NASA announced on Tuesday that its plans to send astronauts to the moon's surface have been postponed, with a crewed landing set for 2025.
The meeting with space reporters was led by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and came just five days after the U.S. Court of Federal Claims dismissed Blue Origin's case against NASA for selecting SpaceX to build a lunar lander for the Artemis Program.
"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, putting the blame on Blue Origin and its lawyers for the delay in NASA's return to the Moon
NASA was prohibited from working with SpaceX on the Human Landing System (HLS) program during the legal proceedings. In addition, the agency was unable to provide milestone payments.
NASA has also criticized the previous government for the new timeline, which was an ambitious push from the agency's previous target of 2028 before former President Trump entered office.
"The Trump administration's target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility," Nelson said.
Vice President at the time Mike Pence set an aggressive goal of putting humans on the Moon by 2024 when the Trump administration launched the Artemis Program in spring 2019. Technically, this has never been realistic, but NASA has never openly admitted this, instead setting 2024 as an aspirational goal.
Nelson did, however, acknowledge the delay, citing the Blue Origin lawsuit, lower-than-requested resources from Congress for lander development, and the infeasibility of the 2024 deadline at the time it was suggested as reasons for pushing the deadline back until at least 2025.
NASA will now require not one, but two test flights before the Artemis III mission, which will carry at least two humans to the lunar surface. One of those flights will be an uncrewed landing by SpaceX's Starship vehicle on the Moon to demonstrate that the huge aircraft can land safely and return to orbit. This flight was not given a time limit by Nelson.
The long-awaited Artemis II mission is the second of these test flights. It will transport a crew of four men to lunar orbit and back, following in the footsteps of the Apollo 8 lunar voyage, which took place in 1968 and followed the first Apollo Moon landing. NASA will now try to fly this mission no later than May 2024, according to Nelson.
Nelson referenced China's recent progress in human spaceflight to put the agency's need to return to the moon into context. NASA would "be as aggressive as we can be, in a safe and technically feasible way, to beat our competitors with boots on the moon," he said.
