This advice is designed to improve the "accuracy, transparency and safety of human spaceflight."
The OIG report makes nine recommendations to Jim Free, who as NASA's associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development (ESD) Mission Directorate is overseeing Artemis. In addition, the HLS and another Artemis element, the moon-orbiting space station known as Gateway, received less money from Congress in FY2021 "than required to meet NASA’s initial acquisition strategy," the report notes. This past August, for example, Hurricane Ida walloped NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana, which builds the core stage for the SLS. Such Artemis delays have multiple causes, according to the report, from technical challenges to the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme weather events. But the OIG report is less bullish, estimating that the mission "will be ready to launch by summer 2022." NASA is targeting February 2022 for the launch of Artemis 1. Artemis 2 will also be a circumlunar mission, but with astronauts aboard. The first, Artemis 1, will send an uncrewed Orion on a journey around the moon. The first crewed Artemis landing mission is called Artemis 3, because it will be the third launch in the program. Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing transportation system Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sues NASA over denied moon lander contract So work under the Starship HLS contract is basically just now getting started. Those protests were denied in July, but Blue Origin then filed a lawsuit, which was dismissed earlier this month. However, two companies that lost out on the HLS contract, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Dynetics, filed protests with the OIG just after the award was announced. In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to provide the initial Artemis HLS, which will be a version of the company's huge Starship vehicle. The new OIG report, which was apparently written before Nelson's announcement, estimates that NASA will miss the Trump administration's late-2024 landing goal "by several years." The audit cites the need to develop and test new Artemis spacesuits, which are behind schedule, and the program's Human Landing System (HLS), which will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. That revised timeline was widely viewed within the space community as overly ambitious, and NASA is no longer working toward it: Last week, agency chief Bill Nelson announced that the first crewed Artemis landing will likely take place no earlier than 2025.Īnd 2025 may be out of reach as well. In March 2019, however, the administration of President Donald Trump accelerated things, re-targeting the first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo days for 2024 and dubbing the initiative the Artemis program.
The original plan to return to the moon called for landing astronauts near the moon's south pole for the first time by 2028. government's calendar, fiscal years start on Oct. So the OIG report's $93 billion estimate encompasses more than a decade of spending, from fiscal year (FY) 2012 through fiscal year 2025. Although the Artemis program was first announced in December 2017, development of Orion and the SLS officially began in 2011.
0 kommentar(er)
