Nasa eyes spacex to replace boeing and push orion to the moon

NASA is quietly rewriting the Artemis playbook, and Boeing may not like what the new draft says. According to sources familiar with the deliberations, the agency is weighing a restructured mission architecture that would strip the Space Launch System of its role as the primary engine driving astronauts toward lunar orbit — handing that job to SpaceX's Starship instead.

What the new architecture actually looks like

The original Artemis blueprint was straightforward enough on paper: SLS launches a crew of four inside Lockheed Martin's Orion capsule, the stack reaches a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon, and a Starship lander docks with Orion there before ferrying astronauts to the surface. Clean, sequential, expensive.

The revised proposal scrambles that sequence. Under the new plan, SLS would still lift Orion off Earth — that part survives — but the capsule would rendezvous with Starship in low Earth orbit, not lunar orbit. From there, Starship takes over, propelling Orion all the way to a low lunar orbit, a tighter, more conventional path around the Moon that SLS and Orion could never achieve together on their own. The shift is architectural, not cosmetic. It redefines what each vehicle is actually for.

The meeting that could settle it — or not

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is scheduled to sit down this Tuesday with the companies at the center of this reshuffling: SpaceX, Boeing, and Blue Origin, the latter still building its own Human Landing System. Isaacman has already staked out a public position: