With the Artemis mission, NASA aims to return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. And on the eve of the new presidential administration, agency officials announced both a postponement of the program’s next major mission and an intention to make the scope of that mission more ambitious.
At a press conference last week at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASA leaders announced that persistent hardware issues forced the agency to postpone. Artemis IIFrom September 2025 to April 2026, a four-person flight will orbit the moon and return to Earth on the Orion spacecraft.
Most observers already thought a 2025 launch was unlikely. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the Orion spacecraft’s ride into space, has not been fully assembled at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is slower than the pace set by its predecessor, the unmanned Artemis I mission. Artemis I launched in November 2022 after SLS was fully assembled about a year ago.
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“The safety of our astronauts always comes first in our decisions. It is our North Star,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a press conference at NASA Headquarters. “We won’t fly until we’re ready. We won’t fly until we’re confident we’ve made the flight as safe as possible for our passengers. We need to do another test flight, and we’ll do it right.” That’s how the Artemis campaign works.”
That said, agency officials are also thinking more seriously about the program’s planned mission.
As originally planned, Artemis II It was the 2020s version of the 1968 mission. Apollo 8, It’s a no-frills trip around the moon and back to Earth to prove NASA’s ability to safely send people around the moon. But now, SpaceX’s Starship rocket is progressing rapidly, and NASA officials are considering expanding the scope of the rocket’s development. Artemis II. Starship is intended to land NASA astronauts on the moon during subsequent spaceflights. Artemis III The private rocket is a key pillar of the public space agency’s ambitious plan to return a man to the moon.
NASA is currently exploring the possibility of launching Starship alongside Artemis II, We have in mind the possibility of rehearsing the kind of maneuvers that need to be performed between Starship and Orion. Artemis III, This will be the first manned attempt to land on the moon since 1972.
“We always want to look for ways to take advantage of new technologies and new capabilities that seemed a little out of reach even five years ago,” said Reid Wiseman. Artemis IIThe commander said this at a press conference last week. “Are you going to ask the astronauts to do more missions? Come on.”
feel the heat
delay of Artemis II The culprit lies in a persistent hardware problem on the mission’s Orion spacecraft, which was a second home for the four astronauts. Most important: An investigation into an epoxy resin called Avcoat that went rogue during Artemis I, the main material in Orion’s heat shield.
“What struck me most was the level of detail that was provided. These are very complex missions and very complex technology, and you don’t often get an inherent understanding of why things go wrong.” Ian Boyd, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies spacecraft thermal modeling, said. protection system. “Certainly, part of it is sending a message to Congress and other stakeholders across the business to let them know that we know what we’re doing.”
Avcort is very well characterized, played a key role in the heat shields used during the Apollo program, and underwent extensive testing prior to use on Artemis. Samples of Orion’s thermal barrier material went through more than 1,000 ground tests, and the overall design went through numerous supercomputer simulations, and a test version of Orion successfully flew into space in December 2014. However, at a press conference, officials said: The material still contained surprises.
Launch is scheduled for April 2026, but engineers and technicians are already stacking up NASA’s solid rocket booster. Artemis II Manned lunar mission.
During Artemis I’s reentry, Orion roared through Earth’s atmosphere at breakneck speeds of nearly 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 kilometers per hour), exposing its heat shield to temperatures close to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat shield did its job and kept conditions inside the spacecraft good, but the hellish conditions still resulted in unpleasant surprises. Post-flight inspections revealed that the Orion aircraft’s heat shield had more than 100 spots where the material had worn away unexpectedly, leaving holes the width of baseballs in some cases on the shield’s surface. .
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy announced in a briefing that the hole was partially caused by Artemis 1’s flight plan. The flight plan included a so-called skip reentry, in which Orion entered and exited the upper atmosphere to slow its descent. This flight plan allowed thermal energy to build up in the outer layer of the heat shield, producing gas. Extensive testing reveals that the Avcoat throughout Artemis I Orion’s heat shield exhibits uneven permeability to gas escape, with areas of low permeability allowing gas to accumulate to the point where the material cracks. I did.
In response, the agency is modifying Orion’s future reentry trajectory to reduce the heating that caused the gas buildup. NASA officials say future heat shields will be constructed of Avcoat with appropriate transparency.
“Just because our final temperature was within the four safety factors, our guidance was right in the middle, we were left with the right amount of unused Avcoat material. It’s tempting to believe that it means a spacecraft… executed with plenty of time to spare,” added Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s deputy deputy administrator for the Moon-Mars program. “But everything we’ve learned in history tells us that that’s not what ‘leeway’ means.”
The path forward and the changing of the guard
Avcoat’s research and its message of technical excellence also represent a swan song for NASA leadership in the Biden administration. Nelson, a former U.S. congressman and former senator from Florida, previously announced he would leave government at the end of the year. The day before the press conference, President-elect Donald Trump announced he would nominate billionaire technology CEO and philanthropist Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. Mr. Isaacman led two commercial orbital missions for SpaceX. inspiration 4back in 2021, and Polaris Dawn.
Isaacman’s extensive ties to SpaceX’s human spaceflight program could portend a major shift to Artemis, which is still battling delays in key hardware. For example, NASA needs a new mobile launch tower to accommodate the planned upgrade to SLS for the Artemis mission, currently scheduled for the late 2020s. NASA estimated in 2019 that the project would cost less than $500 million and be completed in 2023. The project will cost $1.8 billion and be completed in September 2027, according to an August report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General. .
The current Artemis portion has been dealing with delays over the years. SLS was originally scheduled to fly in late 2016. And due to recent delays, Artemis II, Approximately three and a half years would elapse between Artemis’s first two major launches. That’s a far cry from the roughly annual pace NASA hopes to achieve with the program by the early 2030s.
That said, SLS and Orion have enjoyed strong support from Congress over the years, which makes Artemis the only major U.S. lunar program since Apollo to survive two presidential administrations largely intact. That’s the reason. If Mr. Isaacman intends to revamp Artemis by minimizing or completely removing these expensive components, he will be asked by those in power during his Senate confirmation hearings next year and during his nominal term as NASA’s newest leader. There is a good chance that you will face hostile questions and strong opposition from other parties.
“We are handing the new administration a path forward that is safe and reliable for us: to return to the moon, get to the moon before China, be in the moon star (space), and get there on the way. (From the Moon to Mars),” Nelson said at a press conference. “I think we ended this with a bow.”
