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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.”
The revised course came as Nasa has been wrestling with a number of delays and technical problems. Earlier this week, the independent body that reviews space safety issued a blunt report sharply criticising the space agency’s current plans as too risky.
The aerospace safety advisory panel recommended that Nasa rethink its objectives for Artemis III, which had been conceived as the first human landing on the moon since the final flight in the Apollo series in December 1972. The panel said that the call for a revision was urgent, “given the demanding mission goals”.
Isaacman said that under the new plan, the eventual moon landing would be achieved through evolutionary steps rather than big leaps in technological procedures. “We’re going to get there in steps, continue to take down risk as we learn more and we roll that information into subsequent designs,” he told CBS News.
He added: “We’ve got to get back to basics.”
Step one in the revised schedule is the launch of the Artemis II moon mission, which has been plagued by delays. The rocket was returned to its hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier this week.
Engineers had discovered a blockage in the rocket’s helium flow in the upper stage of the booster.
The latest delay followed disappointment in February, when Nasa was forced to put off the launch of Artemis II after hydrogen was found leaking from its Space Launch System rocket.
Artemis II will send four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon, designed to take people further into space than ever before, beyond the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
Isaacman said on Friday that additional missions would then be included in the schedule. He likened the extra steps to the approach taken in Nasa’s original moon landing in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on to the lunar surface in 20 July 1969.
That legendary event was hazarded only after three separate moon missions had been completed.
The Artemis III mission will no longer aim to land on the moon. Instead, under the revised plans, it will be launched by mid-2027 as a low-Earth orbit designed to test essential technologies.
That extra stage is intended to give Nasa extra flight experience with the massively complex advanced systems and the chance to test its space vehicles before it attempts a human moon landing. Should all that go to plan, then a new Artemis IV mission would set out in 2028 to land on the moon.
The eventual aspiration is to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole. A second moon landing, Artemis V, could be conducted in 2028, followed by a moonshot attempted each year thereafter, Nasa said.
