NASA administrator Jared Isaacman says the agency is on firmer footing for returning astronauts to the moon following the successful Artemis II mission around the moon in April. Speaking with Space.com, Isaacman said he feels the path to the lunar surface is more achievable now than it was previously. He pointed to the April 2026 flight as evidence the program is making progress and said NASA will launch again in 2027.
Isaacman stressed that the road from Artemis II to crewed lunar landings and eventually a permanent moon base will require many launches of the Space Launch System megarocket. He said he is less concerned right now with whether the program's landers are ready than with NASA launching big rockets at least once a year. He called that cadence imperative for the agency's deep-space human spaceflight missions and said once a year is the minimum he would defend before Congress. He added that he does not expect a return to the early space shuttle era's four missions a year or to the pace of Apollo.
The 2027 launch is to be Artemis III, a crewed mission to low Earth orbit that will test docking between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the Artemis program's private lunar landers, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. Isaacman described the mission as a way to keep exercising those capabilities, and said the risk and taxpayer spending should yield as much as possible while building toward something greater. He said Artemis III will better prepare the agency for Artemis IV, a crewed lunar landing targeted for 2028.
Isaacman said NASA is drawing primarily on the experience and talent within the agency and industry as it approaches Artemis III. He noted that Artemis II and Artemis III differ substantially from Apollo 8 and Apollo 9, but said the spirit, energy, potential and workforce talent at NASA are no different from the 1960s. Just before the interview, NASA announced that Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman will become deputy director of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Isaacman also said the United States is in a real space race with China, one he described as very different from the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. He said NASA plans to land on the moon at the end of 2028 while China says it will do so by the end of 2029, and he predicted China will succeed. He cited China's landers, rovers, suits and two-launch architecture with built-in reusability as evidence, and said the consequences of getting the race wrong would be felt around the world and would call many things into question, from which country's artificial intelligence and computers to buy to whose security guarantees to trust. Isaacman said NASA is taking the challenge seriously while following a playbook of success, and he expects the U.S. to prevail.
