(eleventh in a series)

Artemis Missions

We’ve discussed the hardware elements of the Artemis Program: the Orion deep space crew vehicle, its European Space Agency service module, and the heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, able to send Orion to lunar distances.

Orion got its first try-out in December 2014, on an unpiloted test flight to high earth orbit, using the Delta IV Heavy booster. The Delta IV put Orion into a high, elliptical Earth orbit that successfully demonstrated the spacecraft’s space-worthiness, tested its heat shield during entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and proved the capsule’s recovery systems. This initial 4.5-hour Exploration Demonstration Test 1 mission ended in a Pacific Ocean splashdown, where a US Navy floating dock recovered the spacecraft.

Eight years passed before Orion flew again, this time on the first launch of the mammoth Space Launch System. That Artemis I mission in November/December 2022 saw the second Orion ride the SLS—with 15 percent more liftoff thrust than the Saturn V—off Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. The 25.5-day mission took the unpiloted Orion well beyond the Moon, 270,000 miles from Earth. After nearly a month in space, Orion splashed down on December 11, 2022.

Artemis I was part of NASA’s effort, directed by President Trump late in his first term, to move up NASA’s lunar landing target date to 2024. NASA didn’t make that deadline, but the target date spurred the Artemis team to aim at returning astronauts to the Moon sooner rather than later. If an administration directed NASA to meet a nebulous, “twenty years from now” goal, nobody at the agency would get excited about that deadline, or work very hard toward realizing it. But the specific, near-term 2024 goal motivated the team, and in the end, achieving it rapidly would cost less to execute than funding it on a stretched-out timeline lasting a decade or more.

The Trump administration’s Artemis direction to NASA was quickly endorsed by the Congress,  with Democratic as well as Republican support. The nation is now pushing, along with our partners, for a Moon return by 2028. It will take hard work to meet that deadline, true. But once we have a transportation link between Earth and Moon, NASA can proceed with its goal of establishing a permanent lunar outpost. Experience gained living and working on another world will hone our deep space skills for the challenges of reaching a nearby asteroid, and then Mars, within the next two decades.

Artemis II

In late 2020, NASA selected a subset of its astronaut team to be eligible for the Artemis expeditions. The first of these crews was that of Artemis II: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremey Hansen, a Canadian astronaut.

Their expedition tested the Orion spacecraft on a looping mission beyond the Moon in April 2026. The entire Artemis II stack, like the Saturn V and shuttle, rolled out to launch pad 39B on a crawler transporter in early 2026. (Pad 39A is leased to SpaceX for Falcon 9 and Starship). Pad 39B was where I launched with my STS-80 crew in November 1996, on our 18-day Columbia mission.

Artemis II lifted off on April 2, 2026, its Space Launch System rocket putting the second stage and Orion spacecraft stack into a temporary low Earth orbit.  After a brief checkout of about 2 hours, the second stage—an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage—reignited to put Orion into a very high Earth orbit, with an orbital period of about 24 hours.

Mission Control used that first day to ensure that Orion’s life support system was functioning properly along with other spacecraft systems. The crew also flew Orion close to the expended second stage, giving the maneuvering thrusters and flight control system a thorough workout.

On Flight Day 2, the crew ignited Orion’s main engine (a recycled space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine) for a 5-minute, 49-second translunar injection burn that put the ship on a looping path past the Moon.

On Flight Day 6, Orion skimmed past the leading edge of the Moon at a distance of 4,067 miles. Lunar gravity then pulled Orion around the far side, at a record distance from Earth of 252,756 miles (breaking Apollo 13’s record). On a slingshot path back to Earth, Orion headed home for a fiery reentry through the atmosphere on Flight Day 10. Protected by its  heat shield, the crew observed Orion wrapped in a searing, 5000-degree Fahrenheit plasma as it decelerated into the lower atmosphere. Three main parachutes deployed to slow Artemis II to a Pacific splashdown off California on April 11. It was the first American crewed visit to the Moon since 1972.

Artemis II proved all the elements of the spacecraft–life support, communications, power, and propulsion systems–under deep space conditions. But the mission carried no lander!

Lunar Landing

Yes, Orion can take its crew all the way to lunar orbit. But a single SLS is not powerful enough to send Orion and a lander, capable of many-day stays with perhaps 3 or 4 crew, to the Moon’s surface in a single launch. NASA in 2020 decided to procure lander services commercially. The competition saw one bid from a Blue Origin/Dynetics team, with Lockheed Martin and Draper along as partners. Elon Musk’s Space X also put in a bid, pitching its massive Starship second stage as a lunar lander.

