NASA's first astronaut flight around the moon in decades faces more delays

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA announced more delays Thursday in sending astronauts back to the moon more than 50 years after Apollo.

Administrator Bill Nelson said the next mission in the Artemis program -- sending four astronauts around the moon and back – is now targeted for April 2026. It had been on the books for fall 2025, after slipping from this year.

That bumps the third Artemis mission — a moon landing by two other astronauts — to at least 2027. NASA had been aiming for 2026.

NASA’s Artemis program, a follow-up to the Apollo moonshots of the late 1960s and early 1970s, has completed only one mission. An empty Orion capsule circled the moon in 2022 after blasting off on NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket.

Although the launch and lunar laps went well, the capsule returned with an excessively charred and eroded bottom heat shield, damage from the heat of reentry. It took until recently for engineers to pinpoint the cause and come up with a plan.

Nelson said they would use the Orion capsule with its original heat shield but would make changes to the reentry path at flight's end.

During the flight test, the capsule dipped in and out of the atmosphere during reentry and heat built up in the shield’s outer layer, explained Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator. That resulted in cracking and uneven shedding of the outer layer.

The commander of the lunar fly-around, astronaut Reid Wiseman, took part in Thursday’s news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington. His crew includes NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“Delays are agonizing and slowing down is agonizing and it’s not what we like to do,” Wiseman said. But he said he and his crew wanted the heat shield damage from the first flight to be fully understood, regardless of how long it took.

Twenty-four astronauts flew to the moon during NASA's vaulted Apollo program, with 12 landing on it. The final bootprints in the lunar dust were made during Apollo 17 in December 1972.

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FILE - NASA's Orion capsule is drawn to the well deck of the USS Portland after it splashed down following a successful uncrewed Artemis I moon mission, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, Dec. 11, 2022. (Mario Tama via AP File)

FILE - This file photo provided by NASA shows, from left, NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, March 29, 2023. (Josh Valcarcel/NASA via AP)

A bird is silhouetted against the full moon rising over Zurich, Switzerland, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (Michael Buholzer/Keystone via AP)

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