What is the point of Artemis III?
If you’ve been following spaceflight for the last couple of years then hearing the words “Artemis Three” may provoke a slight excitement reaction. This is because, for almost as long as the Artemis program has existed, Artemis III was meant to be THE moon mission. Those words were meant to have the same weight as “Apollo Eleven”, the eagle landing in the sea of tranquility, the Saturn V, the thousands of NASA engineers that dove head first into the unknown for the sake of humanity.
What is Artemis III?
Since February 2026, the Artemis III mission is now a LEO mission meant to test both lunar HLS from SpaceX and Blue Origin. Luckily for us space nerds, the now first moon mission, Artemis IV is still targeting summer 2028 just as before. This essentially means NASA added an extra Artemis mission in between Artemis II and what used to be III.
A few days ago, NASA announced the Artemis III. The crew itself isn’t very extraordinary, although there is Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano from ESA in the mix. Some have noted the apparent lack of women which doesn’t really mean anything in my humble opinion. NASA chooses their crew based on skill and most importantly, opportunity. Artemis III is set to launch as early as late 2027 onboard an upper stage-less SLS since it only needs to get to LEO. The crew will spend two weeks, but will only spend a total of about 3 days testing the two lunar landers. Blue Origin will be launching their Blue Moon lander (though it looks to be a slightly modified, mark 1.5ish version) first onboard their very own New Glenn rocket. The crew will spend two days testing Blue Moon while docked. This will be the first ever time the Orion capsule will dock. Very shortly after, SpaceX will launch their Starship-Super Heavy rocket. You probably already know Starship but interestingly, according to SpaceX, the Artemis III Starship will NOT be a “Starship HLS” aka an Artemis IV like Starship. Instead, it will most likely be a standard V3 Starship (like the one that launched for Starship flight 12) but with an added docking port… somewhere…
The landers are the bottleneck, but which one is most?
In addition to that revelation, the crew will NOT enter Starship as it won’t even be close to being fitted for crew ingress since it’s a regular Starship. Some were understandably disappointed by the lack of effort from SpaceX for such a mission but we shouldn’t sigh too quickly in my opinion. Indeed, it is possible that since SpaceX never planned for an extra Artemis mission, they simply never had the right hardware available to build a fully fledged out HLS in less than a year. Another theory is that SpaceX technically already proved some of the crew hardware since it should be shared with the Crew Dragon capsule.
Officially, NASA wants to test BOTH landers during this mission, however it does seem somewhat likely that only one will make it in time. The Starship program has been late for a while now but it is finally starting to show some colors and should have its first truly orbital flight (and maybe even Starlink flight) in the next few months. Given SpaceX’s objectives for this mission, late 2027 should be a piece of cake for SpaceX. The real nail-biter is going to be for Blue Origin since they famously lost their only launchpad about half a month ago. Although Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp publicly stated that Blue would be back for a whole new launch THIS YEAR, I struggle to see that being achievable even as an optimist. According to most estimates, Blue Origin should be back to launching New Glenn by late 2027, but that’s only a “should”. To be entirely fair, the Starship timeline is a also a “should” but a more confident one especially since Artemis III isn’t very far from a typical Starship launch.
Most importantly, Artemis III is a flight close enough (in time) to Artemis II that it will help the thousands of employees at NASA build a “muscle memory” for readying the SLS rocket for launch following the “standardization” effort of NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. Indeed, thanks to well done planning from a few years ago, the SLS for Artemis III should be stacked this very summer more than a year ahead of liftoff. In an ideal world this could maybe even mean the NET date could move LEFT, believe it or not.
Personal note
I personally believe that Artemis III is a boring but necessary mission to march towards (or rather, thrust towards) the return of humanity to the moon. I, like many, was disappointed to see that SpaceX’s Starship would not play as big of a role as anticipated but I believe that SpaceX is simply trying to do their HLS-related operations somewhat cautiously and did not want to rush a HLS out of the factory for a LEO only mission especially considering that a Starship HLS is basically a regular Starship if you glance at it really quickly. Blue Origin will need to recover fast from that major anomaly if they truly want a shot at landing humans on the moon. The Mark 1.5 approach is smart if you’re trying to go fast, but now that they got a lot of time ahead of them, what’s the best move? I’ve personally never been a fan of the Mark 1.5 idea. I’d much rather have a good fully kitted out HLS like Mark 2 than some sort of Frankenstein-”we need to get to the moon before china does” lander.
The point of Artemis III is understandable but it is underwhelming. It’s a necessarily boring mission, just like Apollo 9 was.