NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon has changed.
In addition, SLS’s design will be standardized to streamline production, and the rocket’s launch cadence will be shortened from once every three years to once every 10 months, if all goes according to plan. To achieve this, NASA plans to strengthen its workforce to “rebuild core competencies,” Isaacman said, “that will directly contribute to NASA’s launch cadence.”
There is a major shift in the architecture of NASA The Artemis programwhich aims to establish a sustained human presence on the moon and in lunar orbit. However, a recent report by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) casts serious doubt on the previous architecture, questioning the agency’s timeline, projected mission safety and the readiness of Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles that NASA has contracted with private companies to perform lunar landings.
As originally designed, Artemis 3 included a long list of technological innovations, with heavy reliance on HLS, which ASAP determined posed “significant mission-level risk.”
“This is just not the right way forward,” Isaacman said. “Going straight to the moon … is not a path to success.”
“We want to reduce complexity as much as possible,” he added. “We want to accelerate production, pull in the hardware and increase launch speed, which obviously also has a direct security concern.”
With the new framework, Artemis 3 is drastically simplified, and less dependent on the readiness of a lunar lander’s ability to actually land on the moon. Development of both private HLS landers selected by NASA has fallen short of the space agency’s hoped-for timeline, resulting in impending delays.
NASA entered into contract SpaceX‘s Starship to land astronauts on the Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 lunar missions. Starship has flown 11 suborbital test flights in the past three years, but has yet to achieve several critical milestones necessary to qualify the spacecraft for lunar landings with astronauts on board.
NASA chose Blue origin‘s Blue moon spacecraft, meanwhile, to land astronauts on the Artemis 5 lunar mission. A Blue Moon pathfinder known as Mark 1 is currently undergoing testing at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Before NASA will let either Spaceship or Blue Moon carry astronauts to the lunar surface, the vehicles must demonstrate their ability to transfer and store cryogenic fuel in roomrendezvous and docking with Orion, as well as performing an unmanned lunar landing and successful return to lunar orbit.
Now NASA plans to use Artemis 3 as a safe test site for these procedures in low earth orbit before they trusted the landers to be 100% successful on their first flights to the moon.
Previous architecture for Artemis 4 used an upgraded version of the SLS, called Block 1B, which featured the improved Exploration Upper Stage in place of the SLS’s current Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). If NASA’s launch cadence with SLS remained unchanged, Artemis 4 would have launched sometime around 2030.
Space agency officials are counting on a standardized SLS configuration to shorten the wait time between launches, and is now targeting an Artemis 4 liftoff in 2028 as the program’s first manned lunar landing, with the potential for Artemis 5 to repeat the feat later that year.
“I think what we’re doing is directly in line with what ASAP asked us to do,” Isaacman told Space.com during Friday’s briefing. “I think it should be incredibly obvious that you don’t go from one unmanned launch of Orion and SLS, wait three years, go around the moon, wait three years and land on it.”
Isaacman compared the need for an increased SLS launch cadence to America’s first lunar program, saying, “There has to be a better way, in keeping with our history.”
“We didn’t just jump right in Apollo 11. We made it Mercury, The twins and lots of Apollo missions with the launch cadence every three months,” Isaacman said. “We shouldn’t be comfortable with the current cadence. We should get back to basics and do what we know works.”
Meanwhile, team at NASA Kennedy Space Center continue to work toward an April launch date for Artemis 2, despite its recent move from the pad at Launch Complex-39B to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for repairs.
Engineers conduct routine post-fueling procedures following a countdown exercise on February 19 for Artemis 2 rocket met one problem with pressurizing helium flow on ICPS which they could address only back inside VAB. That countdown exercise was the second “wet dress rehearsal” for the Artemis 2 SLS, which experienced liquid hydrogen leaks and an early countdown termination during testing February 2.
“The suspected helium flow system component will be removed and they are going to review detailed sections and assess the cause of the problem,” Lori Glaze, acting assistant administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said Friday. “We’re hoping to get down to the root cause of that and make changes, not only in the hardware, but in our operational procedures, so that we don’t run into the same problem again when we roll back to the pad.”
NASA officials, counting on a quick diagnosis and fix, hope to have the SLS back in place in time to meet Artemis 2’s next launch window, which opens April 1, with more possibilities 3-6. April and 30 April.
Artemis 2 will be Orion’s first mission with a crew on board. They are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The quartet will embark on a 10-day mission to fly a single loop around the moon before returning to Earth.
Artemis 1 sent an unmanned Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back to Earth in late 2022.
