KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla., July 20 — As the world marks the 57th anniversary of the first moon landing, NASA’s Artemis program stands at perhaps its most pivotal moment — and its most expensive. The price tag for getting humans back to the lunar surface has already reached an estimated $93 billion through fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s 2023 report, and the most complex mission in the agency’s history is still facing delays.
The Artemis III mission, now scheduled no earlier than September 2026 per a January 2024 NASA update, will be the first to land astronauts on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Its centerpiece is the Space Launch System rocket, a towering machine that produces 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and can send 27 metric tons toward the moon.
Each SLS launch costs about $4.1 billion, a 2022 GAO estimate found. Inside the Orion crew module — a spacecraft costing roughly $2.2 billion per unit as of 2021 estimates — the astronauts will have a habitable volume of just 9.0 cubic meters for the roughly 25- to 30-day journey from launch to splashdown. That includes about two weeks in lunar orbit.
Once on the surface, the crew will spend six to seven days, with two planned spacewalks using Axiom Space’s extravehicular mobility units.
The high price of complexity
NASA rates Artemis III as the most complex mission it has ever attempted. The reason is straightforward: the mission requires not one but three major spacecraft — the SLS rocket, the Orion capsule, and the Starship Human Landing System — plus an in-space rendezvous and docking without the safety net of an existing station. The Starship HLS, when fully fueled for its lunar descent, will need about 1,200 metric tons of propellant, requiring multiple tanker launches to fill up in orbit before it can head to the moon.
SpaceX’s contract for the initial development and one landing mission is valued at $2.9 billion, with options for additional missions. The mission will also debut the mobile launcher 2 at Kennedy Space Center, a structure that cost over $1.2 billion.
The launch window for Artemis III is roughly 14 days per month, meaning that even with the September 2026 target, weather and vehicle readiness could further push the schedule. The program was originally aiming for 2024, then 2025 — a pattern of delays that underscores the technical hurdles.
What comes next
Looking beyond Artemis III, NASA is laying out a cadence that would see the first assembly of the Gateway lunar outpost during Artemis IV, tentatively planned for 2028, followed by Artemis V in 2029. Each of those missions will depend on the same infrastructure — the SLS, Orion, and increasingly complex in-space operations — but with costs that show no sign of easing.
For the families of the astronauts — and for the engineers, technicians, and contractors who have poured years into this effort — the Artemis program is more than a line in a budget report. It is a monumental human endeavor, one that has already spent more than $93 billion and still has to prove it can deliver on its promise.
The next launch window, when it comes, will carry not just metal and propellant, but the weight of decades of ambition and the hope that this time, the numbers add up to a lasting return.
