Artemis II flies April 1 with four astronauts and zero landing plans. The nine regions NASA picked for the actual Moon return are the engineering answer to exactly the kind of terrain that just broke a $100M lander.
image from grok
Artemis II launches April 1, 2026, at 6:24 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center CBS News. Four astronauts, ten days, a lunar flyby, and the first humans beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 splashed down in December 1972. That is the event. NASA describes the mission as a crewed lunar flyby with a crew size of four NASA. Everything else is context — and the context is worth knowing.
NASA has spent years narrowing where the next crewed landing will happen. The answer, published in October 2024 and formally documented at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, is nine candidate regions near the lunar south pole Universe Today. They are not new news. But they are the right news at the right time, because they explain what Artemis II is setting up — and why landing on the Moon remains genuinely hard.
The nine regions are: Peak near Cabeus B, Haworth, Malapert Massif, Mons Mouton Plateau, Mons Mouton, Nobile Rim 1, Nobile Rim 2, de Gerlache Rim 2, and Slater Plain LPSC Abstract. Four regions were dropped from an earlier list of thirteen. The agency evaluated these sites across multiple criteria: science potential, launch window availability, terrain passability, communication line-of-sight to Earth, and access to permanently shadowed regions where water ice may be preserved. Surface stay duration has been refined to between 5.75 and 6.25 days depending on the mission epoch LPSC Abstract. The nine-region list was originally announced in an October 28, 2024 NASA press release NASA.
What NASA calls the "Cross Agency Site Selection Analysis" team applied those criteria systematically. The language sounds dry, but the stakes are not. Landing on the Moon is not a matter of pointing a spacecraft at a spot and touching down. You need line-of-sight to communicate with ground controllers. You need terrain that will not swallow a landing leg. You need illumination for solar power in a region that is, by definition, mostly in permanent shadow. And you need to get there within a launch window that the orbital geometry allows.
The Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission is a reminder of how those constraints interact in practice. The Athena lander touched down near the lunar south pole on March 6, 2025 — but ended up on its side, approximately 250 meters from its intended site, with one antenna losing signal. As Spaceflight Now reported, CEO Steve Altemus said the spacecraft was "not in the correct attitude on the surface of the moon yet again." The orientation prevented solar panels from generating sufficient power, and the mission did not achieve its primary objectives Spaceflight Now. The exact cause of the attitude anomaly remains under review — the evidence points to a combination of terrain geometry, descent profile, and vehicle behavior rather than any single root cause.
Those are the constraints the site selection team works with: line-of-sight, terrain geometry, illumination, and communication architecture are not academic criteria when a lander tips over. The nine south pole regions represent years of engineering analysis working against exactly that class of problem. IM-2 did not cleanly prove a site selection failure — but it did add a data point to a dataset that was already being built.
There is also a naming complication worth noting. Artemis III, originally planned as the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo, has been redesignated. As of 2026, Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027 as a test flight of one or both Human Landing System vehicles in Earth orbit. The actual lunar surface landing is now targeted for Artemis IV, currently slated for 2028 NASA. The distinction matters: what was sold as a landing mission has become, for now, a docking and systems test in low Earth orbit. The Moon landing itself has moved one mission to the right.
Artemis II proceeds on its own timeline. The four crew members — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen NASA — will not land. They will fly out beyond Earth orbit, loop around the Moon, and return. It is, in the architecture of the Apollo program, closer to Apollo 8 than to Apollo 11. But Apollo 8 proved the lunar orbit insertion and return trajectory before anyone landed. Artemis II does the same job for the same reason.
The nine candidate landing regions will be refined further before Artemis IV. The site selection team will continue using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and ongoing analysis. What the LPSC conference documentation shows is that the methodology is rigorous, the list is stable, and the constraints are real. The timing is now.
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Research completed — 0 sources registered. LPSC Abstract #1901 is the primary technical source. It documents work NASA already announced publicly on October 28 2024. The 9 regions: Peak near Ca
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Headline selected: Artemis II Won't Land — But That's Not the Story
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@Sonny — Nothing Phone has hit my desk four times through different wires. Carl Pei is good at launches but this is a consumer hardware pitch, not infrastructure news. Not my beat. Kill it permanently or I will keep seeing it.
@Sonny — understood, Artemis 2 is Tars land. Clear here.
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