Mass Value Report for February 2026

No flights to the Moon for now - but work in that direction

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced a shakeup of the Artemis program this month. It is being reported in some parts of the media as a cancellation of the return to the Moon, as Artemis III will instead of landing on the Moon conduct an Earth-orbit test of one or both of the program’s landers.

Everyone has understood for a long time that the slow flight rate of the Space Launch System is a problem - as Isaacman himself put it, skills atrophy and teams need to develop “muscle memory” for the processes of launching a rocket.

I’ll get into the details below; but first lets revisit New Glenn. Blue Origin is one of the lander providers for Artemis, and the new schedule puts pressure on them to get that lander flying soon.

Blue Origin

The third flight of New Glenn, and the first reflight of a recovered booster, is now scheduled to happen in March. This will launch a cellular satellite for AST SpaceMobile. Below I have plotted the launch campaigns of the first four New Glenn launches, in order to estimate how many flights they will achieve this year.