For over 250 years, America has led and inspired the world with our accomplishments.
Our leadership in space by the pioneers of decades past, all happened because of the brave men and women that made the decision to take on the credible, the near-impossible challenges and succeed. That is our mandate at NASA, and I assure you, we are not slowing down.
Good afternoon, and welcome to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I'm George Alderman, NASA's deputy press secretary. We're here today to share a series of updates on NASA's ongoing work to accelerate the Artemis program, including the progress we're making towards next year's Artemis III mission and the Artemis IV mission that will return American astronauts to the moon in 2028. Today, you'll hear from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, NASA associate administrator and chief engineer Amit Shah, and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons. Following these presentations, we'll have the opportunity to answer questions from the media in the room and over the phone. But before we hear from our presenters, we're first going to bring you live to the Vehicle Assembly Building, just across the road from us here at KSC, to hear and see our progress on assembling the Space Launch System rocket for next year's Artemis III mission. Over to you, Megan.
Thank you, George. And yes, welcome into a very busy VAB here where crews are actively working on the core stage you see right behind me. Of course, the core stage, the backbone of NASA's SLS rocket. This one in particular will fly NASA's Artemis III crew. Really, just stop to think about what I just said for a moment there. Just six months ago, we launched Victor Reid, Jeremy, and Christina around the moon with Artemis II. And now here we are a short time later, about to assemble the rocket that will fly the next. Really impressive stuff. Now let's keep walking here, the core stage. Let's take a closer look. About the length of a 20-story building, nearly 28 feet in diameter, it stores more than 733,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and all the systems to feed those propellants into the four RS-25 engines you see there. It's currently horizontal in the transfer aisle because teams are currently in the process of moving it around in the VAB. Just yesterday it was vertical in High Bay 2. We actually snapped some pictures as teams skillfully pulled it up and out of the high bay, and then lowered it into the transfer aisle and laid it on its side. And now what you're seeing are teams currently weighing it. Engineers need to know how much it weighs to be able to calculate a flight design. Next week, teams will get it vertical again, this time in High Bay 4, to connect it with these two solid rocket boosters. Both boosters were fully assembled earlier this month, and once integrated, teams will do final checks before rolling everything out to Launch Pad 39B to practice fueling the rocket again. A really huge milestone for teams supporting all of this work. It speaks to their commitment to the schedule and all of our goals as an agency. Artemis III, set to launch next year, will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit to practice docking their Orion spacecraft with two commercial test landers that could ultimately land people on the moon with Artemis IV. To talk more about all of our ambitious goals, let's send it back across the street with Administrator Isaacman.
Well, that is great. Thank you so much for beginning my remarks. I mean, how impressive is that? I'm just so proud of the entire NASA workforce, Jeremy, especially your team. I mean, we're talking a handful of months ago that Artemis II just launched and came back, and look at all the amazing progress you see on the vehicle for the next mission. So with that, good afternoon. Good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to welcome you all back to Kennedy Space Center for an update on the Artemis program. Again, I want to express my appreciation, my thank yous, to the workforce here at Kennedy and across NASA, our industry and our international partners who are making everything we are about to discuss today possible. Now, let us go back in time. Bear, bear with me for a little bit. Some 58 years ago, it's October 1968, and just hours ago, the Apollo 7 astronauts splashed down from the first crewed mission of the Apollo program. Now the Saturn V for Apollo 8, it's already assembled, it's out at Launch Complex 39A, and in less than two months, that mission is going to fly, sending Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders into lunar orbit. In the Vehicle Assembly Building, the Saturn V for Apollo 9 is already waiting. The lunar module, the LEM for Apollo 10, it's already been delivered. And in the midst of all of that mission activity I'm describing, nine months from now, the Eagle is going to land, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will walk on the moon. Now, of course, it is no secret that NASA was playing our part in a rivalry between two superpowers. It was a different time with extraordinary national resources committed to that objective. But we also knew so very little, with so little technology to aid in our efforts and no experience operating at all beyond low Earth orbit. And yet, in that remarkably short span of time, the ambitions of generations once confined to the pages of science fiction became humanity's greatest achievement. And for the first time in billions of years, life born on Earth would set foot on another world. And here we are today, very much in a new space race. And despite decades of accumulated knowledge and extraordinary advancements in technology, this race will be much closer than it ever needed to be. And why is that? I mean, China achieved its John Glenn moment, its first solo orbital human spaceflight, just 23 years ago. Now, at that point, not only had NASA won the first space race, we put our astronauts on the moon six times, and at that point, we had flown 113 space shuttle missions before China had put their first astronaut in space. And from there, in 2003, a Chinese space program, once in its infancy, has since deployed hundreds of communications satellites, Earth observation satellites, military satellites. They've developed autonomous lunar landers and rovers. They've returned samples from the far side of the moon, and they're preparing alongside Russia to build a moon base of their own. Now, China will soon have reusable rockets. They have spacecraft and landers and an infrastructure for a credible two-launch architecture to put their astronauts on the lunar surface in the next three years. Now, this is a story as much about their discipline, focus, and urgency. It is about the weight of institutional inertia and misplaced priorities and decades of decisions, some imposed upon us and others of our own making, that have held America's space program back. And that brings us to the moment we find ourselves in today. Because the appetite, the appetite for tolerating and defending the status quo has reached its conclusion. No longer will we create programs that are too big to fail and too costly to succeed in the hopes of trying to make everyone happy. We will not compromise our architecture, performance, or capabilities to accommodate the lobby of suppliers or to preserve technologies time has passed. We will not allow layers of process and bureaucratic inertia and endless deliberation take precedence over engineering progress and getting hardware built and flown. We will not outsource our expertise anymore, and we will not delude ourselves into believing that more time, more money, and flying less will somehow make our work safer or more achievable. We are here for the mission and to deliver the outcomes the world expects of the most accomplished space agency in history. And what I am describing, this is not some long overdue disruption. It's not entrepreneurial thinking or tech industry pixie dust or some new management philosophy. It's about our own history. It's a playbook this agency knows really well. The same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just nine months. And as extraordinary as those achievements were, they should not represent the upper limits of what NASA is capable of, but the standard that we should continuously aspire to exceed, which is why we are bringing that intensity, that discipline, that engineering ownership back to NASA, because great nations do not remain great by being caretakers of history, but by continuously making history. So soon you're going to hear from NASA's associate administrator and chief engineer Amit Shah, and leader of the Artemis program, Jeremy Parsons. And they're going to tell you what we have gotten right. They're going to tell you what we've gotten wrong and the extremely hard work ahead on America's return to the moon, because confronting our shortcomings and doing something about them is how confidence is earned. It's how cultures are changed, and it's how the might of a great space agency is once again unleashed. Amit and Jeremy will talk to you about the Artemis III hardware being assembled right here at Kennedy Space Center. What's on track, the absolutely outstanding performance of the workforce that has cut the assembly and integration schedule in half, and the work ahead toward a year-end tanking test and a summer 2027 Artemis III launch. And when Artemis III does fly next year, we will have exercised those big rocket muscles that we will have strengthened, and in the process, bring together three of the world's most powerful rockets, alongside the Orion spacecraft and the two human landing systems in development, to test the interoperability and capabilities we're going to need before the next mission. They will talk to you about Artemis IV and the optionality we are preserving to give both of our lunar landing partners the greatest opportunity for readiness in advance of astronauts landing on the moon in 2028. And we have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so. You will learn how the moon base missions, especially Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Mark 1 landers, share important commonality with the transfer stages and crewed landers that will follow. These missions will do far more than lay the first kind of figurative brick of America's moon base. Every mission is going to provide invaluable engineering data, reduce risk, and build confidence in the crewed landings ahead. And when American astronauts do take their first steps on the lunar surface in 2028, a rover and the first elements of an enduring human presence on the moon will already be waiting for them. So like the space race of the 1960s, we are hardly in a position to set it and forget it. With respect to our planning, we will never stop listening to data and adapt as circumstances require. Just as we did during Gemini, and just as we did during Apollo. Now that means simplifying and dramatically reducing the mass of our lunar spacesuits, means improving our upper stage performance to get Orion closer to the moon, and modifying Orion to accommodate different lander requirements. Now, in this incredibly demanding and dangerous business of putting astronauts on the moon, NASA must own the near impossible, rather than shifting the burden to our partners. That is how we give Artemis IV the greatest possible chance of safely and successfully returning Americans to the lunar surface in 2028. And to be really clear, there are serious engineering challenges ahead. Getting Orion to low lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long. Advancing two very different landing systems requires demonstrating capabilities ranging from complex launch campaigns, large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer, to the aggregation of stages in orbit. These are not trivial matters to solve, and no amount of my enthusiasm or schedule pressure changes the laws of physics. What we are undertaking is ambitious. It's extraordinarily difficult, and years of decisions both within and beyond the walls of this agency have cost us time and resources that we never had to spare. But the agency we are reinvigorating and the extraordinary vehicles our industry partners are building are worth every bit of that effort. This will not be a repeat of the flags and footprints. These vehicles are being designed to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering mass to orbit and to the moon, to support longer surface operations, enable more frequent astronaut missions, and transform what will begin as a small scientific outpost into something that may one day resemble a city on the lunar surface. This mountain of effort is our opportunity to potentially spark a lunar economy, to unleash scientific discovery, to learn to live and work beyond our home planet, and mature the technologies we will need for the day when NASA astronauts embark on humanity's next giant leap to Mars. And we will never compromise on testing and qualifying the hardware that our astronauts and, frankly, America's space program depends upon, and we will never launch until we are ready. But we will not accept that great achievement simply requires more time and more money. Nor will NASA sit idly by and watch one of the most consequential moments of this new century pass to our overseas competitors. We are rebuilding the workforce and core competencies that eroded over decades. We are restoring our ability to design, build, test, and fly hardware our missions and industry partners depend upon. We are deploying talent from across NASA centers and throughout the supply chain to attack the critical path. Every vendor and partner should understand that when a schedule is broken, NASA personnel will be knocking on the door, and not to observe, not to write a paper or convene a committee, but to roll up their sleeves and solve problems. This is what extreme ownership looks like, and the capabilities we are rebuilding today will serve America long after the first Artemis astronauts return from the moon. This is a very energized NASA, and the updates you hear today are only a small part of that story. I am beyond proud of how the team has responded since our ignition event earlier this year, and you can see it here at Kennedy in the Vehicle Assembly Building, in our machine shops that are running around the clock, across our centers and throughout our industry partners, because there is, of course, much, much to do. And that brings us to where all of this began, when the men and women of this agency were in the home stretch of a great race, with extraordinary challenges still ahead. We find ourselves at a similar moment under very different circumstances, with perhaps even more at stake. And just as the Apollo generation rose to the occasion, so too will the young engineers that are working late at night right now on Orion, the welders that are helping to modify Centaur and the mobile launcher, the technicians that are in the machine shops, the flight controllers preparing for Artemis III, and the intern getting that first glimpse of what it means to be part of NASA. The work they do from here, the obstacles they overcome, the culture they create, and the agency they reinvigorate will make possible the dreams of tomorrow. And my hope is when the history books look back on this time, the politics over which rocket and landers carried us to the moon, how long it took, and at what cost, will be a footnote compared to all that followed, that when the time came, the Artemis generation chose to go, and we went. And thank you. And now I'll turn it over to associate administrator and chief engineer Amit Shah.
Thank you, sir. You guys can hear me? Okay. Okay. So hard to follow. But I'm here kind of... Jeremy fortunately is going to take most of this, but I just... one thing I wanted to do here is connect the vision. You just heard the inspiration, the fire that Jared just gave us, and kind of serve as a bridge between that and the technical progress that Jeremy's going to talk about. But before I do that, I want to make sure that we really recognize the NASA and all of our partners that have gotten us up to this point. In particular, you know, we stand on their shoulders, and what our plan is, is to unleash them. I want to talk a little bit about Artemis II. You know, I imagine most folks are reasonably satisfied with the result of Artemis II. We just... a couple of statistics I just got, just for fun, for the rocket itself. Again, magnificent piece of engineering for an experimental vehicle. Orbital insertion 99.987% accurate at 27,227.75 feet per second. So we missed it by 3.65 feet. And then apogee orbital insertion was at 99.983% accuracy. Preflight prediction was 1,200 nautical miles. Actual was 1,200.21. And of course Orion. I think we've seen you guys recently released the results of the analysis of the Orion heat shield, and you know how the mitigations for the lofted reentry performed. Again, you know, the team that flew that mission, everyone around the world, it was magnificent. But again, as Jared has said over and over again, that's just the beginning. So I want to talk about how we're doing that. You know, it's... we say having these ideas is amazing, but the implementation is, I think, what we all really focus on every day, and the execution. But really, you know, and Jeremy's going to talk the details of what's going on with the machines. He's got it down pat. But I think it's important that we talk about the strategic arc that was concurrent while, you know, in 2026 that's been going on inside of the agency, which is going to enable us to achieve these things. So there are four major things I think that are important to discuss, and they've been publicized separately, but it's important when you see them together. You know, Jared mentioned before, extreme ownership is our mantra. And you know, when he came in, I think we established that very clearly with the workforce, with... we have to own our mistakes as well as our failures. And when we talked about Starliner, that was really, to me, the reason why we did that. We had to set that tone for our workforce, that our expectation is that you guys are amazing, but at the same time, we have to own these results. They belong to us. The second part of that arc was, you know, this workforce. We have transformed the way we think about the NASA workforce. We have brought more folks in. We have reestablished where our competencies are. We have defined what we believe it means working for NASA and what those skills need to be. We made it awesome to want to work for NASA again. That was the second part. And then, you know, it was about choices. You know, as Jared mentioned, for years we have been asked to do more than we can, and we have to centralize. And we had to focus, and we had to pick the things that not only were achievable, but also would help us advance and establish NASA in the position where it is in the spectrum of where the entire space industry needs to be, which is in the front, doing the hardest things, always pushing on, always pushing the envelope. And that's what ignition was. That's really what ignition is. We made choices. And then after that, we organized ourselves around those choices and how we were going to execute those missions. And in between that too, we flew four people around the moon. So we're here to talk about Artemis specifically. But again, you know, my mandate also is to think about the entire workforce. And I think it goes without saying, you know, this incredible workforce that did the Apollo missions also hit 175 years, planetary window, did powered descent on Mars, flew great observatories, did all those things at the same time we were doing those things. So this excellence, these competencies that we're trying to reinvigorate, we want to reinvigorate them across the board. But again, we stand on their shoulders. But for Artemis in particular, I think it's important, again, to take a little bit of a step back, because there's been a lot of discussion, as Jared said, about, you know, are these new ideas that we've been talking about? It's a new environment, it's a new alignment, it's a new sense of energy. But the ideas are ones that we have contemplated. But now again, we're able to unleash them. So, you know, those of you here in the room, I know a lot of you guys are veterans of the program. You understand kind of how we got here. You know, a lot of the machines that we're showing you today were first envisioned. They were envisioned mostly to maintain capabilities, right? Capabilities that were going away, that were potentially needed for the supply chain, etc. That was the point. You know, we designed these things to maintain those capabilities. But at the same time, there was not a mission focus for those machines. We got one in the first administration of our president. He gave us the mandate to go back to the moon, to do Artemis. And that mandate has continued to today. But, you know, really the capability focus, the way we were organized, that still endured, I would say, all the way through the first test flight of Artemis. You know, we were doing everything we could to get this vehicle together. And then when we flew that mission, we learned a ton. But what we also really learned was that, you know, a couple of things. We need to organize ourselves better as a program. We need to align ourselves around what these missions needed to look like going forward. And then we also revealed some of the limitations of the capabilities that we had fielded. So the agency organized itself as a program. I was asked to serve as the first manager of that program. And very quickly, I tasked the team, this is in 2023, that we had to realign where we were, realign the capabilities where we were, and really think very hard about the architecture, how brittle it was or not brittle, how our contracts were aligned in terms of how we're incentivizing these machines that have been acquired over a 20-year period, and, you know, many different tranches. And then how to address our production risk across the entire enterprise. We're at best case 50% of where we need to be in terms of our ability to crank this hardware out. And so we started, we had a bunch of sessions with all of industry starting in the summer of 2023, where we contemplated all of these things and the limitations of the data we got from Artemis. One, the performance of a lot of the different elements and how they were doing, were they going to converge together to meet together for a mission? And in those cases, did we have the right reliability? Did we have the right rate in order to achieve these goals? And I have to tell you, you know, we had been talking about this and iterating on these ideas for about 18 months until we got deep into Artemis II preparation. And so at that point, you know, we had thought about different orbits for rendezvous. We had thought about alternate stages. We had thought about ways to configure using the assets we had in order to maybe perform missions in LEO or in different orbits in order to really achieve these objectives. What we did and the philosophy we took is the same philosophy that Jared just mentioned, which is we took the Apollo approach. Instead of thinking about these missions as just all-up missions, we thought about them as a series of integrated test objectives, and then we spread them out over the activities. We were trying to do both ground test and in-flight test, and the all-up test that we call the Artemis missions, and try to figure out how we're going to incrementally get to the right spot so we could do a landing, so that each mission was not going to take too much risk that it would not succeed, but also take enough risk to advance our progress, which was the Apollo way. So we had that, we kind of had that in our brain as we were going to go fly. And then, of course, you know, in the run-up to Artemis II, after Jared joined us as our leader, you know, we came to talk to you guys in February of 2026 as we were having problems at the pad about how we were really going to change the way we were doing this, because we had reached it, we had seen it, the administrator had seen how we were doing business, and we had decided, you know what? We have the support, we have the alignment, we have everything is coming together. All these things that we had talked about doing, we need to do them. We need to get focused. We need to start thinking about how to make these things work the right way. And so that's what happened in February of 2026, when we were in the Artemis II launch campaign. You know, we had the ideas, but now we had the power to execute the alignment activities that we had been thinking about doing. You know, and again, the focus was about focusing on rate, focusing on reliability, not making too many development choices too early, which is why we made the choices we did with the mobile launcher, which wasn't going to converge at that point with exploration upper stage, which is going to be a brand new stage that had to be fielded for a landing. We wanted to move back to a place where we had confidence in the machines, understanding the rate where we were, but just enough to give us the opportunity to put together missions that made sense. So that was February. But again, you know, when we think about ignition, ignition happened just a month afterwards. That was about particular programs. We made ambitious objectives, ambitious ideas about what we need to do, putting focus on the future of a nuclear NASA, accelerating our timeline to the point in which that aligns with our policies, but also accelerating to a point where we know we can achieve them if we just focus on rate and focus on the things that we really need to focus on. But really what it was about was contemplating what the NASA workforce would need, what it needs to be working on now, and what we need to build inside the capabilities of the workforce to do the missions that we're going to do that only we can do, which is where we sit in the spectrum of the entire world space community. So we have to align the way we were trying to align, the way we work on the things we work on. But we also know that that alignment occurs and those capabilities occur when we recognize that when we buy things, when we make things, especially when we make things, when we make these incredible machines, we get something for free. And that something we get for free is a trained, capable workforce that knows how to take risks, that knows how to design new things, that knows how to do the near impossible. That was the goal. The goal is to build that capability for the next 20 years. And so the insourcing, the realignment, the core competency development, that's what those things