“We lost almost seven months in litigation and that has led to the first human moon landing probably not being before 2025,” said the NASA chief.
The United States will send a manned mission to the moon “no later than 2025,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said Tuesday.
The government of former President Donald Trump had set the trip goal for 2024 when it launched the Artemis program, but it has suffered many delays, including most recently the legal conflict between the company of Jeff Bezos Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for the development of a moon landing module.
“We lost almost seven months in litigation and that has led to the first human moon landing will probably not be before 2025 ″Nelson said by phone.
It also revealed that at some point there would be an unmanned moon landing, before humans set foot on the lunar surface.
“The good news is that NASA is making solid progress,” Nelson noted, citing the fact that the Orion mission crew capsule has now docked atop the massive Space Launch System rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. .
NASA was targeting a first unmanned mission, Artemis 1, in February 2022, and Artemis 2, the first manned mission to fly over the Moon in 2024.
Nelson revealed that NASA was committed to a total development cost for Orion of $ 9.3 billion, spanning the period between 2012 and 2024, up from the previous estimate of $ 6.7 billion.
If anything, he warned that more funds from Congress would be required to meet the new deadlines, adding that “the Chinese space program is increasingly capable of landing taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) much earlier than originally expected.”
The beings Humans last landed on the Moon in 1972 on the Apollo 17 mission.
NASA says the Artemis program will include the first woman and the first black person to set foot on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite.
The agency wants to build a sustained presence on the Moon and use the lessons learned there to develop a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s. (I)
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