NASA bumps astronaut moon landing to 2025 at earliest
Source: AP
NASA is delaying putting astronauts back on the moon until 2025 at the earliest, missing the deadline set by the Trump administration. The space agency had been aiming for 2024 for the first moon landing by astronauts in a half-century.
In announcing the delay Tuesday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Congress did not provide enough money to develop a landing system for its Artemis moon program. In addition, a legal challenge by Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, stalled work on the Starship lunar lander under development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
NASA is still targeting next February for the first test flight of its moon rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, with an Orion capsule. No one will be on board. Instead, astronauts will strap in for the second Artemis flight, flying beyond the moon but not landing in 2024, a year later than planned. That would bump the moon landing to at least 2025, according to Nelson. Officials said technology for new spacesuits also needs to ramp up, before astronauts can return to the moon.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/spacex-space-exploration-science-business-elon-musk-bfe438a43eb19fde17a351b88f683364
During a National Space Council meeting
in 2019, Vice President Mike Pence called for landing astronauts on the moon within five years “by any means necessary.”
NASA had been shooting for a lunar landing in 2028, and pushing it up by four years was considered at the time exceedingly ambitious, if not improbable.
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