Artemis II Launches a New Era of Lunar Exploration

On December 14, 1972, Eugene Cernan became the last human to walk on the moon. More than 53 years later, NASA is finally—cautiously—taking the first steps toward sending astronauts back.

The four-person crew of Artemis II took flight on April 1 at 6:35 P.M. If successful, the mission will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on an approximately 10-day journey around the moon. They will not land on the lunar surface, but NASA expects the crew to go at least 248,655 miles from Earth—the farthest humans have ever traveled from our planet, exceeding the record set by Apollo 13.

Artemis II is a critical test flight. It marks the first time astronauts will fly aboard NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, and it is the first real test of Orion‘s life-support systems with humans on board. It is less a triumphant return to the moon than a high-stakes systems check.

The road has been anything but smooth. In 2021, NASA’s inspector general estimated that the agency’s total Artemis spending would reach $93 billion through FY 2025, while also warning that a 2024 lunar return was unrealistic. That now looks like a massive understatement. Artemis II is only now taking off from the pad in spring 2026. Even the price tag remains unclear. In 2021, the inspector general claimed that NASA lacked a credible Artemis-wide cost estimate and projected the production and operations cost of a single SLS/Orion launch at about $4.1 billion for the early missions. In February, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman claimed that over the next seven years, the agency will spend an additional $20 billion to build a moon base. It’s unclear if that moon base project will be entirely separate from the Artemis missions.

Artemis II is no longer simply paving the way for Artemis III to land astronauts on the moon. Under NASA’s updated 2026 plan, Artemis III has been downgraded—or repurposed—into a low-Earth-orbit test mission in 2027, meant to rehearse rendezvousing and docking with one or both commercial landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA’s first Artemis lunar landing is now Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, and the agency says the actual landing provider will depend on which commercial system is ready first.

That matters because the bottleneck is no longer just NASA. The return to the lunar surface now depends heavily on commercial hardware that is still in development. The seventh, eighth, and ninth Starship flights in 2025 all experienced mishaps, though SpaceX plans to test Starship again as soon as this week. NASA’s revised plan reflects that uncertainty: Instead of tying the first landing to a single contractor on a fixed timeline, it has shifted to a more flexible approach built around whichever lander proves ready.

Humanity’s long-awaited return to the lunar surface is still coming—but later, and under a very different architecture than NASA originally sold. Artemis now looks less like Apollo with better branding and more like a sprawling hybrid program in which NASA sets goals, subsidizes infrastructure, and relies on private firms to make the crucial pieces work.

Whether that model is prudent or unnecessary is the real debate. NASA moved toward public-private partnerships because commercial space was moving faster than the agency could on its own. But the private space sector is no longer fragile. It is competitive, ambitious, and increasingly capable of pursuing lunar missions on its own terms. If the goal is to get humans back to the moon, Washington should not manage the whole enterprise. It may simply need to get out of the way.

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