AINEWS
Artemis III is now a lander rehearsal. NASA just put four astronauts on it
The mission NASA just crewed will not land on the Moon. It will spend weeks in low Earth orbit shaking out two commercial landers that have never carried a person.
The mission NASA just crewed will not land on the Moon. It will spend weeks in low Earth orbit shaking out two commercial landers that have never carried a person.
Artemis III is no longer the mission that returns humans to the lunar surface. On Tuesday, NASA named the four astronauts who will fly it, and the profile is now a low-Earth-orbit shakedown of two commercial landers that have never carried crew. The crew is real. The destination is not the Moon.
Commander Randy Bresnik, a Space Shuttle veteran, will lead a flight that includes European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio, with Bob Hines as backup, according to NASA's June 9 announcement. It is the first time ESA has assigned an astronaut to an Artemis mission. ESA's contribution to the program is the European Service Module that powers Orion, and the agency framed Parmitano's seat as the institutional payoff of that hardware investment.
The repurposing is the story. When NASA laid out the Artemis program in the early 2020s, Artemis III was the South Pole landing. As of a separate NASA release on early Artemis progress, that surface attempt now belongs to Artemis IV, currently targeted for 2028. Artemis III has become a rehearsal: weeks in Earth orbit, where the crew will approach, dock with, and possibly enter two unproven landers.
The landers are Blue Origin's Blue Moon pathfinder and a Starship-based Human Landing System test article built by SpaceX. Both will be parked in orbit. Both are unproven. The flight plan, as summarized by The Register, calls for Blue Moon to loiter on orbit for up to 90 days and dock with Orion for roughly two days, with a hatch opening and a trial spacesuit donning. The Starship-derived test article gets a shorter visit of about one day. NASA's own language in the release leaves the door open for "one or both" of those rendezvous to actually happen, depending on hardware readiness.
That open door is the point. The mission has been deliberately redesigned to front-load lander risk in the safest available venue, low Earth orbit, before NASA commits Orion, the Space Launch System rocket, and a crew to the much harder trip to the South Pole. The historical analogue is Apollo 9, a crewed Earth-orbit shakedown of the lunar module that flew weeks before Apollo 11's landing. The Register draws the parallel directly; it is the cleanest way to understand why the crew is flying a test flight in 2027 rather than touching lunar regolith.
The honest counter-question is whether any of the moving parts will be ready. The Register reports the launch window as the second half of 2027. The agency release confirms 2027 without specifying the half. SpaceX has not yet placed Starship in orbit, and Blue Origin's New Glenn, the rocket that would launch the Blue Moon pathfinder, suffered a launchpad explosion on a recent flight. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has publicly committed to returning New Glenn to flight before the end of 2026. The Register also notes that Blue Moon's BE-7 engines burn liquid hydrogen, which complicates the most obvious backup option of launching the pathfinder on a Falcon Heavy. None of that is fatal. None of it is resolved.
The rest of the stack is more reassuring. NASA says the Orion crew module and European Service Module are scheduled to be mated this summer, with docking system integration following. Heat shield installation continues. The SLS engine section is being integrated, with RS-25 engine installation planned for this summer. All solid rocket booster segments are at the Kennedy Space Center. The mobile launcher is being refurbished for the new upper-stage configuration, in which a structural spacer replaces the upper stage on Artemis III to keep the rocket's mass and thrust profile within the limits the landers' trajectories assume. That is real hardware, on the ground, on a schedule a crew can train against.
Bresnik's background as a Marine test pilot and Shuttle veteran makes him a natural fit for a mission whose central activity is approach and docking with unfamiliar vehicles. Parmitano, an Italian Air Force colonel and former International Space Station commander, brings operational spaceflight experience and ESA's first seat on an Artemis crew. Douglas and Rubio round out the prime crew; Rubio, who holds the American single-spaceflight record at 371 days, is the mission's most experienced long-duration operator. Hines, a former Air Force test pilot, will train in parallel as the backup.
What to watch next is two readiness gates, not one. The first is whether Starship reaches orbit and New Glenn returns to flight inside 2026, which determines whether both landers can be on orbit when Bresnik's crew gets there. The second is whether the agency narrows the "one or both" language as integration work completes, which would tell builders and suppliers how much of the commercial-lander program is actually being exercised on this flight. Until both are answered, Artemis III looks less like the mission that lands on the Moon and more like the mission that decides who is allowed to try.