Unpacking the Artemis Program and Changes with Director Will Pomerantz
At NASA’s Ignition event on March 24, 2026, Administrator Jared Isaacman outlined a more accelerated and surface-oriented approach to lunar exploration, including a push toward returning astronauts to the surface by 2028, increasing mission cadence, expanding the role of commercial systems, and beginning the first elements of a long-term Moon Base. NASA also said it intends to pause Gateway in its current form and shift more directly toward infrastructure that supports sustained surface operations.
As Artemis continues to evolve and the Moon becomes an increasing focus of national, commercial, and international attention, we wanted to take a step back and hear from someone who has spent years thinking about the future of space activity. Open Lunar asked board member Will Pomerantz to help interpret a significant set of recent changes to NASA’s Artemis program.
Note: We’ve asked Will to contribute their perspective freely in their personal capacities. These views do not formally belong to their organisations or any affiliations but instead draw from their overall experience.
Will Pomerantz is a Board Member of the Open Lunar Foundation and Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment, where he leads the team behind the Collier Trophy-winning Mars helicopter Ingenuity. Previously Employee #001 at Virgin Orbit and VP at Virgin Galactic, he is also co-founder of the Brooke Owens Fellowship and Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. He lives in Texas with his wife, NASA Flight Director Diana Trujillo, and their children. You can read his full bio at the bottom of this post.
Q: Artemis has clearly shifted in both pace and posture. During the recent Ignition meeting in March, NASA has moved further away from Gateway and more directly toward a surface-first model built around cadence, commercial systems, and sustained presence. What do you see as the biggest change in that shift — and what does it tell us about how the Moon is now being approached?
In so many ways, flight rate is key for nearly every part of the industry. Flight rate is an enormous driver of costs, of the pace of new technology adoption, of public engagement, and of the very way we view risk and reward. Though rarity can certainly make things more exciting, that usually comes at an enormous cost, both literally and figuratively.
Until recently, the Artemis program planned on conducting flights only once every few years, even in the most charitable and optimistic view of things. While physics dictates long times between launch windows for other destinations in the solar system, orbital mechanics weren’t the driving factor behind the long gaps between flights in the Artemis plan; instead, those came from technological choices, budgets, and politics.
In March, NASA recognized the challenges that were always inherent in the plan and announced some major shifts designed to avoid those risks. They culled out some of the technologies and mission elements that NASA’s leadership team viewed as long poles in the schedules separating each Artemis flight. They put a clear spotlight on the remaining development programs that will dictate when we can land the first Artemis crews on the lunar surface, and simultaneously applied real pressure to the companies developing those systems and offered to change the way NASA does business in order to make things easier on those programs. And they embraced a ‘more shots on goal’ philosophy that dramatically upped the number of lower-risk, lower-reward missions that will occur in between each flagship Artemis mission.
I think these were necessary steps. Some of them were certainly painful, and only time will tell which were dialed in exactly right and which simply traded old problems for new. As always, direction is nothing without execution. But the reverse is equally true: execution without direction is no great thing, either. Artemis now has a direction that makes a good deal of sense to me; and just as importantly, a NASA leadership team that is clearly unafraid of discarding sunk costs to pursue wiser plans when the situation calls for it
Q: For years, Gateway represented a particular vision of Artemis: shared architecture, shared contribution, and a visible international backbone around the Moon. As NASA pivots more directly toward surface operations, what is gained in speed or practicality, and what becomes harder to preserve in terms of coalition-building, legitimacy, and shared ownership of the overall effort?
There are still many elements of the Artemis program that are ripe for international partnership. If anything, the increased pace of things should significantly increase the number of opportunities for contributions from other nations. And with more crewed missions and more CLPS-style robotic missions alike added to NASA’s plans, there is a broader range than ever of the size of financial commitment that is required for a partner agency to take on a genuinely meaningful role.
