NASA Releases Artemis Schedule - Less Than One Mission Per Year

In an article on Teslarati explaining that new HLS contract award we talked about last Wednesday, space correspondent Eric Ralph links to Loren Grush, space correspondent at The Verge on Twitter.  Ms. Grush said, "NASA's going to give us at least a year off between some flights" and presented this graphic of the Artemis program schedule. 

While the footnote at the lower left says the images of launches in 2025 and 2027 don't mean they occur in those calendar years, the first crewed lunar landing, Artemis III, would need to slip in the wrong direction and Artemis IV move forward for there not to be a one year gap between those missions.  

This shows eight Artemis missions to the moon, including the unmanned Artemis I scheduled for this summer, all spread into nine years.  The first Saturn V launch isn't a 1:1 comparison to the Artemis I mission, but that was in 1966.  The last Apollo mission, 17, was in  1972, six years later.  There were Earth orbiting, lunar orbiting and lunar landing Apollo missions.  The landing missions: 11, 12, and 14-17, or six lunar landing missions, were all between July 1969 and December 1972 or 3-1/2 years.  In addition to those six lunar landing missions, there were five others (I'm including Apollo 13 here, since it didn't land) for a total of 11 missions carrying three astronauts.  The first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, was in October of 1968 while the last was December 1972.  Four years.  Artemis is looking at six missions in seven years. 

Eric Ralph notices something a little different in that NASA graphic.  Take a look at 2027. Notice there's no reference to a lander, SpaceX or other, just a hab (habitat?) delivered to the Gateway?  After the 2025 SpaceX HLS landing on the moon, the next reference to a lander is 2028: three years.   That would be like Apollo landing Apollo 11 in July 1969 but waiting for Apollo 12 until 1972.  The graphic doesn't specifically say there will be a SpaceX lander in 2028, but that's the most rational place to put the new contract's landing system.

The question of why the launch cadence is so low gets back to something we talked about years ago: the SLS Exploration Upper Stage or EUS.  It's needed for the heavier things that NASA wants to put in lunar orbit, like the lunar gateway and that just-mentioned hab, but it isn't going to be ready to fly until 2027.  In 2018, the SLS version with the EUS, Block 1B, was expected to debut as early as 2024.  NASA now says Block 1B will debut no earlier than 2027.  Put another way, four years after the last "expected to debut date", the date has slipped three years.  I suppose that's progress of some sort.  After four years, they're still not saying "we'll be done in four years" - they're saying "we'll be done in three." 

The current NASA graphic of SLS versions.  The Block 1 SLS currently on the pad doesn't have the Exploration Upper Stage. 

Eric Ralph's article on Teslarati has some interesting perspectives in it.  The wild card; in fact, the wildest card in space exploration is Starship and Super Heavy.  If they meet even most of their goals for that system, I wouldn't be even a tiny bit surprised for SpaceX to be putting their own missions on the moon at rates that put Artemis to shame.  I could certainly see Jared Isaacman buying a trip to the moon like this year's Polaris Dawn.