NASA has announced that it is delaying its ambitious Artemis II and Artemis III missions, which will see astronauts travel around and then land on the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The missions will be pushed to April 2026 and mid-2027 respectively, which is around six months later than previously planned.
The delay is due to problems with the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. Orion is the capsule in which crew members for each mission will travel, and it must withstand temperatures of nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere. On the previous Artemis I mission in 2022, the Orion capsule was used in an uncrewed test and fared generally well, completing the mission as planned.
However, on landing it was revealed that the heat shield around the capsule, which will protect astronauts inside from extreme temperatures, had degraded more than anticipated. The heat shield is designed to be ablative, meaning it will be worn down somewhat during re-entry, but the charring of the material was worse than expected and a report released earlier this year found that there were “critical issues” with the shielding that needed to be fixed before it could be safe for astronauts to travel in.
“Throughout our process to investigate the heat shield phenomenon and determine a forward path, we’ve stayed true to NASA’s core values; safety and data-driven analysis remained at the forefront,” said Catherine Koerner, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate in a statement. “The updates to our mission plans are a positive step toward ensuring we can safely accomplish our objectives at the Moon and develop the technologies and capabilities needed for crewed Mars missions.”
NASA also shared that it had identified the issue with the heat shield material, which was that gases were building up in a layer of material called Avcoat and could not escape, causing the material to crack. It emphasized that if there had been crew inside Orion during Artemis I, they would still have been safe and would not have been exposed to dangerous temperatures, so the 10-day Artemis II mission will go ahead using the current heat shield system, but the trajectory of re-entry will be adjusted to minimize these issues. New heat shields will be manufactured for Artemis III to allow gases to permeate the material.
“The Artemis campaign is the most daring, technically challenging, collaborative, international endeavor humanity has ever set out to do,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We have made significant progress on the Artemis campaign over the past four years, and I’m proud of the work our teams have done to prepare us for this next step forward in exploration as we look to learn more about Orion’s life support systems to sustain crew operations during Artemis II. We need to get this next test flight right. That’s how the Artemis campaign succeeds.”