With the Artemis program, NASA aims to return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. And on the eve of a new presidential administration, agency officials have announced a delay in the program’s next major mission and plans to make that mission ambitious.
At a news conference last week at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, the agency’s leadership announced that persistent hardware problems had forced NASA to back off. Artemis II—Four-person crewed flight on an Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back to Earth—September 2025 to April 2026.
Most observers had already envisioned a 2025 launch unlikely. That journey into space aboard Orion—NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—is not fully assembled at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This puts it behind the pace set by its predecessor, the unmanned Artemis I mission. Artemis I start up In November 2022, after fully assembling its SLS about a year earlier.
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“The safety of our astronauts is always first in our decisions; it’s our North Star,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference at the agency’s headquarters. “We don’t fly until we’re ready. We don’t fly until we’re sure we’ve made the flight as safe as possible for the humans on board. We have to do this next test flight, and we have to do it well, and that’s how the Artemis campaign continues.’
That said, agency officials are also thinking more about the program’s intended missions.
As originally thought, Artemis II It was the 2020 version of the 1968 mission Apollo 8, A non-return trip around the moon and back to Earth to demonstrate NASA’s ability to send safely to and from the moon. But now, with development of SpaceX’s Starship rocket moving forward quickly, NASA officials are considering expanding the opportunity. Artemis II. Starship aims to land NASA astronauts on the surface of the moon next Artemis III mission, making the private rocket a crucial pillar of the public space agency’s ambitious lunar return plans.
NASA is now exploring the possibility of launching a Starship in parallel with Artemis II, Looking to rehearse the maneuvers that will have to be done between Starship and Orion. Artemis III It would be the first manned landing on the moon since 1972.
“We’re always looking for ways to exploit new technologies (and) new capabilities that even five years ago seemed out of reach,” said Reid Wiseman. Artemis IIcommander, in last week’s press conference. “Are you going to ask an astronaut to do more in his mission? Bring it.”
Feeling the heat
delay of Artemis II hardware problems persist with the mission’s Orion spacecraft, a home away from home for its four astronauts. Big-ticket item: Research into Orion’s primary heat shield material, an epoxy resin called Avcoat, which misbehaved during the Artemis I era.
“What surprised me the most was the level of detail they provided. They’re very complicated missions and very complicated technology, and you don’t often get into the reasons why things don’t work,” says Iain Boyd, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, who models spacecraft thermals. protection systems “Certainly part of that is sending messages to Congress and other stakeholders across the enterprise that they know what they’re doing.”
Avcoat characterizes it very well: it played a key role in the heat shields used in the Apollo program and underwent extensive testing before being used on Artemis. Samples of Orion’s heat shield materials were passed through more than 1,000 ground teststhe overall design ran numerous supercomputer simulations, and a test version of Orion successfully flew into space in December 2014. However, in the press conference, agency officials said that the material still contained surprises.
Although it’s not scheduled to launch until April 2026, engineers and technicians are already piling on NASA’s robust rocket boosters. Artemis II manned lunar mission.
As it re-entered Artemis Ia, Orion screamed through Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 kilometers per hour), with its heat shield enduring temperatures approaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat shield did its job, keeping conditions right inside the spacecraft, but unpleasant surprises still arose in those hellish conditions. Post-flight inspections revealed More than 100 places In the heat shield of that Orion ship, the material wore away differently than expected, in some cases leaving pits about the size of baseballs on the surface of the shield.
During the briefing, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy announced that the hole was caused by the Artemis I flight plan, which included what is known as a skip re-entry, in which Orion entered and exited the upper atmosphere to help slow its descent. This flight plan resulted in the accumulation of gas-forming thermal energy within the outer layer of the heat shield. Extensive testing revealed that the Avcoat along Artemis I Orion’s heat shield was irregularly permeable to gas leaks, and in areas that were less permeable, gases accumulated to the point of cracking the material.
In response, the agency is changing future Orion reentry trajectories to reduce the heating that caused the gas build-up. Future heat shields, NASA officials said, will be built with Avcoat, which has adequate permeability.
“Because our bottom temperatures were within four safety factors, because our guidance was in the middle, because we had the right amount of virgin Avcoat material left, it’s tempting to believe that this means the spacecraft … has done it by a margin,” added Amit Kshatriya, of NASA’s Moon to Mars Program. administrative assistants “But everything we’ve learned in our history tells us that’s not what ‘margin’ means.”
The Way Forward and the Changing of the Guard
The Avcoat investigation—and its message of technical excellence—also represents a swan song for the Biden administration’s NASA leadership. Nelson, a former U.S. congressman and U.S. senator from Florida, previously announced he would leave the agency at the end of the year. The day before the press conference, President-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of billionaire tech advisor and philanthropist Jared Isaacman. to lead NASA. Isaacman has ordered two private SpaceX orbital missions: Inspiration 4Back in 2021, and Polaris Dawn.
Isaacman’s strong ties to SpaceX’s human spaceflight program could foreshadow big changes at Artemis, which is grappling with key hardware delays. For example, for the planned upgrade of SLS for the Artemis missions planned for the late 2020s, NASA needs a new mobile launch tower. In 2019, the agency estimated that the project would cost less than half a billion dollars and would be completed in 2023. It will now be delivered in September 2027 at a cost of $1.8 billion, according to the statement. August report Courtesy of the NASA Office of the Inspector General.
The pieces of what is now Artemis have faced years of delays; The SLS was originally scheduled to fly in late 2016. And with the last delay Artemis II, Approximately three and a half years will pass between Artemis’s first two major launches. That’s a far cry from the annual cadence NASA wants to achieve with the program in the early 2030s.
That said, SLS and Orion have long enjoyed strong support from Congress, a key reason why Artemis remains the only US lunar program to survive intact from Apollo under two presidential administrations. If Isaacman wants it Renew Artemis By reducing or eliminating these expensive components, he could face hostile questions and tough opposition to his powers in the Senate confirmation hearing next year, and in his notional term as NASA’s final leader.
“We’re giving the new administration a safe and reliable path for us: getting back to the moon, getting there before China, having a cislunar (space) presence … and being on the way (from the moon to Mars),” Nelson said at the press conference. “I believe that that we have wrapped it with a loop.”
