Next two Artemis missions delayed again, with the future of SLS/Orion hanging by a thread
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”
In a press conference today, NASA officials admitted that their present schedule for the next two Artemis missions will not be possible, and have delayed the next mission (sending four astronauts around the Moon) from the end of 2025 to April 2026, and the next mission (landing astronauts on the Moon) to a year later.
It must be noted that when first proposed by George Bush Jr in 2004, he targeted 2015 for this manned landing. Should the present schedule take place as planned, that landing will now occur more a dozen years late, and almost a quarter century after it was proposed. We could have fought World War II six times over during that time.
Several technical details revealed during the conference:
- It appears a redesign of Orion’s heat shield will take place, but not until the lunar landing mission. For Artemis-2 (the next flight), engineers have determined they can make the shield work safely by changing the re-entry path. They have also determined that the design itself is still insufficient, and will require redesign before Artemis-3.
- Though Orion’s life support system will still be flown for the first time on Artemis-2, the first to carry humans, they have been doing extensive ground testing and have resolved a number of issues. They are thus confident that it will be safe to fly with people on its first flight.
- Though SLS’s two solid-fueled strap-on boosters will be stacked for more than one year when Artemis-2 launches in April 2026, they are confident based on data from Artemis-1 that both will still be safe to use.
The political ramifications that lurked behind everything however are more significant.
First, the timing of this whole press conference and its announcements was clearly intended to help sell at a minimum the first two SLS and Orion missions to the next administration. Everything said was aimed at convincing the world that NASA has now done everything it can to make these two SLS/Orion Artemis missions safe to fly, with a now reasonable schedule that can be relied on.
Second, the schedule for the manned lunar landing of Artemis-3 remains utterly unrealistic. As noted by one journalist during questioning, Artemis-1 launched six years late in 2022, while Artemis-2 at present won’t fly until three and a half years later, in April 2026. Why should anyone realistically expect Artemis-3, the human landing, to occur only one year later, in 2027? The design of SLS makes such a fast pace practically impossible, as it takes almost a whole year just to get the rocket delivered to Florida and prepped for launch.
Bill Nelson answered this question by noting his unwavering determination of landing that mission before the Chinese, who are right now targeting 2030 for its first manned lunar landing. He noted Chinese’s policy of claiming what it possesses, despite international treaties that forbid it to do so, and he fully expects China to do the same on the Moon, in defiance of the Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition. He wants us there first, to prevent this.
Thus, he unconsciously indicated that a 2027 date for Artemis-3 is unrealistic, but making that a target date gives NASA a three year margin to beat the Chinese.
Finally, though NASA officials have made the decision to once again delay Artemis-2 in order to make sure the first two technical issues above are resolved to their satisfaction beforehand, the overall attitude seems to be a strong desire to save the program at all costs. Thus, it will still launch manned in a somewhat untested manner that NASA would consider unacceptable if a private company attempted it.
How will the new administration respond? I have previously predicted it would likely cancel both Orion and SLS, possible before the next launch. I now think that prediction was wrong. The political realities will likely force the next administration to at least fly Artemis-2 around the Moon and back.
Superheavy after its October flight, safely captured at Boca Chica
It is far less certain it will go along with an SLS/Orion Artemis-3 mission, as presently designed. The 2027 launch date is three years away, giving Trump and his new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, plenty of time to reshape Artemis-3 into an entirely different animal. Moreover, Artemis-2 still has to fly, and do so without problems.
I remain certain the end of SLS and Orion will come during the Trump administration. The only unknown now is whether it will come before or after the Artemis-3 manned lunar landing, a mere fifteen years late. My bet is that SLS and Orion will be canceled before Artemis-3, and that Moon mission will be redesigned to use different rockets and manned spacecraft to get its people to and from the Moon. This reshaped mission won’t fly by 2027, but neither would have SLS/Orion.
I expect however that the next American manned lunar landing will occur before 2030. It will have to rely on SpaceX’s Starship and Superheavy, but both are developing at a pace that outstrips anything NASA could do with SLS, as illustrated most spectacularly by the image to the right.
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As I mentioned in my (off topic) post on Robert’s Boeing post and as Robert said in his post on the Artemis topic above, Nelson clearly highlighted the competition between the US and China.
I went further and suggested that Nelson was setting the stage for China landing first on the moon (somewhere) beating our return date to the moon. Our excuse will be that “Sure Chinas landed on the moon, WE already did that 55 years ago and now we are going for a harder polar landing objective.”
Pam Melroy made the point later that “we are now in a day for day slip” condition on the schedule. We have doinked around enough (years & years) now that we probably do not have sufficient runway to solve issues that will naturally occur. Things don’t look good for getting there before China.
