The number is 2027. That is when NASA now plans to launch Artemis 3 — not to land on the moon, but to rehearse getting there.
The agency announced a structural overhaul of its Artemis program on February 27, confirming that the mission once scheduled to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface will instead serve as a test run. The first actual landing has moved to Artemis 4. A potential second landing is penciled in for Artemis 5, targeting late 2028.
The goal of returning humans to the moon by 2028 has not changed. The path there has.
Too Many Firsts on a Single Flight
The previous Artemis 3 plan carried a compounding weight of untested milestones. According to a report from the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, “the numerous and unprecedented mission objectives — many being attempted for the first time within a single flight — result in a compounded level of technical and safety risk.”
Central to that concern was SpaceX‘s Starship, the contracted lunar lander for the mission. Before Starship could land astronauts on the moon, it would need to complete more than a dozen propellant transfer flights in Earth orbit — a process for moving and storing cryogenic fuel in space that has never been demonstrated. Then it would have to rendezvous and dock with NASA‘s Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit, descend to the surface, and launch back up to dock with Orion again for the trip home. Every one of those steps would have been a first.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman drew a direct comparison to the agency’s own history at the February 27 press conference. “We didn’t go right to Apollo 11,” he said. “We had a whole Mercury program, Gemini [and] lots of Apollo missions before we ultimately landed.”
The original Artemis sequence had moved from an uncrewed lunar orbit in 2022 to a crewed flyby on Artemis 2, then directly to a surface landing on Artemis 3 — gaps of three or more years between missions, with no intermediate test of the full landing system.
What Artemis 3 Actually Does Now
Under the revised plan, Artemis 3 will launch in 2027 and rendezvous with one or both contracted landers in Earth orbit. Blue Origin‘s Blue Moon lander is the second vehicle NASA has under contract alongside Starship, according to the announcement. The restructured mission tests the orbital mechanics and docking procedures without committing to a lunar surface attempt.
Meanwhile, Artemis 2 — four astronauts on a 10-day loop around the moon aboard Orion — remains unchanged in its objectives. The rocket was recently rolled back to the hangar for repairs, and the agency says it is working to complete those fixes before a launch window opens on April 1.
The new sequence mirrors the incremental logic of the Apollo era: build toward the landing rather than bet everything on it. Artemis 4 inherits the surface landing. Artemis 5 would follow in late 2028 with a second attempt — provided the missions before it deliver what the earlier architecture tried to do in one shot.
Photo by Pixabay
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