NASA selected SpaceX in 2021, but there were complaints from the other competitors that the selection wasn’t run fairly. In response to the dispute, Congress told NASA to run a second competition to ensure that the agency has a backup lander option. By summer 2023, Musk had retained the primary lander contract, but Blue Origin won a contract to have its Blue Moon lander to be ready about 2028.

SpaceX lunar lander plan calls for about fifteen Super Heavy booster launches into low Earth orbit, each second-stage Starship tanker hauling methane and liquid oxygen (LOX)  propellant to fill an orbiting fuel depot. Once filled, a Starship lander would launch atop its Super Heavy, refuel at the LEO propellant depot, and then rocket itself to lunar orbit. There, a crewed Orion will rendezvous with Starship, and the descent crew would shift to the lander. Starship would fire its engines to deorbit and land on the Moon. A single crewman would wait in orbit while Starship and the crew stayed on the surface for about a week.  

That’s a complicated plan. Based on my experience with space station assembly, refueling the low-Earth orbit propellant depot with fifteen successive Starships will be a devilish challenge, complicated by repeated rendezvous, dockings, and propellant transfers. Each Starship tanker must launch, fuel the depot’s tanks, and return safely for a quick turnaround and relaunch.

The entire concept depends on an operational and reliable Starship atop its Super Heavy booster. As of July 2026, the Super Heavy/Starship combo has flown thirteen times, increasing the rocket’s performance with each test. Yet the test program has suffered recurrent failures. and has not yet put a Starship into orbit. To be fair, SpaceX sees Starship as a Starlink satellite delivery rocket, and the test series is primarily designed to ready Starship as a reusable satellite hauler. The Artemis lander demonstration has lagged, perhaps because of that focus on the satellite launcher mission.

Of course, NASA is anxious that SpaceX show Starship will quickly demonstrate an ability to land on the Moon, and for that, it must prove that orbital refueling capability. Starship flight 13 in July 2026 was a solid success, putting the second stage into a suborbital trajectory and demonstrating a successful soft splashdown into the Indian Ocean, an achievement roughly similar to a lunar descent. But NASA is still waiting for SpaceX to orbit Starship, demonstrate refueling, and build the propellant depot. Even after more than a dozen test launches, the company is still far from meeting its lander commitment.

To ensure that Artemis has a lander ready for NASA’s first landing attempt in 2028, the agency has asked both SpaceX and Blue Origin to simplify their concepts, hoping to speed development. Blue Origin has proposed a larger variant of its Blue Moon robotic lander to serve as a crewed lander, but Blue Moon will also need some orbital refueling, and it has yet to fly.

NASA wants both Starship and Blue Moon to serve as uncrewed targets for Orion practice dockings in low Earth orbit during Artemis III, planned for late 2027. Artemis IV in 2028 might have a shot at a Moon landing. We’ll talk about whether this is a realistic goal…next time.  

Next: Artemis–What Comes Next

www.AstronautTomJones.com

(Tenth in a series)

Initiated by the Trump administration in 2017 to achieve a lunar return, the Artemis program (in mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo) incorporated elements of the space shuttle (RS-25 liquid-fueled engines, the core stage of the Space Launch System, and the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters), plus parts of the canceled Constellation program (the Orion spacecraft, its European service module, and proposed upgrades to increase the performance of the SLS solid rocket boosters).

SLS

A central and enabling element of Artemis is the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift booster, designed to lift Orion on a trajectory to the Moon. In the making for ten years, the rocket uses shuttle-derived propulsion systems. First, two 177-foot, five-segment solid rocket motors on the sides, like the shuttle’s yet taller and more powerful, with 3.6 million pounds of thrust each. The SLS core stage is powered by four space shuttle main engines, RS-25s, totaling 2 million pounds of thrust. That shuttle technology has thirty years of flight heritage, one reason the SLS has now flown twice with no major problems.  

The SLS core stage engines burn oxygen and hydrogen, just like the propellants stored in the space shuttle’s orange external tank. In the SLS core stage, a huge liquid hydrogen tank is topped by a liquid oxygen tank, both feeding those four shuttle main engines. About two dozen of those RS-25 engines remain from the shuttle program, to be used on future Moon flights. Unlike on the reusable shuttle, those SLS RS-25s won’t be coming back. They’ll wind up in the ocean after each launch because it’s more economical to build new ones rather than incorporate a system to recover and refurbish them. When NASA runs out of repurposed shuttle main engines, it will purchase new ones from an Aerojet Rocketdyne production line turning out cheaper versions to supply future missions.

