Administrator Bill Nelson said on Tuesday that NASA has pushed back its program to land astronauts on the Moon by a year to 2025, because of opposition to a single-source contract awarded to SpaceX to build the lunar lander.
“We’ve lost almost 7 months to litigation and the first manned landing is unlikely before 2025,” Nelson said in a televised press conference.
Nelson was referring to a court ruling last week that dismissed protests by SpaceX rival Blue Origin over the loss of the lunar lander contract.
Another reason for the delay is that the original 2024 deadline set by the Trump administration “was not based on technical feasibility,” Nelson said.
Nelson also cited the failure of Congress in the previous budget to provide enough funding to develop the lunar lander.
NASA’s new schedule calls for humans to orbit the Moon in May 2021, which will leave the crew 40,000 miles from the Moon — a record distance in space — before returning to Earth, Nelson said. .
In addition, there will be an unmanned lunar landing before the 2025 manned mission, which aims to place two astronauts on the lunar South Pole.
Although the updated schedule does not affect later US lunar missions, Nelson warned that the US finds itself in a race with China to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the last US Apollo landing in December 1972.
“The Chinese space program has been able to land Chinese Taikonauts much earlier than originally expected,” Nelson said. “But whatever it is, we’re going to be as aggressive as we can be in a safe and technically viable way to beat our competitors with boots on the moon.”
The first Apollo landing on the Moon in July 1969 ended an earlier space race that pitted the United States against the former Soviet Union.
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