Kshatriya, the Deputy Administrator for Moon to Mars Program, speech (while he was sitting in Germany) demonstrated reasons why there are multiple significant problems with Artemis:
1. He is in Germany coordinating 55 nations, a dozen + industry partners and over “10,000 industry workers” instead of having his butt back at his office working the problem with a small tight team of problem solvers. NASA wasting huge amounts of money churning giant staffs to demonstrate political virtue statements rather than money going to solving technical problems with multiple stepped tests of hardware and analysis.
2. Heatshield differences from the working and proved Apollo shield are the way they are because some material components are banned due to our environmental green fetishes.
Combining 1 & 2 one wonders why heatshield testing similar to Apollo with Little John II did not occur – flying steep powered suborbital trajectories to test the shield at at least near similar conditions. Given the life support, electrical issues they covered, why not a Apollo 7 like shakedown flight in LEO ?
As Robert keeps pointing out NASA continues to say that they won’t fly until safety is assured yet they are taking short cut steps all over the place while holding commercial operators to a very different and sterner standards. What a disaster!
“why not a Apollo 7 like shakedown flight in LEO ?”
Because the legacy component of Artemis is a chronically hardware poor program. They simply don’t have the SLS launchers or Orion CSMs to do the kind of testing campaign they really need to do. And they are not capable of operating at the kind of mission cadence they would need to do it in any sort of timely manner.
Contrast with Apollo. Which despite being on an absolutely brutal timeline managed 16 test flights of Saturn rockets, including 5 Apollo CSMs in various earth orbit profiles, before they ever put human beings on top of one. And when they did, as we all know, they then undertook four manned test missions of increasing complexity before they attempted a landing.
This is the most fundamental reason why even Artemis program managers have told the GAO that the program is not sustainable.
Things get kind of dicey when you can only launch once every two years at $4.2B a pop…
I’d say the spiciness level of the Artemis program has just gone from Cajun to kimchee.
Administrator-designate Isaacman is, almost certainly, already hard at work preparing to hit the ground running. Silk-pursing the Artemis sow’s ear will absolutely be Job One for him.
The shortest, and least politically-fraught, path to saving Artemis – i.e., cancelling SLS and possibly Orion – would be to secure proposals, at warp speed, for alternative means of getting astronauts to cis-lunar space. NASA has little budgetary flexibility at this point so proposers would have to agree to start work immediately via either unfunded Space Act Agreements or SAAs with only token funds attached in the expectation of being paid more no earlier than one or two fiscal years out. As a practical matter, the only two firms capable of agreeing to such terms would be SpaceX and Blue Origin.
With proposals in-hand, work could be authorized while attention in the Administrator’s office could turn to the financial and political tasks needed to effect a cancellation of at least SLS. Orion could be on the chopping block too if Blue Origin’s proposal does not involve launching Orion on New Glenn.
2025 was already shaping up to be the most interesting year in the history of U.S. manned spaceflight. Now, it seems certain be dialed up to 11.
With flat budgets I’m surprised it made it this far–both of the 39 series pads should have been kept.
Here’s the thing though–“disruptive” isn’t always a positive term. Bernie looks almost too eager to join DOGE..and might even back a boost to NASA, if he gets the head of the Pentagon served on a plate.
There was an article in Business Insider where there was a bit of a pushback on the part of an Israeli against Elon’s criticism of F-35. Like Mr. Z I was also skeptical at first…lots of good discussion at Secret Projects Forum..some pushback against Sweetman’s book.
With DOGE looking to make Game-of-Thrones “Red Wedding” looking like paper cut in comparison–look for unlikely alliances.
I don’t know if the rest of you have noticed this–is it my imagination–or is Fox sounding more like Michelle Obama’s food police? They echo Maddow in the corn syrup fear mongering.
That means Obamacare is here to stay, but the farm vote is about to take it up the silo instead.
My head is spinning.
Once Starship proves it can do its job (and I’ll throw in Blue Origin’s vehicles just to be inclusive) SLS is dead. It is simply unaffordable, old technology and an outdated way of doing business.
Dick Eagleson, no kidding! And not just spaceflight. It’s going to be The Year of Popping Eyes and Exploding Brains.
Richard M – Exactly. Most people who have done developmental engineering know that sufficient hardware, at the right time, is a vital part of the early design-develop-test-analyze-adjust-test-implement cycle. Your contrast with Apollo is spot on. Musk has and is doing that same type approach in a very lean manner on Falcon, Dragon and Starship.
Artimis excuse is that the program is a small fraction of what Apollo cost, but they waste so much money doing silly things like having too many “partners” that all need a slice of the pie while they endlessly analyze some issue into the ground, while the 10,000 person meter is running.
