NASA is moving fast on its plans to build a moon base and return astronauts to the lunar surface in as little as two years.
Administrator Jared Isaacman said Friday that the space agency is still on track to launch Artemis III next summer on a docking exercise with Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos' lunar landers. The two-week mission featuring four astronauts will be confined to orbit around Earth - no moon trip this time.
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The all-important Artemis IV - NASA's first moon landing by astronauts since Apollo - remains scheduled for 2028, Isaacman said. His update came six months after the successful Artemis II flight around the moon by four astronauts, humanity's first lunar trip in more than half a century.
NASA will keep its options open as long as possible before choosing between SpaceX and Blue Origin for the Artemis IV lunar lander, according to officials.
Isaacman said the "new space race" to land astronauts on the moon - racing against China now versus the Soviet Union during the Apollo era - will be "much closer than it ever needed to be" because of slow going in past years.
But the space agency is now accelerating its pace, he noted, eliminating endless meetings and bureaucratic inertia, as SpaceX, Blue Origin and other companies scramble around the clock to meet the deadlines and NASA bolsters its workforce.
Adopting Apollo's urgent and intense approach from 1968 through 1972, a period which saw 24 astronauts fly to the moon and 12 land on it, is not "tech industry pixie dust or some new management philosophy," Isaacman said.
"It's about our own history. It's a playbook this agency knows really well, the same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just nine months," he said during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center.
Both landers will be launched next summer for docking practice by the three NASA astronauts and one Italian who will blast into orbit aboard NASA's Orion capsule. The mission will require three launches in quick succession from Cape Canaveral. Orion will dock first with Blue Origin's Blue Ghost about 270 miles (435 kilometers) above Earth, then with SpaceX's Starship in a slightly lower orbit.
"As a rocket nerd, it's going to be pretty awesome," said Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator.
NASA's planned moon base near the moon's south pole - nowhere near Apollo's more equatorial locales - should see its first launch by year's end. The Pittsburgh company whose first lunar landing mission fizzled in 2024 will attempt a "take two," this time aiming for the moon's south polar region with a rover and other experiments. More landers, rovers and orbiters will follow, so many that by the time the first Artemis moonwalkers arrive, their moon car will already be there waiting for them, according to officials.
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To speed up and reduce risk, the initial moonwalkers will wear a lighter, less complex spacesuit than the one still under development by Axiom Space for longer, later excursions. Axiom will test these new so-called "sortie suits" on the International Space Station next year.
Setting up a long-term presence is what makes this so much more challenging than the Apollo-style commuter flights, said NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who is part of the Artemis III crew.
"It is incredibly ambitious," Rubio told The Associated Press earlier this month. "One thing I've always believed and learned is don't bet against America."