[6] As of December 2024[update], NASA officially expects Artemis III to launch no earlier than mid-2027 due to heat shield issues on Orion and valve problems in the spacecraft's life support system.

[7][8] In August 2023, due to delays in the development of Starship, NASA officials expressed an openness to flying Artemis III without a crewed landing.

[11] In April 2024, it was reported that alternative mission options being internally evaluated by NASA include a test of docking between Orion and Starship HLS in low Earth orbit.

After a multi-phase design effort, on 16 April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop Starship HLS and deliver it to near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) prior to arrival of the crew for use on the Artemis III mission.

Artemis III, as it was now billed, was repurposed to accelerate the first crewed lunar landing of the Artemis program by the end of 2024, with a profile that would have seen the Orion MPCV rendezvous with a minimal Gateway space station made up of only the Power and Propulsion Element and a small habitat/docking node with an attached commercially-procured lunar lander known as the Human Landing System (HLS).

[23][24] On 10 August 2021, an Office of Inspector General audit reported a conclusion that the spacesuits would not be ready until April 2025 at the earliest, likely delaying the mission from the planned late 2024 launch date.

In March 2024, NASA announced the scientific instruments to be included on the mission were a compact, autonomous seismometer suite called the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, or LEMS.

The third instrument is the Lunar Dielectric Analyzer, or LDA, an internationally contributed payload that will measure the regolith's ability to propagate an electric field.