Don’t book your tickets for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission next 12 months just yet.
Now we have had reason to doubt the official September 2025 launch date for the mission, the primary crewed flight into deep space in greater than five many years, for some time now. That is principally because NASA is constant to mull the implications of injury to the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield from the Artemis I mission nearly two years ago.
Nevertheless, it seems that there at the moment are other problems with holding to this date as well.
No schedule margin
A brand new report from the US Government Accountability Office found that NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program—that is, essentially, the office at Kennedy Space Center in Florida liable for constructing ground infrastructure to support the Space Launch System rocket and Orion—is in peril of missing its schedule for Artemis II.
During this flight a crew of 4 astronauts, commanded by NASA’s Reid Wiseman, will launch inside Orion on a 10-day mission out to the Moon and back. The spacecraft will follow a free-return trajectory, which is vital, because if there’s a major problem with Orion spacecraft’s propulsion system, the trajectory of the vehicle will still carry it back to Earth. At their closest approach, the crew will come inside about 6,500 miles (10,400 km) of the surface of the far side of the Moon.
The brand new report, published Thursday, finds that the Exploration Ground Systems program had several months of schedule margin in its work toward a September 2025 launch date at the start of the 12 months. But now, this system has allocated all of that margin to technical issues experienced during work on the rocket’s mobile launcher and pad testing.
“Earlier in 2024, this system was reserving that point for technical issues which will arise during testing of the integrated SLS and Orion vehicle or if weather interferes with planned activities, amongst other things,” the report states. “Officials said it is probably going that issues will arise because that is the primary time testing a lot of these systems. Given the dearth of margin, if further issues arise during testing or integration, there’ll likely be delays to the September 2025 Artemis II launch date.”