are really about. It's about this workforce and about unleashing them and giving them the skills to do those things. So, you know, again, you've heard a lot of folks probably in my chair before say, we need to do more work. Our engineers need to smell like math and hardware again. And that's the idea. But the reality is there's a way to do that too. We can't just snap our fingers and say that that's what we want to do. So let's go do it. We need to get better at this. And so with my role now, you know, it's about focusing on how we build what we're building, but also how we build them. What are we doing with our design and construction standards? What are we doing with our in-house procedures? How are our machine shops and production capabilities aligned towards those things? Are they up and running? Are the machines humming? And thinking about the NASA workforce not as ten different places where we build things, but as one integrated workforce, one production enterprise that is able to fill gaps when we need to, but also start things ourselves if we need to do that too. And Jeremy's going to show some great examples of this. So this will help our mission succeed and will help, you know, invest, just help us realize that we have a workforce that's hungry to build and we need to unleash them. That's what this is. That is what a lot of this strategic arc has been about. And that's how I think we're going to get there. But there are key enablers in the way we conduct our engineering enterprise to make that happen. So, you know, this doesn't happen, of course. You know, like I said, we've had these ideas, but what has really aligned here is the support. You know, at first, an invigorated NASA workforce that's invigorated by leadership, the support of our stakeholders in the administration and Congress, the resources and the flexibility they've given us, the clarity of vision that the administrator has given us, and a leadership team that we have aligned around that's ready to prioritize NASA, prioritize one NASA over everything else. So that's what's different. Jeremy's going to show, you know, that this is a bit more than just words that we're putting this to practice. I think the performance that you're seeing here in the VAB is proven, and it's just going to get better. And, you know, as I said before, the ideas are important, the vision is important, but it takes courage and patience to do what Jeremy's team is doing. And that's what they're doing every day. But I would tell you, the most important thing I want to end with, and before I hand it over, is that, you know, the team at NASA, our industry partners and international partners, they've heard the call and they have been open to change. And this kind of change is hard, especially when we push as fast as we need to in the race that we're in, it's very hard. But they have been willing to make the hard sacrifices to make this possible. They're the ones that are going to carry this forward. They're the ones that are going to be here 20 years from now. They're going to be part of this generation that decided we were going to do the near impossible. And if we're right, and if these things work, we're going to have a NASA for the next 20 years that will continue to be the light that shines on the world, that can help us teach the world how to build at planetary scales, how to build these scales, and how to build these things to stay. And that is the goal. That is the goal of what we're trying to do. And I think that what you'll see is just us getting started here, but these missions are really going to change that. And I'll hand it over to Jeremy. Before I do, I have to say, you know, Jeremy and I started working together when I joined Artemis after Space Station about five years ago, and I have been so impressed with the way he has taken the reins here. He's an incredible leader and he is the right person for this job. We support him 100%, and I just want you to understand, like, the task we have given to him is almost monumental. I certainly, when I was running the program, couldn't get anywhere close to the performance that he's been getting out of it. And I'm just incredibly honored to hand it over to him. Go ahead, Jeremy.
Thank you. And thank you both for your absolutely laser-focused leadership. What I will tell you is across the board, the Artemis team have united behind the vision. They're excited about it. And what I...
You just saw with the core stage and the transfer aisle is just an example. Six months ago when we asked the team to go do some of these things, they didn't know it could be done, right? And so they're like, oh...
performed in a way that I cannot be more proud of. So I get to sit up here and represent the thousands of men and women working on Artemis across the country, and I cannot be more proud to do it. But they are sacrificing nights and weekends because they believe in the mission that's been given to them. And it is really an honor to represent their work to you guys today.
So within our Artemis team, we have been laser focused on driving progress, really to get to our boots on the 2028 timeline. We're fighting daily to increase the pace and value of our missions. We're strengthening the spaceflight workforce. We're rebuilding core competencies, and we're onboarding the key talent we need in order to achieve these goals. What I'm seeing, and kind of what both the administrator and Amit spoke about, is that these workforce investments are already paying dividends, both in our technical operational foundations, but also in our progress towards Artemis three.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of updates on Artemis three. I will tell you there's been a lot since we last spoke. So it's going to take a little while. Just sit back and I'll let them jump in as we need to. But so what we're seeing, right, is we're using the workforce that we're talking about. We have key personnel embedded at production facilities, at vendors, and we've empowered them with the decision authority to resolve issues. And we're seeing issues resolved in hours rather than days or weeks. And if you know anything about spaceflight hardware, there's always issues. And that time, those hours make a huge difference. And by doing so, we're seeing our processing times cut in half in some cases. And in more, we've actually reduced our resolution times for non-conformances by up to 85%.
So for Artemis three, as you just saw in the VAB, we have the hardware coming together, the boosters are stacked, the core stage is coming together, and all of these pieces are being built, tested and integrated in Florida. Now, so what we're going to move to now is I'm going to talk a little bit about where we've gotten to on Artemis three. It has been a significant few months. We've struck a mission baseline, and as you know, Artemis three is bringing together NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. We're launching three of the most powerful rockets in the world and undertaking what is likely the most complicated launch campaign ever undertaken.
So I'm going to walk you through the concept of operations for this mission. The graphic that will come up on the screen gives you a really good idea of what we're talking about as simply as we can. So we have baselined a 14-day mission. So that capability, we can extend up to 17 days because, you know, weather can happen, could delay a launch, things along those lines. But every day of this mission is built around specific tests that reduce risk, give us valuable science, and allows us to test out our capabilities before we go and undertake the lunar landing.
The first sequence in this launch campaign is going to be the Blue Origin, launching its Blue Moon test lander. And so as we've talked before, Artemis three is a low Earth orbit mission. And so prior to that New Glenn launch, what we're already going to do is we'll have SLS out at the launch pad. We would have conducted a wet dress rehearsal, and we're going to do everything we can to ensure that that vehicle is ready to go as quickly as we can. After that first Blue Origin launch, the Blue Moon test lander can loiter for up to a month in orbit. But end of the day, we want to minimize that risk. And so we want to get the crew on orbit and made it up as soon as we can thereafter.
Once in orbit, the Blue Origin team will make sure the vehicle is healthy and ready to support our rendezvous and docking operations with Orion. And just to give you a little bit of a feel, the Blue Moon lander is going to allow Orion to dock, the crew to ingress, and carries many of the same systems as the lunar lander will around the moon. Some of those systems, some of the things that we really get to buy down for, for me, first and foremost, is what we call our systems, our environmental control and life support systems. Those are tricky to build. That was one of our big objectives in Artemis two. But we're also going to be testing out our reaction control systems, our tanks, our valves, our thrusters, the articulating solar arrays, active thermal control systems and radiators.
The lunar crew module primary structure, it's the first build of it. It's going to be the exact same for Artemis three and tons of other things, including our software, flight computers and avionics systems, building, testing, and flying these. And Artemis three will help us understand and learn as much as we can from Blue's operations during this flight. It's similar to how we've started to take an evolvable approach between Artemis one and two and now three, and it sets us up for a lunar landing.
And for the next vehicle in the sequence is going to be the SLS. So we launched Orion into what is what we call an elliptical orbit at 16 by 975 nautical miles. And over the first day, Orion is going to transition from that higher altitude down to about 300 nautical miles. And that's really about getting thermal stability. Orion was built as a deep space vehicle. And so we're going to have to really manage the thermal environments, which are higher in a low Earth orbit. The crew is going to spend the first two days checking out the Orion spacecraft and setting up for proximity operations. During that time, Orion will maneuver down to a 237 nautical mile rendezvous orbit. And that's where we intend to meet the Blue Origin lander.
On flight day three, Orion performs the first major test of the mission. And this one's going to be a big one. It's the rendezvous and docking with the Blue Moon test lander. This is where we learn how both Orion and Blue systems operate together. Their guidance systems, laser navigation control, communications altogether in real world conditions. Over the next two days, the crew will conduct operations docked with Blue Moon. They're going to open up the hatch. They're going to enter the lander. They're going to evaluate the environmental controls, the life support systems. We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmosphere pressure. And we're also going to test emergency scenarios, dual vehicle control. And we're going to put our mission control teams through their paces.
