--- title: "NASA Turns to a Longer Centaur to Bring Orion Down Into Low Lunar Orbit" description: "For years NASA built workarounds for a capsule that couldn’t reach a low Moon orbit, leaving lander makers to carry the load. Now it plans a fix" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-23T22:48:25Z modified: 2026-10-24T11:50:35Z url: https://rews.cc/a/nasa-turns-to-a-longer-centaur-to-bring-orion-down-into-low--ee7dd5 language: en tags: ["nasa", "orion", "space", "blue-moon", "artemis", "science"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # NASA Turns to a Longer Centaur to Bring Orion Down Into Low Lunar Orbit *For years NASA built workarounds for a capsule that couldn’t reach a low Moon orbit, leaving lander makers to carry the load. Now it plans a fix* By Jan Sokol · October 23, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/nasa-turns-to-a-longer-centaur-to-bring-orion-down-into-low--ee7dd5 ## In brief - A NASA chart showed Orion docking with Blue Moon about 8,500 km above the Moon, and NASA is studying a low lunar orbit option - Artemis manager Jeremy Parsons said a low orbit would cut Blue Moon’s propellant needs and allow quicker departures from the surface - Orion’s Service Module has long lacked the delta-V to reach low lunar orbit and return to Earth - NASA is working with ULA on an extended Centaur V that, with the SLS core stage, would get Orion to low lunar orbit - Artemis III becomes a docking test in low Earth orbit next year, with a crewed landing planned for 2028 Every orbit is a deal between what a machine can do and what its owners will admit it cannot do. On Friday, 23 October, NASA showed a chart of the latest deal. Orion, the capsule built to carry Americans back to the Moon, docks with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit about 8,500 kilometres above the surface. The two craft can meet there under the plan as drawn. NASA would rather they met lower. As [Eric Berger reported for *Ars Technica*](https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/nasa-updates-lander-plans-for-moon-landings-finally-solves-long-festering-orion-issue/), NASA is also working on an option to hold the rendezvous in low lunar orbit, a few hundred kilometres up. Jeremy Parsons, who manages the Artemis Program, explained what that would mean. From that height Blue Moon would need much less propellant to take astronauts down to the surface and bring them back up, and the mass saved could go elsewhere on the vehicle. A low orbit would also give crews more chances to leave the surface in an emergency, and faster ones. For a company building a lander, every kilometre of height costs kilograms of fuel. ## A capsule that could not make the trip The meeting point sat so high because of an old problem with Orion itself. Its Service Module does not have enough delta-V, the total change in speed a spacecraft’s engines can deliver, to leave Earth, drop into low lunar orbit and still get home to a splashdown in the Pacific. The shortfall has embarrassed the agency for a long time. For just as long, nobody seemed willing to fix it. So NASA built around it. It placed the Lunar Gateway, its planned outpost, in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, a long looping path that Orion could reach safely. The hardest part, the descent from that height and the climb back, was handed to the landers and to the companies designing them. A weakness in the government’s own spacecraft became a design problem for its private contractors. A reflection, not a finding: big institutions seldom repair what they can route around. A repair means admitting a fault. A workaround can be called an architecture. ## The extended Centaur On Friday the agency said it is working with United Launch Alliance on an “extended” version of the Centaur V upper stage. Combined with the core stage of the Space Launch System, it would let Orion reach low lunar orbit. The statement NASA published that day on its [revised lander plans](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-partners-accelerate-lander-development-for-2028-moon-missions/) did not mention the stage at all, and no timetable for it has been given. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman spoke of the fix in unusually frank terms. “Getting Orion to low-Lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long,” he said. He presented it as help for the landing partners, whom NASA has been trying to assist in every way it can, given how urgent the schedule has become. > “We could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they’ll show up and meet our timelines. Or we can say well let’s start turning those knobs to help.” Before that, he described what the agency watches: “What progress are our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to be helpful? Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially.” For years the companies had to make up for the capsule’s limits. Now the agency is offering to cover some of the distance itself. ## Two landers, two orbits NASA’s release sets out the rest of the plan. The halo orbit is no longer where Orion meets its landers. Each company gets an orbit suited to its own system. Blue Origin is postponing in-space refuelling for now. Instead it will use three transfer stages built from Mark 1 and Mark 2 hardware, which work like a multistage rocket: each stage drops away once its propellant runs out. The docked stack then heads for an elliptical polar orbit around the Moon. NASA says that compared with the halo orbit, this route gets crews back to Orion faster, needs less lander propellant and makes fuller use of SLS performance. SpaceX’s route is different. Tanker ships will fill a depot in low Earth orbit, and the depot will fuel the lander. The lander will then dock with Orion near Earth and push both vehicles to low lunar orbit. NASA is modifying Orion to make that possible. Starship [reached orbit for the first time](https://rews.cc/a/spacex-starship-reaches-orbit-for-the-first-time-on-its-14th-41d6e2) only this month. Artemis III is now a test flight in low Earth orbit next year, in which Orion will rendezvous and dock with test versions of both landers. A crewed landing is planned for 2028. NASA will pick the company for the first crew according to whose lander is ready, and a second landing will follow. CNN’s account of the briefing ran under the headline [“The most complicated launch campaign ever”](https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/23/science/nasa-artemis-update-spacex-starship-blue-origin). In the agency’s release, Isaacman said: “NASA has no intention of sitting idly by as all the pieces come together.” The plan ends where it always has. Two astronauts would go down to the lunar South Pole and make two moonwalks of about two hours each in suits made by Axiom Space. NASA’s new step is admitting how far up their capsule would otherwise be waiting.