WASHINGTON, — NASA has abruptly reworked its Artemis moon program, inserting an additional crewed test mission in 2027 before attempting to land astronauts on the lunar surface, in a major course correction aimed at reducing risk and speeding up the pace of missions. Under the new plan, Artemis III will no longer be the first crewed moon landing. Instead, it will become an Earth-orbit test flight designed to rehearse critical docking operations with lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The actual lunar landing mission is now designated Artemis IV and remains targeted for 2028.
NASA said the revamped Artemis III mission will send the agency’s Orion capsule into low-Earth orbit to attempt a rendezvous and docking with one or both commercial lunar landers, followed by in-space testing of life support, communications, propulsion and lunar surface suit systems. Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency concluded that adding another test step was the safest path to a successful landing within its desired timeframe. NASA said more detailed objectives for Artemis III will be released after further reviews with industry partners.
Isaacman framed the decision as a return to the logic of the Apollo era, arguing that NASA’s previous sequence asked too much of Artemis III by effectively jumping from a lunar flyby to a landing attempt. The shift also follows a fresh warning from NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which urged the agency this week to re-examine Artemis III’s mission objectives and system architecture to better balance risk. Reuters reported the safety panel had already raised doubts about whether the earlier landing plan was realistic.
The announcement comes as NASA is still trying to get Artemis II off the ground. That mission — a crewed flight around the moon without a landing — is now scheduled for no earlier than April 2026 after a helium-flow problem in the rocket’s upper stage forced NASA to roll the Space Launch System back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. Officials said that issue was separate from earlier hydrogen leak problems that also disrupted launch preparations.
In another major change, NASA said it is dropping plans for the upgraded “Block 1B” version of the SLS rocket, which would have used a more powerful upper stage to carry heavier cargo. Instead, the agency wants to standardize the existing Block 1 configuration and increase launch frequency to at least one SLS mission per year. Reuters said the decision affects Boeing’s contract to develop the upgraded upper stage. The overhaul is one of the biggest changes to Artemis since the program began in 2017. NASA says the goal is still to return U.S. astronauts to the moon before China reaches its own target of a crewed landing by 2030 but the agency is now conceding that getting there will require more testing, not less.
