NASA Delays Next Two Artemis Missions

There isn't one aspect of the Artemis/SLS program that has been on time, let alone early, nor has any aspect been under budget, so the way to look at this is "situation normal." Same situation different date.

NASA has delayed the Artemis 2 and 3 missions by nine months to perhaps a year.  

During a Jan. 9 media teleconference, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that Artemis 2, the first crewed mission that will send four astronauts around the moon, had been pushed back from the end of 2024 to no earlier than September 2025. Artemis 3, the first crewed landing, was in turn delayed from late 2025 to no earlier than September 2026.

There were three separate reasons specified as leading to the decision that delaying the missions in the interest of crew safety was the prudent thing to do.  

First was unexpected erosion of material on the Orion capsule’s heat shield during reentry on Artemis 1 in December 2022, which the agency had previously reported.  Amit Kshatriya, NASA deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program, said they have made "good progress" in understanding what happened, but said they had not yet reached a conclusion for the Root Cause of the unexpected erosion.  He said they need more time to produce models and test them. 

The next problem involved components for the capsule’s life support system.  

Inspections of hardware delivered for the spacecraft that will fly the Artemis 3 mission found failures in circuitry that drives valves. “When we examined it, we recognized there was a design flaw in that circuit,” he said. “Those valve electronics affect many parts of the life support system on the spacecraft,” including systems that remove carbon dioxide.

NASA has decided to replace the electronics on the Artemis 2 vehicle although they have already passed earlier acceptance tests. 

The third issue was associated with the launch abort system.  

In some cases where the abort system is triggered, there would be “deficiencies” in the electrical system on Orion. “The concern would be not that the vehicle wouldn’t be able to abort safely off of SLS, but that it would be able to maintain all of the power margin that we need from that separation all the way to landing,” he explained. That assessment of that issue is still in its early phases.

The delay is a bit exasperating, but given the way they describe things, it does seem like the reasonable and prudent thing to do.  Pushing the Artemis 3 moon landing out to September '26 was being talked about even before these things holding back Artemis 2 were.  It's no secret that SpaceX has not been able to get Starship into orbit, which has cascade effects to the Human Landing System (HLS) and on orbit refueling, which are needed for the first landing.  

Kshatriya called the Artemis 3 date aggressive but neither he nor Jim Free, NASA associate administrator, would estimate the chances that the mission stays on that schedule.  Free recently was saying that the moon landing would need to be delayed but floated the idea that it might be pushed back to Artemis 4 instead of 3 being delayed as much as necessary.  

Free also famously argued that the problem was they didn't do enough cost-plus contracts and having SpaceX on a fixed cost contract did nothing except save a little money.  As one the people who work for him stated, "on cost-plus contracts, the hardware is always late, and you pay more. On fixed-price contracts, it's only late. So yeah, his comment was technically accurate but totally tone-deaf."

In November of '22, so over a year ago, I said that I've seen a prediction by a guy who has been scary accurate in his predictions saying that Artemis 3 won't launch until '27 instead of '25. Eric Berger at Ars Technica has better sources than I do and says, a more realistic date "for Artemis 3 is probably 2028-ish."   

It seems everything is moving in that direction, it's just a matter of how big the delays are.

After its Artemis 1 flight, technicians inspect the heat shield anomalies on the Orion capsule . Credit: NASA/Skip Williams