NASA Pushes Back America’s Return to the Moon to 2027, With the Next Artemis Program Flight Slated for 2026

The next time Americans will see astronauts on the moon will now be no sooner than 2027, after NASA announced further delays to its Artemis program on Thursday.

Artemis 2, a ten-day flight around the moon and back with a crew of four astronauts, is now planned for April 2026, instead of its former target of September 2025. Artemis 3, intended to be the first crewed mission to land on the moon in more than 50 years, is now planned for mid-2027.

The Artemis program is NASA’s campaign to establish human presence on the moon once again, with lunar bases that will serve as a staging point for eventual missions to Mars. The program has faced several delays in the past and is estimated to cost $93 billion by the end of the 2025 fiscal year, wrote Alexandra Witze for Nature News in 2022.

“The updates to our mission plans are a positive step toward ensuring we can safely accomplish our objectives at the moon and develop the technologies and capabilities needed for crewed Mars missions,” Catherine Koerner, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, says in a statement.

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The delays were announced after an investigation into the performance of the Orion crew capsule’s heat shield as the spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere during the 2022 Artemis 1 unmanned test mission.

After the Orion space capsule returned to Earth, engineers noticed flaws in the spacecraft’s heat shield, the structure that protects its astronaut crew from the temperatures of atmospheric re-entry, which can reach up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The investigation found that during the 2022 re-entry test, hot gases trapped inside the heat shield’s outer layer were not able to “vent and dissipate as expected,” per another NASA statement. Instead, the gases built up pressure and cracked the Avcoat material that composes the heat shield’s outer layer and is designed to wear away as it heats.

However, the team made another crucial finding—in localized areas of the heat shield, where the Avcoat was more permeable, the gases vented successfully and kept those regions from cracking.

“We took our heat shield investigation process extremely seriously with crew safety as the driving force behind the investigation,” Howard Hu, manager of the Orion program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, says in the statement. “The process was extensive. We gave the team the time needed to investigate every possible cause, and they worked tirelessly to ensure we understood the phenomenon and the necessary steps to mitigate this issue for future missions.”

NASA notes that had there been a crew aboard the Artemis 1 flight, the data show they would have remained safe, despite the damage to the heat shield. Still, engineers will limit the time Orion spends in high temperatures by changing the trajectory of Artemis 2’s re-entry.

During Artemis 1, Orion entered Earth’s atmosphere using a technique called skip guidance entry. Like a rock skipping across a pond, the spacecraft dips in and out of Earth’s atmosphere, slowing itself with drag and then rising with lift, until finally descending with parachutes for the splashdown. Engineers suggest this technique allowed enough heat to build in the heat shield and cause damage.

Based on the findings of the investigation, NASA will shorten the duration of this skip phase for Artemis 2, reports Jeff Foust for Space News.

The updated timeline will also allow NASA to troubleshoot technical issues, and the investigation was run in parallel to other assembly steps and testing to keep the timeline as close to the original as possible.

In a new space race to land on the moon’s water-rich south pole, which could be used as a future source of fuel, the Artemis program is part of the United States’ plan to reach the moon before China, which announced a program to reach the moon by 2030 and establish a southern lunar research base by 2040.

“The Artemis campaign is the most daring, technically challenging, collaborative, international endeavor humanity has ever set out to do,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says in the statement.

“We have made significant progress on the Artemis campaign over the past four years, and I’m proud of the work our teams have done to prepare us for this next step forward in exploration as we look to learn more about Orion’s life support systems to sustain crew operations during Artemis 2. We need to get this next test flight right. That’s how the Artemis campaign succeeds.”

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Olatunji Osho-Williams is an intern with Smithsonian magazine.