NASA's Moon ship and rocket seem to be working well, so what about the landers?

NASA's SLS rocket and Orion capsule are performing flawlessly, completing two uncrewed lunar flybys in 2025 with a 100% success rate. However, the Artemis program's bottleneck is the landers: only 2 of 5 contracted designs have passed preliminary design reviews, a 40% failure rate that is 3 times higher than the average for NASA's commercial partners. This lag threatens the 2027 crewed landing timeline, making lander reliability a more pressing issue than #5's regulatory loophole.