Moon Landing Pushed Again: Artemis III Won't Touch Lunar Soil Until 2028 at the Earliest

Moon Landing Pushed Again: Artemis III Won't Touch Lunar Soil Until 2028 at the Earliest

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen were still wringing seawater out of their flight suits after splashing down off San Diego on April 10 when NASA rewrote what comes next. Their 10-day Artemis II mission had been flawless — a precision loop around the Moon's far side, reaching 248,655 miles from Earth, farther than any crewed mission since Apollo 13. No landings, just Orion's deep-space systems running clean. Then NASA announced the restructure.

Artemis III, once the marquee Moon landing, is now a low Earth orbit dress rehearsal — launching no earlier than late 2027, but docking with commercial landers rather than touching the lunar surface. SpaceX's Starship (in a lunar-modified configuration) and Blue Origin's Blue Moon will meet Orion in orbit to test docking and systems before the actual landing attempt in Artemis IV, now penciled in for 2028. That's a full year slip from earlier timelines. SpaceX still needs to nail cryogenic propellant transfer and heat shield performance; eleven test flights in, six of which included successful booster returns, Starship's lunar variant hasn't yet proven the critical refueling choreography the mission depends on.

The Moon landing humanity was promised for 2025, then 2026, then 2027, is now a 2028 target — written, as one Reddit commenter put it, in pencil.

Gobble's Take: At this rate, the first humans to land on the Moon post-Apollo will need a time machine more than a rocket.

Source: r/spacex

Microgravity May Be Interfering With Human Fertilization

Before anyone worries about building a lunar base, someone needs to answer a more fundamental question: can humans even make more humans up there? New research is forcing that conversation into the open. A team of Australian researchers published a study in Communications Biology simulating microgravity conditions and testing how it affects sperm fertilization across human, pig, and mouse samples over a four-hour period. The focus: how sperm swims and navigates toward an egg.

The findings vary by species. Human sperm's ability to swim was unaffected, but its navigation was altered — that navigational problem was addressed using progesterone, a chemical cue that guides sperm toward the egg. For mice, researchers found a 30 percent decrease in successfully fertilized eggs. Pig sperm also showed a decrease in successful fertilization. The researchers note this study may be the first to identify the navigational mechanisms disrupted by microgravity — and how to correct them.

The motivation is practical. NASA is actively building toward a permanent lunar presence through the Artemis Program, with Mars on the longer horizon. "As we progress toward becoming a spacefaring or multi-planetary species, understanding how microgravity affects the earliest stages of reproduction is critical," said Associate Professor John Culton, Director of the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources at Adelaide University. Long-term settlements can't rely on continuous resupply from Earth — including people.

Gobble's Take: We're scheduling Moon landings for 2027 while still figuring out whether humans can reproduce off-planet — the science is racing to catch up with the ambition.

Source: Universe Today

NASA's Artemis II Launches Astronauts Toward the Moon for the First Time in 50 Years

NASA's Artemis II mission launched on April 1, 2026 — sending the first astronauts to the Moon in over 50 years. It marks a historic milestone for human spaceflight, and the first crewed lunar mission under the Artemis program.

Other missions are queued up across the solar system. Europe and Japan's BepiColombo, launched in 2018, is set to enter orbit around Mercury in 2026. Rocket Lab and MIT plan to launch the Venus Life Finder as soon as 2026 to scan for organic molecules in Venus' clouds. NASA's DAVINCI, targeting Venus' atmosphere and surface geology, launches no earlier than 2030.

Looking further out, China's Solar Polar Orbit Observatory aims to launch in 2029 to image the Sun's polar regions for the first time in decades. India's Venus orbiter, Shukrayaan, targets a 2028 launch with international instruments aboard.

Gobble's Take: Artemis II just made the Moon real again — if this doesn't reignite public interest in space exploration, nothing will.

Source: Planetary Society

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The Rocket That Only Flies When Nothing Else Can Just Made Its Seventh Flight
• NASA's $4 Billion Moon Rocket Just Rolled to the Pad Carrying Four Humans for the First Time
• The Plan to Mine Asteroids for Oxygen — Not Gold — That Would Make Mars Settlements Possible
• The Invisible Anchor Keeping Every Galaxy in the Universe From Flying Apart