NASA Delays Return to the Moon (Plus How Will DoGE Impact NASA)

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NASA’s plan to return to the moon took another hit today when the agency announced it was delaying plans for its next Artemis mission by seven months. This is not the first such delay NASA has announced.

NASA announced Thursday that the next Artemis mission, which will send four astronauts on a flight around the moon, will be delayed until 2026 — yet another postponement in a program that is already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

In January, NASA said it would launch the Artemis II mission in September 2025 instead of late 2024. Now, the space agency says it is targeting a launch in April 2026 to allow more time to address issues with its next-generation Orion space capsule.

The delay also means the subsequent mission, that one sending astronauts back to the moon’s surface, will also be delayed until 2027.

The agency said Thursday that a planned mission to land on the moon in 2026 will now take place no earlier than mid-2027.

The delays were caused by problems with the Orion crew capsule, specifically with the heat shield.

The issue relates to how the Orion capsule reenters Earth’s atmosphere upon returning from deep space, said NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy. The vehicle uses what NASA calls a “skip reentry” — acting like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond to slow its descent.

Orion makes use of the maneuver “because the velocity of the spacecraft and the energy that it has to dissipate is much greater than the energy that you dissipate just coming back from low Earth orbit,” Melroy said.

However, the problem arose when, as the Orion capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere during Artemis I’s return, “heat accumulated inside the heat shield’s outer layer” — causing the unexpected wear, according to Melroy.

There is a kind of deadline running because China has sent a number of successful missions to the moon in the past few years and plans to send their own astronauts there by 2030. The delays announced today are not necessarily the worst case scenario. NASA’s launch system (SLS) is expensive, behind schedule and way overbudget. The cost per launch has been estimated to be as high as $2 billion.

SpaceX is part of the Artemis III mission. It is set to provide orbital refueling and the ship that will actually land astronauts on the moon. But it’s quite a complicated plan. For instance, here’s how they get back to earth once the mission is complete.

When their surface expedition is complete, the two astronauts will lift off the surface of the Moon and head back to NRHO in Starship to reunite with their crewmates in Orion. After docking, the crew will spend up to five days in orbit, transferring samples between the vehicles and preparing for the journey back to Earth.

When they reach the optimal NRHO departure point, with all four astronauts back in Orion, they will undock and ignite Orion’s engines, slinging the spacecraft past the Moon, and allowing it to coast toward Earth. The crew will travel about 24,855 miles (about 40,000 kilometers) per hour during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Assisted by 11 parachutes, the spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean where it and the crew will be retrieved with support from the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been doing its best to accelerate development of Starship and its reusable super heavy booster but has faced continued delays from government regulators.

“Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” the firm said. “This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.”

And at this point you can probably see where having Musk in charge of a Department of Government Efficiency might shake things up. On top of that, the Trump transition team just nominated its next NASA administrator who is a big fan of Elon Musk and a big client of Space X.

Yesterday, President-Elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a 41-year-old entrepreneur, private astronaut, and pilot, as the head of NASA…

In some ways, Isaacman is Musk’s Mini-Me. Both men made their fortune, in part, from payment-processing companies. Both used their wealth to pursue their boyhood dreams of spaceflight: Musk created SpaceX; Isaacman began in the lower atmosphere, by buying up the world’s largest commercial fleet of ex-military aircraft. In 2021, Isaacman treated himself to an entire SpaceX mission, which allowed him to see the Earth from space. Earlier this year, he again hired SpaceX to fire him into orbit to conduct the first private spacewalk.

Could NASA decide to kill its own SLS launch vehicle and the Orion capsule in favor of a Starship that can land itself? The efficient path here would be to hand the work to the person who has no real competition in the world right now: Elon Musk. Give SpaceX a deadline and the greenlight to fly as many rockets as needed and see what happens. Ultimately, if SpaceX and Musk succeed, that will be good for America and for Trump who will have the return of astronauts to the moon during his 2nd term.