MIAMI – United States delayed manned return to the Moon for 2025 as part of their program Artemis due to legal challenges and covid – 19 and hopes to do it first before China reaches this satellite, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday.
“We are estimating, not before 2024, for Artemis III, that it would be the human landing,” said Nelson at a press conference.
The former senator said the agency has had to deal with technology issues, legal problems that took seven months to resolve, and even the coronavirus pandemic.
Nelson also said that the mission Artemis I, will not carry astronauts in a flight that will orbit the Moon , it is delayed until the spring of 2022, while the manned mission Artemis II targets May 2022.
The new schedule represents a lag from the previous target of 2024, established by the administration of former president Donald Trump .
“The Trump administration’s goal of a human landing in 2024 was not based on technical feasibility ”, said Nelson.
He noted on the other hand that the Chinese are being very “aggressive” in space and that the interest of NASA and the United States is to return “first” to the Moon.
“We want to be the first to return to the Moon there after more than half a century,” said Nelson.
“We are faced with a program very aggressive and good Chinese space (…), we have seen them achieve quite a lot ”, he specified.
He recalled that the Chinese installed a space station in a short period of time, was the second nation to land a rover on Mars, they prepare the return No samples from that planet and they will have robotic missions to the Moon, among other space advances.
“They give us indications that they are going to be very aggressive (…), we have every reason to believe that the Chinese are a very aggressive competitor ”, he reiterated.
Nelson specified that one thing is to go 240, 000 miles and back, and another is to travel millions and millions of miles.
“There is much to learn on the Moon to go to Mars,” he said.
Among the lessons that must be mastered, Nelson mentioned the construction of habitats and the learning of “how we are going to exist for long periods of time in that environment, in order to prepare ourselves to take astronauts to Mars.”
The mission aims to take Orion to Mon and beyond, to a distance from Earth that ships designed to transport human beings have never reached until now.
It will not be until Artemis III that the astronauts of the agency The US will step on the lunar surface and among them will be a woman and a person of color, according to NASA plans, which has adopted a policy in favor of diversity and inclusion in its crews.