NASA’s Artemis mission to orbit moon pushed back to 2026

NASA's plans to orbit the moon and to eventually conduct another landing mission have been delayed again due to issues with the Orion crew capsule.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced on Thursday new delays in the U.S. space agency’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, pushing back the next two planned missions including the lunar landing.

Nelson told a news conference that the next Artemis mission, sending astronauts around the moon and back, has slipped to April 2026, with the landing mission planned the following year. The delay came after NASA concluded an examination of the Orion crew capsule, made by Lockheed Martin, and its heat shield, which had malfunctioned during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere during a 2022 flight.

The Artemis program was established by NASA during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration with the goal of returning astronauts to the moon for the first time since the U.S. space agency’s Apollo 17 mission. The program is intended to establish a lunar base as a step toward the more ambitious goal of human missions to Mars. The United States is estimated to spend roughly $93 billion on the program through 2025.

The Artemis program has made noteworthy progress but also has experienced various delays and rising costs.

In 2022, NASA carried out the Artemis I mission, a 25-day uncrewed voyage around the moon ending when the Orion capsule carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins made a successful splash down in the Pacific. During its blazing atmospheric reentry, heat became trapped inside the Orion heatshield’s outer layer, causing cracks and raising concerns after the mission about the capsule’s future models.

Nelson said he and other senior NASA officials concluded a meeting on the heat shield this week, facing a decision on whether to make Lockheed replace and upgrade the heat shield on the Artemis II Orion capsule, or fly the capsule with the existing heat shield design but change its reentry trajectory to ensure the same heat-cracking does not recur.

The NASA chief said he and the other officials unanimously decided to keep the heat shield as is and change Orion’s return trajectory for the next mission.

That marked the first flight of NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket, a powerful and over-budget vehicle tasked with launching humans to space aboard the Orion capsule. SpaceX’s Starship is contracted to land astronauts on the moon’s surface.