Plans to return humans to the moon will come in later mission as agency grapples with delays and glitches

If at first you don’t succeed, move, move the goalposts.

Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon.

The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency’s recently confirmed administrator, Jared Isaacman. Announcing the changes on Friday, he said that Nasa would introduce at least one new moon flight before attempting to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, in 2028.

The new, more incremental approach would give the Nasa team a chance to test flight and refine its technology. As part of the changes, the Artemis II mission to fly humans around the moon this year, without landing, would also be pushed back from its latest scheduled launch on 6 March to 1 April at the earliest.

“Everybody agrees this is the only way forward,” Isaacman told reporters at a news conference. “I know this is how Nasa changed the world, and this is how Nasa is going to do it again.”

  • Jul (they/she)@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    13 hours ago

    No surprise. The administration is pretty heavily anti-science and not likely to prioritize anything that is for pure science beyond what brings direct profit to a friendly corporate contractor. Sad that the project likely will die off and lots of engineers and scientists will lose their jobs, but honestly there are better things that NASA should be doing like restoring the weather systems that DOGE forced them to scrap to avoid revealing more evidence of climate change or more pure science. This was always more a publicity stunt and pipe dream of Musk’s to look cool rather than science driven, though it would have had some level of scientific benefit.