The launch of the Artemis I mission in mid-November was spectacular, and NASA's Orion spacecraft has performed nearly flawlessly ever since. If all goes as anticipated—and there is no reason to believe it won't—Orion will splash down in calm seas off the California coast this weekend.
This exploration mission has provided dazzling photos of Earth and the Moon and offered a promise that humans will soon fly in deep space again. So the question for NASA, then, is when can we expect an encore?
Realistically, a follow-up to Artemis I is probably at least two years away. Most likely, the Artemis II mission will not happen before early 2025, although NASA is not giving up hope on launching humans into deep space in 2024.
It may seem strange that there's such a long gap. After all, with its flight in November, the Space Launch System rocket has now demonstrated its capability. And should Orion return to Earth safely, it will validate the calculations of engineers who designed and built its heat shield. Should it really take more than two years to finish building a second rocket and spacecraft and complete the certification of life support systems inside Orion?
The short answer is no, and the reason for the long gap is a bit absurd. It all goes back to a decision made about eight years ago to plug a $100 million budget hole in the Orion program. As a result of a chain of events that followed this decision, Artemis II is unlikely to fly before 2025 because of eight relatively small flight computers.
"I hate to say that it’s Orion this time holding us up," said Mark Kirasich, who served as NASA's program manager for Orion when the decision was made, in an interview. "But I’m bringing up the rear. And it’s part of my legacy."
A long time ago, in a budget far away
About eight years ago, senior officials at NASA and Orion's primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, needed to fill a budget hole. At the time, NASA was spending $1.2 billion per year developing the Orion spacecraft, and while it was making progress on the design, there were still challenges.
NASA's exploration plans at the time were substantially different from the Artemis Program of today. Nominally, the agency was building Orion and the SLS rocket as part of a "Journey to Mars." But there was no clear-cut plan on how to get there and no well-defined missions for Orion to fly.
One key difference is that NASA only planned to fly the original version of the SLS rocket, known as "Block 1," a single time. After this initial mission, the agency planned to upgrade the rocket's upper stage, making a version of the rocket known as "Block 1B." Because this variant was taller and more powerful than Block 1, it required significant modifications to the rocket's launch tower. NASA engineers estimated that it would take nearly three years of work after the initial SLS launch to complete and test the reconstructed tower.
So it seemed plausible that the Orion planners could reuse some components from the first flight of their spacecraft on the second one. In particular, they focused on a suite of two dozen avionics "boxes" that are part of the electronics system that operates Orion's communications, navigations, display, and flight control systems. They estimated it would take about two years to re-certify the flight hardware.
By not needing to build two dozen avionics boxes for the second flight of Orion, the program closed the $100 million budget hole. And schedule-wise, they would have nearly a year to spare while work was being done on the launch tower.
"It was simply a budget decision," Kirasich said. "The launch dates were completely different at the time."
The plan changes
NASA planned to launch the first SLS and Orion mission—originally known as Exploration Mission-1—in 2017. A second mission, carrying humans on board Orion in a test flight, was due to follow three years later on the larger rocket. Because this gap was so long, political pressure began to grow on NASA officials to close it.
As delays mounted for Exploration Mission-1, NASA officials decided it would indeed be best to build a second launch tower. They estimated it would cost $300 million. Building a second launch tower, these officials reasoned, would also allow for several flights of the "Block 1" version of the SLS rocket. This would protect them from the inevitable delays with the Block 1B upgrade of SLS.
By 2018, outside safety advocates began adding weight to NASA's proposal for a second launch tower, saying that a 33-month gap would raise concerns about launch readiness.
"That represents a pause in the program that we think could involve safety difficulties because the experience that’s being built up by people falls down, people have to relearn their jobs, et cetera, et cetera," said a member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, engineer Donald McErlean. "We think it would be much more efficient for the continuation of the program if it were possible to construct a second mobile launcher and start that construction now."
In 2019, Congress decided that NASA should build a second launch tower for the Block 1B version of the SLS rocket and allocated the funding NASA requested, $383 million. This has proven to be a huge fiasco. The primary contractor, Bechtel, is years late, and the project is now estimated to cost at least $1 billion. NASA has already spent nearly half a billion dollars in funding, and the project remains in the planning stages. The absolute earliest the project will be completed, said NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, is November 2026.
However, because NASA ultimately decided to build this second launch tower, it is free to use the original one for multiple SLS launches. Despite some damage to the tower after the Artemis I launch in November, officials said it would be repaired long before it is needed for the Artemis II mission.
That put Orion and its avionics boxes on the clock.
Eyes on Orion
As part of its plan to build a second launch tower, NASA decided to fly three missions on the Block 1 version of the SLS rocket. These became the first three Artemis missions—the first an uncrewed test of the vehicles, then a crewed mission to fly by the Moon, and then finally a lunar landing with Artemis III later this decade. After this, it's possible that Artemis IV will fly on an upgraded version of the rocket if the launch tower and new Exploration Upper Stage are ready.
