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NASA’s plan to land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024 is “unlikely,” according to an audit report from the agency’s inspector general’s office.
The report warns that the space agency “will have difficulty” in “reaching any date close to this ambitious goal”, although it could potentially do so with “strong, consistent and sustained leadership from the president … as well as stable and funding. timely “.
NASA Artemis program, named after Apollo’s mythological sister, the namesake of the first lunar mission, aimed to get the first woman and the next man to the lunar surface by 2024, though that date is now up for debate.
Although President-elect Joe Biden has named members of his NASA transition team, he has not yet set his administration’s priorities for the space agency or the Artemis program.
In addition to the astronaut landings, NASA planned to establish a “Lunar Gateway” outpost that will orbit the moon by the mid-1920s, and then lunar landings to deliver cargo to the surface by the late 1920s.
The OIG report said that due to the many challenges facing the Lunar Gateway mission, “we anticipate further delays in scheduling and cost increases, making it unlikely that the Gateway will be available for the planned lunar landing in 2024”.
It is unclear whether these missions will continue or if they will be postponed.
Some reports expect Biden, as president, to redetermine the agency’s research priority on climate change, reimbursing missions the Trump administration has set aside.
His administration could then postpone the date of the lunar landing until 2028, in line with a bill from the US House Science Committee that approved plans to venture to Mars, but over a longer time frame.
The OIG report stated, “Over the past decade, our oversight work has found that NASA is constantly struggling to address each of these significant issues and the accelerated schedule of the Artemis mission is likely to further aggravate these challenges.”
The agency had always recognized that the date of 2024 was an “ambitious timeline”, noting that spaceflight systems “can take six to eight years to develop” when it was less than five years for the agency to reach its target for 2024.
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