The last time a human being stood on the Moon was December 1972. Gene Cernan climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, said a few words for the record, and left. In the half-century since, twelve people have walked on another world and every one of them did it before most people alive today were born.
Artemis is NASA's programme to change that. But it is not a re-run of Apollo, and understanding the difference is the key to understanding why it is taking so long.
Apollo Was a Sprint. Artemis Is Meant to Be Infrastructure.
Apollo was a geopolitical race with an unlimited-ish budget and a single objective: land a man and return him safely before the decade was out. It succeeded brilliantly and then stopped, because once the objective was met the political rationale evaporated. The hardware was expendable, the landing sites were chosen for safety rather than long-term value, and nothing was built to be reused.
Artemis is trying to do something harder and less photogenic: establish a sustained human presence. That means reusable elements, a permanent orbital outpost, resource extraction on the surface, and international partners with their own contributions and their own schedules. It is a slower, messier, more bureaucratic undertaking than Apollo โ and if it works, it lasts.
The Hardware
SLS produces more thrust at liftoff than the Saturn V did, drawing on Space Shuttle heritage โ its core stage uses upgraded Shuttle main engines and its boosters are extended versions of the Shuttle solid rocket boosters. It is powerful and it works, but it is fully expendable and extremely expensive per flight, which has made it a persistent target of criticism in an era of reusable rockets.
Orion carries the crew to lunar orbit and back. Its European Service Module โ supplied by ESA and built by Airbus โ provides propulsion, power, water, and oxygen. That dependency is a deliberate design choice: it binds international partners into the programme structurally rather than symbolically.
NASA selected a lunar variant of SpaceX's Starship as the Human Landing System that will actually carry crew from lunar orbit to the surface. It is enormous compared with the Apollo lunar module, and it depends on a technology nobody has yet demonstrated at scale: cryogenic propellant transfer between vehicles in orbit. Several tanker flights are required to fuel a single lunar landing.
Gateway is a compact outpost planned for a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon โ a highly elliptical path that is cheap to reach and stable to maintain. It serves as a staging point between Orion and the lander, and as a platform for science. Contributions come from ESA, JAXA, and CSA alongside NASA.
New spacesuits are also on the critical path. The Apollo-era suits are long retired and the ISS suits are designed for microgravity, not for walking, kneeling, and working in abrasive lunar dust. NASA contracted Axiom Space to develop the surface suit for the first landing โ a reminder that the unglamorous items are often what gates a schedule.
The Mission Sequence
Artemis I flew in November 2022. Uncrewed, it sent Orion beyond the Moon and back over roughly 25 days, validating SLS, the capsule, and reentry at lunar return velocity. It was broadly a success โ though post-flight inspection found the heat shield had eroded in an unexpected way, and resolving that took considerable time and contributed to subsequent delays.
Artemis II is the first crewed flight: a lunar flyby, not a landing, carrying four astronauts around the Moon and back. NASA named the crew in 2023 โ Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. It will be the first crewed lunar mission in over fifty years, and the first ever to include a woman, a person of colour, and a non-American.
Artemis III is the landing โ the mission that puts humans back on the surface, this time near the lunar south pole rather than the equatorial regions Apollo visited.
๐ Dates have moved repeatedly, and may move again. Artemis milestones have slipped several times as heat shield analysis, lander development, and spacesuit readiness have worked through. Rather than quote a target date that may already be stale, check our live launch tracker for the current scheduled window.
Why the South Pole
Apollo landed near the lunar equator because it was operationally simpler and the lighting was predictable. Artemis is going to the south pole for one reason: water ice.
The Moon's axial tilt is very slight, which means some crater floors near the poles have not seen sunlight in billions of years. These permanently shadowed regions are among the coldest places in the solar system, cold enough to have trapped water ice delivered over aeons by comets and micrometeorites. Orbital surveys mapped hydrogen concentrations consistent with buried ice, and in 2009 NASA's LCROSS mission deliberately crashed a spent rocket stage into a polar crater and detected water in the resulting plume.
Water on the Moon is not a scientific curiosity โ it is the entire economic argument. Water is drinking water. Split by electrolysis it becomes breathable oxygen. Split and cooled it becomes liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen: rocket propellant. Every kilogram of water already on the Moon is a kilogram that does not have to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well at enormous cost.
This is what makes a permanent presence conceivable rather than merely expensive. A base that can produce its own consumables and fuel is a fundamentally different proposition from one that must be resupplied from Earth indefinitely. Whether the ice is accessible enough, pure enough, and abundant enough to actually support this is one of the central open questions Artemis is meant to answer.
The polar location also brings real difficulties. Sunlight arrives at extremely low angles, casting long shadows and making navigation and landing harder. Temperatures in the shadowed regions are brutal for machinery. And the landing sites of most interest are, by definition, the ones that are hardest to see into.
Not a Race, But Not Not a Race
China has been running a methodical and highly successful lunar programme for years. Its Chang'e missions have landed on the near side, landed on the far side โ a first for any nation โ and returned samples from both, including the first-ever samples from the lunar far side. China has stated an intention to land astronauts on the Moon around 2030.
NASA officials generally avoid the language of a race, but the comparison shapes budget conversations in Washington in ways that are not subtle. The two programmes also differ in structure: Artemis is built around commercial contracts and a broad coalition of partner nations under the Artemis Accords, while China's programme is more vertically integrated and moves on a schedule it has so far met.
What Would Actually Count as Success
A single successful landing would be a genuine historic achievement and would dominate news coverage for a week. But it would not, on its own, mean Artemis had worked.
The real test is whether the programme survives the years after the flags-and-footprints moment โ whether Gateway gets built and used, whether resource extraction moves from concept to demonstration, whether missions keep flying once the novelty and the political payoff have faded. That is precisely where Apollo failed, and everyone involved knows it.
It is worth watching for that reason. Not for the landing itself, dramatic as it will be, but for what happens in the decade afterwards.