Posted: Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 8:58 AM ET (1358 GMT)
NASA officially gave up Tuesday on any chance of landing humans on the moon in 2024. In a briefing with reporters, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission was now scheduled for no earlier than 2025. A major reason for the slip, he said, was the time lost on NASA's Human Landing System contract with SpaceX because of protests and a lawsuit filed by Blue Origin. However, he also blamed inadequate funding for HLS by Congress as well as the conclusion that the 2024 goal set by the Trump administration "was not grounded in technical feasibility." At the briefing, NASA also said that Artemis 2, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, had slipped from 2023 to as late as May 2024, and that the cost of the Orion program through Artemis 2 had grown by more than a third to $9.3 billion.
