Artemis and the New Race Back to the Moon
NASA's Artemis program is targeting a 2024 crewed lunar landing with SLS, Orion, and commercial partners like SpaceX.
It’s been nearly fifty years since anyone walked on the Moon, and NASA is now openly betting on doing it again by 2024. That’s the Artemis program, and the timeline is aggressive by any standard of modern spaceflight development. Whether you think it’s realistic or not, it’s worth understanding what’s actually being built and why this attempt looks different from previous “we’re going back” promises.
The hardware
The core of Artemis rests on two big pieces of NASA-built hardware: the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift rocket that’s been in development for years, and the Orion capsule, which is meant to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. SLS is the rocket that gets the crew and cargo out of Earth’s gravity well; Orion is where the astronauts actually sit. Both have been through long, expensive development cycles, and both are central to how NASA plans to get anyone to lunar orbit in the first place.
But rockets and capsules only get you to orbit around the Moon. Getting down to the surface and back up again is a separate problem, and that’s where things get interesting.
Commercial partners enter the picture
Rather than building a lunar lander entirely in-house the way it did during Apollo, NASA is leaning on commercial partners for the Human Landing System (HLS) — the vehicle that will actually take astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface. SpaceX is among the companies contracted to work on this piece, which says a lot about how far the public-private model has come in spaceflight over the last decade.
This fits a pattern that’s been building for years now: NASA increasingly acts as a customer and standards-setter, while commercial companies handle a growing share of the actual engineering and hardware. We’ve already seen this play out with cargo resupply missions to the ISS, and it’s clearly the model NASA wants to scale up for Artemis.
Why this matters
A 2024 landing is an ambitious target, and anyone who’s followed NASA’s rocket programs over the years knows that deadlines like this tend to slip. SLS alone has seen years of delays and cost overruns before ever flying. So there’s healthy reason for skepticism about the date itself.
But the structure of the program is the more interesting story than the specific year. If NASA can successfully offload significant chunks of hardware development to commercial partners while keeping SLS and Orion as the backbone for crew transport, it could set a template for how deep space missions get built going forward — cheaper, more distributed, and less dependent on any single contractor or single government budget cycle.
I’ll be watching how the HLS contracts play out over the next year or two. That’s probably the piece most likely to determine whether 2024 stays on the calendar or quietly slides, the way so many space program dates have before it.