After last month’s near-flawless Artemis II mission sent a crew of four astronauts around the moon and back, NASA’s attention has fully turned toward its next test flight, Artemis III—the last planned step before landing humans on the moon.
This week NASA released new details about the Artemis III mission that help to sketch in some of what the agency is planning for this test flight. But key pieces of information, such as the identities of the mission’s astronauts, remain a mystery.
What We Know about Artemis III So Far
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Artemis III is expected to launch in late 2027. It was originally conceived as a lunar landing mission, but in February NASA announced that the agency had scrapped that idea in favor of a test that will be performed in Earth’s orbit. During that test, NASA’s Orion crew capsule (the spacecraft that housed the Artemis II astronauts on their journey around the moon) will attempt to dock with one or both of the two possible vehicles that the agency wants to use to land astronauts on the moon.
Both vehicles, versions of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander and SpaceX’s Starship, respectively, have never been tested in such a scenario. Still, in its latest Artemis III news release, NASA said the mission’s astronauts could attempt not only to dock with the lander but also to leave the Orion capsule and enter the vehicle. That would enable the agency to simulate the transfer between spacecraft that will be necessary for a human landing.
“For the first time, NASA will coordinate a launch campaign involving multiple spacecraft integrating new capabilities into Artemis operations,” said Jeremy Parsons, acting assistant deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, in a statement. “We’re integrating more partners and interrelated operations into this mission by design, which will help us learn how Orion, the crew, and ground teams all interact together with hardware and teams from both lander providers before we send astronauts to the moon’s surface and build a moon base there.”
The Orion capsule, according to new details, will have an updated heat shield design that NASA says will reduce some of the risk involved in reentering the atmosphere. And the crew will spend longer in this Orion capsule than they did in Artemis II, which lasted around 10 days.
NASA has a rough plan of how the test will go: The Space Launch System rocket will loft an Orion capsule, carrying an undisclosed number of astronauts, into Earth orbit. Once there, the astronauts will attempt to dock the capsule with a lunar lander vehicle and perform a series of other tests designed to assess the agency’s readiness to attempt a human moon landing. This basic outline is similar in scope to Apollo 9, a 1969 mission in which a three-astronaut crew spent 10 days testing the spacecraft’s ability to land on the moon from the comfort of low-Earth orbit.
What we don’t know about Artemis III
There’s a lot NASA has yet to reveal about Artemis III, including the target launch date, the identity of the crew or the duration of the mission. Previously, when Artemis III was conceived as a moon landing test, the mission was expected to last three to four weeks, according to the European Space Agency, but that timeline doesn’t necessarily apply to the new scope.
And NASA has not divulged whether there are other science experiments that the crew might conduct while in space or if the Orion capsule will have other modifications to its insides for them to explore and try out. Another unknown is exactly what orbit the spacecraft will fly in—like Apollo 9, it will be in low-Earth orbit, but that could mean any altitude under 2,000 kilometers or so from Earth’s surface.
It is also unclear whether the two spacecraft that Orion is supposed to dock with will be ready for the test by late 2027—both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar landers have been riddled with delays. So have Axiom Space’s next-gen space suits, which the Artemis III crew are supposed to test in a spacewalk outside their capsule. All three companies have repeatedly insisted they will be ready when the time comes.
NASA says it will provide more details on these and other questions soon, so watch this space.
