The Need to Resolve Safety Concerns and Other Issues Delays Artemis II and III Missions

NASA has announced delays in the upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon. In an announcement on Tuesday, they said that both the Artemis II and Artemis III missions will be delayed, though the Artemis IV mission will remain on schedule. Specifically, the Artemis II mission, which will have astronauts (including Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen) returning to lunar orbit, has been rescheduled to September 2025. Artemis III, which will have astronauts land near the lunar South Pole, has been rescheduled to September 2026. Artemis IV, which is the first mission to the upcoming Lunar Gateway space station in orbit around the Moon, is the one that remains on schedule for 2028. Resolving Artemis Safety Concerns In the announcement, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pointed to ensuring crew safety as a paramount factor in the choice to delay the mission, saying “the safety of our astronauts is NASA’s top priority.” Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development, said that “we must get it right as we develop and fly our foundational systems so that we can safely carry out these missions.” The announcement by NASA elaborated on the issue, saying that the Artemis II mission will “test critical environmental control and life support systems required to support astronauts” on the Orion spacecraft. NASA’s testing of the Orion, they said, “has uncovered issues that require additional time to resolve.” They will be “troubleshooting a battery issue,” as well as “addressing challenges with a circuitry component responsible for air ventilation and temperature control.” In a media teleconference, Kshatriya elaborated on the issue. He said that they discovered “a design flaw in that circuit [that could] affect many parts of the life support system on the spacecraft, in particular the CO2 scrubbing system.” Kshatriya said that was unacceptable, so it must be replaced, but that replacing the circuit is “going to take us quite a bit of time” in order to ensure that Orion meets “the workmanship standards that we expect for a human vehicle.” Another issue uncovered during the uncrewed Artemis I mission is also being worked on, which was described in the announcement as the “unexpected loss of char layer pieces from the spacecraft’s heat shield.” Kshatriya said that the heat shield had performed well from a heat protection standpoint, and that they had been expecting some char, but that they “were not expecting some pieces of that char to be liberated from the vehicle.” He said that NASA needs to understand this “debris transport phenomena” in order to ensure the safe landing of Orion. In the announcement, NASA said that they expect to finish the investigation of the heat shield issue this spring, and Kshatriya echoed that position. Artemis’ Private Partner Delays NASA also said that Artemis III is being delayed in line with the Artemis II delay, but also acknowledges “development challenges experienced by NASA’s industry partners.” This is undoubtedly a reference to the serious delays faced by SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft. A variant of Starship will be used as Artemis III’s Human Landing System (HLS) which will actually take astronauts to the lunar surface. As no Starship has yet to successfully achieve orbit, it’s likely that we’re a long way off from the HLS being able to carry crew of any sort, let alone carry Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface. Blue Origin was selected as a second provider in May 2023, and its Blue Moon lunar lander is also comparatively early in development, and not planned to be used to land astronauts onto the lunar surface until the Artemis V mission in 2029. So Artemis is currently dependent on SpaceX’s resolution of Starship’s issues and finally delivering a safe and effective lunar landing system. Will Artemis Face Funding Problems? Left unstated, but also possibly relevant, is the funding issues faced by Artemis and by NASA in general. The cost of the Artemis program has already been called into question by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in September, who said that NASA “does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS)”. This approach makes sense in some respects, as NASA has made it clear that crew safety and mission success are their highest priorities and it’s doubtful they would compromise on those priorities in the name of cost-cutting. The ongoing delays with Starship and other heavy lift launchers, like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, also reinforce the utility of the SLS as the keystone for the Artemis program, at least for now, despite its very high cost, as the SLS has already been into orbit while its private-sector counterparts have not. Nevertheless, as Ars Technica mentioned last May, NASA is confronting a Republican House leadership that is looking to dramatically cost non-military spending. While NASA leadership has warned Congress about the potentially “devastating” impact of funding cuts, the situation in Washington has become so critical that the impact may well be overlooked, especially as the US federal government faces the possibility of a shutdown in the coming weeks. As the Chinese lunar exploration program continues to move forward, however, and as American policymakers continue to decry what they call “the CCP’s malign ambitions in space,” Congress may find itself caught between its restrictive spending goals and its combative foreign policy agenda.