Nasa has announced more details about its next Artemis mission, which is set to launch in the summer of 2027.

The Artemis III mission will not head to the Moon. Instead four astronauts will fly to low Earth orbit where they will dock with two prototype lunar landers, one made by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company and the other by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This will pave the way for the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for 2028, which will see astronauts land on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

Artemis III has been described by Nasa as the most complicated mission it’s ever attempted.

It involves four astronauts, three rocket launches, three different spacecraft and two dockings. It will last for 14 days, although it could be extended to 17 days if needed.

The first rocket to launch will be Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, blasting off from Florida. It will be carrying its prototype lander called Blue Moon. No astronauts will be on board and the lander will be placed into low Earth orbit.

Then Nasa’s Space Launch System rocket will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four Artemis III astronauts in the Orion capsule. This is the same type of rocket and spacecraft used for the Artemis II mission, which saw astronauts fly around the Moon and back to Earth.

Orion will also be placed into orbit around the Earth, and the crew will spend two days checking out their spacecraft.

Then on day three of its flight, Orion will dock with the Blue Origin’s Blue Moon. The crew will open the hatch and enter the lander, where they will spend two days checking out its systems.

On flight day six, SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket will blast off, also from Florida. The upper stage of its rocket, called “the Ship” is the prototype lander (although it has not yet been fitted out as a lander and lacks life support systems) and this will be placed in low Earth orbit.

Nasa’s Orion spacecraft and its crew will undock from the Blue Moon lander and then dock with the SpaceX Ship. This will be a shorter demonstration lasting for two hours, and the Artemis III crew will not enter the SpaceX lander.

Once undocked, the Orion crew will spend the rest of their mission carrying out additional tests of their capsule and carrying out science experiments, before returning home.

The Artemis III crew will be aboard Orion for two weeks, slightly longer than the nine days spent there by the Artemis II team. Their return journey will test an upgraded heat shield during the capsule’s fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission was originally conceived to be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, but Nasa changed its plans in February 2026.

The reason was simple: the SpaceX Starship lander contracted to carry astronauts to the surface is not ready, and the in-orbit refuelling it depends on has never been demonstrated.

Rather than slip the schedule further, Nasa repurposed the mission as a crewed docking rehearsal — so that when the landers do fly, the techniques to dock with them and the suits to enter them will already have been tested with people on board.

In terms of the in-orbit refuelling, a March 2026 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had made “limited progress” maturing the technology. The first refuelling demonstration is, optimistically, scheduled for late 2026.

Nasa astronaut Randy Bresnik will serve as the mission’s commander.

Luca Parmitano, of the Italian Space Agency, will be the pilot. He has spent more than 300 days in space.

Americans Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio will be the mission specialists.

Bob Heintz will serve as a backup crew member. A test pilot who has logged 170 days in space, he can step into any role.

Nasa hopes Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, will be the first crewed lunar landing of the modern era. Astronauts are expected to descend to the Moon’s south polar region and remain on the surface for around a week.

The frozen water locked in permanently shadowed craters could one day be used for drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel during future missions.

But the biggest setback was on 28 May 2026, when Blue Origin’s only launch pad at Cape Canaveral was seriously damaged after a rocket exploded during an engine test.

Rebuilding the New Glenn launch pad has taken months, but Nasa says it is working with Blue Origin and is confident the launchpad will be ready by December or January 2027, so it can meet the timeline to be ready for the Artemis III mission in summer 2027.

The overarching ambition behind Artemis is to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon. Nasa’s Moon Base programme — unveiled in May 2026 by the agency’s administrator, Jared Isaacman — sets out three phases:

A working base would allow sustained scientific research, the testing of technology bound for future Mars missions, and the eventual extraction of lunar resources. It would also keep the United States ahead of China in a renewed space race.

Many in the field doubt that Nasa’s timetable can be met.

Experts are concerned about the slow pace of the development of SpaceX;s Starship lunar lander and the absence of any in-orbit refuelling tests.

But the biggest set back was on 28 May 2026, when Blue Origin’s only launch pad at Cape Canaveral was seriously damaged after a rocket exploded during an engine test.

Rebuilding the New Glenn launch pad is expected to take many months. When SpaceX lost a pad in 2016 it took 15 months to rebuild it — and SpaceX had other pads to fall back on.

Blue Origin does not, which calls into question the company’s ability to provide the Blue Moon Mk2 needed for one of the lunar landings.

“It would not surprise me at all if China gets [to the moon] first,” the Open University’s Dr Simeon Barber told the BBC. The limiting step, he said, was the lander — the most challenging piece of the mission’s technical architecture, and the one least under Nasa’s direct control.

Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026 from the Kennedy Space Centre.

Its crew of four – commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen – became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit since 1972.

Over ten days, Orion flew around the far side of the Moon, passing within 4,000 miles of the lunar surface and reaching a maximum of 252,756 miles from Earth -further than any humans have ever travelled.

The capsule successfully splashed down off the coast of San Diego on 10 April 2026.

The mission tested Orion’s life-support and communication systems and gave engineers their first detailed look at how the heat shield performs on a lunar return. The Artemis II flight was the essential proof that the hardware works with people on board.

But given the other technical challenges, that was the easy part.

The last human mission to the Moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days on the surface in the Taurus-Littrow valley.

No human has set foot on the Moon in the half-century since.

In total, 24 American astronauts have travelled to the Moon and 12 have walked on its surface – all as part of the US Apollo space programme. Five of the 24 are still alive.

America first went in the 1960s, primarily to beat the Soviet Union to assert its geopolitical and technological dominance.

Once that goal was achieved, political enthusiasm and public interest ebbed, as did funding for further exploration.

China has announced a target to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030. It has tested its Mengzhou capsule and Lanyue lander, and is preparing a new heavy-lift rocket called the Long March 10.

India has set a target to put people on the moon by around 2040, following the successful landing of its Chandrayaan-3 mission near the lunar south pole in 2023.

Russia is part of a joint China-led lunar base project targeted for the mid-2030s, although sanctions, funding and technical problems make its contribution uncertain.

European and Japanese astronauts are also expected to fly on future Artemis missions, although there is no contractual guarantee of an international seat on Artemis III.