NASA adds Artemis test mission in 2027
Agency says extra lander checkout in low Earth orbit keeps 2028 Moon landing target alive, Risk reduction arrives as Artemis II slips again
Images
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Friday that the agency still plans lunar landings in 2028 (AFP/Getty)
AFP/Getty
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman speaks during a press conference in Florida on Friday (AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
NASA says it will add an extra Artemis test flight in 2027 as part of a “major overhaul” aimed at reducing risk and making its lunar timeline credible.
According to The Independent, Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the change at Kennedy Space Center, describing a mid-2027 mission that would test new commercial lunar landers in low-Earth orbit before attempting a crewed landing. NASA still lists 2028 as the target for returning astronauts to the Moon, but now talks about two landings “at the beginning and end” of that year rather than a single, clean sequence.
The shift is a tacit admission that Artemis was trying to jump from a single crewed lunar flyby to a landing architecture that depends on multiple moving parts working first time. Isaacman framed the adjustment as a return to the stepwise logic of Mercury and Gemini before Apollo 11: practice the hard parts in an environment where abort options exist, then scale up. In engineering terms, the added flight buys time to discover integration failures—interfaces between NASA’s Space Launch System, Orion, and privately built landers—without the cost of a full lunar campaign.
NASA’s own recent experience illustrates why the agency is reaching for an extra rehearsal. Artemis II, the first crewed Orion mission, has been pushed back after a helium issue on the 322-foot SLS rocket, The Independent reports, with April now described only as the earliest possible launch window. When a program’s schedule is already constrained by a single bespoke launcher, every unplanned fix competes with test time, supplier capacity, and the availability of launch infrastructure.
What NASA is calling “risk reduction” also changes the risk it is willing to carry. A new preparatory mission adds another launch, another set of hardware and software configurations, and another chance for something to go wrong—while spreading the consequences across more milestones and more years. The benefit is that failures happen earlier and closer to home, where they can be diagnosed and redesigned without stranding a crew near the Moon.
The agency is now asking the public to interpret “back to basics” as progress.
The only concrete new date in the plan is the mid-2027 test flight.