5–7 minutes

Updated 9:45 p.m. Eastern with post-launch briefing details.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The first human mission beyond Earth orbit in more than 50 years is underway with an April 1 launch of four astronauts on a flight around the moon.

The Space Launch System rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39B here at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on the Artemis 2 mission. After a normal ascent, the SLS upper stage and Orion spacecraft separated from the core stage about eight minutes later in a low transfer orbit.

“It was an amazing ride uphill,” Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman said in a transmission from Orion about three hours after launch.

During the countdown controllers reported an issue with the rocket’s flight termination system and, later, with one of the batteries in the launch abort system. Both issues were resolved before the opening of the launch window. Controllers also addressed a brief loss of telemetry from the vehicle.

On board the Orion spacecraft, called Integrity by its crew, are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman is the commander of Artemis 2 and Glover the pilot, with Koch and Hansen serving as mission specialists.

The upper stage, called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage or ICPS, performed a burn of its RL10 engine 49 minutes after liftoff to raise its perigee to 185 kilometers, ensuring it is in a stable orbit. A second burn about an hour later raised its apogee to more than 70,000 kilometers. Artemis 2 liftoff The Space Launch System ascends towards orbit on the Artemis 2 launch April 1. Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust

Shortly after reaching orbit, NASA reported a loss of communications with Orion. Those communications were restored a short time later, and agency officials said a configuration issue during a handover between communications satellites may have caused the dropouts.

Astronauts also reported some other minor issues with Orion, such as problems setting up the toilet in the spacecraft, but nothing that appeared to jeopardize plans for the flight.

Orion will spend a day in this highly elliptical orbit, separating from the ICPS nearly three and a half hours after liftoff. The four astronauts will manually maneuver Orion around the ICPS and test spacecraft systems before Orion’s main engine fires to send the spacecraft on a free-return trajectory around the moon, with a splashdown off the coast from San Diego, California, late April 10.

Once Orion successfully performs that maneuver, the Artemis 2 crew will be the first humans to travel beyond Earth orbit since the three-man Apollo 17 crew in December 17.

“We’re looking to make sure that the life support system works” before performing the translunar injection, or TLI, maneuver, Norm Knight, director of the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said at a post-launch briefing. “We are sure those are functional because once we commit to TLI, they have to function.”

He said controllers will also check to make sure vehicle systems handled the rigors of launch without problems, and that they have redundant communications, propulsion and other systems.

The workload on that first day will be among the hardest on the mission, Knight said, because of the level of activities checking out Orion ahead of the TLI maneuver. “They may not be feeling well on top of that” as they adjust to weightlessness, he added.

Artemis 2 is key test of Orion for future missions that send humans to the surface of the moon. When the Artemis 2 crew was named three years ago, the mission was scheduled to launch in late 2024 as a prelude to a landing attempt on Artemis 3 a year later. However, Artemis 2’s launch slipped by more than a year, primarily because of work to characterize the heat shield on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in late 2022 that suffered more erosion than expected.

Under revised plans NASA announced in late February, Artemis 3 will instead test Orion’s ability to rendezvous and dock with lunar landers under development by Blue Origin and SpaceX while in Earth orbit. That mission is projected to launch in mid-2027.

NASA’s first attempt to land humans on the moon since Apollo 17 is planned for Artemis 4 in early 2028, with a second landing attempt on Artemis 5 in late 2028. NASA will determine whether to use Blue Origin’s or SpaceX’s landers based on the progress the two companies make.

The Artemis 2 crew endorsed the revisions to the upcoming Artemis missions and plans by NASA announced March 24 to establish a moon base over the next decade.

“That fired us up. That gave us a lot of hope,” Wiseman said at a March 29 briefing. He said the crew changed their schedule to meet with planners for the revamped Artemis 3 “to go through all the things we want to feed forward in Artemis 3.”

“All of a sudden, the tempo has picked up. We are fired up. We are ready to go,” he said.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the post-launch briefing that he spoke with the crew after the Feb. 24 State of the Union address, which both he and the crew attended. He said he told them some of the details about the agency’s revised exploration plans that NASA announced one month later.

“It was very energizing for the crew,” he recalled. “This is a risky mission, for sure. Any type of new test flight mission going in this environment is going to be challenging. They knew it was building up to something bigger.”

6–7 minutes

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — While the Artemis 2 mission is primarily a test flight, the four astronauts on board will conduct some science during the nearly 10-day mission.

At a March 29 briefing, NASA officials said preparations for the mission, the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, are going well, with no major issues being worked. Forecasts call for an 80% chance of favorable weather for a liftoff in a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. Eastern April 1.

The mission, the first flight of humans beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972, is principally a test flight, allowing the four-person crew to test spacecraft systems and vehicle performance.

However, there will be some science on the mission as well. Much of that will be concentrated about five days into the mission when Orion swings around the moon on its free-return trajectory, passing within several thousand kilometers of the lunar surface.

“Science wasn’t in the driver’s seat to define what Artemis 2 is,” said Jacob Richardson, deputy lead of Artemis 2 lunar science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a panel discussion at the Goddard Space System Symposium March 12. “Instead, we are using Artemis 2 as an opportunity to get science to prepare for our later Artemis missions when science is more of a driver.”