Artemis is NOT a return to the moon program, it is a white collar welfare project to spread around money until the whole house of cards comes down. The collapse is soon and old Billy Nelson, crafty politician that he is, has positioned Issacman to take the fall. We will see if and how “new” space jujitsu’s “old” space’s trap.
There is something else to consider–there is an old statement about not speaking ill into existence…and yet…
While some populists have targets, some in the populace do too…as we saw with United Healthcare’s CEO.
You can just about drive right into Boca–security is better…still…
I understand some new tankage is to be partly underground… that’s a good thing…the new tower looks like it is back a bit more from the beach….
What may have looked to be another turkey shoot…might wind up being more like Enemy at the Gates.
Job #1
Getting folks in the Secret Service who knows their jobs.
I remember G. Gordon Liddy’s old radio program….one episode he lamented about bodyguards being ‘roided out muscle heads. Like the ones George Will complained about I suppose.
Where it seemed the Secret Service took their time…poor Gerald Ford got yanked back from Squeaky Fromm so fast he went into plaid–though you really don’t want your Commander In Chief to look like that.
While many Secret Service veterans still beat themselves up over JFK (different times)–I am with Liddy in praising one particular agent in particular: he wasn’t a 300 pound gorilla–no…he was the man who stepped into the bullet.
I don’t know if Jared reads this or other sites…maybe it is best if he doesn’t.
But just in case he does–wear body armor my friend.
Jared isn’t just Bill Nelson’s replacement-
He just became Will Graham from MANHUNTER.
Sorry but seeing the words “they are confident” is probably always going to be a red flag after Starliner. Especially when they want to trust putting astronauts on board with no testing to prove that their “plans” can work. Didn’t we just waste enough months on the same issue recently before they finally “decided” (were forced by public opinion) to choose the safer option? Just because Starliner finally made it back to earth unmanned didn’t mean there weren’t additional issues with no way to prove manned might not have been worse.
Hopefully Isaacman (as someone that has been in space recently in a well tested option) can finally pull the plug before more time and money are wasted. If a program is too expensive to even build the equipment to have test flights while there are other less expensive (especially to taxpayers) and more fully tested options that are expected to be available within a similar or faster time frame, it should be an easy call. The Space program decisions should not be reliant on how many Congress critters are getting rewarded for their support when the private sector is building far better for far less.
That old expression “good enough for Gov’t work” should not be uttered in NASA! NASA should be the ultimate in engineering, innovation, ACCOUNTABILITY, and National Pride! The segment of excrement, oblama, redirected it’s mission to a “muslim outreach” miasma! Is it still that or a money pit for the mediocre? Maybe Mr. Musk should let Rammy take care of the other stuff and he can spend most of his precious time reviewing NASA! I know some will scream about stealing “secrets”, but really, SpaceX is clearly more advanced than whatever NASA is now! The old days of Eternal Life for a Gov’t Program should be over!
Good grief! Where will they find people dumb enough to take a look at the remains of that heat shield and say, “Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a try”?
It’s time to scrap NASA (“Never A Straight Answer”); it’s no longer the bootstrapping program it was in the Sixties and has become entrenched in Pournelle’s “Iron Law of Bureaucracy”.
@BLSinSC: Musk should leave the agencies where he has a conflict of interest to Vivek.
Yep, lots of people of a certain persuasion are waiting gleefully for Musk to bumble straight into a Massive Glaring Catastrophic Conflict of Interest. Obviously they’re smarter than he is, you know…
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet at NASA.
Human spaceflight is a mess, and has been a mess for a long time. But the science mission directorate is still able to get things done, and they are often amazing things — thanks to the disciple enforced by their science reviews, procedures, and (outside the largest missions) political kibitzing from Congress. There are inefficiencies and bloat in the SMD, too, sure (read some of Casey Handmer’s recent essays on this point), but this remains a part of NASA that still usually returns good value for dollars spent. And judging by a few of Isaacman’s X posts, I have the sense that he basically agrees. This is not to say that the SMD isn’t an area that *could* benefit from more commercial approaches in some areas, and there are at least signs that they are starting to dip their toes in that pond. Something else for Isaacman to review.
That said, so much of NASA was physically built at a time when it had more money to spend, and the physical facilities are showing it in many places. I think there’s room to shed some NASA facilities and even a center or two, and it’s way overdue to look at all that. Maybe you need a presidential military base closing commission to make it politically sellable?
Space Force could pick up a place…before it was made civilian—Marshall was really ABMA, a leaner place more like SpaceX…North Alabama got kicked around—and I am thinking the price of killing SLS is that we get Space Force back. Marshall should remain for rocket development same as Air Force has Area 51.
I suggest that killing Goddard be part of BRAC. Greens infest that place…John Christy and the guys at UAH need those responsiblities.
I want Goddard dead.