NASA delays moon landing to ‘no earlier than 2025’
A major factor, he said, is also the delay caused by the lawsuit over the agency’s April selection of SpaceX to build the Human landing System to take astronauts to the lunar surface, which was dismissed last week.
“We’ve lost nearly seven months in litigation, and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025,” Nelson said.
The announcement marks the first acknowledgment that the aggressive timeline to land a crewed mission — which will include the first woman — on the moon by 2024 set by the Trump administration was overly optimistic, given all the components that have to be developed and tested, as well as the need for more congressional buy-in.
It also means that the race against China to put down stakes for a more permanent presence on the lunar surface has heated up.
“The Chinese space program is increasingly capable of landing Chinese taikonauts much earlier than originally expected,” Nelson said. “But whatever. We are going to be as aggressive as we can be in a safe and technically feasible way to beat out competitors with boots on the moon.”
“We are facing a very aggressive and good Chinese space program,” he added, citing Beijing’s new space station, the rover it landed on Mars and an upcoming robotic mission to return Martian samples. “They are going to the south pole of the moon. We have every reason to believe we have a competitor, a very aggressive competitor, in the Chinese. … We want to be there first.”
The cost of the Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, has also been revised from $6.7 billion to $9.3 billion, Nelson said.
“These updated cost and schedule estimates for the Orion … are the result of an increase in the scope and … the delays caused by Covid,” he said.
The uncertain fate of the HLS program is also a major cause for delay.
Work is now resuming on the SpaceX design, but Congress wants NASA to also finance a competing one to ensure it has an alternative.
“There will be the need of a significant increase in funding for the competition,” Nelson said. “For a full-up competition,” NASA will need “$5.7 billion over about six years.”
