NASA's revised 2028 Artemis campaign: no lander pick until both are tested
From the Space digest for Oct 24, 2026
Sources MSN MSN AP News NASASpaceflight.com Around Prague Mashable The Mirror
What happened: NASA published its October Artemis update in the early hours of October 24 (12:20–12:25 AM ET), laying out the revised campaign toward a 2028 Moon landing. The agency's plan now has Orion docking with test versions of both the SpaceX Starship and Blue Origin Moon landers in Earth orbit before any lunar landing, and per MSN's relay of the campaign outline, NASA will not decide which lander to use until those flight tests show which one is ready. A further MSN-syndicated piece makes the recast explicit: Artemis III itself is now a 14–17-day low Earth orbit test for summer 2027, pushing the crewed Moon landing to Artemis IV. NASASpaceflight's write-up of the same "Artemis Acceleration" media event (published 12:25 AM ET) adds the SLS stacking status, details on the new "Sortie" EVA spacesuit, and the "dual 2028 paths" strategic frame; Around Prague's write-up corroborates the dual-lander Earth-orbit test plan. Mashable's October 24 piece adds the design change behind the "faster, leaner plan" label: the new Artemis IV profile scraps a distant orbit around the Moon where the landers were once staged, framed as NASA's answer to China's lunar ambitions. AP News's wire piece the same day frames the effort as NASA adopting Apollo's urgency, with the agency planning to build a Moon base and return astronauts to the lunar surface in as little as two years. The Mirror's October 24 report extends the Moon-base element of that same campaign: Administrator Jared Isaacman says NASA is "giving a lot of thought" to lunar meteor strikes as it pushes ahead with Moon-base plans the paper pegs for 2032.
What's genuinely new: Six things. First, the lander selection is now explicitly open — the choice between Starship HLS and the Blue Origin lander is gated on test results, not on a pre-committed lane, which reshapes what "2028" means in practice. Second, the summer 2027 Artemis III flight is pinned down as a 14–17-day low Earth orbit test by name, with the crewed Moon landing carried by Artemis IV — the orbital-test character of the mission stated directly rather than implied by the docking choreography. Third, the mission profile drops the distant lunar-orbit staging — the concrete architecture change presented under the "faster, leaner plan" framing. Fourth, NASASpaceflight's rundown adds SLS stacking status and the "Sortie" EVA-suit details alongside the dual-path framing. Fifth, AP's wire framing names a Moon base as part of the two-year plan — a stated objective sitting beyond the landing campaign itself. Sixth, the Moon-base ambition now carries a dated horizon and a named technical caution: plans pegged for 2032 with Isaacman weighing meteor-strike risk against them.
Watch: the year-end tanking test; whether the recast 14–17-day Artemis III holds its summer 2027 slot; the early-2028 uncrewed-landing targets both providers carry; the unresolved Starship-refueling count dispute (NASA advisers' "around 22" vs Musk's "6 to 8"); and whether the 2032 Moon-base target shows up in NASA planning documents and how meteor-strike risk weighs on it.