[ad_1]
SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday that his company’s spacecraft would likely be ready to land humans on the moon before 2024.
Responding to a tweet asking if the SpaceX launcher would be ready to transport astronauts to the Moon by 2024 despite several mission delays, Musk said it could happen “probably sooner.”
SpaceX had landed a $ 2.9 billion contract to build a Human Landing System (HLS) for the Nasa Artemis mission to the moon, outbidding its rivals Blue Origin and Dynetics.
Partly because of protests filed with the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) by SpaceX competitors, SpaceX has experienced delays in receiving payments of its mandatory funds from NASA, the most recent of $ 300 million. dollars having been paid on July 30.
So far, the company has received nearly $ 440 million from the US space agency, or about 14.5% of its potential award amount of about $ 3 billion, according to USAspending, the official source of open data on federal spending.
While it was former US Vice President Mike Pence who set the vision for an Artemis launch date of 2024, NASA’s own Inspector General noted in a recent report that “the lunar landing by the end of 2024, as NASA currently predicts, is not achievable ”.
According to this report from the Office of the Inspector General, released last week, the agency faces “significant challenges” in meeting its goals of producing its next-generation space suit technology by November 2024.
“This schedule includes a delivery time of approximately 20 months for the planned design, verification and test combination, two qualification suits, one ISS demonstration suit and two lunar flight suits,” the report notes, adding that the delays are attributable to “lack of funding, impacts of COVID-19 and technical challenges”.
“Given these anticipated delays in the development of the space suit, a lunar landing at the end of 2024, as NASA currently predicts, is not feasible,” the report notes.
As the suits are also to be tested for integration with other mission components, the report says they would not be ready for flight “until April 2025 at the earliest” with parts of the program scheduled to be delayed. at least two years.
“Current schedule projections show that the VISE flight units will not be delivered to the HLS program for integration and testing until January 2025 – a delay of nearly 2 years from the originally planned date of March 2023,” the report notes. .
Source link
