Major Changes to NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV Missions to the Moon
NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return Americans to the Moon and create an “enduring presence” on its surface, has announced a major update to its timeline.
The previously announced Artemis III mission in 2027 will no longer land astronauts on the Moon; instead, it will conduct low-Earth-orbit tests. A newly announced mission, Artemis IV, will instead reach the Moon in 2028.
In a statement, NASA said that Artemis III’s tests will include rendezvous and docking exercises with commercial lander craft produced by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The mission will also involve testing the docked vehicles’ life support, propulsion, and communications systems in space. The mission will also test the performance of a new spacesuit, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU). The AxEMU hasn’t yet been tested in space.
Revising the Artemis Mission Program
The announced changes are not the first modifications to the Artemis program’s schedule. Artemis II, the first crewed mission to fly around the moon since Apollo 17 visited the surface in December 1972, has been delayed after a leak of liquid hydrogen during a “wet” dress rehearsal in early February 2026 that tested the rocket’s fueling and countdown stages.
A second wet rehearsal, which was conducted on Feb. 19, 2026, revealed issues with the rocket’s flow of helium during the interim cryogenic propulsion stage.
While the revised mission program has opted for a more conservative third mission, NASA’s announcement hinted at a much more ambitious plan post-2028. The agency committed to “undertaking at least one surface landing every year thereafter,” in their new announcement.
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A Measured Schedule
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who became the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk, said in a statement that changes to the program should remove future obstacles from the agency’s plans.
“NASA must standardize its approach, increase flight rate safely, and execute on the President’s national space policy,” said Isaacman in a release. “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives. Standardizing vehicle configuration, increasing flight rate and progressing through objectives in a logical, phased approach, is how we achieved the near-impossible in 1969 and it is how we will do it again.”
Overall, experts said the agency’s plans represented a more measured schedule that involved a less dramatic jump between a moon orbit and landing.
NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya recognized this in a statement.
“The entire sequence of Artemis flights needs to represent a step-by-step build-up of capability, with each step bringing us closer to our ability to perform the landing missions. Each step needs to be big enough to make progress, but not so big that we take unnecessary risk given previous learnings,” said Kshatriya.
The Lunar Gateway
Experts noted that the agency’s announcement omitted reference to Lunar Gateway, a small space station orbiting the Moon. In the Agency’s original plans, the Lunar Gateway would have acted as a waystation for the second lunar landing, but it did not feature in the newly announced schedule.
The station will house a $2 billion-dollar robotic arm designed by the Canadian space program. This robot, Canadarm3, uses advanced AI, allowing it to operate relatively independently at a great distance from Earth. The omission comes amid strained U.S.-Canada relations.
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