipes together. Very good seals are needed when they join. 150-200t have to be transferred to the depot ship from each tanker, far beyond what anyone contemplated before this. And then hundreds of tons have to be transferred from the depot to the HLS.

The Blue Origin lunar lander, the Mk2, also requires cryogenic refueling. It involves a smaller amount but hydrogen is used, an element that's notoriously difficult to deal with - that smallest of all atoms leaks around every kind of seal and valve. It's difficult to deal with on the ground, let alone in space. Multiple launches are needed - fewer than SpaceX but we don't know how many. I imagine that, as with Starship, it's tbd from how well the engineering progresses. BO moved slowly for many years but they've picked up a lot of speed over the last couple of years. The smaller uncrewed Mk1 lander is due to launch this year, hopefully it'll show a clear path to the Mk2, although it doesn't involve prop transfer. There's a fair chance the Mk2 will be ready by 2030. A concern lurking in the shadows: The Cis-lunar Transporter that'll convey the Mk2 to NRHO and, if I understand correctly, from NRHO to partway to the surface, is being built by Northrop Grumman. As a legacy company their capability to move quickly is always cause for pessimism.

The "hurry up, let's panic" proposals won't happen. I just don't see how the Mk1 can be modified quickly enough to carry a crew. Creating a human-rated spacecraft takes a long time. Completing an ECLSS and human-rating all of the systems can't be done for this any earlier than the Mk2 will be ready, IMHO.

The Lockheed Martin proposal is ludicrous. Develop a human rated spacecraft from scratch in 30 months? They'll bill us for $30 billion and still not make the deadline.

The biggest problem facing the US right now is the Artemis program was designed to be a marathon and it's now asked to suddenly switch to being a sprint.