NASA Says Artemis III Mission Is 'Right Around the Corner' After Artemis II Success

On April 10, 2026, the Orion spacecraft Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT, returning astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen from a 10-day journey that took them 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than any humans have ever traveled [1]. It was the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972 [2].

Within days, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman declared the next step was "right around the corner" [3]. But what exactly is around that corner has changed significantly. The agency's first crewed lunar landing, once targeted for late 2024, has now slipped to 2028 at the earliest — and the mission originally designed to achieve it, Artemis III, has been stripped of its landing entirely [4].

The Artemis II Success

The Artemis II mission launched on April 1, 2026, atop an SLS Block 1 rocket from Kennedy Space Center [5]. Over 10 days, the four-person crew performed a lunar flyby, tested Orion's life-support systems with humans aboard for the first time, and verified the spacecraft's communications and navigation capabilities in deep space [2].

The mission's most scrutinized moment came during reentry. Artemis I, the uncrewed test flight in 2022, had revealed unexpected "char loss" on Orion's heat shield as it reentered Earth's atmosphere at roughly 25,000 mph [6]. NASA spent months diagnosing the issue before clearing Artemis II to fly. Mission Control reported a "perfect descent" during the April 10 splashdown, and initial post-flight inspection of the heat shield showed improvement over the Artemis I results [1].

How Much It Costs — and Where the Money Goes

The Artemis program has consumed approximately $93 billion from fiscal year 2012 through 2025, according to estimates from NASA's Office of Inspector General [7]. That figure encompasses SLS development ($31.6 billion), the Orion spacecraft lifecycle through FY2030 ($29.5 billion), Exploration Ground Systems ($7 billion), and the commercially contracted Human Landing Systems — $2.9 billion for SpaceX's Starship HLS and $3.4 billion for Blue Origin's Blue Moon [8][9].

Source: NASA OIG / Payload Research

Data as of Mar 1, 2026CSV

The OIG has calculated that each of the program's first four SLS/Orion flights costs roughly $4.1 billion [7]. By comparison, each Apollo mission cost approximately $3.8 billion in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars using a CPI adjustment, though the total Apollo program ran roughly $250–310 billion in today's dollars depending on the inflation index used [10]. The comparison is imperfect: Apollo flew 17 missions with a much larger workforce, while Artemis has flown two missions in four years with a different industrial base. But the per-flight cost of SLS has drawn persistent criticism from both the Government Accountability Office and independent analysts [11].

The 2025 "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act added $4.1 billion specifically for SLS rockets for Artemis IV and V, with a mandated minimum expenditure of $1.025 billion per year from FY2026 through FY2029 [12]. An additional $2.6 billion was allocated for the Lunar Gateway, the planned orbital outpost being built in cooperation with Canada, Japan, the UAE, and ESA [12]. Total new Artemis-related funding in the bill reached approximately $9.9 billion through 2032 [13].

Five Delays and Counting

Artemis III has been the program's most rescheduled mission. The original target, set during the Trump administration's first term, was a crewed lunar landing by late 2024 [14].

Source: NASA / GAO / Wikipedia

Data as of Apr 1, 2026CSV

In August 2021, NASA's OIG reported that the new Axiom-built spacesuits would not be ready until April 2025 at the earliest, making the 2024 date untenable. In November 2021, Administrator Bill Nelson confirmed a slip to no earlier than 2025 [14]. By June 2023, NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free acknowledged the target was "probably" 2026. In December 2023, the GAO assessed a landing before 2027 as unlikely [6]. NASA officially pushed the date to "no earlier than September 2026" in January 2024, then to mid-2027 in December 2024 [15].

Then came the most significant change. On February 27, 2026, Isaacman announced that Artemis III would no longer attempt a Moon landing at all. Instead, the mission — now targeting mid-2027 — would test one or both commercial landers in low Earth orbit, conducting rendezvous and docking exercises with Orion and evaluating the AxEMU spacesuits [4]. The first crewed landing was reassigned to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028 [4].

"I would certainly much rather have astronauts testing the integrated systems of the lander and Orion in low-Earth orbit than on the Moon," Isaacman said during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center [16].

