NASA to Hold Oct. 23 Briefing on Accelerating Artemis Program and 2028 Moon Goal

NASA said Wednesday that it will hold a public briefing Oct. 23 to discuss how it plans to accelerate the Artemis moon program and provide an update on upcoming missions, including Artemis III and progress toward a U.S. return to the lunar surface by 2028.

The briefing is scheduled for 2 p.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 23, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will be livestreamed on NASA Live at nasa.gov/live. NASA said the participants will include NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager.

NASA’s Oct. 14 notice is a preview of that event, not a mission announcement. The advisory does not announce any new policy decision, architecture change or launch-date revision. Instead, NASA said the briefing “will include details about NASA’s Artemis III mission … and how plans to return American astronauts to the Moon by 2028 are progressing.”

That update matters because NASA already reshaped the Artemis sequence earlier this year. Under NASA’s current 2026 plan, Artemis III is no longer framed as the mission that would land astronauts on the Moon. Prior NASA releases said Artemis III is now targeted for 2027 as a crewed low-Earth-orbit test flight, sending four astronauts into orbit around Earth to test systems needed for later lunar landings. In that same sequence, the first crewed lunar landing is now planned for Artemis IV in 2028.

NASA’s new advisory also describes Artemis III as a mission that will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems for future Moon landings, reinforcing that the agency’s near-term focus is on proving hardware and operations before attempting a return to the lunar surface.

The 2028 goal also carries broader policy weight beyond NASA’s internal schedule. A White House executive order signed Dec. 18, 2025, made “returning Americans to the Moon by 2028” a formal administration objective. Isaacman, who was sworn in as NASA administrator in December 2025, is expected to be one of the officials laying out how the agency intends to meet that deadline.

For now, though, NASA has offered only the promise of an update — not the update itself. Any substantive new decisions about mission timing, the Artemis flight sequence or other changes to the current plan will have to wait until the Oct. 23 briefing.