But it’s challenging to predict just how much enthusiasm there will be for those kinds of partnerships in the near term, even given the tremendous wave of public support that will follow from the inclusion of Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen as a Mission Specialist on the Artemis II lunar flyby. The recent changes in the Artemis program presumably came as a wrench in the works for other nations who had planned, budgeted for, and often already completed substantial work towards Gateway and other programs. Here in the US, the NASA leadership team has just seen how incorporating international partners can significantly increase the momentum of a program, which can absolutely be a double-edged sword. And of course, it’s impossible to ignore the context of the USA’s changing relations with nearly every allied nation under the current Administration. Each country’s views of both risk and reward of partnering with NASA have likely changed quite substantially in recent years.
Q: NASA is clearly pushing toward a more commercial lunar future, with more private-sector involvement and a bigger focus on building a sustained ecosystem over time. This push has been raising bigger questions about how early norms get set. What feels most promising about that shift, and where do you think we as an industry need to be especially intentional early?
Humanity has a great opportunity to establish norms for lunar activities before there is an overwhelming level of activity to be governed by those norms. We’ve seen time and time again here on Earth that it is extremely difficult to introduce or adjust norms on any field that’s already rushing forward at full speed – there’s simply too much momentum and too many self-interested players unwilling or unable to compromise. When it comes to lunar exploration, we aren’t at that level of saturation yet, so, we have this great moment now where we can put things in place when the playing field is fairly equal and when key stakeholders can think about things fairly objectively.
At the same time, it’s very difficult to get anyone’s attention on norm-setting activities when it seems as though those norms won’t matter until the distant future. With so many demands on every key stakeholder’s attention, few will devote any serious time or thought to matters that seem like academic exercises at best.
That’s why this moment is so precious. Lunar time keeping, or power infrastructure, or zoning seemed like pure science fiction when lunar missions were a perpetually-moving “five years away” at best, and only coming from one or two players whenever they did actually happen.
But now, we’ve had actual lunar missions from China, Japan, India, Israel, Europe and the USA within the past few years – and we’re seemingly approaching a bend in the curve where those numbers will shoot up again. These new missions are coming from players with a very wide range in philosophy, incentives, legal systems, and more. Norms are starting to feel urgently needed, and we can begin to identify those who should have a seat at the table to define them.
That’s one reason why I’m extremely encouraged to see so many of those new players starting to proactively engage with programs like Lunar Ledger, the open-access database of global lunar activities and objects. A program designed to facilitate transparency and coordination will live or die depending on whether or not people choose to engage with it. In the case of Lunar Ledger, both new commercial entities and traditional intergovernmental agencies are already beginning to engage with it – and that is fantastic news for anyone who cares about the future defined by peaceful and cooperative activity on the Moon.
Q: This next phase of lunar activity will depend not just on missions, but on how well actors coordinate as activity scales. Where do you see the biggest coordination gaps emerging, and what kinds of shared infrastructure or norms do you think will matter most?
There’s a lot of surface area on the Moon – to put in an Earthly perspective, there’s more land on the Moon than any continent but Asia here on Earth. Imagine a landmass the size of North and South America combined, and you get a sense of how much of the Moon there is to explore. But of course, lunar missions won’t be randomly spread around the lunar surface. Instead, they will often be clustered around certain key areas, whether those are the places that are easiest to reach, or best for resource prospecting, easiest to operate in, or whatever else.
These areas could get quite crowded. And in the lunar environment, with its low gravity and lack of atmosphere, landing even in the general vicinity of another spacecraft can pose hazards, as incoming spacecraft can kick up dust and larger particles that move faster than a speeding bullet and travel great distances. We’ve seen in recent times how the act of landing on the Moon is very, very challenging; and it turns out that in a way, you also have to worry about subsequent landings from your neighbors! There are opportunities here for infrastructure – including comparatively ‘low-tech’ concepts like landing pads and berms – that could make each landing much safer, both for the landing spacecraft and those that preceded it. And there are norms that should be established about how mission operators keep the rest of the community informed about the particulars of each landing so that we can increase the odds of every mission’s success, as well as making it easier to study phenomena like plume impingement that will inform future mission design.
