NASA Officially Pushes Back The Launch Schedule For Crewed Moon Missions, As We Predicted It Would, Over Three Years Ago...

Even before the problems with yesterday's private / commercial robotic lunar mission, it was clear that NASA's own assessment of Artemis issues related to crew safety hadn't been fully resolved to meet the deadlines in this prior time line. So obviously NASA was going to stretch the various Artemis missions' time lines. [Here was our August 2022 prognostication on it.]

Safety first; always -- and this afternoon, NASA made it official. Here's the revised release, and a bit:

. . .To safely carry out these missions, agency leaders are adjusting the schedules for Artemis II and Artemis III to allow teams to work through challenges associated with first-time developments, operations, and integration.

NASA will now target September 2025 for Artemis II, the first crewed Artemis mission around the Moon, and September 2026 for Artemis III, which is planned to land the first astronauts near the lunar South Pole. Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains on track for 2028. . . .

Now you know -- and to do mighty things. . . we must be willing to take a step back, from time to time. This is one of those times -- and perhaps the end goal (of boots on Mars) is not as worthy a goal as we once thought, compared to other unexplored opportunities to do space science. We shall see. Onward.

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