“They're going to open up the hatch. They're going to enter the lander. They're going to evaluate the environmental controls, the life support systems,” says Parsons. “We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmospheric pressure, and we're also going to test emergency scenarios, dual vehicle control, and we're going to put our Mission Control teams through their paces." 

For all of the confidence expressed at the press conference, no one at NASA pretends that the Artemis III mission doesn’t have a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that could go badly wrong before the space agency can tee up the 2028 Artemis IV landing. And even if the mission does completely succeed, NASA will still require both competing spacecraft to execute an uncrewed lunar landing and liftoff to prove their mettle further. Only then will the landers be certified to carry crew. 

Whether the two companies can perfect the engineering and fly the uncrewed missions in the maximum 18 months that will elapse between the launch of Artemis III and the flight of Artemis IV at the end of 2028 is uncertain. Isaacman, for one, expresses confidence that the target date can be met without slipping into 2029 or later. But he acknowledges that NASA’s years of uncertainty since the Apollo program—with priorities shifting from Skylab to the shuttle to the International Space Station, and with start-stop programs to return to the moon that burned through money but never got anywhere—have set the agency back, especially as it concerns the ongoing competition with China.