During the close approach, astronauts will observe the moon with the naked eye along with handheld cameras. Besides photos, they will document what they see both verbally and in annotations on tablets.

“Human beings are the most sophisticated detector there is, and they’ll be giving some very nuanced verbal descriptions,” said Kelsey Young, science flight operations lead for NASA’s Artemis internal science team, at the symposium.

The images that the astronauts take will be at far lower resolution than the best images from spacecraft such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Given the distance of the flyby, the moon will appear about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.

Scientists will support the Artemis 2 mission in a room adjacent to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz

However, the observations do offer some advantages. One is the ability to take in the whole disk of the moon, including regions of the lunar farside not seen directly by the human eye before. “They’ll have this interesting perspective that enables them to contextualize the observations they see in one section of the moon to another section of the moon in the blink of an eye,” Young said.

Another advantage is preparation for future missions on the lunar surface. While crews have not been selected for later Artemis missions, astronauts have started training for such missions, ranging from a one-week “Lunar Fundamentals” course to fieldwork.

Young said that the Artemis 2 astronauts have embraced the opportunity to do lunar science after some initial skepticism. “We had a lot of questions from the crew over the first few months of training: ‘What can our observations tell you about science that orbiting spacecraft cannot?’” she recalled.

“We really rose to the challenge of convincing them that your words carry scientific weight. What you describe helps us, the lunar science community, really unlock these high-priority mysteries that we have,” she said.

The astronauts have embraced those observations. “The scientists are really excited about getting these four sets of human eyes, the best cameras in the universe, close to the moon,” Victor Glover, pilot of Artemis 2, said in a March 29 briefing. “It’s not any specific thing, but being able to observe the moon and cosmic phenomena with the human eye up close.”

One example he cited was a report by Jack Schmitt, a geologist who walked on the moon on Apollo 17, who noted that once astronauts were within about 5,000 kilometers of the moon, they were able to see traces of color in an otherwise grayscale terrain from specific minerals. “That is one of the things I am really looking forward to, being closer and seeing some of that detail.”

The April launch window has a bonus science opportunity, as the trajectory for a launch in the early days of that period would create a solar eclipse as the moon blocks the sun from the perspective of Orion.

“This is something new that we just started learning about last week,” said Jeremy Hansen, a mission specialist on Artemis 2. The mission’s science team “right away came up with some instruction for us on how we can leverage this opportunity to look for things they’re interested in on the moon.”

There will be a science team at the Johnson Space Center during the mission, coordinating the observations by the astronauts, along with a science officer in Mission Control itself. “For the first time ever, science has a seat in the control room,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, at a March 26 symposium by the Universities Space Research Association and Space Policy Institute.

Artemis 2 will perform additional science beyond lunar observations. An example is A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response, or AVATAR, an experiment that will fly “organs on a chip” to study the effects of radiation and microgravity using bone marrow tissue samples taken from the four Artemis 2 astronauts.

Other experiments include movement and sleep monitors worn by the astronauts and studies of their immune systems. The German space agency DLR will provide radiation monitors for the mission like those flown on Artemis 1.

“We want to think about how we pack these small but mighty technologies into every single opportunity that we have,” Fox said. “We plan to take advantage of every human mission to be able to try to do these kinds of things.”

She added that the Artemis 2 astronauts were willing participants in AVATAR. “They actually think it’s really cool,” she said. “Victor remarked, ‘It’s like having an extra four crewmembers.’”

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WASHINGTON — While NASA outlined plans to increase the cadence of robotic lunar lander missions at a recent event, the agency has said little about how companies will speed up work on landers that will take astronauts to the lunar surface.

At NASA’s “Ignition” event March 24, the agency discussed its new effort to develop a lunar base, a process whose first two phases will span seven years and cost $20 billion.

A major part of that plan is dramatically increasing the rate of robotic lunar lander missions, something agency officials had been hinting about for weeks leading up to the event, with a goal of monthly lunar landing missions. NASA-backed companies performed two landings in 2025, with up to four projected for 2026.

“Phase 1, which starts today, is all about getting to the moon reliably,” Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for Moon Base at NASA, said in a presentation at the event. “Learning how to get there in high cadence, deploying assets in different areas of the moon where we think we may want to build this moon base.”

That phase, which runs from 2026 through 2028, will include 21 landings placing 4,000 kilograms of payload on the surface. Garcia-Galan said in the presentation NASA was planning on only two landers in 2026, but increasing rapidly to nine in 2027 and 10 in 2028.

He said those lander plans will depend “on what we get from solicitations we have on the books today” and thus should be considered approximations.

Phase 2, which runs from 2029 through 2032, calls for 24 landings providing 60,000 kilograms of payload. That would include larger robotic landers through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program capable of delivering up to 5,000 kilograms each.

“The numbers look smaller, but all of these systems are heavier,” he said, with an average of six landings a year during Phase 2. “This is the type of cadence we think we’re going to need to develop this moon base in the timeframes that we want.”

Phase 3, starting in 2033, would include CLPS landers capable of delivering up to eight metric tons each to the lunar surface, supporting regular logistics missions to the lunar surface and the return of cargo from the moon. That phase involves 28 landings over four years.

“The CLPS program is one of the tools that we’re going to leverage pretty heavily,” he said. However, he said the program would evolve from its origins for low-cost, risk-tolerant landers.

