The last time the folks at NASA tested a crewed lunar lander in low-Earth orbit, here’s how they did it. First, a Saturn 5 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida carrying three astronauts, an Apollo spacecraft, and a lunar module. Then they got to orbit and the astronauts flew both ships. Then they came home. That straightforward mission was accomplished 57 years ago, during the flight of Apollo 9.

The next time NASA attempts something of the kind—during the planned flight of Artemis III in the summer of 2027—things will be a lot more complicated. First an uncrewed Blue Origin New Glenn rocket will launch from KSC carrying the company’s Blue Moon lander into orbit. Then NASA will launch its prosaically named Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket, carrying the four Artemis III astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft. Then the crew will rendezvous with the Blue Moon, dock with it and enter it, checking out its systems before returning to the Orion.

Then SpaceX will launch a Starship rocket carrying its own Starship lander, which will also be uncrewed. The astronauts will rendezvous and dock with that ship too, but not enter it since it will not yet be equipped with a life support system. Then they will separate and the crew will spend a few more days running tests on the Orion. All of that work will take up to 17 days from first liftoff to splashdown. And only if everything goes just right with that mission can NASA achieve its goal of landing astronauts on the lunar surface during the 2028 flight of Artemis IV—and in the process, win a new space race with China.

On Oct. 23, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman—along with Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons—conducted a marathon two-hour press conference at KSC, detailing plans for Artemis III and IV, conceding that the hurdles are considerable, but insisting the goals are within reach. The current NASA, with its tight funding and long timelines, may not be the old NASA that used its generous budgets and garage full of rockets to pop off nine crewed Apollo lunar missions just from 1968 to 1972, but it will be no less successful.

“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,” said Isaacman. “Now, in this incredibly demanding and dangerous business of putting astronauts [back] on the moon, NASA must own the near impossible…That is how we give Artemis IV the greatest possible chance of safely and successfully returning Americans to the lunar surface in 2028.”

The extreme complexity of Artemis III is owing in part to a pair of decisions NASA made in 2021 and 2023 and in part to the simple limits of known rocket technology. If the engineering physics were perfect—and engineering physics are never perfect—a lunar crew could use just one spacecraft to get to the moon, land, blast back off, and return home. But a spacecraft that could do all of those jobs and remain robust enough to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere would simply be too heavy for a lunar landing and subsequent liftoff.

Instead, as in the Apollo days, the job will be divided between two ships—one lightweight one to perform the landing and liftoff and one orbiting mothership to bring the crew home when the lunar exploration is done. During Apollo, the space agency selected Grumman Aircraft Engineering to build its squat, four-legged 23-ft. tall, lunar module (LM). It was a simple ship with a low center of gravity, ensuring a stable foothold on the lunar surface.

Grumman inked the contract in 1962 and delivered the goods in time for Apollo 9 and the missions that followed. In 2021, NASA similarly awarded a contract for a crewed lunar spacecraft—this time to SpaceX and its Starship lander. The decision was a headscratcher.

Starship is a silo-like cylinder with a tapered nose cone, measuring 165 ft. tall, calling to mind less an actual spacecraft than the 1953 illustrated book about Tintin’s adventures on the moon. Apollo astronauts used a nine-rung ladder to get down to the lunar surface. Artemis astronauts aboard Starship will use an elevator. Critics and competitors pounced on the plan—not least because of the risk that the giant machine could tip over on the moon—and in 2023, NASA issued a second contract, this time to Blue Origin, which promised to build a lander more in keeping with the low-slung Apollo lunar module.

Both companies have continued to produce their landers and both will get a shot to fly on the historic Artemis IV mission—with the winner to be determined by the performance of the ships during Artemis III.

But neither company has had an easy go of things. SpaceX has launched 14 Starships since 2023, only achieving Earth orbit for the first time in September 2026. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, meanwhile, launched three times from January 2025 to April 2026, before a massive explosion on the launch pad during a test of its first stage engines occurred in May 2026. The disaster marked a major setback for Blue Origin, not least because the pad infrastructure itself was partially destroyed in the blast. The company has been working feverishly since to rebound, and at the Oct. 23 press conference, the NASA brass praised its efforts.

“Blue Origin's New Glenn team has amazed the world with their progress for return to flight after the incident in May,” said Parsons. “We're working closely with them. We have over 100 NASA team [members] engaged throughout return to flight…and I have seen Blue Origin mobilize an absolute army working around the clock.”Assuming the company can maintain that pace, it stands a good chance of being the winner in the Artemis III sweepstakes. That’s partly because its rival, SpaceX, will not fly a full-up version of its Starship lander during the mission, but rather what amounts to a boilerplate ship equipped with a docking port that will test only whether the Orion and the Starship can meet and link up in orbit.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander won’t be a fully operational vehicle either, but it will have a functioning crew compartment that will allow the Artemis III astronauts to enter and run tests.

“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,” says Parsons. “We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmospheric 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." For all of the confidence expressed at the press conference, no one at NASA pretends that the Artemis III mission doesn’t have a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that could go badly wrong before the space agency can tee up the 2028 Artemis IV landing.

And even if the mission does completely succeed, NASA will still require both competing spacecraft to execute an uncrewed lunar landing and liftoff to prove their mettle further. Only then will the landers be certified to carry crew.

Whether the two companies can perfect the engineering and fly the uncrewed missions in the maximum 18 months that will elapse between the launch of Artemis III and the flight of Artemis IV at the end of 2028 is uncertain. Isaacman, for one, expresses confidence that the target date can be met without slipping into 2029 or later. But he acknowledges that NASA’s years of uncertainty since the Apollo program—with priorities shifting from Skylab to the shuttle to the International Space Station, and with start-stop programs to return to the moon that burned through money but never got anywhere—have set the agency back, especially as it concerns the ongoing competition with China.

“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,” he says. “That brings us to the moment we find ourselves in today, because the appetite for tolerating and defending the status quo has reached its conclusion. We are here for the mission, and to deliver the outcomes the world expects of the most accomplished space agency in history.”