NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told agency staff in an internal memo, sent on 20 September 2026 and first reported publicly on 24 September by FOX 35 Orlando after obtaining a copy, that the Artemis III lunar landing mission is running approximately 90 days behind its schedule. In the memo, Isaacman wrote that NASA is “approximately 90 days broken against the Artemis III schedule, but there are still a lot of decisions to be made, problems to solve, and opportunities for the schedule to recover.” The disclosure was also reported independently by SatNews and by the Kennedy Space Center focused outlet TalkOfTitusville, both citing the same internal communication.
According to the FOX 35 report, the memo does not lay out a detailed account of what caused the slip, though it points to continuing work by the two companies building human landing systems for the mission, SpaceX and Blue Origin, as a contributing factor without assigning specific blame. NASA had not responded to the outlet’s requests for comment by the time of publication. The memo reportedly frames a launch in summer 2027 as the best case outcome, a timeline the agency believes could still preserve the possibility of two crewed lunar landing attempts by 2028. Isaacman is described as stressing that NASA will not launch before the hardware and crew safety reviews are ready, regardless of the pressure to hold to a fixed date.
The memo followed a series of NASA center visits by Isaacman and, according to a separate account from Payload Space published on 25 September, also set out a changed approach to international cooperation on Artemis. Isaacman told staff NASA was done, in his words, trying to “stitch together coalitions for the sake of coalitions” and would instead pursue only partnerships that amount to “good deals” for the United States. He argued that the pace of the lunar program carries strategic weight beyond science, saying that who reaches the lunar surface first shapes perceptions of technological leadership that extend into security relationships such as NATO. At the same time, he said international contributions remain part of the plan, noting that a majority of Artemis Accords signatory nations have already committed payloads or technical demonstrations for future lunar surface missions.
The schedule pressure sits on top of a bigger structural shift NASA made earlier in 2026, when it paused development of the Lunar Gateway space station in its previously planned form and redirected the program toward building infrastructure directly on the lunar surface, a decision the agency tied at the time to concerns about the pace of competing lunar lander and rover programs elsewhere. Isaacman’s memo reportedly reaffirmed that pivot toward a lunar surface base rather than an orbiting station as the near term priority, alongside the schedule recovery effort for Artemis III itself.
For a program that has already absorbed multiple schedule adjustments since Artemis I flew in 2022, a further slip of roughly three months is not by itself unusual, but the timing carries added weight because Artemis III is intended to return American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo program, using a lander architecture that depends on commercial contractors whose own hardware, particularly SpaceX’s Starship, is still working through its own extended development and testing schedule.
Several elements of the situation remain unconfirmed in public reporting. NASA has not issued its own public statement addressing the memo’s contents, so the 90 day figure and the summer 2027 target come solely from the internal communication as described by the outlets that obtained it. No breakdown of which specific technical issues are driving the delay, at either lander contractor or within NASA’s own Orion and Space Launch System programs, has been published. It is also not yet clear what formal schedule announcement, if any, NASA plans to make, or when a revised official launch date might be confirmed.