NASA Delays Artemis II and III Moon Missions Due to Safety Issue

(Washington, D.C.) In a teleconference today, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson confirmed that the agency’s planned Artemis II and III moon missions have been postponed.

Photo of NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft taking a selfie near the moon in November 2022, courtesy of NASA via Space.com.

Specifically, NASA’s Artemis III mission – the agency’s planned mission to land on the South Pole region of the moon, which was previously slated for 2026 – will now take place no earlier than mid-2027.

NASA’s Artemis II mission – a pathfinder mission previously slated to fly astronauts around the moon in September 2-25 – will now take place no earlier than April 2026.

That delay is partly linked to issues with the Orion crew capsule that will be home to the astronauts during both lunar missions, per CNN, NASA previously disclosed that the spacecraft’s heat shield, which keeps Orion from burning up as the vehicle reenters the Earth’s atmosphere, became charred and eroded in an unexpected way during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022.

Per NASA, the agency’s decision comes after an extensive investigation of an Artemis I heat shield issue showed the Artemis II heat shield can keep the crew safe during the planned mission with changes to Orion’s trajectory as it enters Earth’s atmosphere and slows from nearly 25,000 mph to about 325 mph before its parachutes unfurl for safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Photo courtesy of NASA.

“The Artemis campaign is the most daring, technically challenging, collaborative, international endeavor humanity has ever set out to do,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We have made significant progress on the Artemis campaign over the past four years, and I’m proud of the work our teams have done to prepare us for this next step forward in exploration as we look to learn more about Orion’s life support systems to sustain crew operations during Artemis II. We need to get this next test flight right. That’s how the Artemis campaign succeeds.”

According to NASA, engineers have begun assembling and integrating the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III based on lessons learned from Artemis I and implementing enhancements to how heat shields for crewed returns from lunar landing missions are manufactured, in order to achieve uniformity and consistent permeability; a “skip entry” is needed for return from speeds expected for lunar landing missions.

NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission will be flown by NASA astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen – the astronauts will fly aboard the 10-day test flight around the Moon and back to Earth, collecting data about Orion systems needed to support crew on their journey to deep space and return safely home (including air revitalization in the cabin, manual flying capabilities, and how humans interact with other hardware and software in the spacecraft), per NASA.