So, that’s one area that’s always on my mind. But with so many more missions bound for the Moon these days, and with the likelihood that that number is likely to continue growing, there will be many more benefits to openness, coordination, and cooperation. Missions shouldn’t be stepping on each other’s toes, as it were. And in a field as technically demanding as lunar exploration, perhaps there are wheels we don’t need to reinvent over and over again, where a technical standard or something akin to a public utility can be a benefit for everyone.
Artemis II is the next big public moment in exploration. Beyond the symbolism of sending humans around the Moon again, what should people actually pay attention to? What will Artemis II tell us about where this broader lunar effort is going, technically, politically, and internationally?
I thought I was prepared for the Artemis II mission. I hadn’t been born yet when the crew of Apollo 17 left the Moon and ended that era of exploration; but I felt like I knew what was coming. I’ve poured over HD images of the Moon from missions ranging from SELENE to Blue Ghost, and we’ve all been able to see daily images of the full Earth from DSCOVR for a decade now. And of course, we are flooded with video of humans living and working on the ISS – especially as a NASA spouse living next to the Johnson Space Center, where astronauts are also our friends and neighbors.
But wow, was I ever wrong. The emotional impact of seeing those photos coming home from Integrity absolutely gobsmacked me. Somehow, knowing it was a human behind the lenses of the cameras that took those photos made it so much more impactful. I teared up as Carroll Crater was named, I laughed along with the viral memes about Microsoft Outlook and Nutella, and I ooooh’ed and aaaah’ed over the stunning images of the stark lunar landscapes, just like everyone else. There was no feeling of “been there, done that,” even for a mission that could easily seem on paper like a retread of Apollo 8.
So, don’t discount the value of the symbolism.
But what matters most is what comes next.
We had a huge flip in perception. It seemed like almost no one outside of the traditional space communities even knew Artemis II was happening until the day of the launch; but then it became very much part of the cultural awareness. The crew did a spectacular job both as explorers and as ambassadors of all humanity, nailing big moment after big moment. People were paying attention.
But the launch pad had barely cooled off before we saw the White House release a budget proposal that would deeply cut back NASA’s budget. NASA has worked miracles before, and they can do so again – but are we as a nation matching resources to expectations? It’s hard to say just yet.
So, watching the political process as NASA, the White House, and Congress triangulate on a budget for Artemis and for NASA as a whole will be one telling sign. But a budget proposal isn’t the same thing as an operating plan; and similarly NASA isn’t the same thing as the entire space community. The reactions of NASA’s partner nations in the Artemis Accords, the stock tickers of companies like Intuitive Machines and Firefly, and the adoption of tools and resources like the Lunar Ledger – all of these things will be worth watching closely!
Will Pomerantz is a Board Member of Open Lunar Foundation and an aerospace executive with two decades of experience in the entrepreneurial and non-profit sectors. He currently serves as the Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment, where he leads the team that built the Collier-Trophy-winning Mars helicopter Ingenuity in partnership with NASA JPL. In that role, he led the development of the Skyfall mission concept, recently selected by NASA to launch in 2028.
Will has spent his career at the intersection of commercial space and innovation. He was Employee #001 and Vice President for Special Projects at Virgin Orbit, and previously held the same VP title at Virgin Galactic. His career also includes serving as Senior Director of Space Prizes at the XPRIZE Foundation.
Beyond his executive roles, Will is committed to improving the future of the nation’s aerospace workforce. He is the co-founder of both the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship, award-winning programs that have provided internships, mentorship, and more than half a million dollars in cash grants to undergraduate students from underserved communities.
A graduate of Harvard and the International Space University, Will has served on two US Federal Advisory Committees and currently serves on the Boards of Directors for the Open Lunar Foundation and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship Foundation, as well as the Advisory Boards of SEDS-USA and Space for Humanity. He lives in Texas with his wife, NASA Flight Director Diana Trujillo, and their children.