In late 2017, president Donald Trump signed the Space Policy Directive 1, a major policy shift to return the United States to the surface of the Moon. The signing took place 45 years to the minute after Buzz Aldrin became the first person to walk on the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. In 2019, vice president Mike Pence announced the plan was to accelerate NASA’s efforts and land on the Moon by the year 2024.
But 2024 came and went. Nine years on, the nation has taken some considerable steps closer, sending an uncrewed spacecraft around the Moon and back as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission in November 2022 — but it’s still clearly years away from touching down on the Moon.
That’s no longer just speculation. NASA has now announced major changes to its Artemis program that could mean we won’t be attempting to land on the Moon until, at the very earliest, early 2028.
Following several delays to its follow-up Artemis 2 mission, which will see four astronauts travel around the Moon, NASA’s leadership officially revealed that Artemis 3, originally envisioned as its first modern lunar landing attempt, will no longer attempt to touch down on the Moon’s surface during a Friday press conference.
It’s perhaps the most significant reframing of NASA’s and the Trump administration’s flagship program of returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon, highlighting persistent issues plaguing the agency since the first Trump administration.
It could also highlight significant delays with SpaceX’s efforts to develop a Starship-based lunar lander. The company was tapped by NASA to come up with a way to transport the crew from lunar orbit down to the surface.
Instead, Artemis 3, now scheduled for “mid-2027,” will serve as a test of docking with one or both of NASA’s Human Landing Systems partners, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, in low-Earth orbit — not lunar orbit, as initially planned. NASA is also planning to use the opportunity to have astronauts test out their Moon suits while in orbit.
Artemis 4 and 5, both lunar landing attempts, have now been moved back to early and late 2028, respectively — and that’s if everything goes according to plan.
“We’re not necessarily committed, but we want to have the opportunity” to make both attempts in 2028, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the press conference.
In an initial statement during today’s press conference, Isaacman said that a three-year launch cadence between Artemis 1 and 2 was simply too long, arguing that “skills atrophy” over that time period and that something needed to change.
“We’ve got a lot of talented folks that have been working hard on the Artemis 2 campaign, and whether they will want to stick around for three more years after this mission is complete is a question mark,” he said. “This is just not the right pathway forward.”
Isaacman argued that flying different configurations of NASA’s extremely costly Space Launch System rocket for each mission didn’t make sense.
“A wide objective gap between missions is also not a pathway to success,” he said. “They didn’t go right to Apollo 11. We had a whole Mercury program, Gemini, Apollo… Lots of Apollo missions before we ultimately landed.
“We need to chunk it into achievable objectives,” Isaacman later explained, arguing that the agency needed to study the “incremental risks” to increase “reliability and standardization” over several missions.
Meanwhile, NASA remains committed to launching Artemis 2 — which was initially scheduled to launch earlier this month — “in the weeks ahead,” according to a press release.
The rocket was rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this week for further work following technical issues, including a helium leak that triggered launch delays.
In a way, the 322-foot-tall orange and white rocket’s retreat is symbolic of the space agency’s reimagining of its Artemis program, a reining in of some extremely ambitious goals and timelines that ultimately turned out to be unrealistic.
Instead, Isaacman’s NASA is deciding to take one small step at a time, hopefully leading up to its long-awaited return to the Moon.
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