The "Artemis" moon program by the US space agency NASA is facing further delays. The planned manned lunar orbit mission "Artemis 2", previously scheduled for November 2024, will be pushed back to September 2025 due to issues with the rocket and spacecraft, NASA announced at a press conference on Tuesday. The planned manned moon landing, "Artemis 3", will subsequently be postponed to September 2026. "Artemis 4", another planned moon landing, is still targeted for September 2028.
"We are doing something incredibly difficult," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "Safety is our highest priority." Therefore, they want to give the teams more time to work on the current challenges. Among other things, the heat shield of the "Orion" capsule still needs to be revised, according to the press conference.
"It remains exciting," said Jan Wörner, former head of the European Space Agency (ESA), to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Space travel remains demanding and potentially dangerous. In the past, the so-called "Space Race" between the US and the former Soviet Union had driven them to take high risks, but that era is over. "It is therefore reasonable to postpone the launch when difficulties are identified - especially in astronautical space travel," said the former president of ESA.
Originally, US astronaut Christina Koch, her US colleagues Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen were supposed to fly around the moon for about ten days in the "Orion" capsule in November 2024. They would have been the first four astronauts near the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, when astronauts briefly walked on the lunar surface.
The rocket system "Space Launch System" and the "Orion" capsule were successfully tested unmanned for the first time at the end of 2022. Around a year after "Artemis 2", another manned flight including a moon landing was planned with "Artemis 3".
Named after the Greek goddess of the moon, the "Artemis" program aims to send the first woman and the first non-white person to the moon - originally scheduled for 2024, a timeline that experts have doubted from the beginning. The European Space Agency (ESA) and space agencies from several other countries are involved in the "Artemis" program.
The last time humans were on the moon was with the Apollo 17 mission about 50 years ago - the landing took place on December 11, 1972. So far, the US is the only country to have successfully landed astronauts on the moon with the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, bringing a total of twelve astronauts to the lunar surface.
Earlier this week, NASA also experienced a setback in its moon missions when a privately-funded US space mission, supported by NASA, failed to achieve a successful commercial landing on the moon. While the launch of Astrobotic's "Peregrine" spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport on Monday was successful, there were subsequent issues with the propulsion system that made the planned moon landing impossible.
NASA is increasingly collaborating with commercial providers because it has proven to be a more efficient and ultimately cost-effective approach. For the "Peregrine Mission 1", private individuals were able to purchase space for transporting materials to the moon in the 1.9-meter-high and 2.5-meter-diameter lander.
In April 2023, a Japanese company also failed in a similar moon mission, citing a faulty altitude calculation of the lander during the landing attempt.
China has been much more successful in moon missions recently: The country has successfully landed three unmanned lunar landers on the surface of the moon since 2013, with plans for another one later this year.