By BlueShift | 2026-03-02

In order to ensure the Artemis program's long-term success and safety, NASA is making revisions to increase launch cadence and add additional missions, among other measures, before ultimately attempting a return to the moon.

Achieving the national objective of returning American astronauts to the moon and establishing an enduring presence calls for standardizing vehicle configuration and adding an additional mission in 2027, the space agency said.

It necessitates undertaking at least one surface landing every year thereafter, potentially as many as one every 10 months.

The Artemis program is aiming for up to two lunar landing attempts in 2028, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during a February 27 briefing.

NASA will add missions between Artemis 2, now slated to launch as early as April after encountering delays, and the ultimate lunar landing, a strategic revision that he said would allow for improved launch "muscle memory."

New launch schedule

Artemis 3 was to have sent astronauts to the moon's surface.

"We are going to pull in Artemis 3 to launch in 2027 with a revised mission profile," Isaacman said. "So instead of going directly to a lunar landing we will endeavor to rendezvous in low earth orbit with one or both of our lunar landers."

A series of integrated operations between the Orion spacecraft and the landers will inform future hardware development, he said, "whether it's in the landers or the [space] suits, before Artemis 4, where we will attempt to land on the moon."

Artemis 4 will aim for a lunar landing in early 2028. Isaacman said he hoped that could be followed by a second moon landing within the year.

"We're not necessarily committing to launching two missions in 2028," he said, "but we want to have the opportunity to be able to do that."

Speeding up the cadence of Artemis launches would allow for building more institutional knowledge in the model of the Apollo program, which originally put Americans on the moon.

"Launching a rocket as important and complex as SLS every three years is not a path to success," Isaacman said, adding that "your skills atrophy, you lose muscle memory."

"Having a wide objective gap between missions is also not a pathway to success," he added, noting that "we didn't go right to Apollo 11. We had a whole Mercury program, Gemini, lots of Apollo missions before we ultimately landed."

Throughout all those programs, "our average launch cadence was closer to three months," not three years, he said.

The program's first major spaceflight, Artemis 1, launched nearly three years ago, completing two lunar flybys, among other maneuvers.

The Artemis 2 mission will be the first crewed flyby of the moon in more than half a century, but has encountered delays, with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft rolled off the launchpad in late February to make necessary repairs.

New path forward

The program's new path forward "reduces risk, strengthens our ability to execute these missions," said NASA's associate administrator Amit Kshatriya.

"It reflects the adjustments that we need to keep our schedule credible and our teams focused on what matters most, which is safe and achievable missions."

NASA is making the changes "as part of a plan that's going to work," he said, noting that it reinforces the agency's commitment to the astronauts "when we ask them to take that risk, when we take that risk together."

"Our commitment to flight readiness is not about slowing down momentum, it's about increasing it, about making sure that we are focused on the right things," he added, with the goal of a more stable foundation and more realistic path.

The changes were necessary to "ensure support and resources" for the program's success, said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.

"For people outside NASA, we make it look easy. But what we are doing is anything but easy," she said, adding that "our team rises to challenges and they meet every bar that is set."

"We're not surprising industry or our stakeholders," Isaacman said. "We've been having these discussions for a long time across all of our all industry partners, all of the prime contractors on the SLS vehicles, both of our HLS landing providers."

"Everybody agrees this is the only way forward," he said, adding that similar conversations have been held with stakeholders in the US Congress, who are "fully behind NASA."

"They know this is how NASA changed the world and how it's going to do it again," he said.

'Enduring presence'

Amid intense competition, China has been forging ahead with a lunar effort, which is targeting 2030 at the latest for a first crewed mission, AFP reported.

Its uncrewed Chang'e 7 mission is expected to be launched in 2026 for an exploration of the moon's south pole, and testing of its crewed spacecraft Mengzhou is set to go ahead this year.

"I think competition is good," Isaacman said of the new "space race."

"We're here talking to you about what is a common-sense approach to achieve the objective, whether we had a great rival in the running or not," he said.

"One of the challenges but also one of the greatest opportunities... is the ability to return America to the moon, not just for the flag and the rocks, but to be able to build out that enduring presence," Isaacman said.