JOIN USNASA moves moon landing deadline back to 2025
NASA is pushing back its deadline for returning American astronauts to the moon’s surface by as much as one year, officials announced Tuesday. It is the first official acknowledgement that 2024, the target set when Donald Trump was president, cannot be met.
Instead, it will occur sometime in 2025, said Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator who was selected to lead NASA by President Joe Biden earlier this year. He blamed the shifting timeline on a lawsuit over the agency’s moon lander, to be built by SpaceX, and delays with NASA’s Orion capsule, which is to fly astronauts to lunar orbit.
“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, adding that NASA will need to have more detailed discussions with SpaceX to set a more specific timeline.
December 2022 will be the 50th anniversary of the last astronauts on the moon. Since the Apollo 17 mission returned in 1972, the US space program focused on other objectives. But the moon has come back into vogue at times, including under Trump.
The 2024 deadline to land the first American astronauts on the moon in more than a half-century was first unveiled by then-Vice President Mike Pence during a 2019 meeting of the White House’s space council.
The new mission, which caught many at NASA and in the space industry by surprise, was an urgent one: loft the first woman and next American man to the lunar surface “by any means necessary,” he said at the time. The motivating force was that Americans are “in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s,” a reference in part to China, which has set a goal of landing astronauts on the moon in the 2030s.
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