NASA Cancels Artemis III's Crewed Landing

Last week, NASA announced that its Artemis II mission will be pushed to April at the earliest, due to issues with its helium tanks. Now, it's broken the news that the Artemis III follow-up mission will totally cancel its original goal of landing astronauts on the Moon.

Instead, Artemis III—now scheduled to take place in 2027—will be another crewed flight without a landing phase, followed by Artemis IV, a crewed lander mission, hopefully in 2028.

This really can't be that surprising. Beyond the relatively minor delays to the launch of Artemis II, there was also the scathing report issued just last week from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). It doesn't mince words on the topic of Artemis III and human safety: "As planned today, the Panel deems Artemis III a high risk, and rebalancing objectives is thus essential to the safe achievement of the ...