Name: NASA revising Artemis program to return to moon | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T12:10:21.000Z
Duration: 4 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

NASA says it is revising its Artemis rocket program to return astronauts to the moon by 2028, beating China.

The program has suffered several delays, but

To-infinitive

Artemis 2 is expected to launch in the coming weeks for a lunar flyby.

NASA is now adding an additional mission in 2027 called Artemis 3.

It will undertake further preparations without actually landing.

The US space agency hopes its successor mission, Artemis 4, will carry out the final moon landing in early 2028.

The first moon landing was almost 60 years ago.

Keith Cowie, editor at NASA Watch.com told us why the US is so keen to return.

Well, you and I saw that, but 75% of the people in the world never saw that.

So for a lot of people, this is the first moon landing.

So just we haven't done something in a while doesn't mean we should.

But, you know, there's a bit of a different international dynamic now.

Whereas when the moon return was first announced after we lost Columbia, we went back and forth here in the States and how we were going to do it.

Now suddenly China wants to go to the moon and we have a political atmosphere that says, well, we need to challenge China.

So that's sort of factored into the equation.

But long story short, experts will agree that we have unfinished business on the Moon.

We sort of stopped after a few missions with Apollo, and

half a century later, we need to sort of pick up with new ways of doing things to go back and really explore this world right next door.

But what exactly can we learn there that we haven't already learned?

Well, we've learned a lot just from the rocks that we brought back that we didn't expect.

And one of the reasons now that we're going back as we went before my little moon, here we went near the equator.

Well, now we're going to go down to the poles because there's dark regions where the sun never reaches, and

there could be water and things like that that you can use for life support and for rocket fuel.

So there's other reasons to go back there.

But again, we have tools now to understand this world that we didn't have back in the day.

And we have a lot of questions that have built up over the past 50 years as to why this rock says this and this rock says that.

And if you look at what China's doing, they're interested, too.

Now, do you think there will be unlimited finance in the future, or does NASA need to scale back its ambition in the future?

But the image you showed when you first came on, had this, the rocket and the pad, and

One of the questions, though is who's going to pay for this and what will it look like?

There was or is supposed to be a little miniature space station orbiting the moon that the original program was going to go to and then go from there to the moon.

ESA was going to build two big pieces of it, and

we can't get an answer now as to whether we're going to still do that.

Now, the US is of course, competing, as you mentioned, with countries like China or India in advancing its space program.

So will other nations react to today's news?

And of course, again, this issue of you and I are little boys watching this thing happen, but

the rest of the world, again, this is really exciting because 75% of us on this planet have never seen anybody walk, live out another world.

So this is exciting for nations like India and others that have now had the technological capability to go do things like this.

So again, I think everybody's adjusting to this and we, they've always looked to the US as a leader, but

And in a multipolar world, everything will probably readjust and we'll see what happens.

Where does this leave the space ambitions of the Europeans?

Well, that's going to be interesting because Europe is quite, we see, I see them as an equal in terms of capability and interest and resources.

They were going to be full partners of this.

And now again, with the Gateway Space Station, we don't know what's going to go on with.

There was talk of having a European astronaut and a Japanese astronaut on the surface.

We're going to have a Canadian astronaut on the next Artemis mission.

So there has been an international flavor to this.

You've had the Artemis Accords, which is big, large international group of people coming together.

But I'd be really surprised if the international aspect of this changes in any fundamental way.

Keith Cowan there from NASA Watch, as ever, thank you very much, Keith.