NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays

New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a major overhaul of the agency's Artemis moon program Friday, acknowledging that the agency's plan to land astronauts on the moon in 2028 was not realistic without another preparatory mission first to lay the groundwork. 

He said NASA will now add an additional flight in 2027 in which astronauts will dock with new commercial moon landers in low-Earth orbit for detailed tests of navigation, communications, propulsion and life support systems and to verify rendezvous procedures.

That flight, in turn, will be followed by at least one and possibly two lunar landing missions in 2028 that incorporate lessons learned from the preceding flight.

The goal is to accelerate the pace of launches of the huge Space Launch System rocket while carrying out Artemis flights in evolutionary steps — not attempting missions that rely on too many untested technologies and procedures at once.

"We're going to get there in steps, continue to take down risk as we learn more and we roll that information into subsequent designs," Isaacman said told CBS News. "We've got to get back to basics."

Isaacman outlined the plan in an interview with CBS News space contributor Christian Davenport and then again during a news conference Friday. 

The announcement came two days after release of a sharply-worded report from NASA's independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel that deemed the existing plans too risky.

The panel raised concerns about the number of "firsts" required by the original Artemis III moon landing mission and recommended that NASA "restructure" the program to create a more balanced risk posture.

"It is interesting that a lot of the things that we are addressing directly go to the points they raised in their report," Isaacman said Friday. "I can't say we actually collaborated on it because I generally think these were all pretty obvious observations."

The revised plan also comes as NASA has been struggling to launch the delayed Artemis II mission on a flight to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon.

Launch had been planned for early February, but it was delayed to repair a hydrogen leak and, more recently, to give engineers time to fix a helium pressurization problem in the rocket's upper stage. Launch is now on hold until at least April 1.

The Artemis III mission, which had been expected to land astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2028, now will be redefined and rescheduled — launching in 2027 but not to the moon, Isaacman said. Instead, the yet-to-be-named astronauts will rendezvous and dock in orbit closer to home with one or both of the commercially built lunar landers now under development at Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

The idea is to gain valuable near-term flight experience before attempting a moon landing with astronauts on board. With Artemis III under its belt, NASA hopes to launch two moon landing missions in 2028, Artemis IV and V, using one or both landers, and to continue with one moonshot per year thereafter.

"What helps us get to the moon? Well, for sure, rendezvous and docking with one or ideally both landers, that gives you an opportunity to do some integrated testing of a vehicle that we are going to depend upon the following year to take those astronauts down to the surface of the moon," Isaacman told CBS News.

The revised Artemis III mission will also give astronauts a chance to test out new spacesuits that future moonwalkers will use.

"It's an opportunity to … actually have the suits in microgravity, even if we don't go outside the vehicle in them. You get a lot of good learning from that," Isaacman said.

The Artemis III test flight with one or two lander dockings in Earth orbit is similar in concept to Apollo 9, which launched a command module and lander to Earth orbit for flight tests in 1969 and helped pave the way to the Apollo 11 landing four months later.

Isaacman said SpaceX and Blue Origin are "both looking to do uncrewed landing demonstrations as part of the existing agreement."

"So we want to just take advantage of this to set up both vendors for future success on a lunar landing," he said. "This is the proper way to do it, if it works out from a timing perspective, to be able to rendezvous and dock with both. ... This, again, is the right way to proceed in order to have a high confidence opportunity in '28 to land."

The Artemis IV and V missions in 2028 will use whichever landers are deemed ready for service. If only one company's lander is available, that lander would be used for both missions, an official said. If both are available, one would be used for one flight and one for the other.

Launching Artemis III, IV and V before the end of 2028 will not be easy, and Isaacman said it is essential that NASA rebuild its workforce and regain the technical competence to support a higher launch cadence, moving from one flight every 18 months or so to a flight every year. That pace, he argued, will reduce risk.

"When you regain these core competencies and you start exercising your muscles, your skills do not atrophy," he said. "It's safer. And yes, you are buying down risk, because you're able to test things in low Earth orbit before you need to get to the moon, which is exactly what we did during the Apollo era."

He said he did not blame NASA's contractors for the current slow pace of Artemis launches. Instead, "we should have made better decisions (in the past) and said, you don't go from Artemis II to landing on the moon with Artemis III."

Safety advisers called for changes to "high risk" plans

The Artemis overhaul was announced two days after the release of a report by the lAerospace Safety Advisory Panel that said the original plan to move directly from Artemis II to a lunar touchdown in 2028 using a SpaceX lander did not have the proper margin of safety and did not appear to be realistically achievable.

The panel raised concerns about the number of "firsts" required by that mission in its current form and recommended that NASA "restructure the Artemis Program to create a more balanced risk posture for Artemis III and future missions."

The plan outlined by Isaacman appears to address many of the core issues raised by the safety panel.

Officials said Isaacman had discussed accelerating lander development with both SpaceX and Blue Origin and that both were on board. He also discussed the accelerated Artemis overhaul with Boeing, which manages the SLS rocket and builds its massive first stage; with United Launch Alliance, builder of the rocket's upper stage, Orion-builder Lockheed Martin and other Artemis contractors.

All, the official said, were in agreement.

"Boeing is a proud partner to the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA's vision for American space leadership," Steve Parker, the president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a statement. "We are ready to meet the increased demand."

SpaceX said, "We look forward to working with NASA to fly missions that demonstrate valuable progress towards establishing a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface."

And Blue Origin responded, "Let's go! We're all in!"

Isaacman also said the agency would halt work to develop a more powerful version of the SLS rocket's upper stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS. Instead, NASA will go forward with a "standardized," less powerful stage but one that will minimize major changes between flights and utilize the same launch gantry.

Under the original Artemis architecture, NASA planned on multiple versions of the SLS rocket, ranging from the "Block 1" vehicle currently in use to a more powerful EUS-equipped Block 1B and eventually an even bigger Block 2 model using advanced solid rocket boosters. The latter two versions required use of a taller mobile launch gantry, already well under construction at the Kennedy Space Center.

"It is needlessly complicated to alter the configuration of the SLS and Orion stack to undertake subsequent Artemis missions," Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, said in a statement.

"The entire sequence of Artemis flights needs to represent a step-by-step build-up of capability, with each step bringing us closer to our ability to perform the landing missions. Each step needs to be big enough to make progress, but not so big that we take unnecessary risk given previous learnings."

As a result, NASA will stick with the current version of the SLS with the addition of the "standardized" upper stage. No other details were provided.

Isaacman closed out the CBS interview by saying flight-tested hardware, a revitalized work force and a more Apollo-like management strategy are only part of the story.

"There's another ingredient that's required, and that's the orbital economy, whether it happens in low-Earth orbit or on the lunar surface," Isaacman said.

"We've got to do something where we can get more value out of space and the lunar surface than we put into it. And that's how you really ignite an economy, and that's how everything we want to do in space is not perpetually dependent on taxpayers."