On flight day six, after those operations are complete, Starship launches from Florida. And so Orion will then undock from Blue Moon and adjust its orbit to a 206 nautical mile rendezvous orbit with Starship on flight day eight. The Starship for Artemis three has a docking system that's built onto the nose cone, and it's letting us conduct on-orbit testing with a second, very different lander. And if you've seen some of the Starship images, a very large vehicle. So we want to learn how to control attitude together, how we're going to fly these vehicles together and how we're going to operate.
The demonstration with Starship is shorter, about two hours. The crew will not enter the Starship during the mission, but it gives us critical data and allows us to really understand the forces of docking, how we're going to push, how we're going to work together. When Starship operations are complete, Orion and crew have the remaining days available for additional test objectives before needing to come home. There is literally every hour already planned out in the timeline. We are packing it with science, with mission objectives, but three of the big ones that I really want to hit on is we have our Orion crew survival suit evaluations, so we didn't get those completed during Artemis two. And they're really important for contingency scenarios when you're in a lunar flight, if we lose pressure in the cabin, things like that. This is a really big one. We want to get on this mission.
We're also going to conduct docking sensor tests, acoustic and thermal measurements. And we're going to perform human factors assessments inside Orion, as well as a wide range of science and technology demonstrations. End of the day, the mission, the full 14 days is packed the entire time with science, with objectives that are really each buying us down risk to go into some of the science. We're including a series of studies focused on human health and biological science, testing concepts for future missions on the moon, and a host of Earth and Sun observations.
Our human research program is going to conduct four studies that build upon the Artemis two experiments, and they're going to conduct a proof of concept study for how crew could perform health related assessments in situations where mission control isn't available. Those are going to be critical lessons learned as we build out our moon base and have our lunar aspirations. We're going to perform Earth and Sun observations that will take place to continue training crew in critical observation skills, and it leverages the distinct orbital characteristics of where we're going to be in this mission.
Everything we do on Artemis three is designed to reduce risk for future lunar landing missions. And then, when combined with the Mark I landings, with the additional Starship launches, with our uncrewed demonstrations, make us very comfortable with the risk level we're going to go take on Artemis four. Big picture though, we're providing the choreography of a multi-launch campaign. We're teaching these teams how to work together, how to make critical, real-time mission decisions, all in an environment that is low Earth orbit, where if something goes wrong, we can come home much more quickly.
Let's see. All right, so let's talk about some of the fun stuff, which is the crew and hardware progress. So since being assigned to the Artemis three mission on June 9th, Randy, Luca, Frank, and Andre have already completed more than 350 hours of classroom instruction. They've participated in 22 integrated simulations with the flight control team. Our flight control team in Houston has already conducted 55 mission simulations, preparing mission control to safely and successfully execute our missions. At KSC, the launch team is already training heavily to keep the muscle memory alive. They've already performed 100 hours in simulations with cryo and countdown sims.
As you can see in the video behind you, we're also really well advanced with our rocket hardware. I want to stop for a second for integrated exploration, ground systems and Space Launch System teams. They have demonstrated just absolutely amazing endurance, efforts and creativity. The minute the vision for Artemis three was announced, our teams began accelerating booster deliveries. And actually we had, I think, a call that evening of the ignition event to get boosters delivered earlier and laying out plans to expedite operations. To that end, stacking was completed at the end of September. That's a pretty big deal when you think it's just five months after we just landed Artemis two.
And then for some additional perspective, we were able to cut the time it took to prepare the booster segments for stacking in half, and booster stacking operations were completed in 20% of the time, or were cut by 20%. The team has been doing this by a number of different things. NASA is on the floor. They are leading. They're bringing decision velocity. They're incorporating lessons learned. We're improving our requirements, simplifying, and we're getting creative on how to perform work in parallel. Meanwhile, as you heard earlier, we're getting ready to integrate the core stage with the boosters. And so we have some pretty cool images of that coming through.
And then there you go, which again, just for perspective, that is the absolute coolest lift I've ever seen in my life. 220 feet long. You got two cranes. You're going vertical in the historic vertical assembly Vehicle Assembly Building. It's pretty exciting. And I was getting images and pictures all day yesterday from everyone on the team. They can't be more excited about what we're doing.
When we talk about kind of the engines there at the bottom, just so you know, if we go to this next photo, we have the L3Harris facility in Canoga Park, California, and we're actually building up a large inventory of engines ready to go for this next vehicle as well, because we have kept the team proficient and immediately rolled into Artemis three. We've seen the team able to leverage lessons learned. We're taking fewer non-conformances and resolving issues much more quickly. This isn't because we're cutting corners or doing things less safely. We're exercising muscle memory rather than building it again three years in between losing workforce. We immediately rolled into the next one.
The mobile launcher was back in the Vehicle Assembly Building 17 days after launch. You compare that to between Artemis one and two. It is a world of difference. With this, we plan to keep that muscle memory going. We want to roll out for a tanking test with the boosters and core stage in the coming months. And this is about testing out critical systems, but also about keeping our team performing the reps and staying ready. This configuration is what we're going to call a short stack configuration. We will not have the spacecraft or Orion on top. It's just going to be the core stage and the boosters. But more importantly, it allows us to test new hardware where we previously saw liquid hydrogen leaks.
And so I'll start kind of showing some of this photo, because this is just kind of an example of how we've been implementing some of this. After Artemis two, we knew we needed to change out what we call the quick disconnect because we had leaks of hydrogen on Artemis one and two. The reason why we hadn't done it was it was going to cost tens of millions of dollars and about multiple years. So let's see, in April timeframe, right around maybe late March, when we had kind of the last wet dress rehearsal and saw some of these leaks again, we kicked off a team internal to NASA. They decided to bring the work in-house. They leveraged our unique experience where we redesigned it, fabricated it, and we already have it in testing less than five months for an absolute fraction of the cost.
And so this is what we can do and must do more of going forward, both for the taxpayer and what our cadence is going to demand of us in the space race. NASA needs to be expected to do this kind of work, and we have some of the best technical knowledge in the industry to do it. It's an example of how we're taking the handcuffs off of some of our engineers and allowing them to lead.
Next up is probably my favorite example of something that we have done recently, which is the spacer that's going to fly on Artemis three in place of the upper stage. So when we pivoted to a low Earth orbit mission, the SLS team quickly came back and said, we don't need the upper stage for that. Core stage has plenty of performance to drop us into orbit. So rather than waste that critical hardware and the cost of that upper stage, the ICPS, we developed the idea of a spacer to keep the interfaces the same. As you see in this footage, our Marshall and SLS teams moved at a speed that has absolutely blown my mind. They finished the design, they got the material, they fabricated it all in-house. This is since ignition. The hardware is done and will be largely delivered to KSC in the next couple of months. There was no contracting, no unnecessary overhead. We had these capabilities. We unleashed them to go do it. And it's some of the fastest work I've ever seen.
As for the spacecraft, the Orion crew and service module are fully mated and going through integrated testing in the operations and checkout building. Just down the road, we got more than 95% of the Orion hardware integration complete. Our remaining work is finishing out some of the crew systems and doing critical environmental testing. Given how successful Artemis two was with our optical comm capabilities, getting imagery back, we actually decided in the March timeframe to add two Starlink terminals to the vehicle to improve the imagery quality and the downlinks. So again, this is another example where we were able to change on a dime. We quickly implemented the hardware, and we actually have those two terminals going on this week being installed.
Our goal is to increase parallel production, reduce timelines, and make Orions available sooner. And to that goal, we also have approved more than 250 components to be removed from the two spacecraft and reused for future flights. This is going to help us to accelerate our readiness and decrease our dependency on long lead vendors and supply chain. That's how we get the stage set for our moon base ambitions.
So let's see. Let's talk about the lander test articles. So work with our lander partners, Blue Origin and SpaceX, is progressing really well for both Artemis three and four. I think Blue Origin's New Glenn team has amazed the world with their progress for return to flight after the incident in May. We're working closely with them. We have over 100 NASA team engaged throughout return to flight, engaged with the FAA, lander production, and I have seen Blue Origin mobilize an absolute army working around the clock to get them back to flight. This picture here is of their next booster headed to their integration facility.
And so Blue Origin is shooting for pad operations to start back up in November with a first return to flight launch of New Glenn soon thereafter. The design for the Artemis three lander test article is in good shape. We have gone through design reviews, we've been participating with them, and they have parts coming together from across the United States. And I will tell you, I see that team fighting for every single day, figuring out how to shave hours off the test article. Crew cabin is currently being built with pressure testing and full integration of the Mark II test lander slated for early 2027.
But NASA is not just standing by. We're working closely with them to embed some of our best people to help on software, to help on welding, to help on thruster development, and they're using NASA facilities in a lot of these instances. So to give me a minute to stop talking, we have a video. We have a video from Blue Origin, including the return to flight efforts, Mark I work that will inform Mark II, and hardware progress for Artemis missions. So why don't we cue that video?
I really love that video. And I love, again, some of the work we're doing and what we're seeing from our leadership too, right? Is they are absolutely walking the walk every time we run into a supplier issue, a priority issue across the industry. Administrators are immediately on the phone. They're immediately putting pressure. We're immediately going out and helping to make things happen. And it's really been an absolutely impressive undertaking.
