This week we mentioned that NASA was going to update us on the status of the Artemis missions, those related to NASA’s conquest of the Moon. And while we were expecting good news, the reality has been quite different.
The Artemis II and III missions, which planned to take American astronauts to the Moon, have been delayed. In a press conference, NASA officials reported that issues with the heat shield and life support systems would delay the launches until 2026 and 2027.
On December 5, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Associate Administrator Jim Free, and astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman provided an update on the status of the Artemis program dedicated to returning American astronauts to the Moon and establishing a permanent human presence there.
Why the Artemis II and Artemis III missions are delayed
In a statement, the officials explained that the issues with the thermal shield used to protect the crew capsule upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and the ongoing problems with the environmental control and life support systems of the Orion spacecraft have forced a new delay in the mission schedules.
The Artemis II mission, in which two American astronauts and a Canadian astronaut would orbit the Moon, initially scheduled to fly between 2019 and 2021, was delayed until 2023. Subsequently, it was moved to September 2025. Now, it has been pushed to April 2026.
Meanwhile, Artemis III, which was supposed to allow astronauts to land at the Moon’s south pole, has been rescheduled for mid-2027 and there has been speculation about the possibility of canceling the landing or even changing the mission to low Earth orbit to test the technology.
The reasons for the delay are mainly based on the heat shield. It is the largest heat shield ever made for a manned spacecraft and is made of a novolac epoxy resin, called Avcoat, with special additives set in a fiberglass honeycomb matrix. It was originally created for the Apollo command module, but has since been reformulated to meet current environmental regulations.
The problem with the shield occurred during the uncrewed Artemis I mission. Upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere on a trajectory that mimicked a lunar return at 40,000 km/h (25,000 mph), some sections of the shield were charred and had not softened as designed.
Subsequent tests showed that the gases generated inside the material at the tremendous reentry temperatures had not escaped properly and had cracked the shield, causing pieces of it to break off.
NASA is once again exposed
The new delay is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the space agency regarding the Artemis program, the most ambitious to date and the most disastrous.
The project, which was already facing criticism about the mission’s objectives and the insistence on using outdated space shuttle technology from the seventies for the Space Launch System (SLS) launch vehicle, has been plagued by cost overruns.
With a budget that skyrockets to 93 billion dollars for 2023 and a cost of at least 2.2 billion per launch, with only one launch every two years. Compared to SpaceX, it seems that the American agency is in trouble.
