NASA has announced a new schedule for future Artemis missions to send astronauts to the moon. This is the second delay of these manned missions after the postponement in January of this year. The agency said it now plans to launch the Artemis 2 mission in April 2026, and to postpone the Artemis 3 mission to mid-2027.
The delay was partly caused by problems with the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield during the Artemis-1 test flight without a crew. During this mission, the charred material on the heat shield wore out in an unexpected way. Data from inside the capsule showed that if the crew had been present during the flight, the temperature would still have been safe, even though the heat shield did not work as expected. But that’s exactly the kind of thing you don’t want to take chances with when the astronauts are already on board.
“Victor, Christina, Jeremy, and I have followed every aspect of this decision, and we are grateful to NASA for being open to weighing all options and making decisions in the best interest of human spaceflight,” said Reed Wiseman, the NASA astronaut who will lead the Artemis II mission. “We look forward to flying Artemis II and continuing to pave the way for sustainable human exploration of the Moon and Mars.” The other three members of the Artemis 2 crew are Victor Glover and Christina Koch from NASA and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
It is planned that Artemis 2 will carry out a ten-day mission around the Moon and return to Earth. Although the team will not land on our most famous satellite, the test flight aims to collect more data about the Orion space capsule ahead of the Artemis 3 mission, during which the team will land at the south pole of the Moon.
