Artemis III

Artemis III is NASA's most operationally complex human spaceflight mission since the Space Shuttle era. Launching on the Space Launch System from Kennedy Space Center, a crew of four will spend roughly two weeks in low Earth orbit carrying out rendezvous and docking tests with the two commercial lunar landers selected for the Artemis programme: SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2.

The mission does not include a lunar flyby. Instead it serves as the critical bridge between Artemis II's crewed lunar flyby in April 2026 and Artemis IV's planned crewed landing at the lunar South Pole in 2028. Orion will dock with each lander in sequence, verifying that hardware and software interfaces work together in orbit — with crew on board for the first time.