NASA has delayed its plans to send astronauts back to the moon yet again.
The Artemis mission will see four astronauts sent around the moon and back, before blasting off to land on the moon’s surface a year later.
But Bill Nelson, head of NASA, told a news conference the next Artemis mission has slipped to April 2026, with the subsequent astronaut landing mission, Artemis III, planned for the following year.
The flight had already been delayed once, and was supposed to take off in September 2025.
Now, astronauts won’t loop around the moon until 2026 and won’t land until 2027 in one of Elon Musk’s new Starship spacecrafts.
“Assuming the SpaceX lander is ready, we plan to launch Artemis III in mid-2027,” said Mr Nelson.
“That will be well ahead of the Chinese government’s announced intention” to land on the lunar surface by 2030, he said.
The new delays come after NASA concluded an examination of the Orion crew capsule and its heat shield.
The shield cracked and partially eroded during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere on its debut 2022 uncrewed test mission, Artemis I.
Read more: The space race for the moon’s water
The Artemis programme was established under Donald Trump’s presidency and will see the US take astronauts back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Unlike Apollo, the Artemis programme will not just land astronauts, but will see lunar bases built on the moon that will help take humans to Mars in the future.
In October, the space agency announced it had identified nine possible landing locations for the mission, all near the moon’s south pole.
When Artemis III lands on the moon in 2027, it will be the first time a woman and a black astronaut will step on to the lunar surface.
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