Event: NASA

New York/Cape Canaveral, Florida – NASA on Friday abruptly said it was shaking up its Artemis lunar program that has suffered multiple delays in recent years, a bid to ensure Americans can return to the moon's surface by 2028.That goal remains unchanged, but the U.S. space agency is shifting its flight lineup to include a test mission before an eventual lunar landing to improve launch "muscle memory," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said.That strategic revision comes amid repeated delays to the Artemis 2 mission, which was originally due to take off as early as February, but now will not launch before April. It is meant to see the first flyby of the moon in more than half a century.

Nasa is shaking up its Artemis mission to the moon, cancelling a multibillion-dollar Boeing upgrade to the centrepiece SLS rocket and slotting in a test flight closer to Earth as the programme remains beset by delays and cost overruns.The changes announced on Friday mean that Nasa is essentially swapping the actual moon landing for an additional test mission staged closer to Earth – while insisting the 2028 deadline for a lunar touchdown remains unchanged.Artemis III, which was supposed to be the moon landing and is now pulled forward to 2027, will see Boeing’s Space Launch System rocket launch a crew aboard Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule.The craft will then dock with one or two of the commercially supplied landers in Earth orbit, Nasa said. Artemis IV will land a crew on the moon a year later.Nasa said the goal of the changed sequence is to fly more frequently to counteract one of the biggest criticisms of Artemis: the slow development pace of its SLS rocket.Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman speaks about the Artemis programme at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Friday. Photo: ReutersThe space agency has been preparing to launch the rocket in coming weeks, with a crew of four set to fly around the moon, though that mission is now delayed by weeks and potentially months because of technical issues.

Updated - February 27, 2026 09:22 pm IST - WASHINGTON, D.C. NASA's Artemis II SLS moon rocket with the Orion spacecraft slowly rolls back towards the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on February 25, 2026. | Photo Credit: AP The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) added a new mission to its Artemis moon programme involving a ​spacecraft docking test in Earth’s orbit before landing its first ‌astronauts on the moon in over half a century, ​overhauling the flagship U.S. moon effort amid ⁠competitive pressure from China.The new Artemis mission, planned for 2027, is one of many moon programme changes the U.S. space ‌agency announced on Friday (February 27, 2026) as China inches closer to its own 2030 crewed moon landing ‌goal, and U.S. safety experts warn more testing is ‌needed ⁠before NASA makes its crewed attempt to land ⁠on the moon, now planned as Artemis IV in 2028.NASA also cancelled an effort to upgrade its Space Launch System rocket to ​instead focus on increasing ‌that rocket’s production and flight rate, which has been slow relative to newer rockets. The move impacts Boeing’s roughly $2 billion contract to build a more powerful SLS ‌upper stage, current plans for which have been ​cancelled.Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are each developing an astronaut lunar lander ⁠for the programme, duelling to be the first to achieve the moon landing for NASA. Boeing and Northrop Grumman ‌build SLS, which carries the Lockheed Martin-built Orion astronaut capsule that will taxi the astronauts to one of the lunar landers in space before landing on the moon.The new mission allows more practice for NASA before its more ambitious step of landing on the moon, ‌which had long been planned for Artemis III. The agency launched ​an uncrewed test of SLS and…