NASA spent a long Friday news conference on October 23 explaining how it plans to put astronauts back on the Moon as soon as 2028, and the plan looks quite different from the one it had a year ago. Ars Technica’s Eric Berger reports it’s the first time NASA has laid out the revised architecture in detail and acknowledged some substantial changes.
The headline dates haven’t moved. Artemis III, a crewed rehearsal that docks with both commercial landers near Earth, is still targeted for “summer” 2027. Artemis IV, the actual landing, is still aimed at 2028.
“This is an achievable path we are on right now,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman 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.”
Background: where Artemis stands
NASA has momentum it hasn’t had in years. In April, Artemis II flew Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon and back in nearly 10 days. Their 252,756-mile maximum distance set a record for human spaceflight.
That flight proved the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion capsule could carry a crew. It didn’t touch the hard part: landing. NASA hired two companies for that. SpaceX is adapting Starship as a human landing system, and Blue Origin is building the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander.
Earlier this year, NASA also canceled the Lunar Gateway, the small space station that was meant to orbit the Moon and serve as a meeting point. That cancellation reshaped everything that followed.
Starship: meet in Earth orbit
SpaceX’s biggest ask in early 2026 meetings with NASA, per Ars, was dropping the requirement to dock with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit. That’s the high, looping lunar orbit Gateway was going to use, and reaching it costs energy. With Gateway gone, the requirement went away.
Now SpaceX fuels a Starship lander in low Earth orbit, then docks with Orion in high Earth orbit. The crew rides toward the Moon in Orion, and two of the four astronauts transfer to Starship to land.
The catch: nobody will say how many tanker launches that takes. Starship needs to be refueled in orbit by other Starships before it can head to the Moon. A NASA safety panel put the number at “about 22” on Thursday, Ars reports. Elon Musk said that was wrong and that it’s six to eight. Isaacman called Musk’s figure possible but the “ultimate potential end state” of Starship, and NASA declined to give its own number.
Ars notes the uncertainty is real. It depends on how much Starship can lift, how much supercold methane and liquid oxygen boils off while waiting in orbit, and how efficiently propellant moves from ship to ship. “A lot of uncertainty remains” on all three, Ars says.
Our read: when the safety panel’s estimate is roughly three times the founder’s, the gap itself is a major schedule risk, not a rounding error. Every tanker flight is another launch that has to go right on time.
Blue Moon: no refueling required
Blue Origin has reworked its plan so initial missions need no ship-to-ship refueling. Ars first reported this architecture in March.
New Glenn would launch three “transfer stages,” modeled on the smaller Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, to low Earth orbit. A fourth launch carries the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, which links up with the transfer stages to push the stack to the Moon. Ars says those launches could use an expendable version of the current New Glenn or a larger, reusable future variant.
NASA’s chart showed Orion meeting Blue Moon in an elliptical lunar orbit about 8,500 km up. But NASA is also working on an option to dock in low lunar orbit, a few hundred kilometers up. Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons said that would significantly cut the propellant Blue Moon needs to get crews down and back up. A lower orbit also gives astronauts more and faster chances to leave the surface in an emergency.
Why it matters: four launches with no refueling is a simpler problem than somewhere between six and 22 refueling flights. It gives NASA a hedge if Starship’s tanker campaign drags.
The Orion fix nobody wanted to pay for
The real news is a quiet one. NASA is working with United Launch Alliance (ULA) on an “extended” Centaur V upper stage. Paired with the SLS core stage, it would get Orion into low lunar orbit.
Some context. Orion’s service module, which provides propulsion, has never had the performance to reach low lunar orbit and still get home. Ars calls this “a point of embarrassment” for NASA. The agency built workarounds like Gateway’s halo orbit instead, and pushed the performance burden onto the lander companies, which had to fly farther to meet Orion.
“Getting Orion to low-lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long,” Isaacman said.
That’s an unusually blunt admission from an agency administrator about his own spacecraft. He framed it as helping NASA’s partners: “Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially. We could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they’ll show up and meet our timelines. Or we can say, well let’s start turning those knobs to help.”
The catch: a new upper stage is new hardware, with its own development, testing and cost. NASA didn’t attach a price tag or a date for the extended Centaur in Ars’ account. A fix that removes risk from the landers moves some of it back onto SLS.
Who this affects
- SpaceX: gets the easier Earth-orbit rendezvous it asked for, but still owns the hardest unsolved problem, orbital refueling at scale.
- Blue Origin: its no-refueling plan and a possible low lunar orbit docking make it look like the more conservative path for early missions.
- ULA: gains a new role in Artemis through the extended Centaur V.
- Astronauts: a lower orbit for Orion means a shorter trip to safety from the surface.
- Taxpayers and Congress: the plan’s credibility rests on dates that depend on unproven technology.
The takeaway
The takeaway: NASA is now designing the mission around what its landing partners can actually deliver, rather than waiting for them to meet an awkward architecture. That’s a real change in posture, and the Orion fix is overdue. But the dates are unchanged while the plan underneath them changed a lot.
What to watch:
- Progress on Starship ship-to-ship propellant transfer, and an official NASA tanker count.
- The first Blue Moon Mark 2 flights and New Glenn’s launch cadence.
- Cost and schedule for the extended Centaur V.
- Whether “summer 2027” for Artemis III survives the next 12 months.
Image: NASA / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
