NASA won’t be returning to the moon in 2024. This decision was strongly influenced by legal conflicts with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin when it gave the Human Landing System contract to SpaceX. It was disclosed in a teleconference initially reported by SpaceNews.
“Because of the litigation of seven months, we have not been allowed to have, under law, any contact with SpaceX” for the HLS program, explained Nelson, in the report.
The lunar landing is the central objective of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission and now this will not be happening till 2025. “Prior to fiscal year ’22, previous Congress did not appropriate enough dollars for the Human Landing System,” said Nelson. NASA had asked Congress for $3.3 billion to fund the HLS in the 2021 fiscal year’s budget proposal (which was the last during Trump’s days), but at the time, Congress only gave $850 million.
This meant that even at that time it was not pragmatic enough to be worked on by this short funding. “The Trump administration’s target of a 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,” said Nelson, according to the report of the teleconference. He had doubts about meeting the 2024 deadline from the beginning anyway and the straggling state of its new spacesuit development, which we already know wasn’t going to be ready for the 2024 landing goal.
In addition, NASA is also postponing Artemis 2, the agency’s first Orion flight set to lift astronauts into space. The first deadline was 2023, but now it could take until May 2024. NASA’s plans have been going through delays but the new collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX turns out to make it more promising in delivering on schedule.