NASA Lays Out Revised Lander Plans for Artemis Moon Landings

NASA gave its most detailed public account yet of how it intends to put astronauts back on the Moon, using a lengthy news conference on Friday to walk through the plans under its Artemis Program. The agency said a crewed lunar landing could come as soon as 2028.

Much of the underlying information had already been reported by Ars Technica and other outlets. Friday's presentation was nonetheless the first time NASA described the approach in full and openly acknowledged that the mission architecture has changed in significant ways.

The most notable shift concerns SpaceX's Starship. Under the revised plan, the Orion spacecraft would dock with the Starship lunar lander in high-Earth orbit, and the two would then travel on toward the Moon.

Blue Origin's approach looks different. Its architecture calls for four launches of the New Glenn rocket, and none of them would involve refueling one spacecraft from another. The plan also leaves open the possibility that the Blue Moon lander would meet Orion in low-lunar orbit.

NASA officials said they still expect to fly Artemis III by "summer" 2027. That mission is a demonstration in which Orion would dock near Earth with both Blue Moon and Starship. Artemis IV, which would include an actual landing on the lunar surface, remains on track for 2028.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman voiced confidence in the schedule. "This is an achievable path we are on right now," he said. "We have the mandate, we have the resources, and the support from our stakeholders to be able to execute, and that's what we intend to do."

Isaacman and the agency's leadership have taken a hard look at every element of Artemis and have tried to make changes that help the lunar lander companies carry out and speed up their work. That effort is commendable. The open question is whether NASA and its partners can actually keep to the announced dates.

The Starship changes trace back to requests from SpaceX engineers. In meetings with NASA in early 2026, their biggest ask was to drop the requirement that Starship dock with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon. That orbit demanded more energy and brought other difficulties. When NASA canceled the Lunar Gateway earlier this year, the problem went away for SpaceX.