Artemis 3 is already underway and we should see that mission in the middle of next year 2027. On April 13, NASA invites the media, influencers and astronautics experts to the presentation of the lunar rocket stage. It would be on April 20 at the agency's Michut assembly facilities located in New Orleans. This is the largest section of the SLS rocket, which will launch the third Artemis mission and the second that will be manned.
Because after the changes in the schedule of the Artemis mission program, Artemis 3 will no longer be the mission in which we will see American astronauts set foot on the lunar soil for the first time in this 21st century, but that does not mean that it will not be a spectacular mission and it will be, because we are going to see in low Earth orbit something similar to what you see in the illustration, that is, the SpaceX Starship ship adapted as a lunar lander docking with the Orion ship.
The Orion ship is the smallest of the solar panels, the problem is that the development of the Starship is very late, the last test was on October 13, 2025 and we are very far from the launches every 15 days or every month that Elon had promised. More in one of those conferences that he does promising many things and announcing many more things, what we have right now is that the next test, according to Elon Musk and if there are no more delays, it would be around the middle of the month of May or early May, if you're lucky.
The May test of the Starship will also be one of the most demanding for the ship that is being designed, I remind you again, to serve as a human landing on the Moon within the international Artemis program, since NASA needs to see the development of this ship as soon as possible and see that this ship is stable before putting humans on it, between the mission that we will see next year and the mission that will take American astronauts to the lunar surface again, we will have to see another mission in the middle where the Starship will have to land on the surface mole.
It will be the test of fire of the Starship, a mission where the Starship will not carry a crew, but it has to demonstrate that it is capable of landing on the lunar surface and taking off from it, it will also be an impressive mission, it is not cataloged within the Artemis program, it will be a particular SpaceX mission, but it has to do it, all this means that we will also have to see how between 6 to 10 refuelings are carried out in space, the exact figure is not yet adjusted.
This is a high-risk operation that has never been done on such a colossal scale. Some transfer of fuel has been made to the international space station, but in a very small amount compared to what has to be put into the Starship. If it goes wrong, and there is an explosion of the Starship and its refueling ship, we could find ourselves with a colossal cloud of debris that would pose a tremendous danger to the satellites orbiting the Earth.
Although Elon Musk makes very epic announcements about the Starship as an interplanetary ship, for now what is real is the contract that SpaceX has with NASA, for now what SpaceX has to do is create that lunar lander.
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