Howard Hu, who became Orion's program manager in February and previously served as its deputy, has been grappling with the avionics box issue for a long time. Accordingly, he has sought to accelerate the production of the avionics boxes needed for Orion. These are essentially radiation-hardened computers capable of operating in various thermal conditions, and they range in size from a large toaster to a microwave.
As avionics hardware has been built for Artemis III, therefore, Hu has moved those boxes into the production flow for Artemis II. (The Artemis I mission avionics that were supposed to be used on the second flight will now be used on Artemis III). Despite this effort, however, the Orion team still needs to recover eight avionics boxes from Artemis I for use on Artemis II.
No one is certain how long recovering the avionics boxes from Orion will take. After being pulled from Orion, they will be sent for inspection and will undergo a lengthy process to re-certify their worthiness for a second flight. The boxes will then need to be meticulously installed on the Artemis II spacecraft, which will then need to be stacked for launch at Kennedy Space Center.
In a 2018 report, Martin, the agency's inspector general, said NASA officials would need "about 20 months" between the Artemis I and Artemis II launches to reuse the avionics boxes (see PDF report). However, in an annual report published in November, Martin said the process would take more than two years.
"Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate considers the non-core avionics reuse to be the primary critical path for the Artemis II mission, with total preparation work between missions to take about 27 months," Martin wrote.
Hu said it was too early to determine a schedule for repurposing the avionics boxes. He said that NASA and Lockheed learned a lot from processing the Orion spacecraft for Artemis I, and they're working to optimize the workflow for Artemis II.
Publicly, NASA continues to say Artemis II will launch in 2024, which would require turning the avionics boxes in 24 months or less. Asked if 2024 was doable, Hu offered an aspirational response.
"I would say that we’re going to try our best to get there," he told Ars. "We’ve got hardware that we’ve got to pull, and then we’ve got to evaluate where we are on the flow, and on the schedule. We’ve got lots of remaining work."
A silver lining?
Every month of schedule slippage is costly to NASA.
Each Artemis mission, consisting of an SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, service module, and ground systems, has a cost of $4.1 billion, according to Martin. Assuming an annual mission cadence, it's reasonable to estimate that every month of delay, for whatever reason, costs $341 million. So NASA's decision to save $100 million last decade could easily result in $1 billion or more in losses today.
Still, it's difficult to place too much blame on Kirasich and other NASA and Lockheed officials for good-faith decisions made in 2014 and 2015. They could not have known that Congress would decide, years later, to build a second launch tower.
Moreover, there is a hidden benefit of an Artemis II schedule slip that NASA officials are reluctant to discuss publicly. This has to do with a sore spot regarding Artemis—NASA's struggle to reach a regular cadence of missions. Before the end of this decade, NASA would like the Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket to be capable of launching a human mission to the Moon once a year to establish a baseline for lunar exploration. It's generally believed that a lower cadence than this is unhealthy for the agency's workforce and lead to a lack of focus and attention to detail. That's not a criticism, just a reality of flying infrequently.
NASA will have at least a two-year gap between Artemis I and Artemis II, with December 2024 being a realistic no-earlier-than date for the first human spaceflight. That's not great, but the bigger worry for some NASA planners is that Artemis III is much further out. It relies not just on Orion and the SLS rocket but on a Human Landing System and new spacesuits for the lunar surface.
The space agency has been funding the development of Orion since 2005 and the SLS rocket since 2011. After more than a decade, they finally have taken flight together. The lunar lander and spacesuits are development programs that are arguably just as complex. NASA only began funding the lunar lander, SpaceX's Starship vehicle, in 2021. It only awarded Axiom Space a contract for spacesuits in September. This leaves comparatively little time for their development.
The Artemis III mission will require all four of these components—the rocket, the spacecraft, the Starship lander, and new spacesuits—to be tested and ready before it flies. Because it used fixed price contracts for the lunar lander and spacesuits, it's safe to assume those projects will be developed more quickly than the cost-plus rocket and spacecraft. But how much quicker?
Publicly, NASA is still holding to the possibility of launching Artemis III—yes, the lunar landing mission—in 2025. That is wholly unrealistic. If we're being honest, a good estimate for the launch of Artemis III is probably 2028.
Therefore, if Artemis II slips into 2025, there will be a longer gap between the first and second missions but a shorter gap between Artemis II and Artemis III, perhaps about three years each.
When I interviewed Kirasich in August, he was weeks away from retirement after a long career as a civil servant. Perhaps for this reason, he was willing to entertain my notion that delaying Artemis II was not the worst strategic idea for NASA.
"I wouldn't say I'm intentionally slowing down Artemis II because I think III is going to move," he said. "You have to push hard on everything. So we’re still pushing hard for Artemis III by the end of 2025. But as you know, it’s development. So if we can make 2025, great. We’re gonna try for as long as we can. A lot of people who have been in this business, like you, like me, say it would not be unrealistic to move past that, but we’re going to keep trying to hit it."
