NASA announces major overhaul of Artemis moon program amid safety concerns, delays: “We’ve got to get back to basics”

New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced a major overhaul of how the agency operates. Artemis Lunar Program Friday, acknowledging that the agency’s plan to land astronauts on the Moon in 2028 was not realistic without another preparatory mission to lay the groundwork.

He said NASA would now add an additional flight in 2027 to conduct tests of new commercial landers in low Earth orbit, then launch at least one and possibly two Moon landing missions in 2028.

The goal is to accelerate the pace of launches of the massive Space Launch System rocket while carrying out Artemis flights in scalable stages – without attempting missions that rely on too many untested technologies and procedures simultaneously.

“We’re going to do this in stages, continuing to reduce risk as we learn more and incorporate that information into subsequent designs,” Isaacman told CBS News. “We have to get back to basics.”

Isaacman described the plan in an interview with CBS News Space Contributor Christian Davenport and then again at a news conference Friday.

This decision follows a very specific report from NASA’s independent Aerospace Security Advisory Committee, which deemed existing plans too risky.

This also comes as NASA has been hard to get started THE Artemis II mission delayed on a flight to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon.

The launch was scheduled for early February, but was delayed to repair a hydrogen leak and, more recently, to give engineers time to fix a problem pressurizing helium in the rocket’s upper stage. The launch is now on hold until at least April 1.

The Artemis III mission, which was to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole in 2028, will now be redefined and rescheduled: its launch will take place in 2027 but not on the Moon, Isaacman said. Instead, the yet-to-be-named astronauts will meet and dock in orbit closer to home with one or both of the commercially built lunar landers under development at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The idea is to gain valuable short-term flight experience before attempting a moon landing with astronauts on board. With Artemis III under its belt, NASA hopes to launch two moon landing missions in 2028, Artemis IV and V, using one or both landers, and continue with one shot at the moon per year thereafter.

“What helps us get to the Moon? Well, of course, the rendezvous and docking with one or ideally both landers, that gives you the opportunity to do integrated testing of a vehicle that we’re going to rely on the following year to take those astronauts to the surface of the Moon,” Isaacman told CBS News.

The revised Artemis III mission will also give astronauts the opportunity to test new spacesuits that future moonwalkers will use.

“It’s an opportunity to have the suits in microgravity, even if we don’t get out of the vehicle with them. You learn a lot from it,” Isaacman said.

The Artemis III test flight with one or two lander docks in Earth orbit is similar in concept to Apollo 9, which launched a command module and lander into Earth orbit for flight testing in 1969 and helped pave the way for the Apollo 11 land four months later.

Isaacman said SpaceX and Blue Origin “are both looking to demonstrate uncrewed landing under the existing agreement.”

“So we just want to take advantage of this to prepare both providers for future success on a moon landing,” he said. “It’s the right way to do it, if it works from a timing standpoint, to be able to meet and dock with both. … It’s again the right way to do it in order to have a confident landing opportunity in ’28.”

The Artemis IV and V missions in 2028 will use landers deemed ready for service. If only one lander from a company is available, that lander would be used for both missions, an official said. If both are available, one would be used for one flight and the other for the other.

Launching Artemis III, IV and V before the end of 2028 will not be easy, and Isaacman said it is critical that NASA replenishes its workforce and regains the technical skills needed to support a higher launch cadence, moving from one flight every 18 months or so to one flight every year. This pace, he argued, will reduce risks.

“When you get those basic skills back and you start exercising your muscles, your skills don’t atrophy,” he said. “It’s safer. And yes, you reduce the risk, because you’re able to test things in low Earth orbit before you have to go to the Moon, which is exactly what we did during the Apollo era.”

He said he doesn’t blame NASA contractors for the current slow pace of Artemis launches. Instead, “we should have made better decisions (in the past) and said we’re not going from Artemis II to landing on the moon with Artemis III.”

Safety advisers called for changes to ‘high risk’ plans

The Artemis redesign was announced two days after the release of a report from the Aerospace Security Advisory Committee that found the original plan to go directly from Artemis II to a 2028 Moon landing using a SpaceX lander did not have the appropriate safety margin and did not appear realistically achievable.

The panel expressed concerns about the number of “firsts” required by this mission in its current form and recommended that NASA “restructure the Artemis program to create a more balanced risk posture for Artemis III and future missions.”

The plan outlined by Isaacman appears to answer many of the fundamental questions raised by the safety committee.

Officials said Isaacman discussed accelerating development of the lander with SpaceX and Blue Origin and both agreed. He also discussed the accelerated overhaul of Artemis with Boeing, which is managing the SLS rocket and building its massive first stage; with United Launch Alliance, builder of the rocket’s upper stage, Lockheed Martin, builder of Orion, and other Artemis contractors.

All, the official said, were in agreement.

“Boeing is a proud partner of the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA’s vision for American space leadership,” Steve Parker, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a statement. “We are ready to meet the growing demand.”

Isaacman also said the agency would halt work to develop a more powerful version of the SLS rocket’s upper stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS. Instead, NASA will move forward with a “standardized” stage, which is less powerful but will minimize major changes between flights and use the same launch gantry.

Under the original Artemis architecture, NASA planned several versions of the SLS rocket, ranging from the currently used “Block 1” vehicle to a more powerful EUS-equipped Block 1B and possibly an even larger Block 2 model using advanced solid rocket boosters. The latter two versions required the use of a larger mobile launch gantry, already under construction at the Kennedy Space Center.

“It is unnecessarily complicated to change the SLS and Orion stack configuration to undertake subsequent Artemis missions,” NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement.

“The entire sequence of Artemis flights must represent step-by-step capacity building, with each step bringing us closer to our ability to carry out the landing missions. Each step must be large enough to progress, but not so large that we take unnecessary risks given previous learnings.”

As a result, NASA will stick with the current version of the SLS with the addition of the “standardized” upper stage. No further details were provided.

Isaacman closed the CBS interview by saying that flight-tested equipment, a revitalized workforce and a more Apollo-like management strategy are only part of the story.

“There is another ingredient that is necessary, and that is orbital economics, whether it happens in low Earth orbit or on the lunar surface,” Isaacman said.

“We need to do something that allows us to get more value out of space and the lunar surface than we put into it. And that’s how you really start an economy, and that’s how everything we want to do in space isn’t perpetually dependent on taxpayers.”