1 of 4 | NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building stands at dusk at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in August. NASA announced Tuesday it will delay its Artemis launches to "work through challenges." File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI |
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Jan. 9 (UPI) -- NASA announced Tuesday it will delay its Artemis launches to "work through challenges" and "ensure crew safety," as the space agency targets 2026 to return astronauts to the moon.
NASA revealed it will now shoot for September 2026, instead of December 2025, to land the first astronauts near the moon's south pole with Artemis III. While NASA was planning to launch Artemis II later this year, the first crewed mission around the moon is now scheduled for September 2025.
Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains on track for 2028. Gateway is a lunar base that NASA plans to build on the surface of the moon.
"In order to safely carry out our upcoming Artemis missions to the moon with astronauts, we are now targeting September 2025 for Artemis II and September 2026 for Artemis III," NASA wrote Tuesday in a post on X. "Safety is our top priority."
"We are returning to the moon in a way we never have before, and the safety of our astronauts is NASA's top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday. "We've learned a lot since Artemis I, and the success of these early missions relies on our commercial and international partnerships to further our reach and understanding of humanity's place in our solar system."
Among the safety issues NASA teams are currently troubleshooting, is a battery problem and an issue with a circuitry component that runs air ventilation and temperature control.
"We are letting the hardware talk to us so that crew safety drives our decision-making," said Catherine Koerner, associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "We will use the Artemis II flight test, and each flight that follows, to reduce risk for future moon missions."
While NASA is initially targeting the moon with Artemis, the ultimate goal of the missions is to gain knowledge to apply toward future manned missions to Mars.
"Artemis is a long-term exploration campaign to conduct science at the moon with astronauts and prepare for future human missions to Mars. That means we must get it right as we develop and fly our foundational systems so that we can safely carry out these missions," said Amit Kshatriya, manager of NASA's Moon to Mars Program Office.
NASA also announced Tuesday that it has tasked SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are providing the Artemis mission human landing systems, to meet the new timelines while planning for future missions involving large cargo. SpaceX's Starship will land astronauts from Artemis III near the moon's ice-rich south pole.
As NASA looks toward Artemis II in 2025, excessive charring to the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis I return flight is the biggest concern facing the next mission.
Artemis II will test NASA's launch system and the Orion spacecraft systems in what is expected to be a 10-day manned flight around the moon that will take astronauts farther from Earth than any other mission. The spacecraft will orbit Earth twice to gain speed to then orbit the moon for a "free-return trajectory" back to Earth.
Artemis II's four-person crew, which includes three Americans and one Canadian, are currently training for the mission. The crew includes NASA astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Victor J. Glover Jr., G. Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
Artemis III will land astronauts on the moon's south pole, which Nelson calls a "different moon" from where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in 1969.
"The south pole is pockmarked with deep craters and because of the angle of the sun coming in -- most of those craters are in total darkness," Nelson said during an Artemis update in August 2023.
While 28 countries have signed the Artemis Accords, NASA is pushing to establish a base on the moon before China wins the space race to make sure lunar resources are "available to all."
Tuesday's announcement of Artemis launch delays did not come as a surprise, as NASA predicted the possibility earlier this year when it named its Artemis II crew.
"I know the goal is 2024," Nelson said last April. "But I think we have to be brutally realistic, that history would tell us, because space development is so hard, that there could be delays to that schedule for the first demonstration flight of landing humans and returning them safely to Earth."
