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The barriers to achieving the 2024 goal have been political and technical, from indecision among lawmakers in Congress to engineering challenges and delays. other systems and spacecraft that NASA may need to send astronauts to the Moon. The Covid pandemic also played a role. The agency’s flagship moon rocket, the Space Launch System, is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that has suffered years of delay.

But last week, NASA overcame an important hurdle. Agency came out victorious From a bitter and protracted legal battle with Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, who had two protests against NASA’s decision to choose SpaceX. The dispute paralyzed the moon landing program for nearly six months and prevented NASA from working with SpaceX on Starship development.

Still, Starship is just one of the wide variety of rockets and technologies that NASA says it needs for lunar shooting.

Inside February, the Space Launch System is scheduled to perform its first uncrewed launch. A capsule called Orion, which was intended to transport astronauts around the Moon, but did not land. The next mission to transport astronauts around and behind the moon could happen in May 2024, pushed back from April 2023.

“There are multiple factors” underlying Orion’s delay, said Jim Free, NASA official who oversees the development of space exploration systems. This includes the Covid-19 outbreak “both in the workforce and in the supply chain,” hurricane damage to Orion’s development facilities in Louisiana, and engineering challenges in upgrading the hardware to enable astronauts to fly on the capsule.

The delays and a few new engineering requirements came with a $2.6 billion increase in the Orion development price, which over a dozen years had a total cost of $9.7 billion.

Moving the moon image to 2025 gives NASA more time, but is still an extremely optimistic program. The Space Launch System would send an Orion capsule carrying astronauts around the moon. In a way that hasn’t been fully disclosed yet, it would dock with SpaceX’s Starship lander, which would then carry the astronauts to the surface.