NASA has finally provided long-awaited updates on its Artemis lunar program, addressing concerns about the Orion spacecraft and the mission’s timing. The news isn’t as bad as we feared, but we’ll have to wait a little longer for America’s return to the Moon.
NASA has found a way around the Orion capsule’s heat shield problem, but the space agency’s return to the lunar surface is facing further delays, in part due to safety issues with the spacecraft’s crew.
During a media briefing on Thursday, NASA announced that its Artemis 2 and 3 missions have been delayed, with the first crewed Orion flight pushed from September 2025 to April 2026, and the first Moon landing since Apollo now scheduled for mid-2027 instead of 2026.
“We must successfully complete this test flight of Artemis 2 to ensure the success of our return to the Moon … so that the remainder of the Artemis campaign can proceed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters. “Space is challenging and we… need time to ensure the Orion capsule can safely transport our astronauts into deep space and return them to Earth.”
NASA has been working to fix a problem with Orion’s heat shield that surfaced during the Artemis 1 mission in 2022. Artemis 1 was an uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back. After the splashdown of the Artemis 1 mission in the Pacific Ocean, subsequent inspections of the capsule revealed an anomaly unexpected performance from its heat shield. During Orion’s re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft traveled at speeds reaching 24,600 miles per hour (39,590 kilometers per hour) and its heat shield withstood temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Although NASA engineers predicted that charring would occur, the shield’s ablative material peeled off more than they expected.
In early May, NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report to assess NASA’s preparedness to launch its Artemis 2 missionidentifying Orion’s heat shield as one of the critical issues to address before travel to the Moon and back.
For its return to Earth, Orion performed what’s called a “voice jump,” according to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “This is a technique that we use coming back from the Moon because the speed of the spacecraft and the energy it has to dissipate is much greater than the energy that dissipates coming back from low Earth orbit,” Melroy told reporters. “So the way it’s designed is to dive in and out of the atmosphere to reduce the velocity.”
As heat entered and exited the atmosphere, it built up within the outer layer of the heat shield, causing gases to form and become trapped inside the heat shield. This led to a buildup of internal pressure, which then led to cracking and uneven leakage of the heat shield’s outer layer, according to Melroy. “We needed to understand why that erosion change in the heat shield occurred to ensure our astronauts were safe during Artemis 2,” he added.
After identifying the root cause, NASA decided to maintain Orion’s heat shield as for Artemis 2, while applying a modified entry trajectory for the spacecraft returning to Earth.
Even with this solution, the space agency still must prioritize astronaut safety before launching a crew aboard Orion. This, however, marks another disappointing delay for the Artemis program, which has suffered from cost overruns and an overly ambitious timeline. The Artemis 2 mission was originally scheduled for November 2024, while the follow-up mission Artemis 3 was originally scheduled for late 2025. With the latest developments, the follow-up mission Artemis 2 will launch nearly five years after the lunar landing program began . .
NASA is facing pressure to land astronauts on the Moon before China gets there first, with the two nations competing with each other in a newly formed space race. NASA Administrator Nelson, however, reassured that, even with the new timeline, the United States is still ahead of China. China’s space program has announced plans to land astronauts on the Moon in 2030, giving NASA a three-year head start, at least for now.
