When Will We Return to the Moon?

The last time a human stood on the Moon, it was December 1972. Gene Cernan climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lander, said a few words for the record, and lifted off. For more than half a century after that, nobody went back, not because we forgot how, but because the reason that sent us (a race against the Soviet Union) ended, and the enormous bill came due. A whole generation has now grown up with the Moon as a place people visited before they were born.

That gap is finally closing. In April 2026 four astronauts flew around the Moon and came home, the first crew to make that trip since Apollo. The program behind it, NASA’s Artemis, is the real answer to “when do we go back,” and that answer keeps moving. This page tracks where it stands today.

The short answer

As of late 2026, here is the sequence NASA is working toward. Every date past today is a target, and targets in human spaceflight slip. Treat them as the plan, not a promise.

• Artemis II (flew April 2026): a crewed loop around the Moon and back. No landing. This one already happened.
• Artemis III (targeting mid-2027): as of the October 2026 update, a test in Earth orbit of the SpaceX and Blue Origin landing systems. No landing, no lunar orbit.
• Artemis IV and V (targeting 2028): the first crewed landings — boots back on the surface for the first time since 1972.

So the realistic read in 2026 is this: humans have already returned to the vicinity of the Moon, and a surface landing is penciled in for 2028, with a real chance it lands in 2029 if the hardware runs late. That is the whole story in three lines; the rest of this page is why each piece is where it is.

Artemis II: the flyby that already happened

On a ten-day mission in April 2026, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen rode an Orion capsule on a free-return path out past the Moon and back, splashing down in the Pacific off San Diego on April 10. They did not land and did not enter lunar orbit. The mission was a full shakedown of the spacecraft, its life support and its heat shield with a crew aboard, the dress rehearsal before anyone risks a landing.

It still made history. The crew traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them, setting a crewed-distance record of about 252,756 miles and breaking a mark that had stood since Apollo 13 in 1970. They photographed the Moon’s far side with their own eyes and even caught a total solar eclipse from deep space. For a program that had been mostly viewgraphs and test articles, Artemis II was the moment it carried people again.

Artemis III: the landing that became a test

For years, Artemis III was the mission — the one that would put the first woman and the next man on the Moon, near the lunar south pole. The October 2026 update changed that. NASA now plans to fly Artemis III as a rehearsal in Earth orbit, around mid-2027, that proves out the two commercial landers before either is trusted with a crew on the surface.

The plan has Orion launch on NASA’s SLS rocket and dock with Blue Origin’s uncrewed Blue Moon test lander, the crew spending a couple of days checking it out, and later a SpaceX Starship test vehicle rendezvousing with Orion as well. Nobody lands. It is the kind of unglamorous, necessary step — can these vehicles meet, dock and keep a crew safe? — that the Apollo program ran through in Earth and lunar orbit before Apollo 11 ever touched down.

Why the change? Both landing systems are running behind, and NASA chose to keep crews flying on the hardware that is ready (Orion and SLS) rather than park the entire program waiting on a lander. It is a schedule compromise, and a candid one.

Artemis IV and V: boots down, 2028

The first actual landing of the Artemis era now falls to Artemis IV, with Artemis V close behind, both targeting 2028. Two very different vehicles are competing to be the one that sets a crew on the surface, and as of late 2026 NASA has not said which goes first — the agency’s stated hope is that both deliver crews to the Moon by the end of that year.

• SpaceX Starship HLS — a towering stainless-steel lander derived from Starship. Its hardest unsolved problem is refueling in space: a fully fueled Starship has to be topped off in orbit by other Starships before it can push on to the Moon, a transfer of cryogenic propellant at a scale nobody has demonstrated yet. SpaceX expects to attempt it in early 2027, with an uncrewed Starship landing on the Moon planned for late 2027.
• Blue Origin Blue Moon MK2 — Jeff Bezos’s lander, which took a different path and dropped in-space refueling from its plan, using a set of smaller tug vehicles to move the lander into lunar orbit instead. Blue Origin’s own schedule took a hit in May 2026 when a New Glenn rocket failed during a test and damaged its launch pad.

Both approaches are genuinely hard, which is the real reason the landing keeps sliding to the right. A lander is not a smaller version of a capsule. It is a crewed spacecraft that has to descend, touch down on an unprepared surface, and launch again, and neither company has flown one yet.

Why the return keeps slipping

If the dates on this page feel soft, that is the honest state of things, not pessimism. The pattern in modern spaceflight is that the rocket and the capsule get finished first and the other pieces — the lander, the spacesuits, the refueling — set the real pace. Three things are pacing Artemis right now:

• The landers. As above: orbital propellant transfer for Starship, and a complex multi-vehicle architecture for Blue Moon. Both are first-of-their-kind.
• The suits. The surface spacesuits are a separate development effort (led by Axiom Space), and a Moonwalk is impossible without them no matter how good the lander is.
• The money and the will. Apollo consumed a share of the federal budget no program has seen since. Artemis runs on a fraction of that, shared across NASA and commercial partners, which buys a sustainable program but not a fast one.

None of this means the Moon return is in doubt. The hardware is built and flying, which is further than the program has ever been. It means the calendar is the uncertain part, and anyone selling you a guaranteed month is guessing.

Could a tourist go to the Moon?

Not on Artemis. These are government missions flown by professional astronauts; there is no tourist seat. The nearest thing to lunar tourism was dearMoon, a privately funded flight around the Moon on SpaceX’s Starship that Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa had booked for himself and a group of artists — and that project was canceled in 2024, with Starship’s development running behind the dates it was sold on.

A commercial trip around the Moon is still a real future possibility rather than a fantasy: once Starship is flying crews reliably, a free-return flyby is one of the first deep-space experiences a company could sell, and it needs no lander at all. But there is no dated, bookable lunar trip in 2026, and the eventual price will sit far above anything on the market today. If you want to understand what reaching space costs right now, our space trip cost guide and the live space tourism price index track every operator and tier, and our rundown of the companies flying people today covers who is selling seats. The far horizon, a trip to Mars, is its own cost breakdown here.

In the meantime, the Moon is yours tonight

The best part of the return to the Moon is that you do not have to wait for it to enjoy the destination. The Moon is the one target in the sky that rewards a cheap pair of binoculars as much as it punishes a bad night — and the full Moon, the one everybody points at, is actually the worst time to look, because the light is flat and the craters cast no shadow. Our guide to observing the Moon walks through where to look and when (hint: a half Moon, along the line between light and dark), so the next time a headline says “we’re going back,” you can step outside and see exactly where.