Less than two weeks.
On June 9 NASA drops the names of the four humans who will fly the Artemis 3 mission. They also promised an update on where things stand.
The reveal happens at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Start time is 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. You can watch the stream live on Space.com if you have the time to spare.
It is not the first landing mission anymore. That ambition shifted in late February when NASA administrator Bill Nelson—not Jared Isaacman—redrew the blueprint. Now Artemis 3 stays in Earth orbit. It tests rendezvous and docking. Specifically the handshake between the Orion capsule and the crewed landers. SpaceX’s Starship is one candidate. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is the other. Or both.
Artemis 2 just finished its trip around the moon in April this year. That crew got their call back in April 2023, almost two years out. This feels standard for space travel timelines. The launch window for Artemis 3 targets mid-2027.
Artemis 3 focuses on proving the systems work before anyone touches lunar dirt.
So we get a year of hype after the names drop.
If everything sticks together the program moves on. Artemis 4 aims for the lunar south pole late in 2028. Who lands then is still up for grabs. Starship might do it. Blue Moon might. Maybe neither yet. Nobody knows for sure.
Money keeps moving while we wait. On Tuesday the agency awarded over $1 billion in contracts. They are building rovers and landers and hardware for a base camp near that south pole. It’s not just about landing anymore. It is about staying put.
We have names on the calendar now. What do you think the roster looks like?
The base keeps getting built. The landers keep evolving. The astronauts haven’t even met each other properly yet, but the clock is ticking down from mid-2027 to… somewhere.