So let's see. Let's move on to SpaceX. And so, as many of you know, SpaceX launched their first orbital flight with Starship Flight 14 in late September. And that was using their version three Starship. It had important upgrades from their previous version. And really, I mean, it was a pretty phenomenal flight. All in all, the SpaceX and NASA teams have conducted a data review of the flight. They're making excellent progress towards Flight 15, which I think will absolutely be awesome to see, because it could likely be a return to launch site and a catch of both the booster and Starship. Both vehicles have already been cryo proofed. Improvements are being worked to address lessons learned from Flight 14.
As you know, SpaceX takes a test, learn and improve approach. And so we're seeing lots of hardware, lots of quick changes and an absolute blistering pace of production. As an example, SpaceX identified the root cause of multiple Raptor engine relight failures at boost back and landing. They implemented several quick fixes for Flights 13 and 14 to improve their chances to reach more test objectives. And then they already have permanent hardware improvements coming for Flight 15 when they start flying an improved version of the Raptor. These sorts of changes in this timeline would be unthinkable in standard industry history.
And so, you know, again, as we expect to see SpaceX's next Starship flight, probably in the November timeframe, we also expect to see these timelines between flights get smaller and smaller. Each one of those flights is going to be critical lessons building confidence, reducing risk towards our lunar ambitions. The image that will come up here is of the Starship production line, and I think that picture says a thousand words of just what the future holds and what we will be able to achieve together.
SpaceX is making progress also here at the Kennedy Space Center, building out the pad for Starship with eyes towards the first launch of Starship from the Cape in the coming months. The entire skyline of KSC, you can see, is also changing as they finish the new Giga Bay, and they build out the infrastructure needed for Starship operations in Florida. For Artemis three, the SpaceX test lander article will have a passive docking system, as we mentioned, on its nose cone, which will be integrated several weeks before flight. But they're already making great progress on that. The design is done as well as the aero cover to protect it, and we're looking at concurrent fit check testing of that next month at NASA Marshall.
So while I'm personally excited about Artemis three, I am also extremely eager to see the upcoming propellant transfer demonstration missions. So this is going to be a first of its kind SpaceX mission, where they're going to launch two Starships in quick succession, one from Boca Chica, one from the Kennedy Space Center. And they're going to prove out how propellant transfer works on orbit to a depot that will. Then again, this is all risk mitigation and building us up towards our eventual lunar campaigns. The hardware and concepts I've already laid eyes on with them. We went through it in detail. They're very mature, and SpaceX is targeting this demonstration for early 2027. So in the next video, we'll take a look at the progress they're making across the board to support Artemis three and beyond.
It's pretty awesome. All right. So that's kind of the progress on Artemis three, what we're doing there. I'm going to go into Artemis four progress. So you can understand where we're at on our lunar mission because we are not slowing down with Artemis three. And we have teams working both things in great parallel activities. We have NASA leadership team that is out on the field every day, working with vendors to drive outcomes just like they are for Artemis three, for everything.
Artemis four on Orion, our crew and service modules are both at KSC. They're undergoing installations and testing. And in this image, you can actually see our mission specialist, Andre Douglas from Artemis three, stepping inside the Artemis four spacecraft. Engineers have also completed bonding tiles on the Artemis four heat shield, and gap filling is in work. As you can see there, we're coming quite far along.
On the SLS side, where final processing inspections of the RS-25 engines are ongoing at Stennis Space Center, as well as preparations and testing of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. What you see here is an image of Artemis four LH2 tank. And so again, we are starting to stack up hardware and get it out the door, which again will allow us to improve that muscle memory and get more flights off. Our teams in Michoud and KSC are working day and night, ensuring core stage four is ready for flight by early 2028, with core stage five ready later that year.
As you know, our team has been focused on what we can do to accelerate our lunar landing and return American astronauts to the moon. Amit, as well as the administrator, spoke about stepping back, looking at our architecture, really trying to understand what we can do to reduce risk. And so that's been a major focus of the last several months. It's been a deliberate effort, including where we could simplify, deciding where we could simplify our requirements, streamline designs and improve mission probabilities of success. These efforts give us options which we did not previously have in some instances. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of that and then kind of take you through our thought processes.
First up is the sortie suit, which I believe some of you may have heard about at this point. NASA and Axiom are advancing both our baseline suit as well as what we now call a tailored configuration, the sortie suit for moonwalking, to use during our earliest early Artemis missions. What you see here is a rendering of the sortie suit. In our original requirements, we were building a design to an eventual end state that far exceeded what we would need in these early missions. The time durations were going to be on the moon, the amount of hardware we can bring with us, and simply put, the complexity of those initial assets added risk and testing, added risk to the design of the landers, and the sortie suit directly addresses those issues.
We are able to cut the suit mass in half, from about 500, a little over 500 pounds, to about 250 pounds. And when you think about what has to be delivered to the lunar surface, that is a really big deal. This is all about building in design margin for landers, creating evolvable capabilities that are intended to grow with our mission. The design of the sortie suit leverages our existing production capabilities, our infrastructure, our supply chain efficiencies with Axiom, using many of the certified components of the baseline suit, as well as already decided and designed interfaces with our landers.
The sortie suit is intended for short, targeted, science-driven spacewalks near the lander, but it also allows for quicker turnaround between EVAs during the early Artemis missions and can be worn by astronauts as they land on and ascend from the lunar surface in a lunar lander similar to Apollo. We've set a minimum surface EVA duration for the sortie configuration suit of at least two hours. We anticipate we'll be able to operate longer, but every minute of our first surface EVAs will allow us to reduce the unknowns and take out any unnecessary conservatism while maintaining our safety controls.
Over subsequent missions, the EVAs will become longer in duration, longer traverses, and in more aggressive terrain and thermal environments. But if history has taught us anything, evolving our designs rather than jumping to an end state is going to be the right way to move ahead quickly. We'll be able to use the sortie suit configuration for missions that are short duration, and then bring on the baseline suit for longer missions with moon base that require construction, longer duration surface stays, and mission plans that reuse suits across multiple crew visits.
This is all about proactively addressing early Artemis mission challenges and not going straight to the end state with lunar surface EVAs. Instead, we're taking an achievable, iterative approach. We continue to plan to do the demonstration of the baseline spacesuit on the space station in 2027, because we're keeping these two lines moving in parallel. This represents a significant risk reduction activity for Artemis four, because more than 50% of your life support system components are the same, it's going to be able to give us good test information. And then Axiom and NASA are working together to complete development, training and the NBL to ensure that our teams are well prepared for a future lunar excursion activities.
We're using a similar approach with the SLS rocket. So as we step back and we looked at what was needed to reduce our risk, improve design margins and give ourselves some flexibility, we are now carrying two configurations of the SLS upper stage. The first is the ICPS, which is currently available. And as you know, we don't have to fly Artemis three. So we got it in the barn ready to go. We are also going to add in a stretch Centaur upper stage by keeping Artemis three in LEO. Again, the ICPS is available and ready to fly, but when we switch from the US to the Centaur, we did so very deliberately. We simply did not have confidence that the US could meet our timelines or the cost and schedule growth that we were seeing was acceptable.
The Centaur is a vehicle that is in production that NASA and ULA know well, and one that is capable of achieving our missions. I have personally visited Decatur, and I will tell you, the factory that I've seen there is able to sustain the build rate that we're looking for, and to get us hardware quickly. And it has great flight heritage. So when we talk about the Centaur, what we're doing there is we're adding 50% increased propellant capacity compared to the standard Vulcan Centaur V. This lets us get more mass to translunar injection orbit. And when combined with the kick stage that's under final study, could allow us to get Orion to what we call a low lunar orbit.
That may not sound like a big deal, but when you're talking about every study we have ever done since 2014, something that came out and it inevitably was, the closer we can get Orion to the moon, the more design margin we have, the more risk reduction, the more mission availability, and the more overall options become available to us. The team has been looking at this for months, and again, we quickly turned on the Centaur, and we're in the final stages of making a decision on a kick stage as well. We're doing this by leveraging the absolute best that NASA and industry has to offer, and really leaning into hardware that exists in many instances.
Here's a look at a couple of the images of Centaur. The first is a rendering of the extended Centaur with Orion in space. And as you can see, they're absolutely beautiful. And then the second is from some of our wind tunnel testing that's actually being conducted out at Ames. So again, we put this into effect less than 60 days ago. They have already machined accurate models that are undergoing wind testing. So we can understand how this vehicle flies, how we need to change our guidance and navigation control. And just again, rapidly moving to get this ready.
Overall, this increased capability enables the SLS rocket to deliver NASA's Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit more effectively. It provides greater flexibility, more performance. And no rocket guy has ever said, I want less performance. So with the stretch Centaur stage, we also will be able to get increased loiter duration times for our landers, which is really about increasing our opportunities for mission availability. You know, our lunar windows are short. We need to be able to have as many opportunities as possible to ensure that we can achieve the mission successfully.
This also supports broader national space policy objectives, maintains strong demand among Vulcan customers, and it creates dual use value beyond the Artemis program. So let's see what makes stretch Centaur different from the US and other development activities that have taken longer. So first and foremost, this is a production line that is in service. It is already humming. They are pumping out vehicles. We are leveraging known capabilities.
