ITrip to the Moon? It may be postponed due to spacesuits not yet ready. The Artemis program, designed to bring astronauts back to the moon in 2024, risks a sharp slowdown because the suits for extra-vehicular activities may not be ready by the scheduled date. This is stated in the report of the Inspectorate General (OIG) of NASA, published on 10 August. Due to delays in the development of space suits, it is unrealistic that NASA can take humans to the moon in 2024, the document reads. NASA’s current program to produce next-generation spacesuits, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU), for November 2024, but the agency is facing several difficulties in achieving this goal. The roadmap is about 20 months behind in the design, verification and testing of the moon suits, the report continues.
Work on these new suits started 14 years ago, but despite a prototype it was readyo already since 2019 and 420 million dollars have been spent so far, the xEmu to date have not yet reached the safety standards necessary to be used in space. According to the inspectorate, the first two suits will not be ready, at best, before April 2025, by which time NASA will have spent over a billion dollars on this goal. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, offered his company’s collaboration via Twitter to make a possible spacesuit, writing simply: SpaceX could do it if necessary.