Artemis III gets a change of plans

According to a report from Ars Technica, NASA are planning to change their plans for the third mission in the Artemis program significantly.

Under the rework, NASA plans to make Artemis III a mission similar to Apollo 9: An SLS rocket will carry Orion into LEO, where the capsule will dock to a Starship HLS lander and perform habitability checks for Starship. This mission is quite the downgrade from the original, planned profile for Artemis III, which called for it to be the first moon landing of the Artemis missions that would launch in September 2026.

Apollo 9 was a flight flown to qualify the operations of the Apollo LM in LEO before sending it all the way to the Moon on Apollo 10.

While the delay in the crewed moon landing is definitely disappointing, this change makes sense: HLS is an unproven system, and much like Apollo, it would do great to completely test out the capabilities of HLS. In fact, if Artemis III proves that HLS works perfectly fine, the lander used on Artemis III can also be used on the demo HLS landing mission due to Starship HLS's reusable nature.

This means that the first Lunar landing has now been pushed back to Artemis IV, currently scheduled to launch no later than September 2028.