NASA pushes first Moon landing since Apollo era to 2027

For the second time this year, NASA has pushed back its timeline to land the first Americans on the Moon since the Apollo era.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Thursday revealed that due to an issue with the heat shield on NASA’s Orion capsule discovered during the 2022 Artemis 1 test mission, the Artemis 3 lunar landing — originally scheduled for 2025 and in January pushed to September 2026 — will now happen no sooner than mid-2027.

NASA also pushed Artemis 2 — a 10-day crewed trip around the Moon and back — from September 2025 to no earlier than April 2026. The delays are not fully unexpected, aligning with a 2023 assessment from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that predicted Artemis timelines were “unlikely” to be met.

Nelson, speaking at a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was joined by NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Associate Administrator Jim Free, and Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator for the space agency’s Moon to Mars program, as well as Artemis 2 mission commander Reid Wiseman.

“We need to get [Artemis 2] right to ensure the success of our return to the Moon, and then return here safely to Earth, in order for the rest of the Artemis campaign to proceed,” Nelson told reporters.

Diagnosing the problem

According to officials, the delays to Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 can be traced to an anomaly engineers discovered during Artemis 1 but did not quite understand — until now.

When reentering Earth’s atmosphere after returning from the Moon, Orion can reach speeds 32 times faster than the speed of sound. To slow it down, NASA on Artemis 1 performed something called a skip reentry — the capsule “dips” into the atmosphere briefly before “skipping” back into space, like a rock skipping over water. This deceleration allows NASA to pinpoint Orion’s landing near the coastline, making it easier to recover the spacecraft’s crew.

Artemis 1 was NASA’s first attempt at a skip reentry with a human spacecraft. But the maneuver did not go according to plan.

Orion’s heat shield is coated in an outer layer of material called Avcoat, designed to guard the capsule and its crew against temperatures approaching 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit on reentry. Avcoat is designed to wear away as it heats up. But an internal NASA investigation found that the heat shield trapped gases that created cracks in the material, causing charred pieces to be flung off.

This was not predicted by NASA’s testing on the ground, which was conducted at a higher temperature than Orion actually experienced. As a result, models predicted the heat shield would fare just fine.

According to Artemis 1 flight data, had Orion been crewed, the capsule would have remained cool enough for astronauts to be comfortable during reentry. But NASA did not fully understand why charred pieces flew off the spacecraft, prompting further analysis.

What’s next?

NASA engineers managed to re-create the temperatures Orion truly experienced within the arc jet facilities at the space agency’s Ames Research Center in California. Following testing, an executive council decided unanimously that a new Orion heat shield would not be needed for Artemis 2.

Personnel began stacking portions of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for Artemis 2 in November. But the SLS has a limited “stack life” after which its propellant will degrade. Instead of modifying the heat shield for that mission — which Nelson on Tuesday said would have pushed Artemis 3 even further, to the end of 2028 — NASA is confident it can shorten each “skip” during the skip reentry, capping the buildup of gases that occurred on the previous mission.

A new heat shield will instead be incorporated on Artemis 3. Kshatriya, supporting the move, said the agency’s investigation produced “one of the most magnificent pieces of engineering analyses that I have ever been a part of.”

NASA on Thursday said the additional time before Artemis 2 will also allow engineers to make necessary upgrades to Orion’s life support systems, which according to Nelson, “need to be checked out.” Kshatriya said it is “taking longer than we thought” to address the issue.

He added that NASA contractor Axiom Space, which alongside Prada is designing the next-generation spacesuits Artemis astronauts will wear on the Moon, is “struggling” to develop its own life support system. Nelson called on commercial partners to “double down to meet and improve this schedule.”

The NASA administrator was adamant that the U.S. would return Americans to the Moon “well ahead of the Chinese government’s announced intention” to do so in 2030, assuming SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander is ready in time. Nelson said Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, is “next on [his] list to call” about the updated mission timelines. Next year, NASA wants to see SpaceX perform an orbital propellant transfer between two Starships. But Kshatriya said “there are going to be risks to that delivery.”

Nelson said he has already spoken to the CEOs of other Artemis contractors such as Blue Origin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Axiom, as well as Jared Isaacman, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to succeed him. Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 payments and an astronaut himself, maintains close ties with SpaceX through his Polaris Program.

“The safety of our astronauts is always first in our decisions,” Nelson said. “It is our North Star. We do not fly until we are ready. We do not fly until we know we have made the flight as safe as possible for the humans on board.”

However, if Nelson’s words are any indication, the space agency is in a time crunch. He called the lunar south pole, where Artemis 3 will land, “vital” to U.S. interests and warned that the area — which harbors water ice within its permanently shadowed craters — could not be “ceded to the Chinese.”