CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA announced Thursday that plans to return astronauts to the moon more than 50 years after the Apollo mission will be further delayed.
Administrator Bill Nelson said the next Artemis mission, in which four astronauts will fly around the moon and back, is currently targeted for April 2026. The project was postponed from this year and was scheduled for September 2025.
Officials said the investigation into damage to the heat shield from the capsule’s first test flight two years ago will take time, and other improvements to the spacecraft are still needed.
This means Artemis’ third mission (landing on the moon with two other astronauts) will be delayed until at least 2027. NASA had set a goal of 2026.
NASA’s Artemis mission was a sequel to the Apollo satellites of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and only one mission was completed. The empty Orion capsule orbited the moon in 2022 after being launched on NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket.
Although the launch and lunar orbit were uneventful, the capsule was damaged by the heat of atmospheric reentry and returned with its bottom heat shield excessively charred and eroded. It took until recently for engineers to identify the cause and come up with a plan.
Nelson said NASA will use the Orion capsule with its original heat shield for the next flight with four astronauts, but plans to change the re-entry path at the end of the flight. Repealing and replacing the heat shield would mean a delay of at least a full year, and further delay the moon landing, officials said.
During flight tests, NASA submerged the capsule in and out of the atmosphere during re-entry, causing gas to build up in the outer layer of the heat shield, officials said. As a result, the outer material developed cracks and uneven shedding.
Astronaut Reed Wiseman, commander of the lunar orbit flight, participated in a press conference Thursday at NASA Headquarters in Washington. His crew includes NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“Delays are painful, slowdowns are painful, and that’s not what we want to do,” Wiseman said. But he said he and his crew want to fully understand the damage to the heat shield from the first flight, no matter how long it takes. Now they can focus on this “big decision left to us.”
NASA’s Arch Apollo mission sent 24 astronauts to the moon and 12 landed on the moon. The last bootprint in the moon’s dust was created during Apollo 17 in December 1972.
Nelson said the revised schedule would require the United States to return astronauts to the moon before China, which has set a 2030 date for a manned moon landing.
Nelson said the space agency has told all Artemis contractors, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to “double down” to meet schedule deadlines. SpaceX’s giant rocket Starship, which is making increasingly frequent test flights from Texas, will carry astronauts to the surface from an Orion capsule in lunar orbit during the first two Artemis moon landings. It becomes a method.
Nelson said he has already called Jared Isaacman, the SpaceX flight billionaire whom President Trump nominated this week to lead NASA, and invited him to NASA headquarters in Washington.
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