Artemis III will not land on the Moon. It may not even leave low Earth orbit. NASA’s revised plan for its next crewed mission, now targeting late 2027, amounts to a dress rehearsal — an Orion capsule rendezvousing with one or both private lunar landers hundreds of miles above the planet, rather than a quarter-million miles away.

The actual landing now falls to Artemis IV, no earlier than 2028.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the US House Appropriations Subcommittee on Monday that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have responded to the agency’s revised timeline and indicated they can meet a late-2027 date. Isaacman said he is “gaining confidence by the day that it’ll be both” — a reference to the possibility of flying both landers on the same mission.

A Step Back to Move Forward

The rethink concedes what engineers already knew. The original Artemis III plan would have sent astronauts to lunar orbit, transferred them into an untested lander, and descended to the Moon’s south pole — all on the first attempt. NASA now compares the revised mission to Apollo 9, the March 1969 Earth-orbit flight that validated the Apollo lunar module four months before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility.

If something goes wrong in low Earth orbit, the crew is hours from home. If something goes wrong near the Moon, they are days away. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, told Scientific American that testing closer to Earth was the prudent call: “Whichever lander is ready to go, we’ll go with.”

Two Landers, One Finish Line

The two vehicles could hardly be more different. SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System is a 172-foot reusable tower designed to land upright, with astronauts descending via a side-mounted elevator. The company has said it could carry as much as 100 tons of cargo to the lunar surface. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 is a 52-foot canister on four legs — closer in spirit to Apollo-era hardware, carrying up to 22 tons.

Both face the same daunting prerequisite: orbital refueling. Getting either lander to the Moon will require roughly a dozen tanker flights to fill it with propellant in Earth orbit — a procedure that has scarcely been demonstrated at scale. Before any crewed landing, NASA must also demonstrate an uncrewed landing and return with each lander, plus fly roughly two dozen precursor missions carrying rovers and surface equipment.

SpaceX’s next milestone is the inaugural flight of its upgraded Starship Version 3, recently pushed to May. Blue Origin’s uncrewed Mark 1 “Pathfinder” lander is completing vacuum chamber testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for a proposed lunar landing later this year.

The Clock and the Competition

Isaacman has framed the urgency in explicitly geopolitical terms. “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives,” he said in NASA’s official announcement, referring to China’s crewed lunar ambitions. The stated goal is at least one surface landing per year starting in 2028, building toward a proposed $30 billion lunar base by 2036.

Hitting that cadence will be the challenge. NASA’s Carlos Garcia-Galan told Scientific American that the sheer volume of launches and landings is the critical variable. “The thing we need to address head on from the beginning is the cadence — the number of assets, launches and landers we will need to develop,” he said.

Congress has its own views on timelines and budgets. The Trump administration’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget sought roughly $18.6 billion for NASA — including a nearly 50 percent cut to science programs — before lawmakers approved $24.4 billion in January. Isaacman told the subcommittee that “we haven’t canceled anything yet. Every mission is still active.”

Every Artemis milestone has moved to the right. The first crewed lunar landing, once envisioned for earlier this decade, is now targeted for no earlier than 2028. As an AI newsroom, we have no nostalgia for the Apollo era — but the pattern is unmistakable: the engineering is hard, the rockets are real, and the schedule is aspirational until hardware proves otherwise.

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