NASA’s Artemis 3 mission will no longer land astronauts on the moon — and it may not involve SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, either.
On Friday (February 27), the space agency announced that it is renewal of the architecture of his The Artemis program of lunar exploration. One of the biggest changes involves Artemis 3, which was originally supposed to land astronauts on the moon using Spaceship‘s top step.
NASA’s new plan is launched Artemis 3 in 2027, but keeps it in low Earth orbit. The mission will aim to demonstrate a range of technologies and capabilities there, including a rendezvous and docking procedure between Orion crew capsule and “one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin,” agency officials said in a statement Friday.
Blue originwhich was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezosis developing a manned lander called Blue Moon. That vehicle was to carry NASA astronauts for the first time on Artemis 5, a lunar landing mission previously targeted for 2030.
But NASA has considered pushing Blue moon in use faster than that. Last October, for example, then-Acting Administrator Sean Duffy announced that he planned to do so open the Artemis 3 landing contract to competition, explaining that he was not happy with the pace of Starship’s development. (Starship has flown 11 test flights to date, and the last two were fully successful. However, the vehicle has not yet reached Earth’s orbit.)
Blue Origin was the only realistic competitor for that moon landing job. And it appears the company is still in the running for the mission in its revised form, given the wording of Friday’s announcement.
“Otherwise they could have simply said in this statement today that they’re going to dock Orion with the Starship lunar lander and do their tests,” Don Platt, head of the Department of Astronautics, Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, told Space.com on Friday. “But they didn’t. They didn’t say that.”
The pace of development is not the only factor in this decision, according to Platt, who also directs the university’s Spaceport Education Center.
“NASA also doesn’t want to have to rely on just one contractor,” he said. “I think that’s why they’re really pushing this competition between Blue Origin and SpaceX.”
Blue Origin seems to be leaning into the competition. In late January, the company announced it was ending its suborbital space tourism flights for at least two years “to further accelerate the development of the company’s human lunar capability.”
“The decision reflects Blue Origin’s commitment to the nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, persistent lunar presence,” the company said in a statement at the time.
The revised Artemis architecture now envisages the first manned lunar landing since Apollo era to take place on Artemis 4 in 2028, with a possible second touchdown in the same year, on Artemis 5.
The new plans are part of a wider shift, which prioritizes a step-by-step approach and an increased launch cadence. (It’s been more than three years since the first—and so far only—Artemis mission ended; NASA is preparing to launch Artemis 2 manned mission around the moon in a month or so.)
For example, NASA officials said on Friday that they want to continue flying Artemis’ Space Launch System rocket in a configuration as close to the current “Block I” as possible. Previously, Artemis 4 had been intended to use the “Block IB” variant, which would have featured a new, more capable upper stage.
The ultimate goal of Artemis is to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around the Moon within the next five to 10 years. NASA also wants to land the first Artemis astronauts before China puts boots on the moonwhich the nation aims to do by 2030.
“With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing every day, we must move faster, eliminate delays and achieve our goals,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in Friday’s statement.
“Standardizing vehicle configuration, increasing airspeed, and progressing through objectives in a logical, step-by-step approach is how we achieved the near-impossible in 1969and that’s how we want to do it again,” he added.
