After Artemis II success, WHAT COMES NEXT? NASA administrator details Artemis III plans

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]So, Artemis 3 is is what NASA or the Artemis program is focused on next. What happens during that mission? So, most importantly, we we uh we are going to test the Orion spacecraft with the landers, the lunar landers, in Earth orbit. This is exactly what we did in the 1960s. Apollo 9 was a rendezvous of the spacecraft with the uh the LEM in Earth orbit because if if you're going to learn something there, you'd rather learn it when you're really close to to home on Earth where you can be back in the water in hours instead of uh learning that less uh a problematic lesson when you're 4 days away uh on the moon. So, um again, drawing on the playbook, we're going to we're going to leverage the Apollo 9 um profile and we're going to test uh we're going to test this uh Orion with the landers in in Earth orbit. This will be extremely cool because you will not only see that massive SLS and 8.8 million pounds of thrust put Orion into Earth orbit.

[00:00:52]You're going to see a SpaceX Starship launch and you're going to see a uh a Blue Origin New Glenn launch all within a matter of days. I mean, this is like going to be the most impressive heavy rocket launch, you know, you know, week of time in human history. It's going to be incredible. And really good demonstration of NASA working with these private companies in order to make this space exploration happen.

[00:01:14]>> Absolutely. You can't You can't do the near impossible alone. We didn't do it that way in the 1960s. You had McDonnell Douglas, you had Boeing, they all came together. You had Grumman, they built the LEM.

[00:01:23]Uh a lot of them are still contributing to the Artemis program today and then you have your new players. You have SpaceX and Blue Origin and uh Yeah, there's a lot of parallels. I mean, back during the Gemini program, we would launch uh you know, the Titan 2 uh rocket with the Gemini spacecraft on it and then you'd launch an Atlas with a target vehicle to practice rendezvous and docking. Well, we're going to do the same thing. It's just they're they're they're bigger rockets now. They're far more powerful with SLS as the NASA vehicle and then SpaceX and Blue Origin launching theirs. It's uh it's going to be a heck of a show, but most importantly, it's going to give us the learning environment to have the confidence to to land astronauts on the moon with Artemis 4 in 2028. So, Artemis 3 was initially, right, supposed to be the mission to put humans back on the moon. Now, we've added Artemis 4, made the intermediary Artemis 3 program. Why is it important to take this extra step?

[00:02:09]Uh because it works. It's a great question, but this is exactly how we did it in the 1960s. You know, there was Gem- uh there was Mercury before Gemini, Gemini before Apollo, and an awful lot of Apollo missions before Apollo 11. And why? Because this is extremely hard.

[00:02:23]There is a reason why we haven't been back to the moon since Apollo 17, you know, more than a half century ago. It's extremely demanding. I mean, the velocities uh that you have to put in a vehicle to send astronauts to the space station, that's 17,500 mi an hour to be in in Earth orbit. You need 25,000 mi an hour. That's why it's such a huge rocket. You're putting all that energy in a spacecraft to then land on another celestial body and bring it back safely.

[00:02:46]It's extremely hard. You can't just jump right to the dream state. It doesn't work that way.