artemis program

16 Articles

NASA Announces Artemis III Crew And Ambitious Goals

June 10, 2026 by 46 Comments

When the Artemis lunar program was first conceived, the third mission would have seen astronauts step foot on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But as hard as getting into space is, a sojourn to our nearest celestial neighbor is even more mindbogglingly complex, and so earlier this year it was announced that actually landing on the Moon would be pushed out to the fourth mission.

In turn Artemis III would take a page out of the Apollo 9 playbook and test out rendezvous and docking procedures with commercial landers while operating in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Moving the target date for the landing a few years down the road gave all involved parties a little more breathing room, but it also provided a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the performance of the vehicles and systems ahead of the critical moment. In the original timeline, the first time Orion would attempt to dock with the lander would have been just before descending to the lunar surface — leaving precious little time to troubleshoot should anything go wrong.

Yesterday NASA held a press conference to update the public on their progress towards the planned 2027 launch of Artemis III, which included the long-awaited announcement of the crew that will kick the tires on the next-generation lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin

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Artemis II Agenda Keeps Moon-Bound Crew Busy

March 19, 2026 by 34 Comments

With the launch of Artemis II from Cape Canaveral potentially just weeks away, NASA has been releasing a steady stream of information about the mission through their official site and social media channels to get the public excited about the agency’s long-awaited return to the Moon. While the slickly produced videos and artist renderings might get the most attention, even the most mundane details about a flight that will put humans on the far side of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time since 1972 can be fascinating.

The Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda is a perfect example. Released earlier this week via the NASA blog, the document seems to have been all but ignored by the mainstream media. But the day-by-day breakdown of the Artemis II mission contains several interesting entries about what the four crew members will be working on during the ten day flight.

Of course, the exact details of the agenda are subject to change once the mission is underway. Some tasks could run longer than anticipated, experiments may not go as planned, and there’s no way to predict technical issues that may arise.

Conversely, the crew could end up breezing through some of the planned activities, freeing up time in the schedule. There’s simply no way of telling until it’s actually happening.

With the understanding that it’s all somewhat tentative, a look through the plan as it stands right now can give us an idea of the sort of highlights we can expect as we follow this historic mission down here on Earth.

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New Artemis Plan Returns To Apollo Playbook

March 4, 2026 by 54 Comments

In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028.

It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in a spidery lander that could only hold two crew members and a few hundred kilograms of gear like in the 60s. This time, NASA wants to return to the lunar surface with hardware capable of setting up a sustained human presence. That means a new breed of lander that dwarfs anything the agency, or humanity for that matter, has ever tried to place on another celestial body.

Unsurprisingly, developing such vehicles and making sure they’re safe for crewed missions takes time and requires extensive testing. The simple fact is that the landers, being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, won’t be ready in time to support the original Artemis III landing in 2028. Additionally, development of the new lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by Axiom Space has fallen behind schedule. So even if one of the landers would have been ready to fly in 2028, the crew wouldn’t have the suits they need to actually leave the vehicle and work on the surface.

But while the Artemis spacecraft and EVA suits might be state of the art, NASA’s revised timeline for the program is taking a clear step back in time, hewing closer to the phased approach used during Apollo. This not only provides their various commercial partners with more time to work on their respective contributions, but critically, provides an opportunity to test them in space before committing to a crewed landing.

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Hackaday Links: February 22, 2026

February 22, 2026 by 5 Comments

We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th, a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair.

The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close to launch, but sending humans into space isn’t the sort of thing you can cut corners on.

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NASA Seeks Volunteers To Track Artemis II Mission

September 1, 2025 by 27 Comments

As NASA’s Artemis program trundles onwards at the blazing pace of a disused and very rusty crawler-transporter, the next mission on the list is gradually coming into focus. This will be the first crewed mission — a flyby of the Moon following in the footsteps of 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. As part of this effort, NASA is looking for volunteers who will passively track the Orion capsule and its crew of four as it makes its way around the Moon during its 10-day mission before returning to Earth. Details can be found here.

This follows on a similar initiative during the Artemis I mission, when participants passively tracked the radio signals from the capsule. For this upcoming mission NASA is looking for Doppler shift measurements on the Orion S-band (2200-2290 MHz) return link carrier signals, with the objective being to achieve and maintain a carrier lock.

Currently penciled in for a highly tentative April 2026, the Artemis II mission would fly on the same SLS Block 1 rocket configuration that launched the first mission, targeting a multi-trans-lunar injection (MTLI) profile to get to the Moon using a free return trajectory. The crew will check out the new life support system prior to starting the MTLI burns.

Because Artemis II will be on a free return trajectory it will not be orbiting the Moon, unlike Apollo 8’s crew who made ten lunar orbits. Incidentally, Apollo 8’s crew included James Lovell, who’d go on to fly the world-famous Apollo 13 mission. Hopefully the Artemis astronauts will be spared that level of in-space excitement.

2023: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2024 by 18 Comments

We’ve made it through another trip around the sun, and for the first time in what feels like far too long, it seems like things went pretty well for the hackers and makers of the world. Like so many, our community suffered through a rough couple of years: from the part shortages that made building even the simplest of devices more expensive and difficult than it should have been, to the COVID-mandated social distancing that robbed us of our favorite meetups. But when looking back on the last twelve months, most of the news was refreshingly positive.

Pepperoni costs ten bucks, but they can’t activate Windows on their registers…

Oh sure, a trip to to the grocery store can lead to a minor existential crisis at the register, but there’s not much we at Hackaday can do about that other than recommend you some good hydroponics projects to help get your own home farm up and running.

As has become our New Year tradition, we like to take this time to go over some of the biggest stories and trends that we picked up on from our unique vantage point. Some will be obvious, but there’s always a few that sneak up on us. These posts tend to make for interesting reading in the future, and if you’ve got the time, we’d recommend going back and reading the previous entries in this series and reminiscing a bit.

It’s also a good time to reflect on Hackaday itself — how we’ve grown, the things that have changed, and perhaps what we can do better going forward. Believe it or not we do read all of the feedback from the community, whether it’s in the comments of individual posts or sent into us directly. We couldn’t do this without readers like you, so please drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking.

So before we get any farther into 2024, let’s wind back the clock and revisit some of the highlights from the previous year.

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