Axiom disagrees, and says they will be ready.

The NASA Office of Inspector General released its audit of the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract on Monday, concluding that the agency is unlikely to have next-generation spacesuits in hand in time for the 2028 Artemis lunar landing or before the ISS is decommissioned in 2030. The report, IG-26-006, is the second and final product of an audit that ran from September 2024 through March 2026.

Axiom Responds

The findings come just four days after Talk of Titusville published an interview with Axiom xEVAS Program Manager Tammy Radford, in which she said that Axiom will be ready for Artemis. After the report was released, Dr. Jonathan Cirtain CEO and President of Axiom Space reiterated what Ms. Radford had said only a few days ago:

What the Audit Says

You can read the OIG report here, or download it in PDF form to your device below.

The xEVAS contract, awarded in May 2022 to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace under a combined maximum value of $3.1 billion, was built on a firm-fixed-price, service-based model. NASA would not own the suits — it would rent spacewalking services from the providers. Collins descoped its task orders in June 2024 after determining it could not meet the ISS demonstration schedule, leaving Axiom as the sole active provider.

The original schedule called for a lunar suit demonstration in 2025 and a microgravity demonstration on the ISS in 2026. As of January 2026, Axiom is working toward demonstrating both suits in late 2027 — a slip of roughly 18 months for each. The inspector general’s office concludes that even this revised target is fragile.

An Acquisition Strategy Mismatched to the Job

Much of the audit’s concern is not with Axiom specifically but with the shape of the contract itself. The inspector general finds that a firm-fixed-price, service-based approach — the same model used successfully for Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew — was a poor fit for a developmental system with no pre-existing commercial market. There was no commercial spacesuit business prior to xEVAS, and by NASA’s own acknowledgment, there still isn’t one outside of planned commercial LEO destinations later this decade.

At the same time, there was no real existing market for Commercial Crew, aside from wealthy adventurers paying to ride Soyuz to ISS for relatively brief stays. Now, with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon up and running, It’s fair to say that the Commercial Crew contract contributed greatly to that market’s rapid development.

NASA’s requirement that potential providers bid on both microgravity and lunar suits narrowed the pool further. The agency received only two proposals: one from Collins, whose management of the incumbent EMU maintenance contract had drawn documented concerns from four NASA program managers in March 2023, and one from Axiom, which had no prior experience in spacesuit development.

An independent Standing Review Board reached a similar conclusion in August 2023, finding that few of the conditions typically required for a successful firm-fixed-price contract were present in the EVA and Human Surface Mobility Program portfolio — but that the contract structure was already too far along to change. With Collins out, Axiom Space became the sole suit contractor.

The 2031 Scenario

The projected 2031 readiness date in the audit is not a prediction so much as a benchmark. The inspector general’s office compared the xEVAS schedule against six recent NASA human spaceflight and commercial cargo programs, including Orion, Commercial Cargo, Commercial Crew, and the Space Launch System. Still it made most of the headlines, giving the appearance that Axiom Space was well and far behind schedule, while in fact, Axiom is insisting that is not the case.

The average time from contract award to first test flight across those programs was 8.7 years. Strip out the two commercial cargo contracts, and it climbs to 10.2 years, which would push the spacesuit demonstrations to mid-2032. You could also lower that number by removing Commercial Crew or SLS. While building a new spacesuit is by no means an easy task, the complexity of an all-new capsule and crewed flight system is probably much higher. Statistics are funny that way — they can be manipulated easily to show one thing or another.

The xEVAS schedule committed Axiom to a test flight in roughly 3.4 years for the lunar suit and 3.8 years for the microgravity suit. By that historical yardstick, the original timeline was less than half of what analogous programs have actually achieved. What the actual time it takes for Axiom Space to deliver production suits for NASA’s use remains to be seen.

The Blue Origin Compatibility Problem

Buried in the audit’s final section is a concrete interoperability problem that has not been widely reported. Blue Origin, designing its Blue Moon Human Landing System for a later Artemis mission, used NASA’s government reference spacesuit interface document to lay out its don/doff area — the section of the crew module where astronauts put on and remove their suits. Axiom subsequently chose a different don/doff connection design.

For the AxEMU to interface with Blue Moon, Blue Origin must either substantially rework its crew module airlock or build its own hardware to accommodate Axiom’s approach. Either path could add cost to NASA. The inspector general flags this as exactly the kind of risk that a uniform spacesuit interface standard would have prevented, and recommends that NASA develop an interoperability plan and a consolidated Artemis vehicle-to-xEVA interface control document. In short, a standard not unlike a Mil-spec or an ISO standard.

Those changes need to happen soon, with the spacesuit’s design reaching its final stages and Blue Origin’s work on its lunar lander starting to take shape. Waiting only adds expense, and incompatibility renders one or the other much less usable. That in turn puts the entire Artemis schedule in danger.

NASA’s Response

NASA concurred with both of the audit’s recommendations — to seek fresh industry input on contract requirements if a successor vehicle is pursued before September 2027, and to develop a plan for interoperability standards between Artemis vehicles and spacesuits. The agency targeted December 31, 2027 for completion of both actions.

In the formal response signed by Dr. Lori S. Glaze, Acting Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development, NASA framed the xEVAS effort as “advancing as planned” and aligned with the 2028 lunar landing schedule. The agency also pointed to a February 2026 announcement adding an additional Artemis mission in 2027 and integrating on-orbit spacesuit testing into either the Earth-orbit Artemis test flight or an ISS-based opportunity — the same low-Earth-orbit shakedown that Axiom referenced in Talk of Titusville’s interview.

What Happens Next

The near-term test for Axiom is the NASA-led critical design sync review that follows the company’s ongoing CDR activities. Qualification testing comes after that, followed by certification and delivery. The first flight opportunity, per NASA’s current plan, is an on-orbit checkout during the Artemis III test flight in 2027, with a full lunar landing demonstration pushed to a 2028 mission. The ISS demonstration sits somewhere in that same window, with exact sequencing still to be determined by the agency.

The inspector general’s office and Axiom Space are, in effect, looking at the same program through opposite ends of the same telescope. The audit sees a developmental hardware program wedged into a service-contract structure that was never designed for it, relying on a single provider that was overweight at its own preliminary design review and whose schedule sits well outside the historical norm. Axiom sees a suit in production, a clean single-architecture design, and 950 hours of pressurized test time in the books.

The Artemis III test flight next year will be the first hard data point that tells the rest of the Space Coast which end of the telescope is pointed the right way.