“We want to increase mission reliability, and that starts now,” he said. Updates to the program will allow CLPS providers to access NASA expertise for lander development.

NASA also issued March 24 a draft request for proposals for CLPS 2.0, the next phase of the CLPS program. It would support more capable landers, such as those capable of surviving the lunar night, returning samples from the moon and using radioisotope power sources.

In an interview during the event, Garcia-Galan said that increasing the cadence of robotic lander missions was an immediate priority. “It is the one area that I want to focus on first, because it’s not in our experience base to achieve that cadence,” he said.

Doing so, he said, will help find “chokepoints” in the lander ecosystem, such as manufacturing, test facilities or technologies. “Identifying that and addressing it is the number one priority here.”

He also emphasized an increased focus on reliability, with NASA offering more support to CLPS providers. “We know how to land things on a different planet,” he said. “We’re going to identify those subject matter experts. We’re going to identify the key things that we can offer.”

That is a shift from the original CLPS model, a “shots on goal” philosophy where the agency expected some missions to fail.

“It’s an evolution,” he said. “It’s shots on goal and win the game.” CLPS award

NASA used the Ignition event to announce the latest CLPS award. The agency said it selected Intuitive Machines for a mission to the lunar south polar region in 2030 valued at $180.4 million.

The lander will carry seven NASA-sponsored payloads, including some instruments that have flown on previous landers. Also on the lander will be two small rovers, one built by Honeybee Robotics and the other “Roo-ver” from the Australian Space Agency.

The mission, designated IM-5 by Intuitive Machines, features a different lander design than its first four missions, which use a lander design called Nova-C. The IM-5 mission will use Nova-D, a lander capable of carrying larger payloads.

“We believe our space infrastructure provides the scalability and flexibility needed to support an increased cadence of new Artemis missions and advance national objectives,” Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in a statement. HLS update

Notably absent from the event was any major news about the Human Landing System (HLS) program. NASA officials have talked about accelerating the development of the landers Blue Origin and SpaceX are developing under HLS to support human lunar landings as soon as 2028, as well as a test of the landers in Earth orbit with the Orion spacecraft on Artemis 3 in 2027.

However, neither the agency nor the companies have disclosed details of “acceleration plans” the companies have developed to speed up landers. NASA provided few updates on those efforts during the event.

“The intent with this change, and working with both providers, is to fly with whichever provider is ready first,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in the presentation.

She said both companies are working on “simplifying” their lander architectures to speed up their development, while retaining the requirement of a successful uncrewed landing before attempting a crewed landing.

“SpaceX has been considering alternatives of their current HLS Starship design while implementing a more streamlined approach,” she said. “The Blue Origin approach implements existing capabilities that they have today as a steppingstone toward their eventual full-capacity architecture.”

She didn’t go into details about those concepts but said that both companies have requested using alternatives to the near-rectilinear halo orbit NASA had planned to use for the Gateway. Doing so, she said, would reduce the performance requirements on the lander while increasing mission planning flexibility.

Other changes, Glaze said, involve changes to surface requirements to make them “simple and sustainable” while allowing them to be expanded in the future. “The simplification of the requirements allows us to focus on achieving the near-term goals while also preserving the long-term goals through evolution of the lander capabilities.”

She didn’t state in the presentation when NASA will disclose more details on the companies’ HLS acceleration approaches. “They’ve both come up with some pretty good, credible suggestions for how we can accelerate,” she said in an interview after the presentation.

NASA is studying how those alternative approaches, including use of different orbits, will work with Orion. “It’s critically important that we understand how the systems are going to interact together, the interfaces they’re proposing, some differences in the mission operations,” she said.

“We’ve been working it for a little while, but we still have a little bit more to go to get that complete,” she said.

Once that’s done, NASA will be ready to discuss how it wants to proceed. “We’ll be able to say, here’s how we want to work with each provider, what we’d like them to really push forward on their development,” she said. “That will also then feed backward to what we want to test during Artemis 3.”

5–7 minutes

WASHINGTON — The four Artemis 2 astronauts arrived in Florida March 27 for final preparations ahead of a launch still scheduled as soon as April 1.

The four Artemis 2 astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — flew from Ellington Field in Houston to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on NASA T-38 jets. They were accompanied by the two backups for the mission, Andre Douglas and Jenni Gibbons.

The astronauts arrived five days before the earliest launch opportunity for Artemis 2, a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. Eastern. There are additional two-hour windows daily through April 6.

NASA has provided limited updates on progress toward launch since the mobile platform carrying the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft returned to Launch Complex 39B March 20, following repairs in the Vehicle Assembly Building to restore the flow of helium into the upper stage.

A top NASA official said in a recent interview that launch preparations have been going smoothly. “I am not tracking any big issues, not even any small issues, that are in our way for next week,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, on the sidelines of NASA’s Ignition event March 24. “Right now, things are moving very well and on schedule, even a little ahead.”

She said at that time that the agency was just starting to look at weather forecasts for the first launch attempt. A March 27 forecast issued by the Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron showed a 10% chance of precipitation on April 1, with partly cloudy conditions and light winds.

The Artemis 2 astronauts, in medical quarantine since March 18, said in comments after arrival at KSC that they felt ready to launch but acknowledged everything might not go well on the first attempt.

