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NASA will provide an update about its Artemis moon plans on Friday (Oct. 23), and you can watch it live.
The news will come during a press conference at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which starts Friday at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
“The update will include details about NASA’s Artemis III mission that will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems needed for future lunar landings, and how plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 are progressing,” NASA officials said in an Oct. 14 media advisory.
Three agency officials will participate in Friday’s “Artemis Acceleration” event. They are:
- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
- NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
- Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager
NASA is currently gearing up for Artemis III, which is targeted for mid-2027. The mission will test rendezvous and docking technologies between NASA’s Orion capsule and one or both of the private spacecraft that NASA picked to be the Artemis program’s crewed lunar landers: SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.
After that will come Artemis IV, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole in early 2028, if all goes to plan. That will be the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 way back in 1972.
It’s unclear which lunar lander will fly on Artemis IV; that depends on how the development of each one progresses and what happens on Artemis III.
And there will be other landings after Artemis IV. NASA plans to establish a moon base via Artemis, and doing so will require a variety of missions, both robotic and crewed.
The agency feels some urgency in this quest, for China has similar goals. It’s important that the U.S. wins this new space race, military and political officials have said, so that the nation can establish the norms of responsible behavior on Earth’s nearest neighbor.
