CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA announced Thursday further delays in sending astronauts back to the Moon more than 50 years after Apollo.
Administrator Bill Nelson said the Artemis program’s next mission — sending four astronauts around the Moon and back — is now scheduled for April 2026. It was scheduled for fall 2025, after moving back this year.
This pushes the third Artemis mission – a moon landing of two more astronauts – to at least 2027. NASA was aiming for 2026.
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NASA’s Artemis program, which followed the Apollo moonshots of the late 1960s and early 1970s, accomplished only one mission. An empty Orion capsule circled the Moon in 2022 after blasting off from NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket.
Although the launch and lunar tours went well, the capsule returned with an excessively charred and eroded heat shield, damaged by the heat of re-entry. It took engineers until recently to identify the cause and develop a plan.
Nelson said they will use the Orion capsule with its original heat shield, but will make changes to the re-entry path at the end of the flight.
The commander of the lunar flyby, astronaut Reid Wiseman, participated in the press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Thursday. Its crew includes NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Twenty-four astronauts traveled to the Moon during NASA’s Apollo program, and 12 landed there. The last boot prints in lunar dust were made during Apollo 17 in December 1972.
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