by As you develop a new type of space mission, expect to wait.
That was the message from the three Artemis 2 astronauts who are now expected to fly to the moon no earlier than September 2025, about a year later than expected. A previous uncrewed mission, Artemis 1, encountered an unexpected erosion of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. That was one of the main reasons behind Artemis 2’s schedule change in January, although the problem has been worked on since Orion’s December 2022 launch.
The observations of the lunar crew here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) were particularly apt; Their interviews in early May came days before the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, destined for its first-ever mission with astronauts, was delayed until at least Tuesday (May 21) due to a valve issue with the United rocket. Launch Alliance Atlas V. (This news comes after the Starliner launch to the International Space Station was adjusted several years after many technical issues, requiring an additional test mission without astronauts and other adjustments.)
So Artemis 2 mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency urged everyone looking at these missions to adjust their expectations. “If all you do is try to simplify a program down to ‘This ships on a certain date that you initially set as a target, you can feel like you’re failing all the time. ,” Hansen said.
Related: NASA’s inspector general determines that Orion’s heat shield issues pose ‘significant risks’ to the safety of the Artemis 2 crew
While NASA’s launch dates are as realistic as possible, Hansen said he sees a delay “completely the other way around.” (Notably, Hansen has yet to fly in space since being selected as an astronaut in 2009, largely because CSA space seats typically occur once every five to six years due to the agency’s modest funding compared to other agencies.)
To Hansen, delay has a silver lining: “If you can identify a problem without killing someone, that’s a huge success. And then if you can identify ways to address it, and learn from it and fix it on the ground, even better.
“At the end of the day,” he continued, “I think it’s also important to recognize that we’re not going to be able to take this risk forever. We’re going to learn everything we can in our test facilities, and [in what] science can be achieved on earth. And then ultimately, we will still have some unknown risk that we will have to accept. But that’s part of space exploration.”
Besides Hansen, the Artemis 2 astronauts are NASA commander Reid Wiseman, NASA pilot Victor Glover (who will be the first Black person to leave low Earth orbit, or LEO) and NASA mission specialist Christina Koch (the first woman to longer than LEO) . Hansen will be the first non-American to cross LEO. They were assigned to the mission in April 2023.
The heat shield conversation resurfaced in the news this month after NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) issued a report saying the ablation problems pose “significant risks” to the safety of Artemis 2. NASA found more than 100 areas of Orion’s heat shield with unexpected corrosion, according to the IG.
“With the recent IG report, the heat shield is getting a lot of attention. But it’s already there; this is not new,” Glover told Space.com in a separate KSC interview. “The IG report seems to have a lot to do with some people, but we were talking about that [the heat shield] has been one of our main issues almost since Artemis 1 landed.”
Glover emphasized that when people commiserate with him about a mission’s “delay,” he sees the terminology better as a “correction” because “the system had to correct itself” to allow for a safer launch. He stressed to the team that they were not surprised and did not see the timeline change as “negative.”
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft has agreed to a lunar mission despite a heat shield issue
“It allows time to be less stressful while we analyze the heat shield and repairs of the mobile launcher,” said Glover, a former US Navy Test pilot; The powerful launch of Artemis 1 did some damage to the mobile launcher. Other issues, such as foam cracking on the core stage of the Artemis 1 Space Launch System rocket, will also be explored, he said.
Related: Artemis 1’s giant moon rocket blew the doors off NASA’s launch tower elevators (video)
Training also continues as Artemis 2 aims to be “the leading edge, the leading edge, the path finder” for future moon missions after that, Glover said. The next 18 months will be full of what he calls the “three Ts”: training, testing, and speaking (or public engagement). He emphasized testing of the heat shield, it is taking place around the world with NASA, the Department of Defense and other places.
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Wiseman, also a former US Navy test pilot, told Space.com in his own KSC interview that schedules should not be the primary goal of development programs. “The whole purpose of the development program, if you cut everything else away, is to fly,” he said.
“When you build a new vehicle, it doesn’t matter how many requirements you set and how many quality programs you set. When human hands try to assemble an extremely complex and powerful machine, it will show in some issues. And you will learn things as you go up to the launch,” he said.
Issues were resolved, Wiseman emphasized, “after flying a few vehicles, because you start to shake those things out. But I would also say in spaceflight, there is no such thing as a routine .I think we have learned it over time.History.
