Artemis III Sets Up a High‑Stakes Test of Rival Moon Landers

By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings

The Artemis II mission’s splashdown on Friday was a milestone in the new space race unfolding between the U.S and China. But NASA’s next leg of this race—Artemis III, now scheduled for 2027—will see a different, more homegrown competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Announced only in March, this next Artemis mission pits the two aerospace companies head-to-head as they vie to be first to flight-test their in-development crewed lunar landers. The mission would involve a crewed Orion capsule launching into Earth orbit, where if all goes to plan the Artemis III astronauts would attempt to rendezvous and dock Orion with a moon-lander variant of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle and, separately, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lunar lander.

The plan shifts an actual crewed moon landing to the Artemis IV mission in 2028, according to NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. That should help shore up the space agency’s extremely ambitious scheduling, which culminates with a proposed $30-billion moon base by 2036. Artemis III, Isaacman has said, is modeled after the test flights of the 1960s Apollo program, especially the Apollo 9 mission of 1969. During Apollo 9, which occurred just five months ahead of the historic Apollo 11 crewed lunar landing, astronauts stayed in Earth orbit, where they moved into and maneuvered a lunar module before returning to a command capsule and then to Earth.

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Slow and steady simply won’t win the 21st-century moon race with China, Isaacman indicated when he unveiled Artemis III during the space agency’s March event. “We are long past the time for Word and PowerPoint,” he said, bemoaning “billions wasted, years lost, nonconforming hardware delivered, programs that never launched [and] fewer flagship science missions” in NASA’s recent decades because of the space agency’s standard, very cautious approach.

But the need for speed doesn’t mean NASA’s replan isn’t methodical or needlessly risky, says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for the agency’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. Artemis III’s demonstration of Orion docking with SpaceX’s or Blue Origin’s lunar landers (or even both if they’re ready on time) is “absolutely key to bring down some of the risk” of later moon landings, she says. “Whichever lander is ready to go, we’ll go with.” And although Artemis II’s triumphant lunar flyby captivated the world, keeping its successor nearer to our planet is the sensible thing to do. “In Earth orbit, where we’re closer to home, if there’s any issues, we can get back quickly, as opposed to doing that first docking maneuver at the moon,” she says.

Representatives of neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX responded to Scientific American’s requests for comment on the current status of their respective landers.

Making Artemis III an Earth orbit test mission of the lunar landers “is an excellent idea,” says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “NASA is wisely looking to create more options in the lunar architecture.” That’s not just to create competition, he says, but to ensure safe, redundant capabilities by having two dissimilar lunar landers.

And they are dissimilar. The incumbent lander, SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (Starship HLS), will be built on the upper stage of the rocket firm’s Starship spacecraft, a reusable, 172-foot-tall tower intended to land upright on the moon. According to SpaceX, it might carry as much as 100 tons of moon-bound cargo. Astronauts would descend to the lunar surface via a side-mounted elevator platform. Last October SpaceX said it had reached 49 milestones in its Starship HLS design, including testing the airlock, rockets and elevator. But the company has not since updated its progress. In February Musk said that SpaceX has “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon” instead of on Mars, his longtime goal.

Blue Origin’s Mark 2 human lander, a 52-foot-tall canister on four legs, is also reusable but outwardly more resembles Apollo-era hardware. It would carry up to 22 tons of cargo, less than what the SpaceX lander could transport. In October 2025 the company presented some updates at an American Astronautical Society meeting, revealing that it is building the life-support systems in-house.

Getting either lander to the moon will require refueling in Earth orbit, a scarcely tested procedure performed across a dozen or so additional flights of fuel-filled orbital tankers. Only after overcoming this significant hurdle could either lander travel to the moon to meet and dock with the astronauts, who would get there in an Orion capsule much like Artemis II’s. In lunar orbit, Orion would rendezvous with the lander, with two of four crew members boarding to descend to the lunar surface.

For now, all eyes will be on SpaceX’s next test launch of its jumbo Starship rocket from Texas, which was recently delayed to May. This would be the inaugural flight of a new and improved Version 3 model and the first attempt to place Starship’s upper stage in Earth orbit. The decision to delay the test launch came soon after SpaceX announced plans to sell its stock to the public, with an estimated valuation on $1.75 trillion, making the launch event very high stakes for Wall Street as well as NASA.

Meanwhile Blue Origin’s “Pathfinder” mission, a test landing of the cargo-only Mark 1 version of its lander on the moon, has been proposed for later this year. That lander is wrapping up vacuum chamber testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Isaacman said during the space agency’s March event. According to NASA, if the mission is successful, another Mark 1 lander will, by late 2027, carry the agency’s science rover VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) to the lunar south pole, where it will prospect for water ice.

In-house, the space agency itself is now carefully watching repairs to the mobile launcher needed for liftoff of its massive Space Launch System rocket for Artemis III.

Even after Artemis III, both or either of the competing space firms must also demonstrate a successful uncrewed landing and return of their lander before astronauts can use it in 2028. The prep needed before NASA’s human landing on the moon also would include two dozen launches of precursor rovers and other equipment. Hitting that rapid cadence of lunar launches will be the key to whether NASA can achieve its moon base timeline, said the agency’s Carlos Garcia-Galan in an interview with Scientific American during the March event. “The thing we need to address head on from the beginning is the cadence—the number of assets, launches and landers we will need to develop,” he added. Another milestone to watch is the development of an Axiom Space space suit that had been meant for the original Artemis III mission on the moon and recently passed a technical review at the space agency.

NASA expects to have more details on the Artemis III mission once SpaceX and Blue Origin alike have had time to officially respond to the new moon base plan, according to Glaze. Exactly what Earth orbit the mission will target is one question: a lower orbit around our planet might save a booster rocket needed for later missions, Ars Technica reported in April, whereas a higher one might more closely mimic a lunar orbit.

“So part of what we’re doing right now is trying to accelerate and get them absolutely ready in 2028” for human landings on the moon, Glaze says. “What’s quite clear is that the imperative is to land in 2028. They’ve taken it very seriously, both [SpaceX] and Blue Origin.”