CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA introduced extra delays Thursday in sending astronauts again to the moon greater than 50 years after Apollo.
Administrator Bill Nelson stated the following mission within the Artemis program — sending 4 astronauts across the moon and again – is now focused for April 2026. It had been on the books for September 2025, after slipping from this 12 months.
The investigation into warmth defend harm from the capsule’s preliminary check flight two years in the past took time, officers stated, and different spacecraft enhancements are nonetheless wanted.
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This bumps the third Artemis mission — a moon touchdown by two different astronauts — to no less than 2027. NASA had been aiming for 2026.
NASA’s Artemis program, a follow-up to the Apollo moonshots of the late Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies, has accomplished just one mission. An empty Orion capsule circled the moon in 2022 after blasting off on NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket.
Although the launch and lunar laps went properly, the capsule returned with an excessively charred and eroded backside warmth defend, broken from the warmth of reentry. It took till not too long ago for engineers to pinpoint the trigger and give you a plan.
NASA will use the Orion capsule with its unique warmth defend for the following flight with 4 astronauts, based on Nelson, however make modifications to the reentry path at flight’s finish. To rip off and substitute the warmth defend would have meant no less than a full 12 months’s delay, officers stated.
During the flight check, the capsule dipped out and in of the environment throughout reentry and warmth constructed up within the defend’s outer layer, defined Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator. That resulted in cracking and uneven shedding of the outer layer.
The commander of the lunar fly-around, astronaut Reid Wiseman, took half in Thursday’s information convention at NASA headquarters in Washington. His crew consists of NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“Delays are agonizing and slowing down is agonizing and it’s not what we love to do,” Wiseman stated. But he stated he and his crew wished the warmth defend harm from the primary flight to be totally understood, no matter how lengthy it took.
Twenty-four astronauts flew to the moon throughout NASA’s vaulted Apollo program, with 12 touchdown on it. The remaining bootprints within the lunar mud had been made throughout Apollo 17 in December 1972.
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