NASA is gunning the engine so it can reach the Moon — and soon build a base there — at incredible speed.
On Friday, the space agency’s administrator Jared Isaacman doubled down on its ambitious timeline to send astronauts to the Moon in just two years, which would be before the end of president Donald Trump’s term.
In a lengthy speech at the Kennedy Space Center last week, Isaacman reaffirmed that the space agency is on track to launch Artemis 3 next summer, a mission that won’t send astronauts to the Moon but will have them practice docking their spacecraft with lunar landers made either by Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin in Earth’s orbit. (The space agency still hasn’t finalized its decision on which vehicle it will be using for the landing, a major point of uncertainty.)
Artemis IV, still slated for 2028 at the time of writing, is when the astronauts will fly to the Moon and land on it for the first time in over half a century, where they’ll spend a week on the surface conducting scientific missions. That is, if everything goes according to plan.
