Opinion | NASA may delay ambitious moon landing plan, regulator says

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recent mission audit that NASA and its contractors have made progress, including completing several important milestones, but they are still struggling to develop advanced spacesuits and space transportation systems. Multiple challenges remain. Therefore, it is unlikely to take off in 2025.

If development follows NASA’s usual timeline, GAO auditors expect a launch date of early 2027. GAO wrote that NASA’s current program is 13 months shorter than average. The complexity of human spaceflight suggests that it is unrealistic to expect the program to be developed more than a year faster than the average for NASA’s major programs, most of which are not human spaceflight. While NASA hopes to proceed faster than usual, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the program is completing critical tasks at a slower pace.

In fact, a 2027 launch would be closer to NASA’s original 2028 goal. That was before March 2019, when the White House, under President Donald Trump, directed NASA to speed up its moon landing program to 2024, in part to create an environment to return U.S. astronauts to the moon, the audit showed. sense of urgency.

In November 2021, NASA postponed the landing to at least 2025. Artemis III will be the first mission to the moon’s south pole and will land the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface, the space agency said, noting that their selection will be based on their experience performing the mission. The right people. So far, all 12 moonwalkers have been white Americans.

NASA has not officially announced the rescheduling, but acknowledged the possibility in an email to The Washington Post. The agency said it is working with its partners to develop a timeline for the path to Artemis 3. All contractors and partners on different parts of Artemis must deliver on time to achieve mission success and the agency’s exploration goals.

This is a very complex project. Various complications may hinder on-time air travel from one city to another, but that’s nothing compared to moving a group of people 238,855 miles away into inhumane conditions.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said the Artemis 3 mission is the third in a series of increasingly complex missions aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership in space exploration and establishing a sustainable of the moon and eventually travel to Mars.

Just as today’s cars are more complex than those of half a century ago, so too are today’s moon landings. These include the astronaut lunar landing suit and the manned landing system that transports astronauts from the spacecraft to the lunar surface. President Biden’s budget request puts the five-year cost of both at $12.4 billion.

In addition to the ambitious timeline, the GAO report cited the following reasons for the timeline delay:

Delays in critical events. These include the destruction of the SpaceX vehicle at the heart of the lunar mission. During an orbital flight test in April, the vehicle deviated from its expected trajectory, lost altitude, began to roll, and began to disintegrate about 4 minutes into the flight. Eight of the 13 critical events in landing system development were delayed by six to 13 months.

There is much work remaining, including ways to transfer propellant to space depots before transferring them to human landing systems. SpaceX has made limited progress in maturing the technologies needed to support this aspect of its program. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, did not respond to a request for comment.

Design challenges. Space suit contractor Axiom is also facing major problems. For example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said NASA’s original design did not provide the minimum amount of emergency life support needed for the Artemis 3 mission. As a result, Axiom representatives said they may redesign some aspects of the suit, which could delay its mission delivery.

Axiom Vice President Russell Ralston said in an email that the company is actively working on innovations in space suit technology needed to maintain 60 minutes of emergency life support. As the report notes, this is a forward-looking effort that may require more time.

These concerns are not new. In August 2021, NASA’s Office of Inspector General documented delays in space suit development and said by the time the work was completed Two new spacesuit systems, called extravehicular mobility units, which include hardware that connects astronauts and vehicles, will cost NASA more than a billion dollars to develop and assemble the next generation of spacesuits. The current models have been refurbished and partially redesigned, but they are still 45 years old.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said that due to the delay, NASA will have a relatively short period of time to ensure that all safety requirements are met before the mission begins.

For John M. Logsdon, founder and former long-time director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, Artemis 3’s delay is no surprise. He said the GAO audit echoed a fairly common sentiment in the aerospace community that we now need to perform a series of miracles to achieve the 2025 goal. So many things have to go smoothly to be possible.

Furthermore, he added that delays are part of the general pattern of the program.

NASA’s Moon-to-Mars plan includes seven Artemis missions through 2031, according to the current schedule. The schedule of each task depends on the previous tasks. Both Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 are behind schedule. Artemis III inherited their tardiness. In September 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that NASA had repeatedly delayed the Artemis mission’s timeline and key program milestones. Delays in the launch of Artemis 1 will have a knock-on impact on the Artemis 2 and 3 mission schedules, as there is a minimum time gap between those missions. NASA also postponed the Artemis 2 mission to May 2024, 13 months later than the original launch date of April 2023.

But once all issues are resolved, the mission will usher in a future in which humans continue to land on the moon, and NASA predicts that human planetary exploration missions are within reach.