A new audit performed by the Office of the Inspector General has revealed that NASA's planned 2024 Lunar Landing mission is "not feasible" as the organization's next-generation spacesuits will not be ready in time.
NASA has been developing its new spacesuits for 14 years and this new audit has revealed that they won't be ready in time as a result of COVID-19, funding shortfalls, and more. When the spacesuits are ready, NASA will have eclipsed its original $200 million in funding, with total costs reaching a potential $1 billion, as reported by Space.com.
"NASA's current schedule is to produce the first two flight-ready xEMUs by November 2024, but the Agency faces significant challenges in meeting this goal," the audit reads. "This goal includes approximately a 20-month delay in delivery for the planned design, verification, and testing suit, two qualification suits, an ISS Demo suit, and two lunar flight suits."
The audit says these delays can be attributed to "funding shortfalls, COVID-19 impacts, and technical challenges" and that they leave no schedule margin for the two flight-ready xEMU suits. In other words, these delays push the suits out of NASA's time range for its planned 2024 moon landing.
The audit says these suits would not be ready until April 2025 at the earliest.
"We reported in 2017 that despite spending nearly $200 million on extravehicular spacesuit development over the previous 9-year period, the Agency remained years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit to use on exploration missions," the audit reads. "Since our 2017 report, NASA has spent an additional $220 million — for a total of $420 million — on spacesuit development. Going forward, the Agency plans to invest approximately $625.2 million more, bringing the total spent…to over $1 billion through fiscal year 2025."
With all of this in mind, NASA's 2024 Moon Landing mission won't be possible — astronauts can't go to the Moon without proper spacesuits, after all. However, the Office of Inspector General made four recommendations to the Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate in lieu of the news:
- Adjusting the schedule as appropriate to reduce development risks;
- Developing an integrated master schedule to incorporate and align the hardware deliveries and training needs of the dependent Programs — Gateway, ISS, and HLS — and the Flight Operations Directorate;
- Ensuring technical requirements for the next-generation suits are solidified before selecting the acquisition strategy to procure suits for the ISS and Artemis programs;
- Developing an acquisition strategy for the next-generation spacesuits that meets the needs of both the ISS and Artemis programs;
As Space.com notes, even if the suits are ready by April 2025, this doesn't necessarily mean the missions can occur immediately. The astronauts would need to undergo new and routine training with the new suits before actually launching into space to use the new suits.
What all of this means is that anyone excited about NASA's visit to the Moon in 2024 will have to hold their excitement for at least a year longer. While waiting to see when NASA actually does make it to the moon, read about how NASA has discovered water on the sunlit surface of the Moon, and then check out this story about how a SpaceX prototype rocket for the Moon and Mars finally made its first successful landing.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.