The Unfinished Lander

The restructuring was driven in part by the status of SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System. As of March 2026, SpaceX had completed 49 HLS-specific development milestones covering power generation, communications, guidance, propulsion, life support, and space environment protection [17].

But a critical demonstration remains incomplete: the ship-to-ship propellant transfer test. The Starship HLS architecture requires multiple orbital refueling flights to fill the lander's tanks before it can reach the lunar surface. NASA originally expected SpaceX to demonstrate this capability by mid-2025, followed by a design certification review in summer 2025 [17]. Neither had occurred as of March 2026, according to a NASA OIG report published that month [9].

A separate NASA OIG audit in March 2026 flagged broader concerns about the agency's management of both HLS contracts, noting schedule risks and the interdependencies between SpaceX's Starship flight-test campaign and the Artemis landing timeline [9]. Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, while progressing on a parallel track, faces its own certification milestones before crewed operations can be approved.

NASA cancelled the planned SLS Block 1B and Block 2 upgrades in February 2026, standardizing on the Block 1 configuration to "reduce risk and maintain schedule stability" [18].

The Case Against SLS

The debate over the Space Launch System's long-term viability has moved from the margins to the center of space policy. The Trump administration's FY2026 budget proposal cited a per-launch cost of $4 billion for SLS and projected $879 million in annual savings from transitioning to commercial alternatives [19].

Senior NASA officials have privately acknowledged the program is "unaffordable" at current cost levels, yet the agency has no formal cost baseline against which to measure production efficiency — making systematic cost reduction difficult to mandate or monitor [7]. The SLS is expendable: each rocket is used once and destroyed. SpaceX's Falcon 9, by contrast, averages roughly $67 million per launch with first-stage reuse, translating to approximately $1,400 per kilogram to low Earth orbit [19].

Defenders of SLS point to its unique heavy-lift capability — 95 metric tons to low Earth orbit in its current configuration — and the fact that no commercial alternative has been human-rated for deep-space missions. The Starship system, while promising far lower costs if fully reusable, has yet to complete an orbital flight with payload delivery, let alone the crewed operations NASA would need [18].

Congress has consistently protected SLS funding. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" mandated minimum annual spending on the rocket through FY2029, a provision critics describe as a jobs program masquerading as exploration policy [20]. Eric Berger, writing in City Journal, argued that Congress "crushed hopes for NASA reform" by locking in SLS procurement regardless of commercial progress [20].

Contractors, Districts, and Political Gravity

The SLS supply chain spans key congressional districts. Boeing builds the rocket's core stage. L3Harris, based in Melbourne, Florida, produces the RS-25 engines. Northrop Grumman manufactures the twin solid rocket boosters [12]. Kennedy Space Center's Exploration Ground Systems program employs approximately 700 civil servants and 3,850 contractors [21].

Senator Ted Cruz's amendments to protect SLS funding have been repeatedly invoked during budget negotiations, alongside advocacy from Alabama's congressional delegation, which represents the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville — SLS's management hub [21]. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance has argued that Artemis spending decisions have been "shaped more by political geography than engineering merit" [22].

NASA's supporters counter that spreading the industrial base across multiple states provides redundancy and ensures broad political support for a program that spans presidential administrations. The Planetary Society has noted that without congressional buy-in, Artemis would be vulnerable to the same cancellation cycle that killed the Constellation program in 2010 [23].

Physiological Risks Beyond Low Earth Orbit

A lunar surface mission would introduce hazards that Artemis II's flyby did not test. Beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, astronauts face three overlapping radiation sources: trapped particles, solar particle events, and galactic cosmic rays [24]. NASA's dose limit for an astronaut's eye lens — one of the most radiation-sensitive organs — is 100 centigrays for a 30-day mission. During a severe solar storm comparable to the 1989 event, unshielded exposure could reach 1,000 centigrays or more [24].

At the lunar south pole, researchers have mapped the shielding potential of crater walls, mountain ranges, and permanently shadowed regions to guide landing site selection [25]. But the permanently shadowed regions that are scientifically valuable — because they may contain water ice — are also the most operationally challenging. Temperatures in these areas drop below -230°C, posing risks to suit mobility, electronics, and battery performance.

