CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, July 20 — The next human footsteps on the Moon are scheduled for a launch window opening no earlier than September 2026, under the current NASA timeline for Artemis III. That mission, the first crewed lunar landing of the Artemis program, will send four astronauts aboard the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B. After roughly two weeks in lunar orbit, two of those crew members will transfer to SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System for the descent to the surface.
The landing site: near the Moon’s south pole, a region selected for its potential water ice deposits. The record shows this will be the first time humans have set foot on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.
That gap of more than five decades frames the scale of what NASA is attempting.
The hardware stack
The SLS Block 1 rocket stands 322 feet tall and generates 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule can carry a crew of four for up to 21 days uncrewed or 18 days crewed. Starship HLS, the landing vehicle under development by SpaceX, is a modified version of the Starship spacecraft — and unlike the other vehicles in this mission, it requires multiple refueling launches in Earth orbit before it can proceed to the Moon.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the total estimated cost for the Artemis program through fiscal year 2025 is approximately $93 billion.
A leap in complexity
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pointed to the mission’s unusual difficulty. The number of separate vehicles involved, along with the requirement for orbital rendezvous and docking without the support of an existing lunar space station, makes this a significant technical and logistical leap compared to any previous human Moon mission. Artemis III will also mark the first use of a commercial human landing system for a crewed lunar descent, along with the first deployment of the new Lunar Surface Extravehicular Activity suits developed by Axiom Space for surface work.
The mission fits within the broader Artemis framework, which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon by the end of the 2020s and to prepare for eventual crewed missions to Mars.
What comes first
Before Artemis III can fly, Artemis II must test the Orion spacecraft and its life support systems with a crew of four on a lunar flyby. That mission, which under NASA’s 2024 schedule update was planned for April 2026, represents the program’s first crewed flight of the Orion vehicle.
Artemis III, if it proceeds on its current timeline, would represent not just a return to the lunar surface but a fundamentally different approach to getting there — relying on multiple commercial vehicles, orbital refueling, and a landing architecture that did not exist when the Apollo program ended.
