CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA remains on track to launch Artemis III next summer and land astronauts on the moon in 2028, Administrator Jared Isaacman said Friday, the Associated Press reported.
Artemis III will be a two-week, four-person mission in Earth orbit to practice docking with the lunar landers being built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. It will not travel to the moon.
Artemis IV, scheduled for 2028, would be the first crewed moon landing since Apollo. NASA plans to keep both landers in contention as long as possible before choosing one for that mission.
Isaacman said the competition with China will be “much closer than it ever needed to be” because of slow progress in past years, and that the agency is cutting bureaucracy and adding workers to move faster.
The update came six months after Artemis II carried four astronauts around the moon.
Sources: Associated Press via KTAR News, CBS News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
