Next Artemis mission will be later than promised
It appears that NASA has already recognized that the next Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-3 and changed from a lunar landing to an Earth orbit test flight, will not happen on the schedule as first proposed by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.
During the hearing on Monday, Congressman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman emeritus of the committee, asked Isaacman about his confidence that Artemis 3 would remain on schedule, given the amount of money allocated for the mission’s landers.
“I’ve received responses from both vendors [SpaceX and Blue Origin],” Isaacman said, “to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous, docking and test [of] the interoperability of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028.”
That’s a shift from Isaacman’s statements during his Feb. 27 Artemis strategy presentation, during which he said, “Artemis 3 will have its opportunity, if we can, by mid-2027, which sets us up for an early ’28 and a late ’28 opportunity [for Artemis 4 and 5].” [emphasis mine]
In other words, Artemis-3 has already shifted from mid-’27 to late-’27. Though Isaacman is pushing hard to speed up the launch cadence of the entire Artemis program, reality is once again proving stronger. We should fully expect Artemis-3 to shift into 2028, partly because the lunar landers — especially Blue Origin’s Blue Moon — might not be ready but mostly because SLS is simply too cumbersome a rocket to stack quickly. Isaacman wants to speed up its launch cadence to once a year. The best we should expect is 18 months to two years.
As for getting two manned lunar landings in 2028, Isaacman might want it but the odds are slim to none. If Artemis-3 flies in late ’27 it will be almost impossible to get SLS ready for a landing mission before the end of ’28.
In the end, these delays will illustrate the need to replace SLS with private commercial launchers.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
It appears that NASA has already recognized that the next Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-3 and changed from a lunar landing to an Earth orbit test flight, will not happen on the schedule as first proposed by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.
During the hearing on Monday, Congressman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman emeritus of the committee, asked Isaacman about his confidence that Artemis 3 would remain on schedule, given the amount of money allocated for the mission’s landers.
“I’ve received responses from both vendors [SpaceX and Blue Origin],” Isaacman said, “to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous, docking and test [of] the interoperability of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028.”
That’s a shift from Isaacman’s statements during his Feb. 27 Artemis strategy presentation, during which he said, “Artemis 3 will have its opportunity, if we can, by mid-2027, which sets us up for an early ’28 and a late ’28 opportunity [for Artemis 4 and 5].” [emphasis mine]
In other words, Artemis-3 has already shifted from mid-’27 to late-’27. Though Isaacman is pushing hard to speed up the launch cadence of the entire Artemis program, reality is once again proving stronger. We should fully expect Artemis-3 to shift into 2028, partly because the lunar landers — especially Blue Origin’s Blue Moon — might not be ready but mostly because SLS is simply too cumbersome a rocket to stack quickly. Isaacman wants to speed up its launch cadence to once a year. The best we should expect is 18 months to two years.
As for getting two manned lunar landings in 2028, Isaacman might want it but the odds are slim to none. If Artemis-3 flies in late ’27 it will be almost impossible to get SLS ready for a landing mission before the end of ’28.
In the end, these delays will illustrate the need to replace SLS with private commercial launchers.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Stacking SLS components is certainly, compared to any other large rocket, a protracted process, but I think the more important limit on launch cadence, to this point, has been the production cadence of major SLS components. I thinkthat is what Isaacman is trying his best to get the legacy contractors to address in a meaningful way. How much success he will have in this respect we can only wait and see.
But a delay of Artemis 3 to “late-2027,” might not actually be a bad thing anent a notional Artemis 4 landing mission in 2028. Perhaps the extra time will allow Blue Origin to participate in Artemis 3 at all instead of being a no-show for a mission notionally conducted earlier. In the best of all possible worlds, the delay would allow Blue to show up to Artemis 3 with a prototype of Blue Moon Mk 2 instead of some much more marginal Mk 1.5 thingy.
Anent SpaceX, a delayed Artemis 3 would increase the odds of that mission being able to be quickly followed by an actual departure of the same HLS Starship used for Artemis 3 to the Moon for a landing, surface loiter and ascent test. The delay would allow SpaceX more time to not only demo on-orbit cryo propellant transfer from a tanker Starship to a prototype depot Starship, but to do so several times in order to accumulate a load of propellant on-orbit sufficient to support the uncrewed lunar landing test right on the heels of Artemis 3.
That, in turn, would improve SpaceX’s positioning to conduct its part of an Artemis 4 lunar landing mission in 2028 – though late in that year rather than early. If Artemis 4 involves using HLS Starship to push Orion to the Moon instead of an SLS upper stage, then – and assuming also that the last ICPS was also saved for Artemis 5 – the pacing items for Artemis 5 will likely be the first set of new-manufacture RS-25E engines for the SLS core stage and the full refueling infrastructure Blue’s lander will require, assuming it’s actually Mk 2 being used and not some cobbly Mk 1.5. All in all, I think Artemis 5 will take place no earlier than sometime in 2029.
Artemis 6, one hopes, would take place in 2030 and feature the debut of a Dear Moon-class Starship in place of the SLS-Orion stack.
“We should fully expect Artemis-3 to shift into 2028, partly because the lunar landers — especially Blue Origin’s Blue Moon — might not be ready but mostly because SLS is simply too cumbersome a rocket to stack quickly.”
None of *us* here will be put out if in fact it turns out that Starship *is* the reason for a mission delay (well, there are one or two regulars who might be), but expect the usual caterwauling from the usual gallery of SpaceX skeptics and haters around the online world.
But brute reality and experience tells us that you don’t just slap together a crewed lunar lander in just a few years, let alone one that meets all of NASA’s HLS requirements. The fact that NASA — partially under Obama (who expressly forbade even *discussion* of a lunar program), partially under the Trump Administration I, partly under Biden — took until 2021 to even contract a lander (and 2022 for the second one) is the core of the problem here, and that would have been true even if they had contracted a “conventional” lunar lander along the lines of the design reference. Obviously, Starship is a much, much more ambitious vehicle than anything like that. And it will be worth the wait — however long the wait takes.
Blue Origin, of course, is even further behind — though we don’t have enough information to tell just *how* far behind.
That said, our host is correct about the achingly slow pace of SLS mission preparation. I’m sure NASA ground systems will improve on that as time goes on, but there’s only so much they can do given the limitations of the rocket and the ground systems. They’ll never get as fast as Saturn V did, let alone how quickly Starship takes right *now*.