NASA Artemis Programme

Artemis is NASA’s long-running campaign to return humans to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972, build a permanent lunar base, and lay the technical and operational groundwork for crewed flights to Mars. It was formally established in December 2017 by U.S. Space Policy Directive 1, and is the first deep-space human exploration programme since Apollo. Unlike Apollo it is explicitly designed to stay: every flight builds toward a permanent foothold rather than a one-off visit.

The core infrastructure consists of three big pieces of hardware: the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, the Orion crew vehicle built by Lockheed Martin with a European Service Module from ESA, and the Human Landing System (HLS) contracted in parallel from SpaceX (Starship HLS) and Blue Origin (Blue Moon). The Lunar Gateway, a small orbital station around the Moon that was originally part of the architecture, was cancelled in March 2026 when NASA shifted focus to a surface base. More than twenty international partners contribute hardware, science instruments and crew slots, including ESA, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, the UAE’s MBRSC, the German aerospace centre DLR, and the UK, Italian and Korean space agencies. Sixty-seven countries have signed the Artemis Accords as of May 2026, which makes Artemis the largest peacetime coalition ever assembled around a single space programme.

The point is not symbolic. Returning to the Moon in this decade is how the agency intends to prove out the life-support, propulsion, radiation-shielding and logistics systems that a crewed Mars mission will eventually demand. The lunar south pole is the immediate target because the permanently shadowed craters there hold deposits of water ice that can be turned into drinking water, breathing oxygen and rocket propellant on the surface, removing the need to lift every gram of consumables from Earth.

In Greek mythology Artemis is the goddess of the Moon and the twin sister of Apollo. NASA’s previous lunar programme, which put twelve men on the surface between 1969 and 1972, was named for Apollo, the god of the Sun. Naming its successor after Apollo’s sister was a deliberate choice announced by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on 14 May 2019: it signals continuity with the original Moon landings while making clear that this campaign is built around landing the first woman, and the first person of colour, on the lunar surface. Artemis II already delivered the first woman, the first person of colour, and the first non-American to fly beyond low Earth orbit; the historic first landing is now scheduled for Artemis IV.

Artemis is structured as a numbered sequence of crewed and uncrewed flights, each stepping up in capability from the last. The architecture was significantly reshuffled in February and March 2026: Artemis III was redesignated from a lunar landing to a crewed test of the Human Landing System in Earth orbit, and Artemis IV became the first crewed lunar surface landing. NASA’s current manifest is:

• Artemis I November 2022, completed

  Uncrewed test flight. An empty Orion capsule flew a 25-day mission including roughly six days in a Distant Retrograde Orbit around the Moon to qualify the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft and the heat shield at lunar-return entry speed.

• Artemis II April 2026, completed

  First crewed Artemis flight, comparable to Apollo 8. A crew of four flew a free-return trajectory similar to Apollo 13 that looped behind the far side of the Moon, broke Apollo 13’s human distance record at 406,771 km from Earth, and returned nine days later. The first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17.

• Artemis III late 2027, planned

  Crewed test of the Human Landing System in low Earth orbit rather than a lunar landing, comparable to Apollo 9. Orion will rendezvous and dock in Earth orbit with one or both commercially developed HLS vehicles, SpaceX’s Starship HLS and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, and may also evaluate the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit.

• Artemis IV early 2028, planned

  First crewed lunar surface landing of the programme and the first human Moon landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972. A support flight pre-positions an HLS in lunar orbit; the crewed Orion launches separately, rendezvous with the lander in lunar orbit, then two astronauts descend, conduct at least two EVAs, and ascend to rejoin Orion for the return home.

• Artemis V late 2028, planned

  Second crewed lunar landing. NASA expects to begin building its permanent Moon base on this flight. From Artemis V onward, SLS launch operations transfer to Deep Space Transport LLC, a commercial consortium of Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

• Artemis VI and beyond annual cadence

  Approximately annual crewed landings, full surface base build-out, and the first international (Canadian, Japanese and European) astronauts on the lunar surface. JAXA’s pressurised Lunar Cruiser rover is planned to enter service from Artemis VII, carrying the first Japanese astronauts to the Moon and supporting multi-day surface traverses.

Dates and mission profiles above III are subject to change as launch schedules slip and hardware contracts are revised. Dedicated tracker pages for each mission go online here as the mission profile firms up and JPL Horizons begins distributing the trajectory.

Orion’s position is taken directly from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system, the same high-precision ephemeris service mission controllers and research astronomers use to plan flybys and observation campaigns across the solar system. During an active mission we poll Horizons every 60 seconds for the latest state vector and interpolate smoothly between updates on screen. For completed missions the tracker serves a pre-rendered timeline of every point so the entire flight can be replayed at speeds up to 60× without further calls to Horizons.

Crew biographies and mission metadata come from NASA’s public mission pages and from the SpaceDevs Launch Library. Deep Space Network signal status is taken from the NASA Eyes DSN feed when an active mission has a downlink locked.