“We’re ready to launch, but we’re also humans trying to load millions of pounds of propellant onto a giant machine and send it to the moon,” said Wiseman, the mission commander, noting the first launch attempt will be the first time the crew have gotten in Orion atop a fully fueled SLS on the pad.

“It could very well be we get on April 1st and we’re behind timeline and we’re just not ready as a team,” he said, resulting in a scrub of one or two days.

“If we get off on the 3rd, great. If we get off on the 6th, great. If we’ve got an issue and we’ve got to come back in May or June or whenever the team and the vehicle are ready, we are ready for that,” he said.

Wiseman said the astronauts did not see anything surprising during a flight readiness review earlier this month that approved plans for an April 1 launch.

“For us, the thing that caught the attention of most was that everything that was briefed we expected,” he said. “There was not a single surprise in that entire flight readiness review.”

The astronauts have also completed mission simulations. “What we just did in front of you was the last simulation,” Glover, the mission pilot, said, referring to the flight of T-38 jets to KSC. The crew recently performed a day of ascent and entry simulations in Houston, working with the flight controllers on those phases of flight.

“The delays that we’ve had since we went into quarantine the first time in January have opened up opportunities to just really imprint some of the learning that we had already done,” he said. “We’ve made the most of this time.”

The launch preparations have coincided with changes to later aspects of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign. NASA announced Feb. 27 that Artemis 3 would now become a mission in Earth orbit in mid-2027 to test rendezvous and docking operations between Orion and lunar landers, followed in 2028 by landing attempts on Artemis 4 and 5. NASA revealed March 24 its intent to effectively cancel the lunar Gateway and instead work on a lunar base.

“We have talked a lot about the exciting changes that have been announced,” said Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis 2. “It has been motivating, it has been inspiring and it has fired us up.”

She said the crew has made additional reviews of its training to see how to prepare the next Artemis crew, yet to be announced by the agency.

Koch is slated to be the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit, while Hansen, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut who is the other mission specialist, will be the first non-American to do so.

“I feel a lot of things, to be sure. I feel a great sense of pride for Canada,” Hansen said. “It is time to continue to evolve our vision as Canadians. What can we continue to do, what can we do next.”

“The point’s not being the first,” he added, “it’s making sure you’re not the last.”

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WASHINGTON — NASA’s new exploration strategy includes the rapid development of a nuclear-powered mission to Mars in 2028, leveraging hardware originally built for the lunar Gateway.

As part of the agency’s “Ignition” event March 24, NASA announced a mission called Space Reactor 1 (SR-1) Freedom. That spacecraft, launching at the end of 2028, would use a nuclear electric propulsion system to go to Mars.

“After decades of study and millions spent on concepts that have never left Earth, America will finally get underway on nuclear power in space,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the event.

SR-1 Freedom will use a nuclear reactor that NASA plans to develop, generating 20 kilowatts of electrical power using high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The reactor will be placed at one end of a truss to protect spacecraft electronics from the radiation it produces.

At the other end of the truss will be the Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, that NASA had planned to use on the Gateway. During the event, NASA announced it no longer planned to develop the Gateway, directing funding and capabilities from the Gateway to a lunar base.

PPE, being built by Lanteris Space Systems, was originally designed to provide both power and electric propulsion for the Gateway. It will be adapted to become the electric propulsion system for SR-1 Freedom, using power from the reactor.

“PPE gives us a huge leg up. That’s the only thing that makes this achievable,” Steve Sinacore, program executive for NASA’s Fission Surface Power program, said in an interview. “That’s a very capable spacecraft bus that is going to be adaptable.”

Between the reactor and the PPE will be radiators for heat rejection from the reactor. The spacecraft will have some solar arrays to provide additional power, particularly immediately after launch, before the reactor is activated.

In his presentation at Ignition, Sinacore described SR-1 as a “pathfinder” for space nuclear power and propulsion, an effort that has made little progress for decades despite multiple efforts that have spent a combined $20 billion.

“The lack of an operational space nuclear reactor is not a technology problem. It’s an execution problem,” he said. He cited four “failure modes” for past projects, including a lack of sustained mission pull for the technology, overly ambitious projects, unrealistic timelines and fragmented leadership. Those factors mirror an assessment published by the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) last summer.

“SR-1 Freedom is designed to break every one of those patterns,” he said, with the demand for the technology for a Mars mission, a reactor that is relatively small, a firm timeline to meet the Mars launch window and clear leadership by NASA.

NASA’s initial response to the INL report was to pursue development of a nuclear reactor for the moon through the Fission Surface Power program, which would have used a reactor developed by industry. However, that effort appeared to stall after two draft requests for proposals.

SR-1 Freedom will take a different development approach. “We’re going to bring this in-house, with NASA as the prime. We’re going to leverage the expertise of the Department of Energy to design and assemble the reactor,” he said in the interview.

“We realized that when we went out and said, ‘Industry, you do it all,’ that was a big ask,” he said of the earlier Fission Surface Power plans, with challenges that went beyond technology to topics like launch authority and indemnification. “This really is a NASA near-impossible thing. Let’s trailblaze, let’s be the pathfinder, and then hand off to them.”

