Saturday, October 24, 2026

News Alert: NASA keeps options open to preserve 2028 Artemis lunar landing

10/24/2026

NASA keeps options open to preserve 2028 Artemis lunar landing

During a two-hour briefing Oct. 23, the first detailed update on NASA’s Artemis program since early June, agency leadership outlined progress on both the Artemis 3 mission, a test flight in low Earth orbit planned for mid-2027, and the Artemis 4 lunar landing attempt in 2028. Officials conceded that the 2027 mission has fallen behind schedule but said NASA is working to preserve the 2028 lunar landing timeline. —By Jeff Foust

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Opinions: Sound decisions will enable U.S. crewed lunar landings

10/24/2026

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By Dan Robitzski

Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.

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Sound decisions will enable U.S. crewed lunar landings

As NASA forges ahead with its modified Artemis moon mission plan, it should take every opportunity possible to test new hardware, mission architectures and ultimately ensure that the missions can proceed as planned, argued NASA alum and aerospace analyst Doug Cooke in a recent commentary article.

Cooke criticized NASA's plans to rely on complicated maneuvers and multiple refuelings of spacecraft and systems that have not yet been proven reliable enough for crewed operations. In his view, NASA should go out of its way to simplify missions, use them as testbeds for future plans and reuse proven architectures where possible.

"To achieve the imperative national objectives for human exploration of the moon and ultimately Mars, it is important to make the timeliest, technically effective, cost effective and lowest mission risk programmatic decisions. ... There is a need for expediency and urgency without sacrificing crew safety."

See the full article here.

Recommendations for America’s ground station infrastructure

Investments in new ground stations will not necessarily solve data transmission bottlenecks until some core inefficiencies with how ground station capacity is managed and sold, according to an opinion article by AnySignal co-founder Ricky Medina.

Ultimately, challenges such as interoperability among providers remain. But solving them will allow satellite communications to become as seamless and hassle-free as mobile roaming, Medina argued.

"The next phase of the ground segment should be measured not by how many antennas the industry installs, but by how reliably operators can maintain command and control, reach their spacecraft and receive mission data without relying on individual sites, providers, or frequencies," Medina wrote.

See the full article here.

SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community’s diverse perspectives. Whether you’re an academic, executive, engineer or a concerned citizen, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion (at) spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. If you have something to submit, read some of our recent opinion articles and our submission guidelines to get a sense of what we’re looking for. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent their employers or professional affiliations.

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