Lunar dust compounds the problem. The regolith at the Moon's surface is electrostatically charged, abrasive, and fine-grained. It infiltrates equipment and spacesuits, degrades solar panels, causes thermal radiator overheating, and poses inhalation hazards if brought inside a habitat or capsule [26]. NASA's understanding of the dust and plasma environment at the south pole remains incomplete — one reason the agency has commissioned instruments aboard the robotic VIPER and upcoming Chang'e 7 precursor missions to characterize conditions before sending crews [26].

NASA has not publicly disclosed a specific mortality or injury probability threshold accepted by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel for Artemis surface operations, though the agency applies its standard "loss of crew" probability framework used across human spaceflight programs.

The China Factor

China's lunar program operates on a different model. The China National Space Administration, working with the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, plans to land two astronauts on the Moon by 2030 using the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft and the Lanyue lander [27]. Chang'e 7, an uncrewed south pole exploration mission, is expected to launch in 2026 [27].

CNSA does not publish detailed cost figures for its crewed lunar program, making direct comparisons to Artemis difficult. Analysts estimate that China's lower labor costs, centralized decision-making, and lack of exposure to U.S. political cycles give it structural cost advantages [28]. China's lunar roadmap has remained essentially unchanged since the early 2000s, and its missions have largely launched on schedule — a track record NASA has not matched with Artemis [28].

The U.S. intelligence community and Pentagon officials have testified to Congress that China's 2030 target is credible, though not guaranteed [29]. If Artemis IV lands in early 2028 as planned, NASA would achieve its landing roughly two years ahead of China. But further Artemis delays could narrow or close that gap — a prospect that has been invoked repeatedly in congressional hearings as justification for continued SLS funding [29].

The Artemis Accords and What Comes After a Landing

As of January 2026, 61 countries have signed the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding multilateral agreements elaborating on norms for the civil exploration and peaceful use of the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies [30]. Signatories span 28 European, 15 Asian, seven South American, five North American, four African, and two Oceanian nations [30].

The two most significant non-signatories are Russia and China. Russia has condemned the Accords as "a blatant attempt to create international space law that favors the United States" [31]. China's absence is partly structural: a U.S. congressional prohibition (the Wolf Amendment) bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China without explicit congressional approval [31].

The Accords affirm principles including transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, and the registration of space objects, but they do not constitute legally binding treaties [30]. NASA's own planning documents envision a sustained lunar presence through the Artemis Base Camp concept, which would include a surface habitat, a pressurized rover, and the Gateway in lunar orbit. However, no legally binding commitment to a permanent base exists — funding remains subject to annual congressional appropriation [12].

The Gateway is the program's most concrete international commitment. Canada is contributing the Canadarm3 robotic system, ESA is providing habitation and refueling modules, and Japan is supplying life-support equipment. These partnerships create mutual obligations that make the program harder to cancel but do not guarantee a permanent human presence on the Moon [12].

What "Right Around the Corner" Actually Means

NASA's post-Artemis II messaging has been optimistic. Isaacman called the mission "the opening act" for America's return to the Moon [3]. But the program's history suggests caution about timelines. Artemis III, now an Earth-orbit test, is targeting mid-2027. The first landing, Artemis IV, is targeted for early 2028. Both dates depend on milestones — orbital refueling demonstrations, lander certification reviews, suit qualification — that have not yet been met [9][17].

The program has spent $93 billion and counting, flown two missions, and has yet to put boots on the lunar surface. Its supporters argue that Artemis II validated the core SLS/Orion architecture and that the restructured approach — testing landers in Earth orbit before committing to a landing — is prudent engineering. Its critics see a program captured by congressional politics and legacy contractors, spending orders of magnitude more per flight than commercial alternatives to achieve less.

Both perspectives contain elements of truth. The question is whether Artemis can deliver a lunar landing before the political and fiscal patience required to sustain a $4-billion-per-flight program runs out — or before China gets there first.