NASA has added another year’s delay to its plan for landing astronauts on the moon: The Artemis 2 trip around the moon is now scheduled for 2025, setting the stage for an Artemis 3 mission in 2026 that would see humans step onto lunar surface for the first time in 54 years.
The reasons behind the postponement have to do with safety concerns that arose in the wake of the uncrewed Artemis 1 round-the-moon mission in 2022. That flight was seen as a shakedown cruise for NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft.
When NASA and its industry partners analyzed the results of Artemis 1, they found several issues that required more time to resolve — including higher-than-expected levels of erosion in Orion’s heat shield, deficiencies in the battery and electrical system, and problems with some of the components used in Orion’s life support system.
“Safety is our top priority,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said today in a teleconference. “And to give Artemis teams more time to work through the challenges with first-time developments, operations and integration, we’re going to give more time on Artemis 2 and 3.”
Artemis 2 is now due to send three Americans and a Canadian astronaut on a 10-day trip around the moon in an Orion capsule in September 2025 rather than late 2024.
The Artemis 3 mission, which would use Orion as well as a modified SpaceX Starship lander to put a yet-to-be-named crew of astronauts on the moon’s surface near the south pole, is now scheduled for September 2026 rather than late 2025.
Artemis 3 would be a milestone for America’s space effort — not only because it would be the first crewed mission to set down on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, but also because it would fulfill NASA’s promise to put the “first woman and the first person of color” on the moon. (All 12 Apollo moonwalkers were white men, and for what it’s worth, the Artemis program is named after a Greek goddess who was Apollo’s twin sister and was associated with the moon.)
There might be further slippage in the Artemis program’s schedule: Last November, the Government Accountability Office said that the schedule for completing development of the Starship lander seemed “unrealistic,” and that Artemis 3 was more likely to take place in 2027. The GAO also noted that Axiom Space needed more time to fine-tune the design of the Artemis program’s next-generation spacesuits.
For now, NASA is standing pat on its projected 2028 time frame for Artemis 4. That would be the first crewed moon mission to make use of Gateway, a yet-to-be-built transfer station in lunar orbit.
The first integrated elements for Gateway had been scheduled for launch in 2025, but NASA said it’s reviewing that schedule “to provide additional development time and better align that launch with the Artemis 4 mission in 2028.”
Last year, NASA awarded $3.4 billion to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and its industry partners for the development of a Blue Moon lunar lander that could serve as a commercial alternative to SpaceX’s Starship. The current timeline calls for the first crewed Blue Moon lander to go into service for Artemis 5 in the 2029 time frame.
Today, NASA said it has asked SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin applying the knowledge gained from the development of their crewed landing systems toward variants that are optimized to deliver massive cargo payloads for later missions.
