A thrust of 39 meganewtons at liftoff, 2,604 metric tons including crew and payload, 98 meters in height for the SLS—Space Launch System—at a cost of about $4 billion per mission. The liftoff of the Artemis II mission takes place at 12:35 a.m. CEST on April 1, 2026, from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, which has remained available to NASA since the historic days when Pads 39A and 39B saw Apollo missions first, and later Shuttle missions, leave Earth’s surface. Pad 39A is now used by SpaceX. Splashdown is scheduled for 2:07 a.m. Italian time in the Pacific Ocean on April 11.
It may look like a mission like many others, just a little more complex. But that is not the case: we are facing an important new chapter in the history of space exploration, and with it, of the space economy.
This is a test mission, a lunar flyby, designed to prepare for the next missions that will return human beings to our natural satellite, this time to stay. But did we not already go to the Moon more than 50 years ago? Where is the difficulty in going back? There are many challenges, especially when one compares the highly pioneering nature of the Apollo era with today’s need to put crew safety first. Going back to stay makes an enormous difference, and the overall strategy also changes depending on the final objective.
Much has been said about various aspects surrounding the launch of Artemis II: the increasingly prominent presence of entrepreneurs such as Bezos and Musk in the return to the Moon, the associated costs, the cancellation—or rather, the placing on hold—of Gateway, the station in cislunar orbit that has been part of the American plan to return to the Moon from the beginning.
But let us talk about costs: if we take 349 million people as an estimate of the American population, and consider $4.1 billion as the cost of Artemis II, that amounts to $0.032 per American per day for one year, or just over three coffees a year. Yes, because the SLS and the Artemis II mission were developed by NASA and its contractors with public money. And they therefore have to meet the highest safety standards both for the mission itself and, above all, for the crew.
The case of Elon Musk is different, for example, as he has now been testing his Starship for several years: with the Super Heavy, thrust reaches 72 to 89 meganewtons, depending on the configuration, with 5,000 metric tons at full load, and about $2 billion for each test launch. In this case, as it often does, SpaceX applies the fly-fix-fly approach, which makes it possible to test the system and learn quickly from mistakes. It burns through $2 billion per flight, but learns quickly, and that helps the program accelerate development. Here, the drivers are commercial and the strategy is to reach the Moon as soon as possible with a resilient system that is also reusable, and therefore more flexible and less costly.
The strategic framework for expanding humanity beyond Earth’s boundaries, and in particular onto the Moon, involves a mix of SLS and HLS Starship, along with various contributions, including from private actors. But what will happen without Gateway, the result of a strategic as well as financial choice? On the one hand, on April 3, 2026, the White House reduced NASA’s 2027 budget by 23 percent, with a $5.6 billion cut compared with the previous year’s budget, which had itself been cut by 25 percent compared with 2025. At the same time, the White House indicated that the $2.6 billion allocated to Gateway development would be reallocated to the development of ground elements on the lunar surface.
Now, Gateway had a specific function in the strategic framework for a systematic return to the Moon: it was a kind of hub for docking vehicles such as Orion, the capsule now traveling with Artemis II, but also Musk’s Starship, as well as commercial landers, to be used for the transfer of crews and cargo to and from the lunar surface, with the South Pole as the objective. In principle, the Artemis program was supposed to develop with several partners—more than 60 countries have signed the Artemis Accords to date—including some that were also to collaborate on Gateway. Logistics would have taken on a different dimension from the one that will now have to be managed without the support station in orbit.
Will this accelerate arrival and settlement at the South Pole? Or will the Chinese get there first, heavily engaged in systematic exploration with their Chang’e missions and the ILRS program?
Trying to get there first means landing where one prefers, since there are only a few landing sites at the South Pole given the large number of craters and the possibility of landing only on their rims, and then being able to exploit the water, helium-3, and materials present on the Moon’s surface, especially inside the craters themselves. The change in strategy may have a very strong underlying geopolitical rationale, but the overall cut should be a cause for concern, as should the recurrence of such cuts. On October 4, 1957, it was the Soviets who launched the first satellite, Sputnik, three months before the American Explorer. And yet Werner von Braun had been pushing, unsuccessfully, the administration of the time to try to launch much earlier. History would have been different.
