For the first time, NASA has put both of its Moon landers on the same public clock. SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon are now racing through a published set of milestones that leads to a docking test in Earth orbit in the summer of 2027 and a crewed landing on the lunar surface in early 2028. The timeline was laid out by Steve Creech, acting manager of NASA’s Human Landing System program, at the International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Türkiye, on October 5. It is the clearest picture yet of how the Artemis program intends to get astronauts back to the Moon — and of how much still has to go right.
The structure of the race is unusual. NASA is not simply paying two companies to build two versions of the same machine and picking the faster one. Each lander must first prove itself in a series of uncrewed demonstrations, then fly alongside the agency’s own Orion capsule on a crewed test mission, and only then carry astronauts to the surface. NASA has pointedly not decided which lander will make that first crewed landing on Artemis IV. The decision, officials say, will be earned by performance in the tests that come before it.
Artemis III: A Dress Rehearsal in Earth Orbit
The pivot of the whole plan is Artemis III, now targeted for the summer of 2027. As redesigned earlier this year, the mission will not land on the Moon at all. Instead, four astronauts — Commander Randy Bresnik, Pilot Luca Parmitano, and Mission Specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas — will ride Orion atop the Space Launch System for a roughly two-week flight in Earth orbit. Their job is to rendezvous and dock with test versions of both commercial landers, one after the other, in a full rehearsal of the choreography a landing mission will require.
The flight plan shows how seriously NASA is taking the rehearsal. Around the third day, the crew is to dock with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 test vehicle and actually board it, checking its life-support systems and controls with astronauts inside. Around the eighth day, Orion will dock with a SpaceX Starship test lander for a shorter, docking-only test, with no crew transfer into the ship. The rest of the flight covers Orion systems checks, spacesuit evaluations, and research. Every step is designed to find problems in Earth orbit, where help is hours away, rather than at the Moon, where it is days away.
Why NASA Rebuilt the Schedule
This orbital test exists because NASA concluded its old plan was drifting. The agency added the intermediate mission in a February 2026 revamp, judging that a cadence of roughly one Artemis flight every three years was uneconomical and eroded the workforce skills and operational sharpness that safety depends on. A test flight in 2027 keeps crews flying, keeps the ground teams practised, and retires the riskiest unknowns — rendezvous, docking, and lander habitability — before anyone’s life depends on them at the lunar surface. It trades a headline for a foundation.
Agency leadership has been projecting confidence about the new tempo. At an “Artemis acceleration” briefing at Kennedy Space Center on October 23, Administrator Jared Isaacman said he was extremely confident Artemis III would launch next year, and that the agency is managing every component of the program down to the day and the hour. Stacking of the SLS rocket for the mission has begun, and a wet dress rehearsal — a full fuelling and countdown practice — is planned for November. Isaacman also added the necessary caveat: no amount of enthusiasm or schedule pressure changes the laws of physics.
Two Very Different Machines, Two Very Different Roads
The milestones underline how different the two landers really are. SpaceX’s Starship path runs through propulsion: a large-scale ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration in early 2027, a landing-leg demonstration in the spring, uncrewed tanker flights in the third quarter, and finally an uncrewed Starship landing on the Moon in late 2027. Starship’s architecture depends on refuelling in orbit — many tanker flights feeding one lander — so each of those steps is a genuine technical gate, not a formality. If the transfer demonstration slips, everything behind it slips with it.
Blue Origin’s road runs through its rocket and its engines. Its smaller Mark 1 cargo lander is expected to fly to the lunar surface in 2027, while the crew-capable Mark 2 test vehicle is integrated with the New Glenn rocket and its BE-7 engine completes qualification through the first half of 2027. A more powerful New Glenn variant is planned to fly in late 2027, and an uncrewed Mark 2 demonstration landing is targeted for early 2028 — almost simultaneous with the crewed Artemis IV window. Blue Moon’s approach avoids ship-to-ship refuelling, using multiple New Glenn launches instead, which trades SpaceX’s orbital complexity for launch cadence pressure of its own.
The Prize: Artemis IV and the South Pole
Waiting at the end of both roads is Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028: the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, aimed at the lunar south pole region. NASA’s own schedule lists the mission’s lander as still to be determined, and Isaacman confirmed this month that the choice between Starship and Blue Moon remains open. A second crewed landing, Artemis V, could follow as early as late 2028, which means the loser of the first race is not necessarily out of the program — but the winner takes the historic first return.
That open verdict is what makes the next fifteen months so consequential. Every milestone on the published chart — a propellant transfer, an engine qualification, a docking in Earth orbit — is effectively an audition held in public. SpaceX brings flight heritage and a furious test cadence; Blue Origin brings a simpler refuelling story and a rocket still proving itself. By the time four astronauts board a lander in 2028, the decision will have been made by the hardware. NASA has set the clock, published the course, and declined to name a favourite. The race to land astronauts on the Moon by 2028 is now, formally, on.
