Artemis 3 has been pushed to late 2027. Can NASA still land astronauts on the moon in 2028?

Artemis 2 enchanted the world in the beginning of April, when its crew of four astronauts flew a 10-day mission around the moon and back to Earth. It was the first human spaceflight of the agency's Artemis program, and the first crewed moon mission in more than half a century. To add to the excitement, in the weeks leading up to the mission, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a dramatic restructuring of the Artemis program . He highlighted a host of mission objectives and ambitious infrastructure plans to establish a permanent human base on the surface of the moon in the coming decade. Part of that vision includes increasing how often NASA launches Artemis' Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — with the goal of shortening the gap between missions from a few years to about 10 months. (There was a 3.5-year gap between Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 .) Artemis 3 also got a complete redesign, from the program's first lunar landing mission to an Earth-orbit rendezvous and docking-only demonstration between Orion and the program's privately developed lunar landers. Now, it seems those landers may have a hard time hitting NASA's 10-month cadence target. Artemis 2 lifts off from Launch Complex-39B, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, April 1, 2026. …