But I would also say NASA is not sitting back and just saying, let's deliver it. We are embedding NASA people at the production facility. We are using our test facilities to help move this along quickly. We've put in materials welding experts from across the agency on the floor making things happen. The team is already well underway and having our weld schedules ready. They have material in hand or in work, and they're moving with a great sense of purpose associated with the space race. The sortie suit configuration and the stretch Centaur, just two of...
the efforts that we are doing to accelerate our return to the moon that I think are really important for everyone to know, because they're going to be very visible, but we're doing it across the board. This chart gives you an idea of where we are with some of those efforts.
So again, I don't need you to necessarily read this, but what I will say kind of across the board is we're looking at some of the key 2026 accomplishments on sortie suit, on Centaur, mobile launcher and SLS. What we are instituting across the board in both these and in the charts that follow are spiral developments. We are putting key people in charge. We're giving them the authority, but then we're holding them to regular deliveries. Build, build a little, iterate, build, iterate to where we get to where we're going very quickly.
And what I will say is in terms of hardware development, in terms of what we're seeing, the teams are really stepping up in performance. The sortie suit. I think if you go to the next slide, the sortie suit. So this is SLS and mobile launcher modification. So kind of what this shows you is from our SLS hardware perspective, every single quarter we have hardware being built and delivered from across the board. So from our boosters to the core stage to our spacecraft adapters, we have deliveries on every single month. Similar for the mobile launcher.
For the sortie suit, what you're going to see is by the end of this year, we'll already have our pressure garment built and delivered, and then we're going directly into our life support systems directly thereafter. And so the team has set an ambitious schedule. They are a blended team between Axiom and NASA. And we are actually kind of sequestering them in some of the Axiom facilities and really seeing a lot of progress.
By instituting some of these initiatives, we are preserving options. We shrink in readiness and increase flexibility for our early missions. The technologies we are developing are complex. Things are going to change. We are going to need to be able to adapt as those things change. If we want to beat China to the moon, if we want to build out our moon base, and if we want margin to evolve, Artemis is going to drive. There is no question about that.
We are changing our time. We are not changing our timelines. We're changing how we do things. We're leaning into our best and brightest. We're giving them ownership and we're simplifying overly complex requirements and establishing approaches that will help us achieve our goals.
All right, I'm almost home, I promise. Stay with me. I'm going to jump into the Artemis 4 concepts of operations. Just to give you kind of a feel for exactly what we're undertaking here as part of our risk reduction efforts, we worked closely with both SpaceX and Blue Origin starting late last year to propose accelerated concepts of operations. This is to really prioritize our lunar landings in 2028. Very similar story with our initial lunar landing concepts is what I was just talking about on the sortie suit and Centaur. And so we are looking to simplify, remove difficult requirements.
We've been already removing what we call the no orbit for docking with Orion, which is a costly orbit that requires quite a bit from a propellant perspective. And by removing that requirement on our lander partners and giving them some additional options, we can increase our mission availability as well as reduce the number of launches required for space.
And this graphic here, we showed the full concept of operations for an accelerated lunar landing mission that I'm going to walk you through here briefly. The Starship propellant aggregation still takes place in low Earth orbit before the crew launch in Orion and SLS, allowing for additional refueling and flexibility in crew launch timing. This accelerated approach has the Starship lander docking with Orion in what is now a high Earth orbit, before performing the translunar injection burn, or what we call kind of a push of Orion to low lunar orbit.
So that is instead of meeting up around the moon, we're going to actually use the Starship to push us out there. Our teams found that if we modified Orion to be able to be pushed, we could drastically simplify the number of launches and really improve the probability of success of the mission. Those mods on Orion have already been greenlit. They're well underway, the design is complete, and the fabrication is in process right now, already on the European Service module.
You can see in this next slide some of the upcoming milestones that we have on this mission. Just because there were so many different milestones, we're heavily focused on the next year. But it is absolutely jam-packed. It's one milestone after another as Starship ramps up, flight rate perfects reusability, brings on additional launch pads, and conducts our prop aggregation demo. Just like with Falcon 9, every flight of Starship teaches us about the system. It increases reliability and confidence and gets us closer to the moon.
The crew cabin build that you saw in the earlier video is well underway. I have laid eyes on it and how it is coming together. I will tell you, I would be much more excited to stay in this vehicle than an Apollo-style mission for our crews. It's going to be really, really awesome. The team is targeting the first uncrewed demo mission to the lunar surface at the end of 2027, and then from there, we're looking at the back half of 2028 for our first lunar landing on Blue Origin, which we're going to go to the next graphic to talk about their accelerated mission concept.
Blue plans to use three Mark 1-like transfer vehicles as tugboat-style transfer vehicles to take the Mark 2 crew lander to lunar orbit. Blue will meet up with Orion to receive the crew in what we call a special elliptical polar lunar orbit, so easier than an NRHO, but it still allows access to the South Pole landing sites. We did this because we could get closer to the surface, requiring less tanker-type launches, less transfer stages.
Blue would first individually launch these three Mark 1-like vehicles, our transfer stages, before the launch of the Mark 2 lander, aggregating in low Earth orbit. Then two of the transfer stages will boost the Mark 2 and remaining transfer stage to the elliptical Earth orbit. That remaining transfer stage will then fire the translunar injection burn to take itself and the Mark 2 to an elliptical polar orbit. SLS would then launch Orion and its crew. Blue's lander and Orion would meet up in that elliptical polar orbit before the remaining transfer stage would bring the crewed Mark 2 to a low lunar orbit.
The Mark 2 will take over from there, performing the landing and short surface stay, ultimately launching the crew back to Orion for the trip back to Earth. Blue Origin already has a tremendous amount of hardware and production and testing for the initial crewed landing mission.
If you go to the next graphic, it kind of gives you a similar feel on the Blue Origin side of just what's coming up. As we mentioned, New Glenn's return to flight is on the horizon. And then in early 2027, Blue plans to bring up their vertical integration facility for its upgraded New Glenn rocket. That is the version of the New Glenn, the Nine by Four, which will serve as the launch vehicle for the Mark 2 crewed lander and supporting stages. Next year, we will also see the first launch of the uncrewed Mark 1 cargo lander.
And so you saw some of those images in the earlier video, but every single one of these Mark 1 missions is using many of the similar systems, similar engines, reaction control, and they're going to give us valuable test and information to reduce our risk for lunar landing. Outside Cleveland, NASA Glenn teams are preparing at the Armstrong Test Facility for a three-engine B7 test campaign that was also shown quickly in the video. But this is really going to tell us how three of those engines can operate together.
And moving quite along on that, after the Artemis 3 mission, we expect to see the first demonstration of the transfer stages and Mark 2 aggregation as part of the uncrewed demo mission. The uncrewed demonstrations for us are going to provide critical operations to reduce risk for our initial surface mission. It's going to allow us to learn how do we start and restart cryogenic engines on the moon rather than hypergolic. We're going to understand kind of the conditions of the regolith at the South Pole, plume conditions and surface interaction, thermal performance of the landers. And it really is going to be a critical stepping stone to the eventual lunar landing.
If all goes according to plan, we'll also have a lunar terrain vehicle on the lunar surface by the time the first Artemis astronauts arrive near the South Pole, giving us additional options as the moon base begins to take shape. NASA and we intend to wait as long as possible to make a decision about which provider is ultimately going to provide the first American astronauts back to the moon in 2028. And so this is, again, really trying to go along with them in the development cycle. And we have dedicated teams working hand in hand with both providers, marching along the way, doing everything we can to accelerate regardless of who goes first. Both providers are planning for lunar landing missions in 2028.
Our work doesn't stop when we return astronauts to the lunar surface. For the future of our American prosperity, leadership, and inspiration, we intend to build a moon base to where we can learn, live, and work there, all to give us the skill sets we need to go further.
All right, last couple of bits. Just closing, I hope you guys recognize and see what I see in this team. They are fighting for every hour. They are fighting for every day. And they have embraced this mission and are excited about the increased launch cadence. I know I am. We finalized modifying our contracts with the human landing system providers, and we have moved at a pace I have not seen since ignition, which to me is just awesome. We're using our resources, we're uncuffing many of our people to go out there, get things done, and solve problems in a way that we hadn't before.
This is an incredibly difficult challenge, but I know if there is any team that can do it, it is the one that we have for Artemis, and we're working with our partners to bring every ounce of expertise, every ounce of industry, all to bear to accomplish the near impossible. So with that, thank you for your time. Thank you for listening. And thank you to our team that's out there doing just amazing work.
Thank you. We'll now move into questions from the media because I'm sure you have a lot of them. We'll begin with questions from the room. For those joining us by phone, please press star one to enter the question queue. And for those here in the room, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to come to you. To help us get to as many questions as possible, please limit yourself to one question at a time and let us know which of our participants you would like to answer. We'll begin in the back right corner in the white.
Thanks. Bill Harwood, CBS News, for Jeremy. I guess, you know, when Apollo went to the moon, one of the strong points, I guess, that they tested on Apollo 10 was they went down, separated. You tested what amounted to an abort system or a way to get out of a landing if things weren't going right. Is there any such capability with either of these landers that once you commit to landing, something goes wrong, can you get out of it? Or are you committed to the mission from that point forward? Thanks.
You want to go ahead right now.