He said that NASA planned to share the reactor design for SR-1 Freedom with industry. “No one owns proprietary rights to it. It will be to the benefit of all the reactor companies.”

The reactor design is intended to be extensible to future missions. That includes Lunar Reactor 1, a reactor to generate power on the surface of the moon that would launch in 2030. “In the 2030s we will scale up and move into production,” he said at the briefing, including systems capable of producing hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts of power.

SR-1 Freedom will do more than simply test nuclear electric propulsion. Upon arriving at Mars a year after launch, it will deploy a science payload called SkyFall, featuring three helicopters based on the Ingenuity helicopter that accompanied the Perseverance rover.

The helicopters will study a potential future human landing site on Mars, Sinacore said, including looking for subsurface water ice.

“They’re going to be very, very similar in capabilities to Ingenuity,” Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said at a press conference at the end of the daylong event. “They’re going to have cameras on them to be able to take images, but they’re not going to be full-up heavy science birds.”

The agency is still studying what to do with SR-1 Freedom once it reaches Mars and deploys SkyFall.

“We have not decided where the mission will end,” Sinacore said, including options to enter orbit around Mars or fly by it to another destination that could further test the nuclear electric propulsion system. “We do want to push the bounds with this demonstrator.”

5–7 minutes

WASHINGTON — NASA, concerned about slow development of commercial markets, is considering revamping its strategy for supporting the creation of commercial space stations to succeed the International Space Station.

At its March 24 “Ignition” event where NASA outlined sweeping changes to its exploration strategy, including redirecting work on the Gateway towards a lunar base and flying a nuclear propulsion demonstration mission to Mars as soon as 2028, the agency said it is weighing an alternative approach to help establish commercial ISS successors.

NASA’s current strategy, under its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, has been to fund initial work by several companies on their designs. Those companies have been awaiting a call for proposals for the second phase of the CLD program, where NASA would provide additional funding for development and demonstration of those stations ahead of purchasing services from them.

The intent of the CLD program was for NASA to be one customer of many for those stations, with companies and other space agencies also using those facilities. But at the Ignition event, agency officials said they were increasingly concerned that the business case for those stations was not closing.

“Though we have seen investor interest, there’s no independently verifiable market research indicating the economic viability of a commercial station that is only partially funded by NASA,” Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager, said in a presentation.

The projected market, she said later, has not emerged as fast as originally projected.

“Many years ago, when we started this program, the data we had was that we’re 10 years away from a mature market,” she said. “As we’ve watched over time, these independent market research surveys continue to tell us it’s about that far out.”

Another concern is the lack of resources by the companies to handle the “incredibly complicated” logistics and operations of a space station, argued NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya.

“Right now, the current industry that we have that’s proposing to build destinations does not have direct experience with that, or the resources,” he said.

A constrained budget, he added, makes it impossible for NASA to provide greater support to companies under the current approach. “In the absence of a mature market, and then in the current budget we’ve been allocated, we cannot fund a path of two stations. It’s a challenge even fund one,” he said.

“The original path that we had laid out is fraught with a lot of high risks,” Weigel said.

NASA plans to seek input from industry on two approaches. One would continue the agency’s current plans with CLD, but the other would involve NASA taking a larger role in supporting development of a commercial space station.

In the latter approach, NASA would procure a core module that would be attached to the ISS. It would provide basic services such as power, propulsion and life support, as well as several docking ports. Additional commercial modules could be attached to those ports.

Ultimately, that core module and commercial modules would detach from the ISS as a standalone commercial station, potentially taking with it some ISS modules.

“A NASA-procured core would serve as a hub for commercial module expansion, allowing for maturation of industry and continued demand growth after the station detaches from ISS,” Weigel said.

A decade ago, NASA said it would offer an ISS port for use by a commercial module as a precursor to a standalone space station. NASA awarded that docking port to Axiom Space in 2020, which plans to use it for a core module it is developing for its own commercial space station.

Weigel said the core module NASA is proposing is “not aligned with any one vendor” like Axiom Space. “My hope is that there’s a lot of broad interest in the core module overall, and I think there are a lot of capabilities that are in design, on their way, and are applicable.”

The agency wants to move quickly on that alternative approach. Based on feedback NASA gets from the request for information, a draft request for proposals for the core module could be ready in a few months, she said.

NASA would supplement that core module with other efforts to stimulate commercial demand. That includes increasing the number of private astronaut missions to the ISS from one to two per year and allowing companies to sell the seat currently reserved for the mission’s commander. That could include selling the seat to NASA for an agency astronaut to fly on such missions.

Officials made clear they had no intent to extend the life of the ISS indefinitely. NASA’s current plans call for the ISS to be retired in 2030 and deorbited, although a Senate NASA authorization bill would extend the station’s life to 2032.

“It is still our job to pivot and go move to transitioning to space stations that are commercially owned and commercial operated in 2030,” Weigel said. “Our overall goal has not changed at all. We are just trying to change the approach to an incremental one.”

“No one here is trying to make the case of keeping ISS up until the end of time,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “The idea is to make the transition the right way, and we have to put everything out on the table on this one right now.”

5–7 minutes

WASHINGTON — NASA is proposing a sharp increase in the rate of robotic lunar lander missions, a move that has excited but also puzzled the space community.

