The Artemis mission—named after the Greek goddess of the Moon and hunting—began with the development of the Orion spacecraft in the early 2000s, originally intended to carry a lunar landing by 2020 as part of the Constellation program. After President Barack Obama canceled that program in 2010, Orion survived in modified form under a new framework, and the first Trump administration set a new target date of 2024 for a lunar landing. Under the Biden administration, the target date slipped repeatedly—from 2025 to 2026 to “no earlier than 2027”—without ever settling on a firm commitment.
And even this was unlikely. “The old timeline was fantasy, no one really believed it,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer, astrophysicist, and historian of spaceflight, told TMD. NASA has earned a reputation for schedule slippage and cost overruns. Also, the original plan called for proceeding directly from Artemis II to a lunar landing without ever test-flying the lander. “The idea to go straight from Artemis II to a landing was overambitious,” McDowell said.
But that changed when NASA got a new administrator: Jared Isaacman. Confirmed by the Senate in December 2025, Isaacman is a billionaire who founded a payments company at 16 and has flown to space twice. He commanded the first all-civilian orbital mission aboard a SpaceX rocket in 2021—during which he placed the first known sports bet from space—and led a second mission in 2024.
Bruce McClintock, the lead of the RAND Corporation’s Space Enterprise Initiative, told TMD that Isaacman’s approach was “more prudent than trying to take these giant steps” in a single mission.
Isaacman added a new mission—now called Artemis III—between Artemis II and the lunar landing, now pushed to Artemis IV. Scheduled for next year, Artemis III will let astronauts dock with Moon landers in low Earth orbit—from 99 to 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface—and test navigation and life support systems.
And now, NASA aims to launch Artemis IV in early 2028, finally (hopefully) bringing Americans back to the Moon.
Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD that the move was a calculated bet. Artemis II, he said, used one of NASA’s two remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stages (ICPS), a critical component of Artemis’ Space Launch System (SLS). There’s one ICPS left, but two more missions in the next two years. For Artemis IV, NASA will now have to rely on an as-yet-unbuilt launch stage. “It needs to essentially be rebuilt from the ground up to work with SLS, and to work with the Orion spacecraft on top of it,” Swope said.
The extra mission lets NASA reduce the safety risks of landing on the moon with an untested lander. But for the agency to conduct those tests before Artemis IV, it needs a completed lander, which it doesn’t have. Currently, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are racing to finish a viable lander by the deadline. Isaacman has a business relationship with Musk—he has flown to space twice aboard SpaceX rockets, and his payments company has invested tens of millions in Musk’s firm—but that doesn’t mean SpaceX will be the one to deliver it.
NASA’s inspector general warned in a March 10 report that Starship, SpaceX’s lander, is significantly behind schedule and may miss the 2027 target. Meanwhile, Blue Origin recently announced it was accelerating development of Blue Moon Mark 2 to meet Artemis’ new schedule. If neither company succeeds, Artemis III will have no lunar lander to test, the new mission’s entire reason for being.
“It doesn’t matter if [Artemis is] going to the moon or low-Earth orbit if SpaceX and Blue Origin don’t have that lander,” Swope said.
But, if everything goes according to plan—a big “if”—U.S. astronauts will be back on the Moon by the end of the decade. NASA’s goal is a permanent lunar presence, to “build out the moon base and actually go there to stay,” as Isaacman put it in a February interview with Ross Douthat. Both the flights and the eventual lunar base will conduct research, but that’s not their primary purpose, McDowell said.
“If you want to do science, most of the time it’s probably better to send robots,” he told TMD. “If you want a Star Trek future in which people are living on different planets, then you have to send humans.”
That future will require a much greater role for private companies, George Nield, the chairman of the Global Spaceport Alliance and a former Federal Aviation Administration commercial spaceflight official, told TMD. History’s most famous space efforts—the Mercury program that first brought Americans into space, the Apollo missions that brought them to the Moon, and the International Space Station—were “all programs that were planned, developed, and carried out by the government,” he said. “Going forward, that’s not going to be sustainable, in terms of cost, to do more than a flags-and-footprints type of effort.”
Moon bases and Mars exploration are currently the stuff of Andy Weir novels, but “all these things are technologically possible,” Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told TMD. But “they’re all hugely expensive,” Boyd added.
Advocates of a long-term lunar presence hope the privatization of low Earth orbit can serve as a model. “We hand things off to industry, where there’s clearly demand outside of a single agency like NASA, and let a market develop,” Isaacman told Douthat.
There are early signs that such a market is viable. SpaceX—before its merger with Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI and the social media company X—generated roughly $15.5 billion in revenue in 2025, the vast majority of it from Starlink, its satellite internet constellation, rather than from government contracts. Further out, entrepreneurs and investors are eyeing orbital data centers, which would process information in space, away from strained electric grids or permitting boards. Others dream of mining for raw materials on the Moon or asteroids.
NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2030 and replace it with privately owned stations built by companies like Axiom Space and Blue Origin. Rather than operating its own flights, NASA plans to buy seats and cargo runs to those stations from companies like SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, which already handle almost all American flights to and from the ISS. “That’s absolutely appropriate,” McDowell said. “NASA’s job is the frontier, and low Earth orbit is no longer the frontier.”
Swope compared NASA’s mission beyond the Moon to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. “It was looking to a vision where now we have these very important cities of the United States on the West Coast that no one really envisioned at the time,” he said. “If anyone thinks that humans will be living in another place, not Earth, at some point—be that 20 years, 50 years, 150 years—you’ve got to start somewhere.”
Lewis and Clark were exploring North American territory, aiming to secure U.S. interests before Spain and Britain could stake their own. Artemis is also racing foreign rivals. China’s state space agency plans to land humans on the Moon by 2030 and, from there, build a lunar base that Russian cosmonauts could jointly crew.
But focusing only on the first to arrive misses the bigger picture and the true scale of NASA’s ambition, Nield said. “Rather than who’s first, it’s which country will choose to commit to a longer-term presence there and, by default, basically set the standards of how humanity will do exploration on the Moon and Mars and beyond,” he told TMD.
The Artemis II crew members weren’t thinking about geopolitics or off-world dreams when they spoke to reporters on Wednesday.
“I haven’t even begun to process what we’ve been through,” Glover said. “We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”