NASA's Artemis II SLS moon rocket with the Orion spacecraft rolls back toward the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday in Cape Canaveral, Fla.John Raoux/The Associated Press
Two days after rolling its towering SLS rocket off the launch pad for repairs, NASA officials cannot yet say when the Artemis II lunar mission will be ready to lift off, but the U.S. space agency is making changes to subsequent flights to the moon in the face of harsh realities about the program’s slow pace.
“Launching a rocket as important and as complex as SLS every three years is not a path to success,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman at a news briefing on Friday to discuss the program’s status.
The blunt assessment comes as engineers investigate a problem with helium flow in the upper stage of the SLS that was first flagged last Saturday and required moving the rocket back into the giant vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Canada is a partner in the Artemis program. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is among four crew members slated to fly on Artemis II, the first human mission to fly around the moon in more than 53 years.
During the Friday briefing, mission managers confirmed that repairs are under way in hopes of having the rocket back on the launch pad and ready to lift off ahead of a launch window in early April. It is not yet clear whether the helium problem can be resolved in time.
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Mr. Isaacman pointed to the long lag time between launches as part of the reason why it is difficult to eliminate technical issues with the SLS.
“When you are launching every three years, your skills atrophy. You lose muscle memory,” he said.
Mr. Isaacman outlined several changes to the program, including redirecting Artemis III from a mission to land on the lunar surface in 2028 to an intermediate step on the way to that goal.
Under the new plan, Artemis III will consist of a flight to low Earth orbit to test the ability to rendezvous with one or both of the lunar landers that are being developed by private-sector partners, SpaceX and Blue Origin.
The aim would be to launch the flight next year, Mr. Isaacman said, with the possibility of up to two lunar landing attempts to follow in 2028.
Mr. Isaacman said discussions about adjusting the program were already under way before the problem surfaced last weekend that delayed the launch of Artemis II beyond March.
The rocket was rolled out in mid-January in advance of a launch opportunity in early February. Hydrogen fuel leaks that occurred during a dress rehearsal stymied those plans. Following a second dress rehearsal, mission managers said last week that they were ready for a launch attempt beginning March 6.
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Less than 24 hours later, the helium flow problem was detected and it became clear the rocket would need to be removed from the launch pad so that engineers could access the faulty system.
“The data were pretty clear that we were in a no-go situation,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
Dr. Glaze added the team working on the rocket was streamlining its efforts, “to give us the very best possible chance at a launch in the early April launch period.”
To achieve its mission, Artemis II can only launch during a limited period each lunar month, when the moon, Earth and sun are correctly positioned for the flight.
The April launch window runs from April 1 through April 6. If the rocket is not ready to lift off by then, the launch will slide to the next window, which opens April 30.
But the larger ripples from Friday’s briefing will undoubtedly be from the “course correction” to the Artemis program, which critics say is moving too slowly and calls for too many untested leaps from one mission to the next.
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Mr. Isaacman, an entrepreneur and pilot who has twice flown in Earth orbit aboard SpaceX vehicles and stepped into his leadership role at NASA in December, now faces the task of steering a complex multipartner lunar program toward a more vigorous timeline.
In addition to the mission changes, he said NASA would move to build up its work force with the expertise needed to support Artemis.
He added that contractors and government officials had been briefed on the changes ahead of Friday’s announcement.
Michael Byers, co-director of the Vancouver-based Outer Space Institute, a policy-focused research centre, said that a key takeaway from the announcement is that NASA appears committed to a version of SLS and Orion as its primary way to send astronauts to the moon rather than handing the task to private space companies.
Although companies will continue to play a role in developing lunar landing vehicles, Mr. Byers said “NASA has a much more careful safety-oriented approach than the private companies have, so I feel better about Canadian astronauts flying on future missions, knowing that they’re going to be travelling within that NASA safety culture.”