In recent days, NASA officials including Administrator Jared Isaacman has discussed a new effort, yet to be formally announced, that would call for sending robotic landers to the moon as frequently as monthly, potentially to support development of a future lunar base.

“I want landers on the moon, at the south pole, on a monthly cadence starting at the beginning of 2027,” Isaacman said in an interview with Spaceflight Now published March 13.

Those missions, he said, would leverage the capabilities of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program that acquires commercial lunar landers for delivering science and technology demonstration payloads. He suggested those missions would be tied to plans, mentioned in a space policy executive order in December, to create the “initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost” by 2030.

“We are going to plus-up for moonbase construction in a huge way,” he said. “Every time one of those landers comes down, we are going to learn something.”

Other agency officials have also talked about a major increase in robotic lunar landings. “The goal of Administrator Isaacman is 30 landings in three years,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, in a March 13 speech at the Goddard Space Science Symposium.

“You’re going to see an increase in our desire to do robotic precursor missions as we go forward in order to actually give ourselves a credible shot at aggregating a lunar base in the right spot,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA associate administrator, in a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) March 16.

Those officials have provided few details about those plans to ramp up robotic lunar landings. “In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to bring a lot of people together in DC to talk about a handful of major initiatives,” Isaacman said, which would include those landing plans as well as other elements to accelerate the overall Artemis architecture.

Some industry officials expect any announcement of an accelerated pace of robotic landings to be tied to the release of the administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, expected in the coming weeks.

The effort will be “CLPS-like,” Kshatriya said, but added that it would be open to other means to send landers to the moon. “The procurement method, how we would do it, I think that’s still open.”

“We’re looking at how the government would work with industry from a CLPS-like construct, how we would reduce barriers with industry so they can achieve a relatively high flight rate,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a panel discussion at LPSC March 18.

A bigger issue than contracting mechanisms is whether companies are able to fly landers on a monthly cadence. The CLPS program has conducted four missions to date, with Astrobotic Technology and Firefly Aerospace each launching one lander and Intuitive Machines two landers.

Some in industry are skeptical that a monthly cadence is feasible in the foreseeable future, given that companies currently developing landers are flying them at a rate of no more than one a year. While there are about a dozen companies that are part of CLPS, most have yet to win a CLPS task order, and it’s unclear if some of the companies are still pursuing the landers they proposed to NASA.

There is also low success rate of CLPS missions so far. Of the four lander missions, only Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 mission a year ago was a complete success. The two Intuitive Machines landers fell over upon landing that limited their performance, particularly on the IM-2 mission last year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander malfunctioned hours after launch in January 2024 and was unable to attempt a landing.

At a NASA town hall session during LPSC, agency officials noted there are four CLPS missions currently scheduled for launch this year: Astrobotic’s Griffin-1, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-3. However, schedules for some of the missions are expected to slip in 2027; in the presentation, Blue Ghost 2 has a launch date of no earlier than December.

Scientists at LPSC, though, were excited about the prospect of an increased cadence of lander missions, and NASA officials said that there will be opportunities to fly science instruments of some kind on all of them.

“We have heard directly from the administrator, ‘I want science on everything. Everything that goes has to have science,’” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate, on the LPSC panel. “It is music to my ears.”

“From our perspective, that is super exciting,” said Ben Greenhagen, chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, in an online meeting of that committee after the LPSC panel. He noted that the science won’t necessarily involve “exquisite, bespoke instruments” but may include tech demos.

One issue, he said, is how to fund the science instruments to take advantage of that increased cadence of landers, and do so without taking money away from other planetary science programs. “We don’t want to become the pariahs of the planetary community, where everyone is blaming us for missions being canceled.”

6–8 minutes

WASHINGTON — NASA has disqualified one of the two proposals for a large astrophysics mission, a decision the project’s leader blames on upheaval within the agency last year.

In a March 9 email, Christopher Reynolds, principal investigator for the proposed Advanced X-Ray Imaging Satellite, or AXIS, told members of the project team that NASA Headquarters had informed him the mission was “not eligible for selection.”

The decision came before NASA reviewed a concept study recently completed by the AXIS team and is instead based on the project’s own assessment that it missed its budget and schedule requirements, he said in the email, seen by SpaceNews.

“I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better,” he wrote.

NASA, in a March 10 statement to SpaceNews, confirmed that it was no longer considering AXIS for its Astrophysics Probe Explorer program.

“Throughout NASA’s standard selection process for science missions, there are multiple points at which the agency evaluates mission concepts against established selection criteria and compliance requirements and makes decisions about how to proceed,” the agency said. “NASA has confirmed the AXIS (Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) Probe concept was not compliant with the 2023 Astrophysics Probe Explorer Announcement of Opportunity.”

In October 2024, NASA selected AXIS, an X-ray telescope with high spatial resolution, along with the Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics, or PRIMA, a far-infrared telescope, as the two finalists for the first Probe mission. This would be a new line of missions in the astrophysics division that, like other Explorer missions, would be competitively selected but have a higher cost cap of $1 billion.

AXIS and PRIMA each received $5 million contracts to perform one-year concept studies to refine their proposed missions. NASA then planned to select one of the missions for development, with a launch in 2032.

Reynolds said the work on the concept study was affected by disruptions at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which provided project management for AXIS.

