- NASA has announced that its Artemis II mission has been delayed to April 2026 at the earliest.
- This as the Orion spacecraft needs to have several issues resolved including with its heatshield and battery.
- As a result of this delay, Artemis III will likely only launch in 2027.
The return of humans to the Moon will have to wait a bit longer now that NASA has revealed that the second phase of the Artemis mission has been delayed.
As you may recall the first phase of the mission kicked off in 2022 when NASA sent its Orion spacecraft to the Moon’s orbit before returning home. The second phase would see humans orbit the Moon with the third and final phase seeing humans landing on our nearest celestial satellite once more.
However, NASA has had to delay the launch of Artemis II again. The launch of Artemis II was already delayed to 2025 earlier this year and Artemis III to 2026. Now however, NASA says that Artemis II will only launch in April 2026.
“The updated timeline for the Artemis II flight is informed by technical issues engineers are troubleshooting including with an Orion battery issue and its environmental control system. The heat shield was installed in June 2023 and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible,” writes NASA.
The space agency says that Artemis III will now only launch in 2027 but this could change should any other complications arise during Artemis III.
Learnings from Artemis I are being used to improve Orion ahead of humans riding the spacecraft to the Moon. During the spacecraft’s record breaking flight, NASA observed charred material from Orion’s heatshield breaking off. Had crew been aboard they’d have been fine but this event highlighted a problem that needed to be addressed.
“Engineers determined that as Orion was returning from its uncrewed mission around the Moon, gases generated inside the heat shield’s ablative outer material called Avcoat were not able to vent and dissipate as expected. This allowed pressure to build up and horizontal cracking to occur near the surface of the charred layer, causing some charred material to break off in several locations,” explains NASA.
“For Artemis II, engineers will limit how long Orion spends in the temperature range in which the Artemis I heat shield phenomenon occurred by modifying how far Orion can fly between when it enters Earth atmosphere and lands. Engineers already are 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 to achieve uniformity and consistent permeability,” the agency added.
During this delay, Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will continue training for the mission. More intensive training will kick off six months before the launch.
NASA is expected to see a change in leadership after President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Jared Isaacman was earmarked to head up the space agency.