Yeah. So both the landers are absolutely going to have an abort capability. And we're going to learn about a lot of that, especially with our uncrewed demonstrations. We're doing ground testing, we're doing validation testing, engine testing and things like that. But we will absolutely have an abort capability as we go to land.
Well, let's see. So I mean, I don't know if you have some thoughts, but I mean, essentially it's not like a... I mean, we have engines that are fully firing, right? And so you would basically ramp them down as you're going to land. And then in certain abort sequences, you would ramp up back the fuel and you just change where you're going.
So they didn't have Apollo... they didn't have uncrewed capability to start the machines, right? So we're just going to use the uncrewed flights to bang away at Raptor restart and those things we're going to need to do it.
Next question. Front row in the red.
Marcia Dunn, Associated Press. You've done a lot of realignment here with the hardware and with the flight profile. But I'm wondering, there's been some calls lately to change the location of the moon base, maybe even Artemis 4 away from the south polar region. Is that under debate? Is that under consideration? And if not, why not?
Do you want... Yeah, I can. I mean, I think, Marcia, we're always going to debate it. I mean, part of the moon base approach has been recognizing that we don't really understand the environment. And we have overhead remote sensing in those assets, right? We know kind of at those resolutions what's there. But, you know, we've only taken a few looks in the last year or so in terms of what that environment looks like. The thermal environment, multipathing. I mean, the regolith down there is very interesting. And so the approach that the moon base program is taking is, hey, let's start, let's just start getting down there, flying sensors. We're going to come up with common sensor packages that are going to ride along the first few moon base missions. This is the, you know, kind of learn phase of the program.
And I think based on that, we'll be able to tell, you know, what looks great from an overhead perspective might not be great from a thermal perspective given the local relief. And so that's kind of really critical. So we're going to make sure we entertain a wide swath of possibility, but we need data. So we need to get that first.
Yeah. And I think giving the appreciation for the sheer quantity of moon base landings that are going to take place in advance of crewed landings and what we stand to learn from that. I mean, we have one, you know, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went up, I think, in 2009. We're going to be having so many additional assets in the cislunar environment, you know, really in the next two years, not to mention every one of the landers and rovers going down. We're going to have plume surface interaction cameras, HD cameras on that. We're going to get a really good understanding of the environment.
And as you've learned today, every time a Mark 1 makes its way to the lunar surface, part of the moon base build-out, that is a lot of critical data that carries over to the Mark 2, considering that's going to be essentially the transfer stages used to push the crew vehicle to it. So while I think there's been some papers that have come out recently about ideal exploration zones outside of the lunar South Pole, I don't think any of them dispute the fact that the lunar South Pole is probably the most advantageous area we can go to.
Short of what I think would be very cool at some point in the future is maybe almost like the historical significance of revisiting an Apollo landing site. But lunar South Pole is the most desirable area. It's where we're going to build the moon base. It's what we're tracking to right now for the Artemis program.
So this course of targeting, yes.
Next question. Second row in the suit.
Hi. Thank you, George, and thank you all for your time. Will Robinson Smith with Spaceflight Now. Question to Jeremy. We heard yesterday during the panel discussion that the latest estimate for the number of flights for refueling for Starship was going to be around the order of 22. That was pretty quickly refuted by Elon Musk on social media, saying it's closer to 6 to 8. Which end is closer based on the data that you have right now? Are we looking at higher double digits, higher single digits, somewhere in the middle? I know it's still in flux, as you know, we're waiting for the propellant transfer. Thanks.
So we were definitely not tracking as high as 22 unless, you know, your transfer efficiency and performance wasn't the same. So I would say Elon's answer of 6 to 8 is probably more, again, what SpaceX is planning to. But I will tell you is our propellant transfer demo is really going to be probably the best method we have to really figure out exactly how many we're going to need, right? So it's going to be a number of different factors in terms of what is your transfer efficiency. Are you losing 5%, are you losing 10%? And then especially as they start to get the capability to that V3 vehicle up, it will really make a big difference. But by all accounts, SpaceX's latest estimate is that 6 to 8 from Elon.
I mean, just to layer on to that, right? We are, I mean, there's still very early on in development program. I mean, right now their target performance from a flight 14 versus where they ultimately hope to achieve a V3 two years from now is very different. And, you know, should that be concerning? If there were a handful of additional flights from now until when we target to landing on the moon, of course. But you're talking about them aspiring to get up to potentially a weekly launch cadence.
I think, I mean, total between Texas, what they're endeavoring to build in Louisiana and here at KSC, you have 14, 15, you know, launch pads that are going to be operational. You saw that from some of the video footage of what their Giga Bay looks like here in the production capacities at Starship. They're not doing this to work with a, you know, a handful of hardware here, but to get into a near weekly cadence.
So from our perspective, if 6 to 8 is kind of the ultimate potential end state for this vehicle, fantastic. I mean, even, you know, they even get additional efficiencies and performance out of Merlin here, however many years later thereafter. But I suspect we will all be able to follow along going into 27 on potentially like a near weekly, maybe biweekly, and then getting weekly as to the progress they're making to get to the ultimate target tonnage to LEO, and that is going to drive a lot of the ultimate number of tanking or depot stops before going to the moon.
Our next question will come from over the phone from Joey Roulette with Reuters.
Just a follow-up, Jeremy, you had mentioned transfer efficiency at this point. What kind of transfer efficiency in the cryo transfer process do you guys expect? If you can break that down any way? And then for Jared and Amit, NASA has kind of delivered almost $3.2 billion to SpaceX in the past six years for the HLS work. Can you say what exactly that has gone to, like what areas the most has that funded, especially considering, you know, you guys think they're still early on in the program? Thanks.
Let's see. So for the first question, in terms of transfer efficiency, what this initial demo is going to prove to us is how much propellant do you have to keep in the tanker versus the depot, and how much can you get out? That's going to be part of it. And then also kind of the boil-off rates along those lines. And so kind of in early estimates, you know, kind of on the conservative side, it could be between 5 and 10% in terms of loss. But what we will tell you is a lot of the engineering teams think that they can do a lot better over time. This is going to be iterative technology. They're going to improve their processes by which doing so, things like that. But all of those end up, when you're talking about thousands and thousands of pounds of propellant, you know, end up playing a big factor in terms of how many launches you need in terms of the overall loss.
Yeah. I mean, just in terms of the dollars and cents that are spent on this. And by the way, just to clarify my remarks of being early on in development, obviously they've been putting money into Starship capabilities for a while. And what I'm referring to is kind of early in terms of, you know, getting the flight data needed to optimize the spacecraft to get to their target tonnage to LEO, which again, if you, with a schedule potentially biweekly, trending to weekly in 2027, we should be seeing a dramatic increase in flight cadence.
In terms of the dollars that have been committed to SpaceX, obviously milestone-driven within the HLS contract. But just to frame it this way, I mean, I think this is an organization that just raised $100 billion in their IPO. So if that's the critical enabling capability, which is Starship for all they hope to inspire, the taxpayers are essentially going to be funding about 3.5% or so of it, which I'd say we're getting pretty considerable value for something beyond just putting astronauts on the lunar surface or helping build a moon base for everything it can do for us in LEO and beyond.
If I recall, I think they spent about a billion on Starship development just in the last quarter alone. This is something that's very advantageous for taxpayers. And I'd say the same story is certainly applicable to Blue Origin. I think Jeff Bezos recently came out and described how much capital they've invested in their commercial spaceflight capabilities, which certainly well in excess of the milestones that have been paid under their HLS contract. And that's a model that, as taxpayers, we should all be very supportive of.
Next question will come from over the phones from Marsha Smith with SpacePolicyOnline.com.
Thanks so much for taking my question. It's to Jared Isaacman. You've talked a lot about the history of the Apollo program and Gemini as well, but I haven't heard you talk much about what you learned from the Apollo 1 fire. Could you talk a little bit about what you took away from that and what you thought the fundamental problems were that led to the Apollo fire, and what you need to be looking out for as you're moving forward with this return of the moon?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's extremely important that we always understand the risks we are taking. Clearly, there was risk on the pad, you know, at that point on a test that was no intention of going into space. But, you know, it was certainly well investigated. Those lessons were learned and carried on. I mean, it's an area right now that we spend an awful lot of time in. You know, we have an hour or so to talk in front of you, but if you want to know the discussions that go on on the flammability testing or the exploration atmosphere testing that's underway, we actually just wrapped up, I want to say, another human spaceflight program test at Johnson Space Center on exploration atmosphere so that we can dinitrogen our astronauts before they walk on the moon, but do so in a way that doesn't create a highly flammable environment.
So if we want to go specific to, you know, the matters of Apollo 1, those lessons have been captured and well understood around the agency, but it's not lost on us. The risk exists far beyond that. And it's, you know, it's why we have flight readiness reviews, why we have preflight readiness reviews that go into it. It's why we discuss things. But those type of consequences that can happen, extremely dangerous work of human exploration shouldn't be confused with things like moving with urgency or purpose, you know, to get to your outcome.
As I said in my remarks before, you know, the idea of taking longer, costing more and flying less somehow leading to better, safer outcomes, I think is a misunderstanding that's been left uncorrected for far too long. I don't know if you want to add.
