Artemis II launches April 1. Four astronauts, one rocket, one capsule. They will not land on the moon. They will not enter lunar orbit. They will fly past the moon on a free-return trajectory and come home in ten days. That is the mission. And it is a crewed test flying well ahead of the actual bottleneck — which is the lander, the untested propellant transfer it requires, and a rescue problem NASA has not solved.
The crew is Reid Wiseman as commander, Victor Glover as pilot, and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as mission specialists. Koch is the first woman to fly a lunar mission. Glover is the first Black astronaut to go beyond low Earth orbit. Hansen is the first Canadian. They will cover roughly 600,000 miles total, passing about 4,700 miles from the lunar surface at closest approach. Splashdown is April 11 in the Pacific.
SpaceX is building the Human Landing System based on its Starship vehicle. NASA is paying for it under a fixed-price contract that has only increased by $253 million — 6 percent — since the 2021 award, according to a March 10 report from NASA's Office of Inspector General. The OIG called the acquisition approach effective at controlling costs. The schedule is another matter.
"SpaceX's development of the Artemis III Starship has been delayed at least 2 years, with additional delays expected," the OIG report stated. The holdup is a single hard problem: moving cryogenic propellant between two spacecraft in orbit. Starship's design requires multiple refueling transfers from tanker vehicles before it can leave low Earth orbit. One key test — a vehicle-to-vehicle cryogenic fluid transfer demonstration — was scheduled for March 2025, slipped to March 2026, and will not be ready on time.
"NASA is tracking a top risk that some of the cryogenic technologies and capabilities SpaceX is developing will not be adequately mature ahead of the Artemis III mission," the OIG report said. That is the technical constraint that pushed the landing from Artemis III to Artemis IV.
Blue Origin is the other contracted lander, originally slated for Artemis V. Its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander is at least eight months behind schedule, with nearly half of the action items from its 2024 preliminary design review still open as of August 2025, per the same OIG report. NASA is now considering Blue Origin as either a primary or backup lander for the first crewed landing, which is not the backup plan anyone expected two years ago.
On February 27, NASA announced a restructuring. Artemis III, previously the crewed landing mission, is now a 2027 flight that takes astronauts to Earth orbit in Orion and tests the rendezvous and docking procedures with the lander — without touching the surface. Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028, becomes the first mission to actually put humans on the moon. The Lunar Gateway — a small space station originally planned for lunar orbit — had its hardware work paused or halted in 2026 as NASA shifted to a simpler direct-to-Orion architecture. The architecture is simpler on paper: just Orion, a lander, and a way to keep the crew alive between the two.
The OIG report noted one risk that does not have a technical fix: there is no crew rescue capability. "If the landers encounter a catastrophic event, NASA knows it would not have the capability to rescue stranded astronauts from space or the lunar surface," the report stated. The elevator on SpaceX's Starship lander — which positions the crew 35 meters above the lunar surface — was identified as a top program risk, since it is currently the only way to get astronauts back up to the spacecraft if something goes wrong.
The 2028 target for Artemis IV is an aspiration, not a schedule. Starship's critical design review is scheduled for August 2026, with an uncrewed demonstration landing at the end of 2026. If either slips, the landing slips with it. Trump administration officials have publicly pushed for 2028 as the goal, which gives NASA political cover but does not change the physics of cryogenic propellant transfer.
For anyone writing contracts, allocating capital, or building hardware against a lunar surface mission: the lander does not exist in a verified flight configuration. The cryogenic propellant transfer required to make it work has never been demonstrated at scale in orbit. An uncrewed Starship has not landed on the Moon. The rescue path does not exist. April 1 answers whether Orion handles human passengers — it says nothing about whether any of the rest is ready.
