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NASA’s first Artemis Moon mission a flawless success after Orion splashdown
NASA has successfully recovered an uncrewed version of its Orion crew capsule, marking the flawless completion of the spacecraft’s first Moon mission and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s first launch.
Six years behind schedule, roughly $20 billion over budget, and costing taxpayers almost $50 billion through its first full flight test, anything less than near-perfection would have been a moderate scandal. But to the credit of NASA and its contractors, who have all worn excuses in the spirit of ‘perfection takes time’ threadbare, the international team behind Artemis I appears to have actually delivered on those implied promises. While some small bugs were unsurprisingly discovered over the 25-day mission, a collection of excellent post-launch NASASpaceflight.com interviews confirm that each major part of the SLS rocket performed about as flawlessly as their respective teams could have hoped for.
Originally intended to launch in late 2016, the first SLS rocket lifted off with the second space-bound Orion spacecraft on November 16th, 2022. Propelled by its European Service Module (ESM), Orion passed the Moon around November 21st. It then entered an unusual distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon on November 26th, reaching a record distance of 432,200 kilometers (268,563 mi) from Earth in the process. After less than a week in lunar orbit, Orion departed DRO on December 1st and began a long journey back to Earth.
The update that's rolling out to the fleet makes full use of the front and rear steering travel to minimize turning circle. In this case a reduction of 1.6 feet just over the air— Wes (@wmorrill3) April 16, 2024
On December 11th, about four weeks after liftoff, Orion separated from its disposable service module (~$400 million) and slammed into Earth’s atmosphere traveling around 11 kilometers per second (~25,000 mph). In another credit to NASA and capsule contractor Lockheed Martin, Orion’s reentry, descent, and splashdown all went perfectly. After its ablative heat shield did most of the work slowing it down, the spacecraft deployed parachutes and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean some 240 kilometers (~150 mi) off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, southwest of California.
Taking full advantage of the fact that Orion and SLS are a government program and continuing in the footsteps of the Apollo Program, the US Navy was tasked with Orion spacecraft recovery. To that end, it deployed USS Portland – a 208-meter-long amphibious transport ship crewed by hundreds of sailors – to recover Artemis I’s Orion, which was completed without issue using the ship’s Navy helicopters, fast boats, and floodable well-deck.
Following capsule recovery, which wrapped up almost seven hours after splashdown, it’s safe to say that NASA’s Artemis I mission was a spectacular, near-perfect success. Only a few aspects detract from the extraordinary performance of the spacecraft. Most significantly, despite being half a decade behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, Artemis I’s Orion capsule and service module did not fly with or test a functioning docking port or Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Those systems will not be tested in space until Artemis II, Orion’s first astronaut launch, inherently reducing the risk-reduction and predictive value of the flight test.
Additionally, Artemis I launched Orion to a distant retrograde lunar orbit. No future NASA missions are scheduled to use DRO. For the time being, Artemis II will be a free-return lunar flyby mission, meaning that Orion will never enter orbit around the Moon – the safest possible lunar trajectory for its crewed debut. For Artemis III and all future Orion missions, the spacecraft will enter a different near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon – similar to DRO in spirit but entirely different in practice. That again slightly reduces the value of Orion’s spectacular performance during Artemis I.
Waiting for Artemis II
Finally, due to a series of decisions and the shockingly slow expected performance NASA and its contractors, the next Orion and SLS launch is unlikely to occur before 2025. Recently discussed by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a September 2022 report [PDF], the cause is strange. GAO says that “NASA estimates it will require ~27 months between Artemis I and Artemis II due to Orion integration activities and reuse of avionics from the Artemis I crew capsule on…Artemis II.” In other words, even though Artemis I was near-flawless, Artemis II will be delayed partly because of an attempt to reuse a tiny portion of its successfully recovered capsule.
Ars Technica’s Eric Berger recently provided another tidbit of painful context with the discovery that the decision to reuse the first deep space Orion’s avionics boxes was made eight years ago to close a “$100 million budget hole.” Inexplicably, NASA and Lockheed Martin believe it will take more than “two years to re-certify the flight hardware.” Berger explains that years ago, NASA only intended to launch SLS’s first Block 1 variant once, and expected that it would take at least three years to retrofit the rocket’s sole launch tower for the rocket’s Block 1B upgrade and second launch overall.
Years later, parochial pork-hungry members of Congress leaped on an opportunity to force NASA to build a second launch tower to help avoid that three-year gap between launches. Ironically, that second tower, ML-2, is now expected to cost anywhere from 2.5 to 4 times more than its original $383 million price tag and is years behind schedule. Meanwhile, SLS Block 1B is also years behind schedule, which led NASA to decide to launch SLS Block 1 three times instead of just once.
Ultimately, that means that the bizarrely slow recertification of eight Artemis I Orion avionics boxes – not the SLS rocket, ground systems, or any rework required after their launch debut – is now “the primary critical path for…Artemis II.” As a result, Berger estimates that delays caused by the decisions NASA made to save $100 million almost a decade ago will likely end up costing taxpayers $1 billion.
Artemis II is unlikely to launch less than 27 months after Artemis I, pegging the launch no earlier than February 2025. That gap of more than two years is just 20% shorter than the 33-month gap a NASA advisor once said could raise safety concerns because of the loss of experience that would result, which factored into the decision to build a second launch tower. Ultimately, NASA appears to have secured another very large chunk of time to ensure that Artemis II – like Artemis I – goes as perfectly as possible when the time finally comes.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
The Tesla Roadster unveiling is getting hyped up by the company’s CEO Elon Musk, who has been a big reason the product has such high expectations due to delayed timelines and a constant need to make it even more insane than before.
Tesla announced on September 12 that it would officially unveil the Roadster in Waco, Texas, on October 1, ending years of patience for fans and reservation holders who have waited for the all-electric supercar to enter production since 2017.
Musk has said that this event will be well worth the wait on several occasions, and last year on the Joe Rogan Experience, he said that there should be a closing chapter to supercars- the end of cars that aren’t focused on safety.
He said:
“Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable. My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. I think if Peter wants a flying car, he should be able to buy one. I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy technology in this car. Let’s just put it this way: if you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.”
Musk’s teases have continued, and now that the event is roughly two weeks away, it seems like Roadster is finally going to show up and blow some minds:
It’s out of this world
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Excitement guaranteed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Tesla has definitely dragged out the development of the Roadster, but there is a good reason for it.
Tesla has been working on many other projects, most notably self-driving efforts to increase passenger safety, and those simply took priority over the Roadster, a low-volume, high-performance sports car that has a lightning-fast acceleration rate of 0-60 MPH in just 1.1 seconds, could potentially fly, and contributes very little to the company’s mission.
However, many people have the Roadster on pre-order through the referral program or with their own money, and it is time that Tesla delivers on that.
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