“In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the federal government,” he wrote.

One issue was NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program, a buyout program that resulted in about 20% of the agency’s civil servant workforce leaving in 2025. Reynolds said that included more than 20 key people at Goddard working on AXIS, such as its project manager and lead for the spacecraft’s X-ray mirrors, a key technology for the mission.

A second issue was Goddard’s response to the administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal for NASA, which sought steep cuts to science programs, including termination of the Probe program. While that funding was largely restored in a final appropriations bill by Congress in January, he said there was reduced access to engineering and mission formulation personnel at Goddard during the summer and fall.

AXIS was also affected by the government shutdown that lasted a month and a half in October and November. While NASA extended the deadline for the concept studies by six weeks, from Dec. 18 to Jan. 29, that was “inadequate compensation,” he wrote.

Those three factors affected the AXIS team’s ability to fit the mission into NASA’s cost and schedule requirements. An initial “grassroots” cost estimate, completed only in September, put AXIS about 10% over budget. NASA’s deadlines, exacerbated by the government shutdown, kept the team from implementing cost and schedule savings it had identified.

Reynolds said that left the team with two options: submit a study that did not meet NASA’s cost and schedule requirements or not submit the study at all.

“We of course proceeded with the submission,” he wrote, planning to discuss how AXIS would meet those cost and schedule requirements during the review process. “NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable.”

Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, said NASA’s decision not to consider AXIS was not a judgment of its technology and science. He said members of the AXIS team demonstrated advances in key technologies, such as X-ray mirrors and sensors, needed for the mission, and that the science case for the spacecraft “only became stronger during our Phase A study.”

NASA’s decision to disqualify AXIS leaves PRIMA as the only candidate for the next Probe mission. NASA has not disclosed how that might affect the selection process. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said at an American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference in early January that the agency expected to make a Probe mission selection by the end of the fiscal year.

The dismissal of AXIS has concerned many in the X-ray astrophysics community, who worry about the field’s future. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, itself threatened with budget cuts and termination in recent budget proposals, is more than 25 years old. There are few options for large missions like it in the foreseeable future beyond NASA’s collaboration with the European Space Agency on its NewAthena X-ray observatory, slated for launch in the late 2030s.

Domagal-Goldman said at the AAS meeting that he expected NASA to focus technology development funding for future large astrophysics missions on the field not selected for the Probe mission, which in this case would be X-ray astronomy.

“I want the community to know that, no matter what happens with the probe, both the X-ray and the far-infrared communities have something to look forward to in the future,” he said.

“NASA will share details about future additional opportunities for the X-ray astrophysics community in the coming weeks,” the agency said in its statement to SpaceNews.

Reynolds wrote that he sees opportunities for X-ray astronomy to pursue “focused, high-impact” missions with smaller Explorer-class spacecraft, leveraging the science cases and technologies developed for AXIS.

He also expressed support for PRIMA. “There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA,” he wrote, “and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight.”

8–10 minutes

WASHINGTON — The Senate Commerce Committee advanced a revised NASA authorization bill that implements some of the changes to the Artemis lunar exploration effort sought by the agency while also extending the life of the International Space Station.

The committee passed on a voice vote March 4 an amended version of S. 933, a NASA authorization act originally introduced nearly a year ago. The committee also approved nearly 20 additional amendments from various committee members with the same vote.

The new version of the bill supports changes that NASA is seeking to make to Artemis that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced at a Feb. 27 briefing.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chairman of the committee, referred to those changes to Artemis in his opening remarks. “Today, the Commerce Committee will help guide those changes with the NASA Authorization Act,” he said. “Our bill authorizes critical funding for and gives strategic direction to the agency, in line with the priorities of Administrator Isaacman and the Trump Administration.”

At the Feb. 27 briefing, NASA announced it would not proceed with upgrades to the Space Launch System, sticking instead to a “near Block 1” version. In a March 3 statement, NASA confirmed that meant it no longer sought to develop the Exploration Upper Stage for the Block 1B version of SLS.

“Subject to the availability of appropriations, the Administrator may seek to identify and fund an alternative technology to replace the Exploration Upper Stage,” the Senate bill states, provided the administrator of NASA determines the stage is “unlikely to achieve the mission goals of the Artemis campaign.”

The bill would instead require NASA to provide a briefing on the issues the agency is facing trying to achieve a higher flight rate of the SLS and plans to address this with a “standardization” of the rocket.

Another section of the Senate bill authorizes NASA to develop a base on the moon, building on a provision in a White House executive order on space policy in December that called on NASA to establish the “initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost” by 2030.

“As soon as practicable, the Administrator shall undertake activities necessary to establish a Lunar Surface Moon Base to develop a permanent crewed United States presence on the Moon capable of long-duration habitation, robotic, and industrial operations to advance science, technology, and strategic interests,” the bill states.

The section includes some general goals for the base and guidelines for development, but few specifics such the composition of the base, schedule for its development or cost. The bill does direct NASA to select a lead center for the base’s development with a specific set of requirements that appear to be intended to ensure the program is run by the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Although the bill includes extensive language about a lunar base, it says little about the lunar Gateway intended to operate in lunar orbit. While last year’s budget reconciliation bill provided $2.6 billion for development of the Gateway, a NASA infographic released Feb. 27 about its revised Artemis plans did not feature the Gateway even while including a lunar base.

