NASA blames Jeff Bezos for forced postponement of moon landing until 2025

It will come as no surprise to anyone if NASA doesn't send astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024. Whatever the real reasons for the delay, the space agency now has a scapegoat - and that's Jeff Bezos. And plans to land a motley crew of the Artemis mission on the moon have been pushed back to 2025.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson broke the news at a press conference, but did so in a peculiar way.

Last Friday's federal court ruling, in which Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin lost its lawsuit against NASA over the lunar craft contract, "means progress for the Artemis program," Nelson said. But warned that NASA is still not ready to disclose a mission timeline. Nelson then did begin discussing a mission timeline.

The first date is already known. Artemis I, in which NASA is to launch an SLS rocket for the first time, is scheduled for Feb. 12, 2022. NASA recently completed the stowage of the rocket, including the assembly of the Orion spacecraft. The 101-meter-high rocket still needs to undergo some testing, but overall it seems to be going according to plan.

Nelson named an approximate date for the Artemis II mission, which "will take astronauts further into space than ever before." That mission, with a crew to and from the moon (no landing), is now scheduled for May 2023 (the previous date was April 2022).

As for the long-awaited Artemis III mission to land humans on the moon, it will happen in 2025, not 2024 as previously planned, Nelson said, blaming Jeff Bezos and the U.S. Congress for the delay. The revised timeline will not affect subsequent mission schedules, including construction of the Lunar Gateway (a space station in lunar orbit) and various activities planned for the lunar surface in the second half of the 2020s, he added.

Source: gizmodo

Illustration: NASA