KVIG Informative

The next Artemis flight will not go anywhere near the lunar surface. NASA will update the public Friday on how the schedule behind it is holding up.

NASA will hold a public briefing on the Artemis program Friday, October 23, at 2 p.m. Eastern at its Washington headquarters, according to SpacePolicyOnline. Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons are scheduled to speak, and NASA will livestream it.

The briefing follows a successful crewed lap around the Moon. Artemis II carried NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a lunar flyby in April, the first time humans traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Isaacman described the mission as a success when he testified before House appropriators on April 27.

The flights that follow look different from the plan NASA held two years ago. Artemis II was originally set for 2024 and the first landing, on Artemis III, for 2025, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology. On February 27, Isaacman announced an overhaul: Artemis III will now launch in 2027 as a low Earth orbit test of rendezvous and docking with test versions of two commercial landers, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk2. The first landing moves to Artemis IV in 2028, with Artemis V following the same year.

The landers are the bottleneck. Isaacman told the House Appropriations Committee that SpaceX and Blue Origin both said their systems would not be ready until late 2027 at the earliest, according to reports on the hearing. As of May, SpaceX had not yet demonstrated the ship-to-ship propellant transfer a lunar Starship depends on, The Register reported.

Money is another open question. The stopgap bill President Trump signed September 2 holds NASA at its fiscal 2026 level of $24.4 billion through December 11, well above the $18.8 billion the White House requested for fiscal 2027, SpacePolicyOnline reported. The House’s Commerce-Justice-Science bill, approved by committee in May, rejects many of the proposed cuts but would still drop NASA science from $7.3 billion to $6 billion while funding for human spaceflight grows substantially.

Isaacman has argued the changes are meant to speed the program up. His plan standardizes the vehicle configuration, raises the flight rate and moves through objectives in phases, and he has framed the urgency as a response to competition from a geopolitical rival, according to ExecutiveGov. NASA has also issued a workforce directive tied to the faster schedule.

Artemis II showed that the rocket and capsule can carry a crew around the Moon. A landing now depends on two commercial landers that, by NASA’s own account, will not be ready for even an orbital test until the end of next year.