NASA delays first crewed flight to the moon in over 50 years ethena

NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade amid a renewed international push for lunar exploration, is facing more delays. The agency said Thursday that a planned mission to land on the moon in 2026 will now take place no earlier than mid-2027.

Additionally, a pathfinder mission that was slated to fly astronauts around the moon in September 2025 will now take place no earlier than April 2026.

That delay is linked in part to issues with the Orion crew capsule that will be home to the astronauts during both lunar missions. NASA previously disclosed that the spacecraft’s heat shield, which keeps Orion from burning up as the vehicle reenters the Earth’s atmosphere, became charred and eroded in an unexpected way during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022.

The space agency has “done extensive testing to understand the risk that our astronauts will have while accomplishing the goals of landing back on the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Thursday, adding that that testing was able to identify the root cause of the heat shield issues. The issue relates to how the Orion capsule reenters Earth’s atmosphere upon returning from deep space, said NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy. The vehicle uses what NASA calls a “skip reentry” — acting like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond to slow its descent.

Orion makes use of the maneuver “because the velocity of the spacecraft and the energy that it has to dissipate is much greater than the energy that you dissipate just coming back from low Earth orbit,” Melroy said.