NASA redesigns Artemis: Starship and Blue Moon, a longer-range Orion and an extended Centaur V

NASA unveiled its detailed plan for returning astronauts to the lunar surface from 2028 under the Artemis program at a lengthy press conference on Friday, October 23, 2026. According to Ars Technica, much of the information had already been revealed, but this is the first time the agency has laid out the full architecture and acknowledged substantial changes from what was previously proposed.

The most striking change involves SpaceX's Starship: the new proposal has the Orion spacecraft docking with the Starship lunar lander in high Earth orbit before setting off for the Moon. For Blue Origin, the architecture includes four launches of the New Glenn rocket but no ship-to-ship refueling operations. Blue Origin's plan also allows for its Blue Moon lander to meet Orion in low lunar orbit.

NASA officials are sticking to the schedule. Artemis III, a demonstration mission involving dockings with Blue Moon and Starship near Earth, would launch in the "summer" of 2027. Artemis IV, which would include the landing, is still targeting 2028. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said: "This is an achievable path that we are on now. We have the mandate, the resources and the stakeholder support to execute it." The article's author credits the agency for reviewing every element of the program but questions whether those dates can be met.

The SpaceX plan. According to the article, the main request SpaceX engineers made in their meetings with NASA in early 2026 was to drop the requirement to dock with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon, which demanded more energy and posed other difficulties. The cancellation of the Lunar Gateway, announced earlier this year, solved that problem. SpaceX will now fuel a lunar Starship in low Earth orbit and then dock with Orion in high Earth orbit. The crew will travel to the Moon aboard Orion, and two of the four astronauts will transfer to Starship for the landing.

A key question is how many refuelings it takes to fill a Starship for a lunar mission. On Thursday, a NASA safety panel said the current number of tanker launches is "about 22." Elon Musk responded that the estimate was wrong and that the real figure will be six to eight. During Friday's Q&A session, NASA officials declined to give a precise number. Uncertainties remain over Starship's payload capacity, how much cryogenic liquid methane and oxygen will boil off in orbit, and how efficiently propellant can be transferred between ships. Isaacman said the six-to-eight-launch estimate was possible but represented Starship's "ultimate potential."

The Blue Origin plan. To meet NASA's request to reach the Moon sooner, Blue Origin has changed its plans and would no longer need vehicle-to-vehicle refueling on its initial missions. Under the published concept of operations, a New Glenn (either an expendable version of the smaller 7×2 variant or a reusable 9×4 rocket) would launch three "transfer stages" to low Earth orbit. These would be based on the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander but with significant modifications. New Glenn would then launch the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, which would meet up with those stages, and they would push the stack toward the Moon. Ars had already reported this architecture in March.

The potentially significant new detail is that NASA's graphic showed Orion docking with Blue Moon in an elliptical lunar orbit about 8,500 km above the surface, but the agency is working to also have the option of doing so in low lunar orbit. According to Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, an orbit a few hundred kilometers up would significantly reduce the propellant Blue Moon needs to take astronauts to the surface and back, and that mass could be used elsewhere in the vehicle. It would also offer more frequent and faster opportunities to leave the surface if necessary.

Extended Centaur. NASA announced it is working with United Launch Alliance on an "extended" version of the Centaur V upper stage. Paired with the Space Launch System core stage, it would allow Orion to reach low lunar orbit. The article calls this an important step forward. It had long been an embarrassment that Orion, with its underperforming Service Module, lacked the delta-V to leave Earth, reach low lunar orbit and return to splash down in the Pacific, and until now nobody seemed willing to fix it.

Isaacman said: "Getting Orion to low lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long." As a workaround, NASA had turned to solutions such as the Lunar Gateway, placed in a near-rectilinear halo orbit that Orion could safely reach. That shifted the performance burden of reaching the surface onto the landers and the companies building them.

Given the urgency, NASA is trying to help the lunar lander companies. Isaacman explained: "We're listening to the data and looking at what's happening around us. What progress are our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to help? Their lives get easier if we bring Orion closer to the Moon, substantially." He said the agency could stay on its previous path and hope the companies met their deadlines, or it could "start turning the knobs" to help.