NASA’s litigation with the space tourism company Blue Origin and the high costs of the project have caused the mission with the objective of sending the first woman and the first person of color to our satellite to be delayed in principle until 2025. .
This has been communicated by NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who stated that the manned test flight of the Origin and Space Launch System (SLS) in Artemis II has been moved to May 2024, which will lead to the landing being at next year.
According to Nelson, the seven months of litigation over the Blue Origin lawsuit, the coronavirus pandemic and unexpected cost increases have influenced this change in NASA’s roadmap.
“Going forward, Congress has made it clear that there must be competition for the more than 10 moon landings in the future. There will be a need for a significant increase in funding and that will start with the 2023 budget,” Nelson said. “After all, the Chinese space program is increasingly capable of landing taikonauts much earlier than originally expected ,” he clarifies.
The goal is to get astronauts to the moon by 2024, with the intention of becoming a prelude to an even more ambitious human landing on Mars in the future .
The Artemis II mission plans to send four astronauts in the first manned Orion capsule on a lunar flyby for up to 21 days. Both Artemis I and II represent test flights to demonstrate the technology and abilities of Orion, SLS, and the Artemis mission before NASA puts humans back on the moon. It will be the first to land humans on the moon since NASA’s Apollo 17 in 1972.
