- Updated: April 2, 2026
- 6 min read
NASA’s Artemis II Mission Marks End of Silicon Valley Partnerships
–:–:–:– The first StrictlyVC of 2026 lands in San Francisco on April 30. Tickets are limited. Register here. Save up to $680 on your Disrupt 2026 pass. Ends 11:59 p.m. PT tonight. REGISTER NOW. Close Image Credits:NASA/Joel Kowsky / NASA under a CC BY-ND 4.0 (opens in a new window) license. Space Artemis II is NASA’s last moon mission without Silicon Valley Tim Fernholz 1:06 PM PDT · April 2, 2026 SpaceX launched its IPO on the same day the U.S.sent astronauts to the moon for the first time in 54 years. And the timing is appropriate: This is likely the last time NASA will try to send people to deep space without major assistance from a company that emerged from the venture-backed tech scene. The origins of NASA’s current lunar campaign trace a complicated path back to the second Bush administration, which began developing an enormous rocket and a spacecraft called Orion to return to the moon.By 2010, the project had grown over budget and was pared back — and paired with a new program to back private companies building new orbital rockets. That decision led to a company-saving contract for SpaceX and a rush of venture capital into extraterrestrial technology, and to the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that is now carrying three Americans and one Canadian around the moon and back. The SLS is the most powerful operational rocket in the world today.It has flown just once before, when it launched an empty Orion spacecraft on a test flight around the moon in preparation for this week’s historic mission, which will set a record for the furthest humans have gone into the solar system. Next time around, however, the pressure will be on SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The two companies are competing to see who will put boots on the lunar regolith.SLS and Orion were built by NASA’s legacy contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with a boost from Europe’s Airbus Defense and Space. They were also costly, delayed, and over budget, while SpaceX was flying a fleet of cheap reusable rockets and kicking off a massive cycle of investment into private space. When NASA decided to head for the moon again in 2019, the agency felt it had to stick with the SLS and Orion.Techcrunch event Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $400.Save up to $300 or 30% to TechCrunch Founder Summit 1,000+ founders and investors come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediatelyOffer ends March 13.San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 REGISTER NOW But there was a missing piece of the puzzle: A vehicle to transport astronauts from space down to the surface of the moon. That, NASA decided, would come from the new generation of venture-backed space firms. The agency also turned to a handful of private space companies to deploy robotic landers for reconnaissance and testing, including Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines.SpaceX bid to use its Starship rocket as a lander and, in 2021, won the job. It was a controversial decision. Getting the enormous vehicle to the moon will require a dozen or more launches in order to fill it with sufficient propellant for the journey. After years of waiting for the spacecraft, NASA chose to push back an attempt to land on the moon and rejigger its program.“This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I’m aware of would have selected had they had the choice,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told Congress last year, noting that the decision had been made without a Senate-confirmed leader at the agency. Blue Origin was added to the roster in 2023 to build its own human landing system.Now, the agency is apparently planning a bake-off: In 2027, NASA will test the ability of Orion to rendezvous with one or both landers in orbit, ahead of two potential landings in 2028. That will put added scrutiny on SpaceX’s next Starship test, which could occur this month, and Blue Origin’s plans to test out its lander on the moon sometime this year.This year, there’s been a major overhaul of the program under the new NASA administrator, billionaire payments entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who paid SpaceX to fly on two space missions and was promoted by Musk as the right candidate for administrator. After being nominated for the job by President Donald Trump, having his nomination pulled, and being renominated, he entered office in late 2025 facing a series of difficult choices about how to return to the moon.In March, Isaacman scrapped plans, long seen as wasteful or politically motivated by outside observers, to build a lunar space station called Gateway, and to invest in expensive upgrades for SLS. Now, he’s all in on the new generation of private space companies. With China, however, on its own disciplined path to put one of its citizens on the moon by 2030, any delays or missteps will be seen in a geopolitical light.Silicon Valley has thus far failed to beat Chinese companies in the physical realms of electric cars or robotics. SpaceX has become the company entrepreneurs across the Pacific seek to emulate, but in heading for the moon, Silicon Valley will have a chance to show it can still own the technology frontier. Topics Artemis, Blue Origin, Exclusive, NASA, Space, SpaceX Tim Fernholz Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy.He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.View Bio April 30 San Francisco, CA StrictlyVC kicks off the year in SF. Get in the room for unfiltered fireside chats with industry leaders, insider VC insights, and high-value connections that actually move the needle. Tickets are limited.REGISTER NOW Most Popular Anthropic took down thousands of GitHub repos trying to yank its leaked source code — a move the company says was an accident Tim Fernholz Anthropic is having a month Connie Loizos Google is now letting users in the US change their Gmail address Ivan Mehta Why OpenAI really shut down Sora Connie Loizos The Pixel 10a doesn’t have a camera bump, and it’s great Ivan Mehta Anthropic’s Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing Julie Bort Let’s take a look at the retro tech making a comeback Lauren Forristal Loading the next article Error loading the next article
Read the full story on TechCrunch. For more insights, visit our news hub.
Andrii Bidochko
CTO UBOS
Andrii Bidochko is an AI entrepreneur and researcher focused on AI agents, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems. He writes about the technologies shaping the future of machine intelligence, from frontier models and agent architectures to real-world AI applications.