Regarding the Gateway, the bill states only that NASA will provide a briefing “on plans for the Gateway outpost” within 60 days of enactment. ISS extension

Another portion of the bill addresses the International Space Station and plans for commercial space stations. Among the biggest changes is a two-year extension of the ISS lifetime, from the end of 2030 to the end of 2032.

The extension, the bill argues, is required because of delays in the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, including postponing the release of a call for proposals for the next phase of the program.

“NASA has repeatedly delayed the release of a request for proposals for sustained commercial low-Earth-orbit services, and such delays, coupled with shifting requirements and inconsistent programmatic direction, have introduced substantial uncertainty into the development planning, financing, workforce scaling, and infrastructure investment decisions of commercial providers,” the bill states.

“As a result of such uncertainty and delayed procurement action, commercial providers have been unable to scale development and private investment at a pace aligned with the previously articulated NASA objective of de-orbiting the ISS in or around 2030,” the bill continues.

The bill directs NASA to maintain ISS operations at its current level, in terms of number of crew and cargo flights to support it. It instructs NASA not begin a transition from the ISS, and deorbiting of the station, until at least one commercial successor is operational. It also requires NASA to select at least two companies for the next phase of the CLD program. Mars missions and studies

The portion of the bill dealing with NASA programs largely endorses ongoing missions. An exception is the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, effectively canceled when it was not funded in the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill enacted in January.

The Senate bill directs the formal termination of the earlier MSR program and calls for the creation of a new MSR effort. The new plan would have a total cost cap of $8 billion, although it was not clear if that included funds spent on the earlier MSR program. It would also require use of “existing flight-proven technologies” and limit international cooperation to contributions that do not “unduly increase” the cost and risk of the program.

The bill directs NASA to submit a plan for carrying out that revised MSR program, including cost and schedule estimates, within 120 days of enactment. It also states that the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, funded in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, should remain separate from this revised MSR effort.

A later section of the bill requires NASA to perform studies of concepts for “Mars-focused missions” that could be launched on commercial heavy-lift vehicles.

One concept included the bill would send human tissues to Mars “for the purpose of studying biological and environmental effects on human tissue in the Martian environment.” A second concept would be focused on space weather measurements as well as physical and life sciences studies that could support future human Mars missions. Launch briefings, not quotas

One provision not found in the bill approved by the committee dealt with limits on commercial launch contracts. According to industry sources who had seen earlier drafts of the bill, it included a provision that would have kept any single company from receiving more than 50% of overall value of launch contracts awarded by the agency in any year.

The proposal had the public support of former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, whose work today includes serving as a lobbyist to United Launch Alliance.

“By capping any single launch provider at 50 percent of NASA’s total launch contract value, Congress is reinforcing competition and protecting the small and medium-sized manufacturers, propulsion companies, avionics developers, and suppliers that make up the backbone of America’s space enterprise,” he wrote in a social media post.

Others, including those commenting on his post, disagreed, arguing it would help companies unable to otherwise compete on a level playing field. The provision would have benefitted ULA as well as Blue Origin and potentially other launch providers at the expense of SpaceX, which has won the lion’s share of NASA launch contracts in recent years.

The bill approved by the committee did not include any restrictions on launch contracts. Instead, it endorsed a “competitive United States commercial launch marketplace” and called for a briefing by NASA on its “plans and strategy for continuing to procure commercial launch services.”

3–4 minutes

WASHINGTON — Workers have completed repairs to the helium pressurization system in the upper stage of the Space Launch System, keeping a potential April launch of the Artemis 2 mission on track.

In a March 3 statement, NASA said engineers traced a blockage in helium flow in the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS, to a seal in a quick-disconnect line feeding helium from ground equipment into the stage. The seal had become dislodged, blocking helium flow.

Technicians removed the quick-disconnect fitting, reassembled it with the seal properly positioned and reinstalled it. Tests confirmed that helium was flowing into the stage after the repairs.

The quick-disconnect line was one of the leading suspected causes of the blockage, along with a check valve inside the stage. NASA said Feb. 21 that neither issue could be addressed at the launch pad, requiring the agency to roll the vehicle back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs.

While addressing the helium issue, workers also performed maintenance on other parts of the SLS. That included replacing batteries in the core stage, ICPS and boosters, as well as replacing batteries in the rocket’s flight termination system ahead of end-to-end testing required by the Eastern Range.

NASA also said it is replacing a seal in a line that feeds liquid oxygen into the core stage. That seal is separate from those in liquid hydrogen lines that caused leaks during a wet dress rehearsal in early February and were replaced at the pad. NASA did not disclose why it is replacing the liquid oxygen seal, as there were no reports of leaks during the two fueling tests conducted last month.

NASA said the repairs and maintenance keep the vehicle on schedule to roll back out to the pad later this month for a launch attempt in early April. Two-hour launch windows are available on the evenings of April 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 during the next launch period. The following opportunity opens April 30.

The agency did not disclose when it plans to roll the SLS and Orion spacecraft back to the pad. At a Feb. 27 briefing, Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said teams would need “at least a week and a half or so” at the pad after rollout to complete preparations for a launch attempt.