NASA Pushes Back Target Date for Moon Landing to 2028, Citing Need for More Design Development

Calling it an architectural update and not a cancellation, NASA announced it is scrapping its scheduled Artemis III moon landing, originally scheduled for later this year, and instead will conduct a lower orbit test in 2027. The next lunar landing won’t occur until early 2028, assuming all goes well before then.Artemis II, which was supposed to launch March 11 as a low-orbit exercise in preparation for the moon landing, will also be delayed until April at the earliest. NASA officials acknowledged at a press conference Friday that the designs currently under blueprint are no-go in their current configuration. “There is too much learning left on the table and too much development and production risk in front of us. Instead, we want to keep testing like we fly and have flown,” said NASA’s associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya. The delay comes as designers across the board, including contractors involved in the project — SpaceX, Blue Orbit, and Boeing, among them — concluded they have too many ideas still in development for the space launch and human landing systems. The multiple variations have prevented implementation of a standardized system that will enable astronauts to land, exit the vehicle, and return home aboard vehicles that will be replicable and launchable in shorter time spans. “We had a chance to have these discussions across all of our industry partners, all of the prime contractors. On the [Space Launch System] vehicle, both of our [Human Landing System] landing providers, everybody agrees this is the only way forward,” the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, said. With delays putting a kink into President Trump’s plan to put Americans back on the moon during his administration, Mr. Isaacman called the situation “not ideal,” but said the current state of readiness leaves too many untested variables on the drawing board.The manager in charge of NASA’s Moon-to-Mars program, Lori Glaze, said the most recent issue that arose during three to four days of testing of Artemis II showed a problem with the flow of helium to the engine systems in the upper stage of the launch. The error forced the Orion vehicle back into the assembly building for repairs.“We hope to get down to the root cause of that and make changes not just to the hardware but to our operational procedures so that we don’t encounter the same issue again when we roll back out to the pad,” she said. “It was disappointing, but that’s where we were and the response of our team was exactly what we should be doing. We allowed the data to talk to us and tell us that’s what we needed to do.”With a revised architecture, the two low-orbit missions will endeavor to include a rendezvous and docking with one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin; in-space tests of the docked vehicles; integrated checkout of life support, communications, and propulsion systems; and tests of the new extravehicular activity suits that the astronauts will wear. Officials said Apollo 11 didn’t get to the moon in 1969 without considerable preparation and preliminary programs like Gemini and Mercury. But, Mr. Isaacman noted, it only took two months to go from Apollo 7 to Apollo 8. By reducing the number of objectives for each mission, Mr. Isaacman said the “cadence of its missions” will naturally speed up to achieve the “national objective of returning American astronauts to the Moon and establishing an enduring presence.”“This is how NASA changed the world and this is how NASA’s going to do it again,” he said.

NASA Pushes Back Target Date for Moon Landing to 2028, Citing Need for More Design Development

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