Space flights|The Artemis III flight will take two astronauts close to the Moon only in the spring of 2027. The United States and its astronauts will reach the Moon before China, which is aiming for 2030.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
The US hearings program Artemis is being postponed again, now by about a year.
The Artemis III flight, i.e. the return to the Moon, will be delayed at least until the summer of 2027.
However, Nasa is not going to give priority to China when both countries aim with their astronauts to the region of the Moon’s south pole.
NASA Director General Bill Nelson will step down in January. He will be replaced by a billionaire who himself has been to space twice.
of the United States astronauts will not return to the moon until the summer of 2027.
The country’s space agency, Nasa, announced last week that its next flight of astronauts was live Artemis II will be postponed until at least April 2026.
Artemis II was scheduled to make a ten-day mission to and around the Moon in late 2025.
Four astronauts fly aboard the launch vehicle SLS and its ship Orion. They were already training for the 2025 flight.
The US return to the Moon has been postponed for various reasons in the 2010s and 2020s.
Artemis III is the ship that is supposed to take two astronauts to the moon.
That flight is also delayed. It is scheduled to be realized in the middle of 2027, says newspaper The New York Times. Previously, it was supposed to reach the Moon already in the fall of 2026.
NASA and the United States are still ahead of China in the race where both countries are aiming for the Moon’s south pole region.
China’s space program aims for a Chinese astronaut to step on the surface of the moon in 2030 – or before that.
NASA’s outgoing director general Bill Nelson said last week that the United States will not give priority to China when a man returns to the moon after a gap of more than 50 years.
The last time two astronauts visited the Moon With the hearing of Apollo-17 in December 1972.
Artemis II and Artemis III are leaving for NASA on a giant SLS launch vehicle. It has flown into space only once.
Artemis 1 flew into space in November 2022. The test flight took place without astronauts.
The flight went well. The problems were only revealed when the leading part of the SLS, or the spacecraft Orion, returned to the earth’s surface.
Orion’s there is a large heat shield at the bottomwhich prevents the astronauts’ ship Orion from overheating in the Earth’s atmosphere.
It turned out that pieces of the large heat shield had come off during the return.
The cause of the error has now been resolved. The cracks in the heat shield were due to the fact that gases had formed in its interior parts. The gases had detached pieces from the heat shield.
A similar heat shield has already been attached to the Orion of the Artemis II ship. NASA engineers don’t change it anymore. The exchange would still have delayed Artemis II’s flight.
Instead, Artemis II’s return to Earth’s atmosphere has been re-planned. The purpose is that Orion heats up in the atmosphere for a shorter time than before.
I know the CEO will step down in January when the US president changes.
The new president Donald Trump named a billionaire to head NASA Jared Isaacmanin. He himself has been to space twice on private flights of the space company SpaceX.
Trump’s return to the presidency sparked speculation that he might even change the course of NASA.
Trump might decide that NASA’s most important goal would be the planet Mars instead of the Moon. The founder of the SpaceX company is also aiming for that Elon Muskwho has befriended Trump.
However, the Artemis moon program will also continue under Trump. Nelson, the outgoing CEO, said he has spoken with the executives of the companies that build the spacecraft.
Ships that go to the moon and their technology are assembled in the United States by several different companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Nasa already decided at the beginning of the 2020s that Musk’s SpaceX will build the ship with which astronauts will land on the surface of the Moon. The ship will be customized from the tip of SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle.
The Artemis program is scheduled to continue well into the 2030s.