The United States delays returning to the moon by 2025 and hopes to do so before China

United State He delayed the manned return to Moon by 2025 as part of the Artemis . program Because of legal challenges and in covid-19 It hopes to do so first before China reaches this satellite, the NASA administrator said on Tuesday, Bill Nelson.

“We estimate, not before 2025, that Artemis 3 will be the human landing,” Nelson said at a press conference. The former senator claimed that the agency had to deal with technology issues, legal problems that took seven months to resolve, and even the pandemic.

Nelson also noted that the Artemis I mission, which will not carry astronauts on a lunar orbit flight, has been delayed until the spring of 2022, while the manned Artemis II mission is targeting May 2024.

The new schedule represents a delay from the previous goal of 2024, set by the administration of former President Donald Trump. “The Trump administration’s goal of landing humans in 2024 was not based on technical feasibility,” Nelson stressed.

Bypass China

In addition, he noted that the Chinese are 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 after more than half a century,” he said.

“We are facing a very strong and good Chinese space program (…) we have seen them achieve a lot,” he said. He pointed out that the Chinese installed a space station in a short period of time, and it was the second country to land a “rover” on Mars, and they are preparing for the return of samples from that planet and they will have automated missions to the moon, among other space developments.

“They give us indications that they will be very aggressive (…), and we have every reason to believe that the Chinese are a very fierce competitor,” he repeated.

It is one thing to go 240,000 miles and back, and the other is to travel millions and millions of miles, Nelson noted. “There is a lot to learn on the Moon to go to Mars,” he said. Among them he mentioned building habitats and learning “how we’re going to live for long periods of time in that environment, in order to prepare ourselves to take astronauts to Mars.”

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The Artemis program contains a series of missions planned for the use of the Space Launch Systems rocket and the Orion capsule. The mission aims to take Orion to the Moon and beyond, to a distance from Earth that ships designed to transport humans have not reached before.

The US agency’s astronauts won’t set foot on the moon until Artemis III and include a woman and a person of color, according to plans by NASA, which has adopted a policy in favor of diversity. and included in their kits.

This article originally appeared HuffPost It has been updated.

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