SpaceX · Starship · 24 Oct 2026

Starship will now push Orion to the Moon. What NASA's new Artemis IV plan changes, and a first look inside Cabin 1

NASA has dropped the far-out lunar orbit it had planned to use as the meeting point for its Moon landings. Under the plan it laid out on Friday, SpaceX's Starship lander will dock with Orion and its crew near Earth, then fire its own engines to carry both spacecraft to a low orbit around the Moon. NASA also showed the first photos of Cabin 1, the crew compartment SpaceX is building for that trip, and a quarter-by-quarter SpaceX schedule that runs to a crewed landing in 2028.

From Alex RSpaceX

What happened

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons gave an "Artemis Acceleration" update at Kennedy Space Center on Friday, Oct. 23, starting at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT) (shown in your time zone). Alongside it, NASA published a new lander plan for its 2028 Moon missions and a step-by-step guide to Artemis III.

We are not slowing down. 🚀

Our Artemis III mission will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems needed for future lunar landings and we're accelerating efforts to ensure the success of Artemis IV, the first Artemis mission on the lunar surface.

— NASA (@NASA) October 23, 2026

Everything below is a plan. None of the Moon steps has flown, and NASA says it still hasn't picked which lander, Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon, will carry the first crew down.

1. The big change: no more halo orbit

For years, the plan was for Orion and the lander to meet in a "near-rectilinear halo orbit," a huge, stretched loop around the Moon. NASA now says the landers and Orion "will no longer rendezvous" there. Each lander gets its own meeting point instead:

Orbit times are approximate figures from NASA's own orbit study on why it first chose the halo orbit.

That last row is why this matters. NASA says the switch will "significantly lower" how much propellant Starship has to collect in Earth orbit, and will cut the time it takes astronauts leaving the surface to get back to Orion. A spacecraft in a halo orbit only swings close to the Moon about once every six and a half days. A low orbit comes round about every hour and a half. So a crew climbing off the surface should have far more chances to catch their ride home.

There's a catch for SpaceX. In this plan Starship does the trans-lunar injection burn, the big push out of Earth orbit, for itself and Orion. NASA says it is "working to modify Orion to enable Starship to push it to the Moon," so that part is still being designed.

2. How a Starship landing now works

• Fuel up near Earth. A depot Starship waits in low Earth orbit. "Similar to a gas station on Earth," NASA says, a series of tanker Starships transfer propellant into it, and the depot then fuels the lander, which launches from Florida.
• Crew launches. Four astronauts launch on SLS and Orion from Kennedy. Orion docks with the waiting Starship lander in Earth orbit.
• Go together. Starship fires its engines and carries the docked pair to low lunar orbit.
• Land. Two astronauts ride Starship to the surface "for several days," while two stay on Orion. NASA is targeting two Moonwalks of about two hours each.
• Come home. Starship lifts the pair back to Orion, which flies the crew back to Earth.

SpaceX has to fly an uncrewed demonstration mission with the lander first, and NASA says that is where SpaceX will prove the refueling approach.

3. First look at Cabin 1

NASA's lander page says SpaceX is adding two demonstrations of Cabin 1, the crew cabin for its Starship lander, to its NASA milestones. On Friday, NASA showed footage supplied by SpaceX of the cabin being built at the Starfactory at Starbase, Texas. It shows a row of window cutouts in the steel hull, and an interior with padded white walls, a wood-toned ceiling panel and a padded floor with tie-down straps. The briefing images also included the first vehicle for SpaceX's propellant transfer demo, which SpaceX describes as "in build and integration."

24/ Here are some looks at the work towards the propellant transfer mission and the cabin 1 for the first HLS version of Starship.

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) October 23, 2026

Note that nobody will use this cabin on Artemis III. On that 2027 test mission, NASA says the crew "will not enter Starship." Orion will dock with a Starship V3 test article for up to two hours, then undock. Cabin 1 is for the landing missions after that.

4. SpaceX's schedule, quarter by quarter

NASA published a SpaceX development milestones chart with the briefing. Every entry from here on is a target, not a done deal:

Look at the first row. My count from the chart is six SpaceX milestones in the quarter we're in now, plus an emulator delivery drawn on the line between December and January. They include three Starship firsts (first V3 booster catch, first ship catch, first Florida launch), with about ten weeks of 2026 left. Parsons said Starship Flight 15 is expected in November and will fly Raptor engine improvements, and that the first Florida launch is expected "in the coming months," according to Spaceflight Now's live coverage. He also said the early-2027 transfer demo will use one Starship launched from pad 39A in Florida and one from Starbase (Spaceflight Now). Our Flight 15 explainer covers what that flight is trying to do.

The overall timeline has already slipped a bit. Isaacman said NASA is working to win back a 90-day delay to Artemis III flagged in an internal NASA memo, and Parsons blamed supply chain problems with lander parts, especially avionics (Spaceflight Now, here).

5. The tanker count, again

One day earlier, a NASA safety adviser had put the number of Starship launches needed to fuel a Moon landing at "around 22," and Elon Musk replied it would be 6 to 8 (our breakdown of both numbers). On Friday, NASA's program manager came down near Musk's end. Here's how the estimate has moved:

Isaacman added that as Starship's launch rate ramps up toward every two weeks and then weekly, and it lifts more mass to orbit, the number of flights should drop further (Spaceflight Now). Precourt's 22 and Parsons' "high single digits" aren't necessarily in conflict. My guess is that some of the gap is the new low-orbit plan, which NASA says needs less propellant, and some is SpaceX's expected gains. Until ship-to-ship transfer has actually flown, every one of these numbers is still an estimate.

My read

This is the biggest change yet to how Starship is meant to land people on the Moon. Starship goes from being a lander that waits at the Moon to the vehicle that hauls the crew there too. It gives SpaceX more of the mission and cuts the propellant bill. It also leaves even less room for error, because the fuel-up near Earth, the docking with Orion and the burn to the Moon now all depend on a Starship working the first time with a crew attached. The good news is that the next proof point is close. Three Starship firsts are on the chart before New Year's, and the propellant transfer demo is down for early 2027.

Bottom line: in the old halo orbit, Orion came closest to the Moon only about once every 6.5 days. In low lunar orbit, it comes round about every 90 minutes, according to NASA's orbit study.

When Flight 15 gets a date, our Starship tracker will have the countdown, and Can I see the launch? will show whether you can see it from your town.

Sources: NASA, "NASA, Partners Accelerate Lander Development for 2028 Moon Missions" (23 Oct 2026): new concepts of operations, Isaacman and Parsons quotes, Cabin 1 demos, Moonwalks, lander not yet assigned; NASA, Artemis III mission guide (23 Oct 2026): Starship V3 test article, two-hour docking, crew won't enter Starship; NASA briefing blog and recording (23 Oct 2026); NASA Artemis Acceleration image album: SpaceX milestones chart and concept-of-operations graphic; NASA, "Why NRHO: The Artemis Orbit": orbit periods; Spaceflight Now live coverage on X (23 Oct 2026): Parsons and Isaacman remarks on Flight 15, the transfer demo, tanker count and schedule; Ars Technica (22 Oct 2026) and Ars Technica (Nov 2023): earlier tanker estimates. The milestone count and the comparison table are my own reading of NASA's documents. Graphic: NASA. Cabin 1 images: SpaceX, via NASA, embedded from Spaceflight Now's post.

— Alex R