NASA is postponing the scheduled date for return of humans to the moon: now the space agency is aiming for the lunar landing in 2025 instead of in 2024 as originally planned. There NASA it justified itself by pointing the finger at the recent lawsuits regarding the contracts for the agency’s lunar lander, as well as the changes to some internal programs that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
NASA: lunar landing postponed to 2025
The return of a human crew to the Moon will come via a NASA project called Artemis. As part of the initiative, NASA hopes to land the first woman and first black person on the moon this decade as it works to understand sustainable ways of living and working on the lunar surface.
Artemis relies on a complicated suite of vehicles, including the Space Launch System, or SLS, a new rocket the space agency has been developing over the past decade designed to send people into deep space inside a new capsule called Orion. In April, NASA also granted a $ 2.9 billion contract to SpaceX to develop the company’s Starship vehicle, to smoothly land people on the lunar surface.
The landing date of 2024 is a relic of the administration Trump, which also redirected NASA to the project aimed at returning humans to the moon. In 2019, then Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA to accelerate its plans for Artemis, opting for 2024 as the landing year. An early target, and many experts rightly doubted that NASA could make it by that date.
Now the space agency has definitively confirmed that the landing will be postponed to 2025, and has also updated the costs of various devices necessary for the launch to deep space. In short, it seems that our return to the lunar surface is not yet too close, and that we will have to wait a few more years to see another group of astronauts leave the planet.