Yeah. I mean, Marsha, I think the intent of the question is that, you know, if we're going fast, how does it mean we're being safe? And what I would tell you is, and, you know, we talk about this a lot, but speed and rigor are not the same dial. They're just not. We can dial them separately. And just because we go fast doesn't mean we're not doing the right things.
In fact, the way we're going fast, as you heard Jeremy say, is to remove things that were unnecessary, that were redundant in terms of our testing capability. And when you go fast, you develop higher quality workmanship. Reliability goes up. Our data and our understanding of the data actually gets better. Now, that doesn't... I'm not neglecting the lessons of history from the standpoint of, you know, schedule pressure being a driving factor. But schedule pressure then devolves into, you know, making the teams make mistakes because they're not thinking about the implications of what that pressure means.
And I would tell you, the environment that we've set up, where we still have the descent processes and the technical authority surveillance that we've learned that's come from Apollo, from Challenger to Columbia. Those processes are all in place. All of the organizational controls are all in place. And so all of those things we continue to do. And so I don't think that we have to make the claim that, you know, urgency... Urgency can mean a test that takes ten minutes, right? If you're going to do that test, do that test.
Urgency doesn't mean just because we have in the past, you know, convinced ourselves that same test requires a year of a diligence building campaign and assurance campaign. Those aren't the same things either. We have to make smart choices. We have to take risks where we can. It is inherently risky. But I would tell you, the lessons of our history are well encoded in the way that we're performing here.
Next question will come from over the phone from Eric Berger with Ars Technica.
Hi. Thanks very much for doing this. A question for Jared. I think you said the problem of getting Orion to low lunar orbit was, quote, left unaddressed for far too long. So maybe you can talk a little bit about why that was and how NASA's, you know, addressing the problem. I know Jeremy addressed it a little bit, and then just maybe a little bit more about how this enables a lunar landing or speeds up or keeps you to 2028 timeline. Thanks.
Yeah, sure. I mean, there wasn't anything in the... I mean, I guess you'd potentially have to go back to Constellation where it was intended to drop off Orion in low lunar orbit. So there's obviously inherent performance issues with getting Orion there. Now, even the exploration upper stage, which might have been useful for, you know, co-manifesting payload to the moon for building out a Gateway, did not help you get Orion into low lunar orbit. So that was unaddressed for a period of time.
The way it was addressed was, well, let's shift that burden onto the landers themselves. Now here we are with, you know, 27 some odd months to go, looking at what we can do within the agency. But we're also, as I said, always listening to the data, looking at what's happening around us, what progress is our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to be helpful? You know, in that regard, because there are direct benefits. You saw two different concepts, but every one of their lives gets easier. If we can get Orion closer to the moon substantially, certainly helps out Blue Origin on their side.
So we could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they'll show up and meet our timelines or not. Or we can say, well, let's start turning those knobs and do so. So meaning it was not part of any of the recent history as far as I know, unless going all the way back to maybe the early Constellation concepts to get Orion close to the moon, but we have the time to be able to do so. Now, I don't know if anything you want to... I don't know.
Well, you know, I would just say, right, when we look across all of those big risks, one of them is if our landers and some of these accelerated concepts could only do 30 days in an EPO mission. Right. Well, if I can get us to low lunar orbit, we can extend that by three times or more. And so really what it does is it just... we're looking at what are those major risk points? What smart investments can we make now that gives us options and flexibility? Because one thing we know we're going to learn is a lot over the next year, as we get into these uncrewed demos, as we put Mark 1s on the moon, as we get into space test flights. And so again, all of this gives us some optionality as we learn to adapt.
Yeah. And at some point, you do have to do something, right? So it was very clear earlier, look, as the shuttle program was reaching its conclusion, it was imperative to maintain capability, right? And we leveraged a lot of the manufacturers that were already producing capability and assembled it into a program that maybe got, you know, some minor tweaks over time as different administrations came in.
But if you zoom out on a whole, looking at it, for as glorious as it is and a great mission that it undertook with Artemis 2, there are certain... like it does not trade well from an efficiency or performance perspective relative to Saturn V. There are things that are shortcomings in it. So we can continue to allow it to perpetuate, or we can make use of the time, the resources, the machine shops that exist across all of our centers. What can we do ourselves? What can we do as builders to take on the tough problems, to shift some of that near-impossible burden back to the agency that's being counted on to do so, and give our landers the highest probability for success in 28. And that's what we're doing.
The other people got heavy over, you know, various architectural changes. It was always kind of in the plan to go to low lunar. But, you know, to the previous question, the safest place to go is low lunar too, because our abort margins, our system margins are actually way higher in order for us to recover that orbit. So we're just trying to push, as we said, everything we can, every knob we can turn on the transfer stage is potentially an additional stage. Just everything we do helps because now we have to get off the surface. You're running the rocket equation in reverse, and you want to make sure that, you know, you give them as much chance. If they have the performance they have, maybe it won't be required, but it doesn't matter because that gives us more system margin to do other things.
Next question will come from in the room. I'll do front row in the black.
One month ago, NASA made a discovery about one asteroid that reached the moon and creates a new character. So we're going back to the moon in 2028. So what's the plan for NASA for something like that? Or what's the concern, the increase? So that's a question for you, Mr. Isaacman.
Well, I mean, it starts... fortunately, that's a once-in-a-century type of an event. So we're fortunate in that regard. But there are much smaller meteor strikes that will happen on the lunar surface with greater frequency. We got some additional data from that, from a great crew of Artemis 2 and some of the observations they relayed back during their mission. So we are giving a lot of thought to that for the moon base.
So these are short-duration initial Artemis stays that are going to be on the lunar surface. When you start talking about Artemis 4, Artemis 5, but in parallel, we are building a moon base. And this is why we're not building one rover for the moon. We're building lots of rovers and we're going to learn. And we're going to gradually scale up capabilities because I guarantee you we're going to...
Need surface improvement. It's not... it's why we're not locking in the design for...
habitation modules today, right? We're doing our science and survival. Lots of uncrewed robotic landers, lots of demos. See what we like to build up to it because yes, there are going to be environmental factors. We're going to need to consider that could be hazardous and be able to address them. And we will do it in a logical, iterative way to get to the right outcome. There.
Next question will come from in the room in the back, in yellow.
Hi. Thank you so much for doing this. Megan Moriarty with WESH 2. I just wanted a clarification on launch dates and timelines. So we previously heard that Artemis III was 90 days behind schedule, and now we're hearing summer again. I just wanted to ask about your confidence in a June 2027 date, or are we looking more towards the end of summer or September? And then do you have a specific date for New Glenn relaunching?
I'll just comment on the 90 days behind schedule. And I don't know if I think Jeremy already relayed that in the coming months. Like, I think they've been very open about targeting the end of the year. And I also want to echo Jeremy's words, because I had a chance to go out and tour some of the pad rebuild. I mean, they are moving with purpose. Like there is a fire in the Blue Origin team like we haven't ever seen before. And you hear that actually around the whole of government. So whether they hit December or they wind up in January, they're breaking everyone's records. Like, I mean, in terms of or certainly they're defying a lot of expectations. Now in terms of the schedule for Artemis III, generally, when I put together an email for 55,000 people, the expectation is it will probably be made public. And I think the way the workforce may have would interpret my words would probably be different than the general media. When you're talking about a mission that did not exist, you know, six months ago, earlier this year, where you have to assemble a lot of hardware in the time span between Artemis I and II was several years to say, look, team, you're working extremely hard. And right now with all of the factors that have to come together with two different landers and all the hardware and testing we do, we're behind 90 days to schedule with opportunities to improve. That's a confidence-inspiring message, and I would encourage the media to take the same. Now, does that mean we'll be able to fully pull in those 90 days? There's a lot of areas in what was disclosed from that memo that will get pulled in, and then there's going to be more new ones that are going to pop up. And that's kind of the nature of this line of work. But I would take that as a confidence-inspiring message, as you should take from a lot of the pictures and the videos that you're seeing here today for a mission that didn't exist not that long ago that we're moving with real speed and purpose right now.
Next question in the room will be from the back row in the white.
Hi, TJ Mascaro, thank you for The Epoch Times. Thank you so much. A question for Jeremy. If both landers are still in play for Artemis IV, can you talk a bit about how you plan to get SpaceX Starship kind of caught up, should I say, to Blue Origin, you know, considering the suite of on-orbit checkouts that Blue Origin will be able to get done during Artemis III as compared to SpaceX?
Now it's a good question, right? And so some of it's teaching our crews how to learn and operate. But what we did is we really did map out all of the major risks for lunar landing, all of the major tests that we need to go conduct. And so with SpaceX, we're going to get a lot of flight tests, sort of reps, but then also on their uncrewed demo, just a whole series of test objectives. We also have kind of the prop aggregation. So the test campaign is different, but also some of the core competencies of the company is also different, right? So they have a lot of experience with ECLSS with Dragon. They have a lot of experience with crew and Dragon. And so they're transferring a lot of that into their current crew cabin build. But really what we're going to get is the series of flight tests, prop aggregation, and then the uncrewed demo. And it does buy down the vast majority of the similar risk as we would for our, you know, with the Blue Origin, just kind of a different path.
Next question will come from over the phones from Loren Grush with Bloomberg.
