CAMPAIGN
A REFERENCED FIELD GUIDE TO THE ARTEMIS PROGRAM
A long-form guide to the rocket, the capsule, the international treaty, and every numbered mission that make up Artemis — including the real, still-unfolding course correction NASA announced in 2026. Every factual claim is numbered and sourced at the end. Scroll to begin.
BEGIN — CHAPTER 01 →Four kinds of hardware, run by more than one organisation
Artemis is NASA's umbrella name for returning humans to the Moon and eventually reaching Mars, built around four main pieces of hardware: the SLS rocket, the Orion crew capsule, commercially built Human Landing Systems, and lunar surface infrastructure.[1] Unlike Apollo, where NASA contracted aerospace firms to build to its own designs, Artemis leans on companies and international space agencies as genuine partners with their own stake in the outcome.[4]
The program's logo shows an "A" bridging Earth and Moon, with a red line tracing the path spacecraft travel between them — a deliberate signal that the goal was never a rerun of Apollo, but a permanent, reusable presence.[4]
A non-binding treaty that keeps gaining signatures
Established October 13, 2020 by the U.S. State Department and NASA together with seven founding partners — Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the UAE, and the UK — the Artemis Accords are a non-binding set of principles extending the 1967 Outer Space Treaty into the era of crewed lunar return.[3]
The ten core principles include peaceful purposes only, public transparency about national plans, mutual emergency assistance, interoperable technical standards, and mitigation of orbital debris.[4] Mauritius became the 70th signatory on July 17, 2026, continuing a signing pace of roughly one new country every few weeks.[3]
The only rocket that can do the whole job in one launch
NASA describes SLS as offering more payload mass, volume, and departure energy than any other single rocket flying today, and as the only vehicle currently able to send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly to the Moon in a single launch.[1] It forms, together with Orion, the backbone of every crewed Artemis mission flown so far.[1]
Built to carry, sustain, and bring a crew home
Orion is the exploration vehicle that carries and sustains the crew on Artemis missions and returns them safely to Earth, launching atop SLS on every crewed flight.[2] Select a component.
November 2022 — no crew, but every system tested for one
Artemis I sent an uncrewed Orion around the Moon and back, validating the SLS rocket and Orion's heat shield under real re-entry conditions before any astronaut would fly aboard them.[4]
Farther from Earth than any human in fifty years
Artemis II launched April 1, 2026, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, together with CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a free-return trajectory around the Moon — the first crewed flight of both Orion and SLS.[1][5]
Over roughly nine to ten days, the crew travelled about 406,770 km from Earth — a new record for the greatest distance humans have travelled from home — before splashing down in the Pacific on April 11, 2026.[1][5]
Rebuilding the sequence around a lander that wasn't ready
With commercial landers not yet ready for a crewed lunar landing, NASA announced in February 2026 that Artemis III would be rescoped from a Moon landing into a crewed Earth-orbit test of both Human Landing System designs, with Artemis IV becoming the first crewed lunar surface landing instead.[6][7] Gateway, the planned lunar-orbit station, was paused in its original form the following month as NASA redirected funding toward a faster, surface-first architecture.[6]
A four-person crew, two competing landers, one rehearsal
As redefined, Artemis III will launch a four-person crew aboard Orion to Earth orbit to rehearse rendezvous and docking with test articles of both SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon, reducing risk before either lander is trusted with a crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV.[7] NASA has targeted the mission for late 2027.[8]
Now the mission carrying Apollo's old title
Under the revised sequence, Artemis IV is now expected to be the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17, targeting the lunar south pole no earlier than 2028 — a title Artemis III would originally have held.[6][8]
Two competing designs, deliberately, not one
Artemis architecture deliberately funds two parallel Human Landing System providers — SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon — contracted alongside SLS and Orion, a hedge against exactly the kind of schedule slip that triggered the February 2026 restructuring.[6][7]
A station redirected before it ever flew
The planned lunar-orbit station Gateway, with hardware already built, was paused in March 2026 as NASA shifted its architecture toward a faster surface base — a decision covered in depth in this guide's companion piece on Gateway.[6]
Sources cited throughout this guide
Bracketed numbers in the text above correspond to the sources below, current as of the dates noted.