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NASA Says Next Human Moon Landing Will Come 2025 at Earliest

NASA Says Next Human Moon Landing Will Come 2025 at Earliest

NASA won’t land astronauts back on the moon before 2025 and says it will need additional funds each year starting in 2023 to keep its Artemis lunar program on schedule.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration extended the timeframe by a year for several Artemis milestones begun under President Donald Trump, including a planned 2023 flight with crew around the moon. That Artemis II flight, previously set for 2023, won’t occur before May 2024, Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.

NASA Says Next Human Moon Landing Will Come 2025 at Earliest

Trump had previously directed NASA to return astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024.

NASA blamed the delays primarily on the pandemic and storm damage at a NASA site in Louisiana. It also cited litigation that Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin initiated earlier this year over a NASA contract awarded to rival firm SpaceX to build a human landing system to put astronauts on the lunar surface. A federal judge ruled against Blue Origin last week, allowing the SpaceX work to proceed.

NASA also revealed that costs for the Orion crew capsule, which will carry Artemis astronauts, have soared by more than $2.5 billion to $9.3 billion through 2024. That program, with Lockheed Martin Corp. as the primary contractor, has seen higher costs because of requirements that have changed throughout the development, NASA officials said.

That comes atop costs of about $11 billion for the Space Launch System rocket, built by Boeing Co., which will launch Orion. The first flight for the system, called SLS, is scheduled to be the Artemis I mission without crew on Feb. 12.

The agency has begun revamping its development processes in a public concession that its budgets aren’t large enough to accommodate the massive amount of funding SLS and Orion have consumed over more than a decade of work, with multiple delays and cost overruns.

NASA recently solicited industry ideas for ways to make the SLS rocket more affordable, possibly by using it for private launches. The agency said it would remain the primary SLS customer, needing at least one launch annually for 10 or more years. “Having taken a good look under the hood these last six months, the agency will need to make serious changes for the long-term success of the program,” Nelson said.

He also faulted the prior administration for setting a lunar schedule not supported by budgets or the pace of engineering work. For NASA’s human landing on the moon “2024 was not a goal that was really technically feasible,” Nelson said.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.