Don't Count on Next Year's Artemis II Flight

Eric Berger at Ars Technica has gone through some Fed.gov General Accountability Office reports on preparations for next September's Artemis II launch, the first mission back to the moon since the end of the Apollo programs, and says they have pretty much used every bit of schedule slack they had reserved. His conclusion was, "It’s increasingly unlikely that humans will fly around the Moon next year."  

A new report from the US Government Accountability Office found that NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program—this is, essentially, the office at Kennedy Space Center in Florida responsible for building ground infrastructure to support the Space Launch System rocket and Orion—is in danger of missing its schedule for Artemis II.
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The new report, published Thursday, finds that the Exploration Ground Systems program had several months of schedule margin in its work toward a September 2025 launch date at the beginning of the year. But now, the program has allocated all of that margin to technical issues experienced during work on the rocket's mobile launcher and pad testing.

NASA has been reasonably cautious in following the step-by-step approach Apollo used in going with the unmanned Artemis I and then the lunar fly-by of this mission next September ('25) followed by the Artemis III lunar landing mission in September '26.  The Apollo program had more hardware and concepts to test, and did so after the Apollo I disaster before landing with Apollo XI. There were many more test missions than in the Artemis program. Still, Artemis I was almost two years ago (November of '22) and NASA still hasn't reached a decision on what seems to be the most critical thing: the Orion capsule's heat shield issues. 

The report continues:

"Earlier in 2024, the program was reserving that time for technical issues that may arise during testing of the integrated SLS and Orion vehicle or if weather interferes with planned activities, among other things," the report states. "Officials said it is likely that issues will arise because this is the first time testing many of these systems. Given the lack of margin, if further issues arise during testing or integration, there will likely be delays to the September 2025 Artemis II launch date."

Weather?  Like the Hurricane of the Month Club?    

This kind of boggles the mind. Yes, the ground systems program has had to complete some important work since the Artemis I mission in late 2022, including building an emergency egress system for astronauts in the event of a problem during the launch countdown. But by September of next year, the agency will have had the better part of three years to work on those and other accommodations. At this point, there is no longer any margin in the schedule.

Artemis I mission during one of its trips to the pad that didn't result in flying, August 2022.   NASA Photo.

Eric Berger's conclusion:

To prepare for the Artemis II launch next September, Artemis officials had previously said they planned to begin stacking operations of the rocket in September of this year. But so far, this activity remains on hold pending a decision on the heat shield issue. Asked when NASA now plans to start stacking operations, the space agency official said, "We are still tracking toward stacking beginning this fall."

The bottom line is that NASA is facing schedule challenges on multiple fronts for the Artemis II mission. Although a launch delay is unlikely to be announced soon, we can be fairly confident that it is eventually coming.

I saw a story today that Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg News and a former US Presidential candidate, called for cancelling the SLS program. The only thing I'm sure cancelling the SLS would do is guarantee that the next boots on the moon will have launched from China, and that may happen regardless of what we do about the outrageously bad SLS program. China says they plan to land a crew on the moon in 2030, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it sooner.