Suspending the core stage between them are the twin, shuttle-heritage solid rocket boosters. Instead of the shuttle’s four stacked segments, the SLS boosters consist of five, vertically stacked segments. That extra power—3.6 million pounds of thrust, about 75 percent of the SLS thrust at liftoff–is needed to propel the core stage through the first two minutes of its ascent.

Booster segments are shipped by rail from Utah to Florida, where they are stacked in the vehicle assembly building at KSC, once home to the Saturn V, and then the space shuttle. The boosters are stacked first, and then technicians place the foam-insulated core stage in the gap between them, with the four main engines on the bottom. Atop the core stage is a second stage to boost the Orion spacecraft into its initial orbit. That upper stage, a modified Centaur called the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS), burns oxygen and hydrogen in a re-startable RL-10 engine with 24,750 pounds of thrust. The 45-foot-tall  ICPS will give Orion its initial boost into a high Earth orbit, enabling Orion’s own engine to reach the Moon.

When SLS climbs off the pad atop 8.8 million pounds of rocket thrust, seventeen percent  more than the 7.5 million pounds lifting Saturn V, the crew’s emergency escape option is provided by a launch escape system. Stacked atop the crew module, the LES’s half-million pounds of thrust would rapidly pull astronauts clear of a failing booster.   

SLS is not the world’s most powerful rocket—in terms of liftoff thrust, SpaceX’s super-heavy booster, termed Starship, uses about 16 million pounds of thrust to get off the ground. As of May 2026, Starship has racked up 7 successes and 5 failures in suborbital testing. It will play a large role in supplying landers and supplies for Artemis lunar missions.

Every time SLS rises from the pad, it costs NASA north of a billion dollars. That’s comparable to what we used to pay during Apollo for a Saturn V launch—and we eventually ended Saturn V flights because of that expense. But at the height of Apollo, Saturn V was part of a Cold War, national priority program—and we bore the expense to win the race to the Moon. In today’s era of constrained domestic spending, a billion dollars a launch is not supportable (Starship is in the “100 million dollar per launch” ballpark.)

Today, I suspect that the nation will not pay $1 billion per launch for very long.  Industry partners on SLS–Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin—will have to propose measures to make SLS assembly and processing more affordable for taxpayers while maintaining safety and performance. If not, after a handful of launches, SLS’’s expense  will render it unable to stand the commercial competition. Elon Musk’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster would be happy to take SLS’s place.

To sum up, the Orion crew vehicle and the SLS heavy-lift booster have both worked as planned during the Artemis I and II missions. Let’s see how Artemis will combine these elements with other American and partner hardware to reach the Moon and establish the planned lunar base in the decade ahead.

Next: the Artemis Moon landers

www.AstronautTomJones.com

(ninth in a series)

Sending humans to the Moon is not only a United States or Western goal. The Chinese have recognized the value of becoming a spacefaring country, and they hope to reach the Moon with their astronauts by around 2030. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is competing with the U.S. economically and challenging us militarily, and it’s plain they want to surpass U.S. efforts in space exploration. We can either walk away from that challenge, or we can compete. Competition is one of the foundations of our capitalist system—we should not shy away from it. I think it would be a mistake to walk away from a challenge in space by the CCP, a formidable commercial and military adversary.

For the nation that executed the Apollo program, it should be easy to go back to the Moon, right? We’ve been there before; we have the blueprints. (I think the Chinese are using those blueprints right now to guide their lunar efforts. And they’re smart to do so.)

Having invented a way to go to the Moon fifty years ago, why not just repeat that plan? The answer: there are better ways to get to the Moon today. When those Apollo machines were built in the 1960s, integrated circuits were brand new and computers were ridiculously expensive–yet their processing power was so limited. Anyone with a recent smart phone holds in their hand a computer with more than 100,000 times the processing power of Apollo’s, and my current iPhone has nearly 4 million times the RAM than that Apollo guidance machine. With 21^st Century electronics technology, we would never build a copy of the Apollo spacecraft; there are smarter ways to reach the Moon than were available to Neil, Mike, and Buzz in 1969.

I mentioned that in 2005 President Bush proposed a program to return to the Moon and follow with eventual expeditions to Mars. It was called the Constellation program, and was to succeed the shuttle after the latter completed the construction of the International Space Station. After shuttle retirement in about 2010, Constellation was to debut a new crewed vehicle: an Orion deep space capsule. Orion would launch atop an Ares I booster, based on the shuttle’s solid rocket booster. Paired with Ares I would be a giant cargo rocket called the Ares V, more powerful than the Apollo-Saturn V rocket. This heavy-lift booster would carry the lander and all crew supplies destined for the Moon. Meanwhile, the crew in Orion would launch to meet the lunar payload in low Earth orbit.

