Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
NASA’s announcement that its plans to put humans on the Moon’s surface, has been delayed, has evoked mixed response.
The space agency is now targeting 2025 for a crewed landing. The Trump administration’s target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility.
Few observers expected Nasa to make the previous 2024 date, because of a funding shortfall and a lawsuit over the landing vehicle. Space agency’s chief Bill Nelson confirmed the delay before media.
Under its Artemis programme, Nasa will send the first woman and the 13th man to the lunar surface. A US federal judge recently upheld a decision by the agency to award the contract to build a lunar landing vehicle for this mission to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had contested the decision, in part because he said the contract was supposed to have been awarded to more than one bidder. Bezos’ firm Blue Origin had partnered with three other aerospace companies to vie for the prestigious lander contract.
However, a funding shortfall from Congress meant this wasn’t possible, according to a rationale published by Nasa at the time of the contract announcement. Nelson partially blamed the landing mission’s delay on the lawsuit.
However, commentators had been saying since last year that the lander cash problem made the 2024 date untenable. The first mission under the Artemis programme is set to fly in February next year.
Nasa will launch the Orion spacecraft on the powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket without people aboard. During this mission, Orion will fly around the Moon on a voyage lasting three weeks in order to test its systems.
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Artemis-3 will be the first mission to return to the surface of the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. It is set to land at the lunar south pole, which is thought to hold vast stores of water-ice in craters that never see sunlight.
The ice in these craters could be used to make rocket fuel on the Moon, bringing down the cost of lunar exploration because it would not need to be shipped from Earth.
