WASHINGTON — NASA on Thursday postponed a mission to send four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth until April 2026.
The move is the latest setback for Artemis, the government space agency’s return-to-the-moon program, which has already faced years of delays.
A subsequent mission to land astronauts near the south pole of the moon is now scheduled for mid-2027, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference Thursday.
The adjustment to the Artemis schedule comes as the Nelson prepares to leave the agency when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January.
Even though Trump had set the goal of sending astronauts back to the moon during his first administration, he could change his mind after he takes office. In the coming months, NASA could instead put more money toward another destination that Trump has talked about: Mars.
Nelson expressed confidence that the Artemis program would continue despite its delays and cost overruns. He said he had spoken to the leaders of companies including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and SpaceX that are manufacturing key components for the mission as well as international partners.
“We must have a shared sense of urgency among all these partners, and I think we have,” Nelson said.
He emphasized that a mid-2027 target for the moon landing would still beat plans by China to send its astronauts to the moon in 2030.
“It is vital for us to land on the south pole so that we do not cede portions of that lunar south pole to the Chinese,” Nelson said.
The first of the two missions that were delayed Thursday, known as Artemis II, is set to send astronauts closer to the moon than they have traveled in more than 50 years. It will also be the first time that astronauts have yet to launch on top of NASA’s giant new Space Launch System rocket and then swing around the moon inside a crew capsule called Orion before returning to Earth and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. The mission will not land on the moon.
The Artemis II crew will consist of three NASA astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch — and a Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen.
A previous, uncrewed mission that circled the moon in 2022, known as Artemis I, was largely successful. NASA officials were hopeful that Artemis II would launch late this year.
But in January, NASA officials announced that Artemis II had been pushed back by at least nine months, to next September. They cited a slew of technical issues behind the delay.
Many of those have now been fixed, but an issue that proved particularly arduous to decipher involved damage to the heat shield, which is critical to protecting the astronauts as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere. Months of engineering investigations delayed preparations for Artemis II.
“Now we know the root cause,” Nelson said. “And this has allowed us to devise a path forward.”
NASA engineers found that inside some portions of the heat shield, gases built up and then created cracks and blew off chunks. The heat shield kept the capsule from overheating and melting, but officials wanted to understand the problem to be sure that a more catastrophic failure would not occur in the future.
They have tweaked the formulation of the material that will be used for future heat shields so that the gases can escape instead of building up. But the heat shield for Artemis II is already built and attached to Orion. Replacing it would have delayed the mission by another year or so.
Instead, NASA engineers concluded that shortening a maneuver during reentry when the capsule essentially skips off the atmosphere would minimize damage to the vehicle and keep the astronauts safe.
The country’s current moon program started in December 2017 when Trump directed NASA to send astronauts back to the moon, a place they had not stepped since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. The Biden administration largely continued the Trump administration’s approach.
With Trump returning to the White House next month, the direction of the Artemis program that he started may shift. Trump has been leaning on the counsel of Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, which is building a version of its Starship spacecraft to be used as the lander for Artemis III mission, the mission that would put two astronauts on the moon.
On Wednesday, Trump announced that he would nominate Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment-processing company, to serve as the next NASA administrator. Isaacman, a close associate of Musk’s, previously led two private missions that launched on SpaceX.
The Space Launch System and Orion capsule are expensive, and the first four Artemis missions are expected to cost more than $4 billion each, the agency’s inspector general estimated.
Trump could ask NASA to change its focus to Mars, the ultimate destination Musk plans for Starship.
Responding to a question about whether he thought the Trump administration might make wholesale changes to the Artemis program, Nelson said he was not concerned.
Despite the rapid development of Starship by SpaceX, Nelson noted that the Orion capsule has already been to deep space during Artemis I. “There is one human-rated spacecraft that is flying and it has already flown beyond the moon, farther than any other human-rated spacecraft,” Nelson said.
Nelson said he called Isaacman on Wednesday to congratulate him and invited him to NASA’s headquarters for a meeting. He said he would not publicly reveal what advice he might provide but expressed confidence on the current Artemis program.
“I think we are handing to the new administration a safe and reliable way forward for us, which is to go back to the moon to get there before China,” Nelson said.
Nelson also said he was not worried about Musk’s influence with Trump.
SpaceX, he said, has proved capable at taking astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. “I have every reason to think that that relationship will continue,” Nelson said. “I’m basically optimistic about the future for NASA under the new administration.”
Wiseman, commander of Artemis II, said that last month, he and his crewmates visited the Kennedy Space Center where they saw the pieces of the Space Launch System rocket that is to send them to space as well as the Orion capsule they will be sitting in.
Afterward, at the airport in Orlando, Florida, they watched SpaceX’s latest Starship rocket test.
“All the elements are there for humans on the moon, and all the elements are there to push us on to Mars in the very near future,” Wiseman said. “I felt it in my soul. I felt it, and I believed it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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