NASA is overhauling its Artemis program. What does that mean for humanity's return to the moon?

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NASA has revealed a huge shakeup to its Artemis program of crewed moon exploration.

The announcement came last week, just after the agency's Artemis 2 rocket was rolled back to the hangar for repairs. What was expected as an update to the timeline for Artemis 2's mission ended up being an explanation of the restructuring of the Artemis program itself.

The plan for Artemis 2 remains the same: Launch a crew of four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and back to Earth aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft. With maintenance already underway, NASA is hoping the repairs to the Artemis 2 rocket can be made in time to meet a launch window that opens April 1. Until now, the mission had been billed as the precursor to an actual landing on the lunar surface on Artemis 3 in 2028, but that is no longer the case. NASA hasn't changed its goal of returning astronauts to the moon in 2028, but Artemis 3 won't be the mission to carry it out.

Instead, that task will fall to Artemis 4, with Artemis 3 launching sooner with a different mission framework, and with a potential second crewed lunar landing on Artemis 5 in late 2028. The approach mirrors that of NASA's early Apollo program, which launched incremental, quick-succession missions to test and prove the technologies necessary to safely land astronauts on the moon.

"We didn't go right to Apollo 11," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during a Feb. 27 press conference. "We had a whole Mercury program, Gemini [and] lots of Apollo missions before we ultimately landed."

In contrast, Artemis' architecture previously outlined a jump from Orion's first uncrewed mission to the moon in 2022, a crewed lunar flyby on the upcoming Artemis 2 mission and a moon landing on Artemis 3 in 2028. But three or more years between missions, and a leap from lunar space to the lunar surface without at least one test-run with Orion and its landing vehicle left too many "firsts" for Artemis 3 to take on and posed a significant safety risk, according to a recent report from the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP).

"The numerous and unprecedented mission objectives — many being attempted for the first time within a single flight — result in a compounded level of technical and safety risk," the ASAP report said.

Indeed, under its original design, the success of Artemis 3 depended on a lot of things going right. The mission's moon lander, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, is expected to need more than a dozen refueling flights in Earth orbit in order to complete its objectives of rendezvousing and docking with Orion in orbit around the moon, landing astronauts on the lunar surface and launching them back to orbit to rendezvous and dock again with Orion, which will safely ferry the astronauts home.

Artemis 3's success was not only dependent on all of those things going exactly right for the first time, but also on a number of operational milestones SpaceX has yet to demonstrate during Starship's ongoing development. One such milestone is the ability to transfer and store large amounts of cryogenic propellant in space, which has never been done before.

Now, NASA is breaking up those objectives between multiple missions. Artemis 3 will now launch in 2027, and will rendezvous with one or both of NASA's contracted moon landers in Earth orbit. In addition to Starship, NASA has also tapped the Blue Moon lander from Blue Origin to support the Artemis program, and the space agency is eager to test out Orion with Starship, Blue Moon or both on next year's Artemis 3 flight.

"It's challenging, it's ambitious, but with this course correction, we are on a more stable foundation, and a more realistic path to the mountains we have ahead," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said on Friday (Feb. 27).

In the same way that Artemis 2 parallels the objectives of Apollo 8 to test out the crew capsule's flight systems around the moon, Artemis 3's mission to demonstrate rendezvous and docking with the lunar landers in Earth orbit, as well as testing out new spacesuits, is now closely aligned with Apollo 9.

NASA also wants to shorten the cadence between Artemis launches. Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968, and was followed less than three months later by Apollo 9 — a much quicker turnaround than Artemis' current wait time of three-plus years.

To do this, NASA is backing away from some of the more complex design upgrades intended for Aretmis' rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). SLS Block 1 was designed with the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) to launch the first three Artemis missions. Artemis 4 and the missions to follow were supposed to employ more powerful SLS variants — Block 1B, Block 2 and so forth — which feature an enhanced Exploration Upper Stage to launch heavier elements of the program, such as components for the Gateway space station planned for lunar orbit.

Now, NASA is planning a more standardized SLS, with an upper stage solidified for its design rather than customized for each Artemis mission, and a new NASA graphic paints a picture of what that and other plans for Artemis' future might look like.

An image released in concert with last week's Artemis announcement illustrates NASA's new vision for the program and humanity's return to the moon, and has some details that may bring clarity to how that vision will unfold.

The newly unveiled image is divided into three frames: Artemis 2, Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 and beyond. The Artemis 2 panel contains no surprises; it shows Orion's launch on SLS, lunar flyby and return to Earth. Artemis 3 shows the mission's new plan, with Orion still flying with ICPS, docking with both Starship and Blue Moon above Earth.

The image's bottom panel — Artemis 4 and beyond — is the most interesting. It shows the standardized SLS Block 1 configuration launching alongside SpaceX's Starship rocket and Blue Origin's New Glenn. Orion is then seen flying next to both landers in space, still attached to its SLS upper stage, which is notably not the ICPS.

Instead, the spacecraft appears to be powered by a dual-engine Centaur vehicle, which is the upper stage for United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan rocket. While NASA has not yet confirmed that it plans to outfit Centaur for SLS and Orion, doing so could make a lot of sense. The stage is nearly equal in diameter to Orion and its service module, has been proven reliable on all of ULA's Vulcan missions to date, and doesn't need to be designed from scratch to support the needs of future Artemis launches.

Other significant inclusions in NASA's illustration are seen on the lunar surface. Next to a handful of Starship and Blue Moon landers stands a robotic Intuitive Machines lander — notably, the first commercial lander to touch down on the moon, which it did as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in early 2024.

Moon rovers bearing a striking resemblance to Astrolab's FLEX lunar excursion vehicle are also seen scattered around the modules of a lunar base. Astrolab's rover design is one of three in the running for Artemis, along with rovers from Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost, neither of which appears to be included in NASA's graphic.

NASA is hoping its Artemis restructuring will accelerate its readiness for a 2028 crewed lunar landing, while also breaking its missions down into more manageable milestones. It's an ambitious undertaking for an increased launch cadence by the space agency, which has run into repeated delays over the course of the last 10 or so years leading up the program's first crewed flight.

Some experts aren't sure the space agency can pull off the new plan in such a short amount of time, but still see the reorganization as a step in the right direction. As Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013, said in an online post, "We didn't 'wait' 3.5 yrs between launches because we wanted to, that is what it took. The new plan increases the probability that the next US moon landing attempt will be successful — even though it is still likely more years away than we hope."

Her post received a response directly from Isaacman, who agreed that "after decades, America’s return to the moon has to be more than just talk."

"I would describe launching SLS every 10 months as extremely difficult," Isaacman wrote, "which is supposed to be our specialty at NASA."