NASA has published the flight plan for Artemis III, a crewed mission in 2027 in which Orion will dock in low Earth orbit with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander and SpaceX’s Starship. It needs three launches from Florida and is meant to retire risks before the first crewed landing on the Moon since 1972, now planned for Artemis IV in 2028. The schedule is already under pressure.
When NASA restructured its Moon programme this year, Artemis III changed from the first crewed lunar landing into a rehearsal close to home. At a briefing at Kennedy Space Center on Friday 23 October, the agency explained how that rehearsal will work. It is, in the words of programme manager Jeremy Parsons, “the most complicated launch campaign ever undertaken”.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Parsons described a mission that sends four astronauts into low Earth orbit in 2027 to test the systems needed for future landings. The crew are NASA’s Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio and the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano, who were named earlier this year.
Three launches, two dockings
According to Space.com’s account of the briefing, the mission requires three rockets, all launching from Florida’s Space Coast:
- Blue Origin’s New Glenn goes first, carrying the Blue Moon lunar lander to low Earth orbit;
- NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) follows, carrying the crew in Orion;
- SpaceX’s Starship launches later, around Flight Day 6, with a docking adapter on its nose.
SLS will place Orion in a highly elliptical orbit of about 29 by 1,806 km, after which Orion manoeuvres to about 555 km. The crew spend the first two days checking out the spacecraft. NASA says the higher orbit helps with thermal management: Orion was designed for deep space, and conditions in low Earth orbit are hotter.
On Flight Day 3, Orion docks with Blue Moon at about 439 km. The crew will enter the lander and test its environmental controls, life support, cabin pressure, emergency procedures and the control of two docked vehicles. On Flight Day 8, Orion meets Starship at about 381 km for roughly two hours. The crew will not enter Starship; the aim is to measure docking loads and how the two vehicles behave together.
The mission then continues for six to nine more days before Orion splashes down under parachutes. Nominally it lasts 14 days, and up to 17. The crew will also test survival suits that were not evaluated during the ten-day Artemis II flight around the Moon in April, and carry out health assessments, experiments and technology demonstrations.
Why rehearse in Earth orbit?
A crewed lunar landing depends on a chain of operations that have never been performed together: rendezvous and docking between Orion and a commercial lander, crew transfer, life support in the lander, and coordinated control by several mission-control teams. Testing these near Earth means a failure can be met with a return within hours rather than days. It is the same logic that led Apollo 9 to test the lunar module in Earth orbit in 1969.
Testing both landers on one mission also preserves competition. NASA has not decided whether Blue Moon or Starship will carry astronauts to the surface first. “We have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so,” Isaacman said.
The architectures differ. In Blue Origin’s approach, Orion would meet Blue Moon in lunar orbit. For SpaceX, Starship would probably dock with Orion in Earth orbit and propel it towards the Moon, according to Space.com.
The Starship encounter is deliberately limited. Docking two large spacecraft produces forces that engineers can model but need to measure: the contact loads at the docking ring, how each vehicle’s attitude-control system reacts to the other’s mass, and how the combined stack behaves. Two hours of data in Earth orbit, with the crew remaining in Orion, offers that information at much lower risk than discovering it in lunar orbit.
Europe’s stake
Artemis III is not purely American. Orion is powered by the European Service Module, built for ESA by European industry, which provides propulsion, electricity, water and air. Parmitano’s place in the crew reflects that contribution, and makes Artemis III a test of international crew operations as well as of hardware.
The schedule
NASA is targeting the summer of 2027 for Artemis III. That will be difficult. An internal memo from Isaacman last month reportedly put the mission about 90 days behind schedule, and Parsons said supply-chain problems with the landers are among the biggest challenges. Both men said they were confident the problems could be resolved.
Artemis IV is planned to land astronauts near the lunar south pole in 2028, which would be the first crewed landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The south pole is the target because permanently shadowed craters there may hold water ice, a potential resource for drinking water, oxygen and rocket propellant.
Uncertainties
- Commercial readiness. Both landers are still in development, and Starship’s in-orbit refuelling, needed for lunar missions, has yet to be fully demonstrated.
- Cost and politics. NASA’s budget and priorities remain subject to Congress.
- Competition. China aims to land astronauts on the Moon before 2030, which shapes the urgency of NASA’s timetable.
What it means for India
India signed the Artemis Accords, the US-led principles for civil space exploration, in 2023. ISRO is pursuing parallel capabilities: its SpaDeX mission demonstrated autonomous docking in orbit, a technology central to both Chandrayaan-4’s planned sample return and the proposed Bharatiya Antariksh Station. Gaganyaan, India’s crewed spaceflight programme, is working towards its first uncrewed test flight. Artemis III’s results on crew transfer between docked vehicles and on lander life support will be watched closely by every agency planning human missions beyond low Earth orbit, ISRO among them.
