NASA will update its plan to land astronauts on the Moon by 2028 on Oct. 23

NASA will hold a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, at 2 p.m. EDT to update its plans for returning American astronauts to the surface of the Moon by 2028. The agency issued the advisory on Oct. 14, and Administrator Jared Isaacman is scheduled to lead the session.

Joining Isaacman will be Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, and Jeremy Parsons, the agency’s Artemis program manager. The briefing is billed as an Artemis acceleration update, and its stated topics are the status of upcoming Moon missions and the path to a crewed landing.

What NASA has said will be on the agenda

The agency’s media advisory, number M26-081, says NASA “will provide an update on its plans to return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon by 2028.” It also names Artemis III, which the agency describes as a mission that will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test systems needed for future lunar landings, rather than a trip to the Moon itself.

The advisory does not announce new dates, hardware or mission changes, and it should not be read as doing so. What it commits NASA to is a progress report: where the 2028 goal stands, what the next flight is meant to prove, and how the schedule fits together. Any decisions or revisions will come from the participants on Oct. 23, and until then the 2028 date is a stated target rather than a revised one. Readers should treat claims about what the agency will say that day as speculation until the news conference takes place and NASA publishes its own account of it.

Three questions frame the session: how firm the 2028 landing goal remains, what Artemis III must demonstrate in orbit next year, and how the agency sequences the missions that follow. The advisory raises each of them without answering any, and Isaacman, Kshatriya and Parsons are the officials positioned to do so.

Artemis III as a test flight in low Earth orbit

Placing Artemis III in low Earth orbit is a notable detail. A flight that stays near home lets engineers exercise landing-related systems with a crew aboard before committing a lander to the lunar surface. The advisory describes the flight only in those terms, and the briefing is where NASA is expected to explain how the orbital test fits ahead of a landing attempt.

The release frames the longer arc in general terms: sending Artemis astronauts on “increasingly difficult missions near the lunar South Pole,” providing economic benefits and advancing science, and establishing “an enduring human presence on the lunar surface” that builds toward the first crewed Mars mission. Those are goals rather than schedules, which is why the Oct. 23 session carries weight.

The Artemis II record behind the update

The update arrives after a crewed lunar flight. Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, from Kennedy and splashed down off San Diego on April 10, ending a 10-day trip around the Moon, with the landing at 5:07 p.m. PDT, according to NASA’s splashdown page. The crew was commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch of NASA, plus Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.

Before the landing, NASA’s recovery preparations page described teams from NASA, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force meeting and preparing for the crew’s return in the Pacific Ocean off California. The flight, in other words, was a full-scale operation across several organizations, and the Oct. 23 update turns attention from that flight to what follows it.

NASA’s Artemis II preliminary lunar science report, dated Oct. 7, adds detail on what the crew learned. The crew passed about 4,067 miles from the lunar surface on April 6 and saw five extremely faint flashes from rock fragments striking the Moon. From Orion, the Sun was blocked by the Moon for 54 minutes, during which they observed the solar corona and planets including Mars and Saturn.

Glover called the terminator, the boundary between lunar day and night, the most striking thing he had seen so far during the flyby, and the report notes that the lighting there resembles conditions at the Moon’s South Pole, which matters for the missions planned near it. Koch described the Moon as a light sponge and Earth as a light mirror. NASA also posted a lunar science operations report and a data user guide on Oct. 6, and full datasets are available through its Planetary Data System, so outside researchers can check the crew’s observations.

U.S. journalists who want to attend in person must apply online through Kennedy’s media accreditation site by noon on Friday, Oct. 16, while remote questions require requesting a dial-in number from the Kennedy newsroom at least an hour before the start. The public can watch on NASA Live, and the agency’s media contacts for the event are Rachel Kraft at headquarters and Tiffany Fairley at Kennedy, and the agency’s broader Moon program is described on its Artemis pages.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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