NASA has put out a call for volunteers to track its Orion capsule during its first crewed trip around the moon.
The space agency on Wednesday published a request for information (RFI) for ground system operators to explain how they could track the crewed spacecraft during the Artemis II mission, targeted for no later than April.
The test flight of Orion and NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is a precursor to the Artemis III lunar landing at the moon’s south pole, scheduled for mid-2027. The mission aims to return American astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than half a century.
The Artemis II crew—NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen—will primarily rely on NASA’s Near Space Network and Deep Space Network for communication during the approximately 10-day moonshot.
However, NASA has increasingly embraced private firms for launch and orbital services with initiatives such as Commercial Crew and Commercial Lunar Payload Services. The White House’s budget request for fiscal year 2026—which proposes phasing out SLS and Orion in favor of commercial alternatives after Artemis III—further accentuates this shift.
The RFI issued by NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program seeks to understand whether commercial ground station operators could play a similar role.
The space agency is looking for companies that can gather one-way Doppler tracking measurements of signals emitted by Orion as it flies through orbital and cislunar space. The capsule will make a lunar flyby at an altitude of about 4,000 feet before returning for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
To protect Orion from radiation, the tracking would be passive—no transmissions or signals would be beamed up from the ground station. Doppler measurements would be shared with SCaN personnel during and after the mission.
Commercial firms have until October 27 to respond to the RFI.
The Artemis II volunteers will build on the capabilities demonstrated during Artemis I in 2022, when 10 volunteers from around the world successfully tracked Orion as it ventured nearly 270,000 miles beyond the moon.
Volunteer measurements were compared with tracking data collected by engineers at Johnson Space Center in Houston and shared with the Flight Dynamics Facility team at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. There were 18 participants in the effort, including government space agencies such as the CSA, commercial firms such as Intuitive Machines, nonprofits, universities, and even a pair of private citizens.
NASA is hoping that in the time between Artemis I and Artemis II, private companies have developed technology that could build on that previous effort.
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