NASA borrows Apollo's urgency for a Moon base and a 2028 landing, Isaacman says

NASA is going back to the way it worked in the Apollo years to put astronauts on the Moon within about two years and start building a base near the lunar south pole, Administrator Jared Isaacman said.

Speaking at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, Isaacman said the agency was copying the pace of 1968 to 1972, when 24 astronauts flew to the Moon and 12 walked on it. That approach, he said, was not “tech industry pixie dust or some new management philosophy”. He warned that the new space race with China would be “much closer than it ever needed to be” because of slow progress in past years.

A rehearsal close to home

The plan reshapes the next two Artemis flights. Artemis III, due next summer, will no longer head for the Moon. Instead, four astronauts will spend about two weeks in Earth orbit, a stay that could stretch to 17 days if weather delays the launch. NASA’s Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas will fly with the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano of Italy.

Their Orion capsule will rendezvous and dock with test versions of the two commercial landers, from SpaceX and Blue Origin, in separate orbits about 435 km up. That needs three launches in quick succession from Cape Canaveral, with Blue Origin’s lander going up first and the Space Launch System following. The rocket’s boosters were stacked on 30 September, and the core stage is due to join them for a fuelling test at Launch Pad 39B by the end of the year.

“It is incredibly ambitious,” Rubio said. Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, was more cheerful still. “As a rocket nerd, it’s going to be pretty awesome,” he said.

The landing in 2028

The first crewed landing since Apollo now falls to Artemis IV in 2028. Each lander would carry two astronauts down while two stay aboard Orion, and the crew would make two moonwalks of about two hours each. SpaceX plans to fill a fuel depot Starship in low Earth orbit with a string of tanker flights, while Blue Origin will use three transfer stages to send its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into an elliptical polar orbit. Each company must first fly an uncrewed demonstration.

NASA has not picked which lander will make the landing and will keep both in play for as long as it can. “We have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so,” Isaacman said.

Building the base

More landers, rovers and orbiters will fly to the south polar region before Artemis crews arrive, and NASA expects the first launch for the base by the end of this year. A Pittsburgh-based company whose first lunar landing attempt failed in 2024 is preparing a second try, aiming for the same region with a rover and experiments.

The first moonwalkers will wear lighter “sortie suits”, which Axiom Space is due to test on the International Space Station next year.

The new timetable comes about six months after Artemis II carried four astronauts around the Moon and back.