NASA has announced the postponement of the Artemis 3 Mission to the Moon from 2026 to 2027 due to some technical problems encountered with the Orion capsule.
U.S. space agency Administrator Bill Nelson said, “We were able to recreate the problem here on Earth, and we now know the root cause. This has allowed us to devise a path forward. Artemis 2, a manned mission that will not land on the lunar surface, has been postponed from September 2025 to April 2026. Artemis 3, by which the first woman and first person of color will set foot on lunar soil at the Moon’s south pole, is now expected to take place in mid-2027.”
Artemis 3, which NASA has been working on for years, had been officially announced in 2017 with the goal of establishing a continued presence on the Moon while, at the same time, giving astronauts the opportunity to experiment and acquire new survival strategies with a view to facing future missions to Mars as well.
However, the first problems were already found soon after the first unmanned Artemis 1 test flight to the satellite in 2022. As a result, NASA engineers could see that Orion’s heat shield had eroded during space travel and found a number of malfunctions on its electrical systems. These are problems they are still trying to resolve. Meanwhile, NASA is also waiting for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to finalize the modified version of its prototype Starship rocket that will be used as the lunar lander for the mission. Space suits designed by Axiom are also still under development.
