For NASA and its astronauts, the moon isn’t that far away in terms of distance, but it’s slipping further into the future.
Artemis II, the first U.S. mission to bring astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years, will not take place later this year as planned, space agency officials announced Tuesday.
They set a target date of September 2025 for the mission to orbit the moon without landing on it.
The Artemis II delay will also postpone the next mission, Artemis III, which will land two astronauts near the moon’s south pole. It won’t happen until September 2026.
Artemis II will be the first mission to send astronauts into space using NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, and NASA officials want to iron out potential problems that could put the crew at risk. I believe.
“We’re not going to fly until we’re ready,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “Safety is paramount.”
Officials cited concerns about the life-support system electronics that kept the astronauts alive in Orion, continued analysis of wear on the capsule’s heat shield from previous unmanned missions, and repairs to the spacecraft that delayed the mission. He cited a number of technical issues, including: launch tower.
Unlike the Apollo program, Artemis II will not orbit the moon. The Orion capsule will rotate around the moon, use the moon’s gravity to be hurled back to Earth, and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. The entire journey takes approximately 10 days.
The crew will consist of three NASA astronauts (Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch) and one Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen.
Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator for the Moon-to-Mars program, said a problem discovered with a valve in the Orion capsule’s life support system was the main cause of the Artemis II delay.
A valve intended for Artemis III’s Orion capsule failed in testing. “That allowed us to stop and observe the circuit in more detail,” Kshatriya said.
Although Artemis II’s valve components passed testing and were in place, “it became very clear that that hardware could not be accepted. It needed to be replaced to guarantee the safety of the crew.” “There is,” he said. said the Kshatriya.
He said NASA also discovered a potential flaw in Orion’s battery if the spacecraft needed to be quickly separated from the rocket in an emergency.
Despite the change in destination, the SLS rocket and Orion capsule, a key part of NASA’s human spaceflight program, had already been in development for years and remained unchanged.
Initially, the pace of return to the moon was slow, with astronauts not scheduled to land until at least 2028. Then in 2019, Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the National Space Council, announced a sudden acceleration and said American astronauts would walk. It will land on the moon again “by any means necessary” by the end of 2024.
Mr. Pence and other critics point out that only eight years passed between President John F. Kennedy’s famous moon mission announcement in 1961 and the Apollo 11 landing, and that NASA He said he was not acting with any sense of urgency.
Pence also stoked fears about China, which has set up a robotic lander on the far side of the moon and aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2030.
The moon project was named after Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology.
In 2021, NASA hired Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to build the Artemis III lander. The company is modifying a giant Starship rocket to take two NASA astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface.
NASA’s advance schedule has begun to slip. Artemis I, the test launch of the SLS rocket that will send an unmanned Orion capsule on a test flight around the moon, was scheduled for late 2020 but will not launch until November 2022.
Artemis I was largely successful, and NASA officials expected Artemis II to follow two years later.
Although NASA’s budget has increased significantly in recent years, it remains a much smaller share of the federal budget than it did at the height of the Apollo program in the 1960s.
In December, the Government Accountability Board announced that the goal for Artemis III to land on the moon is December 2025. It wasn’t likely, They point out that the development schedule for the lunar lander Starship and the spacesuits needed for astronauts to walk on the moon is too optimistic.
Two Starship test launches last year failed to reach orbit, but SpaceX said both provided data for improvements. The Office of Responsibility said if Starship’s development took as long as NASA’s average major project, completion would be in 2027.
The delay will give SpaceX more time to tackle Starship development challenges, including a full-scale uncrewed moon landing, currently scheduled for 2025.
James Free, NASA’s deputy administrator, said the revised schedule for Artemis is not very optimistic, but acknowledged that further delays are still possible.
“We have worked hard to meet the unknown and develop a realistic plan,” Free said.
Other parts of NASA’s moon program are also not going according to plan.
On Monday, NASA’s Peregrine, a commercial robotic lunar lander carrying five experiments, successfully entered orbit toward the moon after liftoff, but moments later its propulsion system suffered a catastrophic failure. While this is a setback for NASA’s lunar research, Artemis is unlikely to be delayed any further.
in Latest updates The spacecraft’s manufacturer, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technologies, announced Tuesday afternoon that its maneuvering thrusters could run out of propellant within about 40 hours.
“Unfortunately, there is no possibility of a soft landing on the moon, considering the propellant leak,” the company said. Engineers continue to look for ways to extend the spacecraft’s life and collect data that will be useful for future missions.
NASA has already booked additional experiments on other commercial landers as part of its efforts to conduct scientific research on the moon at low cost. NASA officials said they expect some of these commercial missions to fail.
But NASA also has concerns about moving forward with Astrobotic’s second mission, which will take a $433.5 million rover called VIPER to the Antarctic region and explore water ice and other resources there. There is a possibility that A larger lander named Griffin will be used for this flight.
The rover is the most complex and expensive payload NASA has ever planned for a commercial lunar mission.