Presidential administrations change; President Obama canceled Constellation in 2010, consigning its lunar ambitions to the NASA wastebasket. Part of his argument was: “We’ve been to the Moon. Why go back?” Obama’s NASA policy chose Mars as the real goal, and intended to bypass the Moon on the way to the red planet.

In the interim, the administration proposed to use commercial rockets to ferry astronauts to the ISS while NASA developed the technology to go to Mars two decades into the future. NASA had proposed in the late 2000s a commercial cargo program to resupply the Station, but Obama’s NASA planned to build on that program, and instead of Orion, use commercial spaceships for crew transport to the Station. By hiring contractors like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its Dragon spacecraft, NASA could support the Station while qualifying Orion for deep space missions to Mars.  

But Obama’s commercial proposals (which didn’t include a heavy-lift launcher) pushed Orion and those Mars expeditions off to the indefinite future. And that plan didn’t include the Moon–we even saw Buzz Aldrin appear with President Obama in 2010, nodding agreement as the president asked, “Why go back to the Moon? Buzz has been there already.” A “Mars without the Moon” program was met with skepticism by the Congress.

So, shortly after the 2010 cancellation of Constellation, the Congress directed the administration to proceed with the commercial transportation option for the ISS, but to build a true national deep space exploration program. In 2011, the Congress directed NASA instead to build a variant of that big Ares V cargo rocket, now called the Space Launch System (SLS), incorporating shuttle technology. Congress also directed NASA to continue to build the Bush-conceived Orion spacecraft. The SLS and Orion give the U.S. the tools needed to revisit the Moon, perhaps go on to an asteroid, and conceivably reach Mars.

Orion

Orion, the crew module, is about a third larger in habitable volume than the Apollo spacecraft—330 cubic feet vs. Apollo’s 210 cubic feet. Orion can support up to four astronauts, vs. three in Apollo, for a 21-day mission around the Moon. The crew module is 11 feet tall, 16.5 feet wide, and weight 22,900 pounds at liftoff. The Orion itself is controlled during reentry by 12 thrusters producing 160 pounds of thrust each.

Orion’s propulsion, life support, and electrical power is provided by the service module, contributed by the European Space Agency. The SM is 15.7 feet tall, 16.5 feet wide, and weighs 34,400 pounds at liftoff. It contains breathing oxygen, water, solar panels and batteries. Propulsion is provided by reaction control thrusters, associated fuel tanks, and a reliable main engine borrowed from the shuttle, the Orbital Maneuvering System engine, producing 6000 pounds of thrust. The service module’s design was derived from ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, a robot cargo ship built to service the ISS.

Orion got its first try-out in December 2014, on an unpiloted test flight to high earth orbit, using the Delta IV Heavy booster. The brief but successful test demonstrated Orion’s space-worthiness, tested the spacecraft’s heat shield during entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and proved the capsule’s recovery systems. Orion’s 4.5-hour inaugural mission ended in a Pacific Ocean splashdown.

A Short-lived Asteroid Option

When that Exploration Flight Test 1 mission took place in 2014, Orion was planned to be part of a larger spacecraft that would expand our deep space skills by visiting—and retrieving—a small near-Earth asteroid, or a boulder from a larger object. It would be a first visit by humans to a solar system object other than the Moon.  

The Obama-proposed asteroid mission was actually a fascinating proposition to me, given my planetary science roots and life-long interest in asteroid origins and resources. I think near-Earth asteroids will serve as excellent stepping stones toward Mars, helping bridge the experience gap between our low-Earth-orbit ISS and risky, years-long voyages to Mars.

But Orion by itself could only undertake missions of about a month, and the Obama administration was not interested in funding a larger, deep-space craft to perform a months-long near-Earth object mission. The asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) succumbed to a lack of attractive targets (too few sizeable near-Earth objects accessible to Orion’s month-long endurance) and operational complexity (a robot craft would have to grapple, bag, and steer an asteroid or boulder back to Earth’s neighborhood to allow Orion to retrieve a sample). The asteroid option itself turned out to be illusory, meant to give NASA something to do in deep space until Mars expeditions became feasible. By executive direction, talk of the Moon was simply off the table for NASA. Underfunded and technically challenging, the asteroid option didn’t survive the transition to the new Trump administration in 2016.

(Next: the Artemis Program)

www.AstronautTomJones.com