New Artemis Plan Returns To Apollo Playbook

March 4, 2026 by Tom Nardi 50 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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Artemis’ Next Giant Leap: Orbital Refueling

December 7, 2023 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

By the end of the decade, NASA’s Artemis program hopes to have placed boots back on the Moon for the first time since 1972. But not for the quick sightseeing jaunts of the Apollo era — the space agency wants to send regular missions made up of international crews down to the lunar surface, where they’ll eventually have permanent living and working facilities.

The goal is to turn the Moon into a scientific outpost, and that requires a payload delivery infrastructure far more capable than the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). NASA asked their commercial partners to design crewed lunar landers that could deliver tens of tons of to the lunar surface, with SpaceX and Blue Origin ultimately being awarded contracts to build and demonstrate their vehicles over the next several years.

Starship and Blue Moon, note scale of astronauts

At a glance, the two landers would appear to have very little in common. The SpaceX Starship is a sleek, towering rocket that looks like something from a 1950s science fiction film; while the Blue Moon lander utilizes a more conventional design that’s reminiscent of a modernized Apollo LM. The dichotomy is intentional. NASA believes there’s a built-in level of operational redundancy provided by the companies using two very different approaches to solve the same goal. Should one of the landers be delayed or found deficient in some way, the other company’s parallel work would be unaffected.

But despite their differences, both landers do utilize one common technology, and it’s a pretty big one. So big, in fact, that neither lander will be able to touch the Moon until it can be perfected. What’s worse is that, to date, it’s an almost entirely unproven technology that’s never been demonstrated at anywhere near the scale required.

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