NASA on Thursday announced another delay to its first crewed lunar mission since Apollo, with astronauts now set to fly around the moon in 2026 and land in 2027.
The delay means the Artemis II – the next flight in NASA’s Artemis moon program that looks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years – will launch roughly 17 months after it was initially scheduled.
NASA now expects to launch the Artemis II mission in April 2026, when it will send four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon. The Artemis III lunar landing flight will follow in mid-2027. NASA attributed the delay to modifications in the Orion spacecraft’s reentry process to mitigate pressure on its heat shield.
“We and our industry and international partners need this time to make sure that our own capsule is ready to safely deliver our astronauts to deep space and back to Earth,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. “We do not fly until we are confident that we have made the flight as safe as possible for the humans on board. We need to do this next test flight, and we need to do it right.”
Earlier this year, NASA delayed the Artemis II mission until no earlier than September 2025, citing safety concerns with the Orion aircraft’s heat shield. That decision came after a watchdog group reported in May that the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft intended to carry the mission’s astronauts suffered unexpected damage in more than 100 places during an uncrewed test flight in 2022.
NASA has since investigated the pattern of erosion on the heat shield and worked to determine why it performed differently than its engineers had expected.
Based on the investigation, Nelson said the Artemis II mission will use Orion’s original heat shield but change the spacecraft’s reentry procedure to lessen the heat it will face when it returns to Earth’s atmosphere.
During Orion’s return to Earth in the Artemis I mission, it dipped in and out of the atmosphere to reduce its velocity, but heat built up and became trapped in the heat shield’s outer layer, leading the shield to crack and shed unevenly, said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator.
NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, who will serve as the commander for the Artemis II mission, acknowledged that the delays are frustrating but said he valued the time spent determining how to improve Orion’s safety for the crew. NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, as well as Canadian Jeremy Hansen, will join Wiseman on the Artemis II mission in 2026.
“Slowing down is agonizing, and that’s not what we like to do,” said Wiseman, who will serve as the commander for the Artemis II. “We really appreciate the willingness to take the risk to actually slow down and understand root cause and determine the path forward.”
(c) Washington Post
Whom do they make these “moon missions” for? Hasn’t the world woken up to the moon landing lies?
Was NASA more technologically advanced in 1969 than it is now? With all the money poured into this how can it be that NASA is having so much trouble doing what it has already done multiples 50 YEARS AGO???