Why NASA Wants to Go Back to the Moon
WiredAug 12, 2022
NASA has called off its second attempt to launch its moon rocket in five days it was unable to repair a fuel leak discovered during tanking.
The second attempt at lift-off was expected at 2:17 p.m. EST Sat., but by 4 p.m. the launch was officially scrubbed. A third attempt is now potentially planned for late Sept. or October.
Eventually, Nasa will return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, including the first woman to do it. As part of a long-term plan for a Moon to Mars exploration in the next 20 years, the Artemis project is an exciting test to see how close humanity is to reaching much further than the Moon in the decades to come.
Despite the long-term plan for the Artemis program this decade, only now is Nasa creating a single management structure to handle its entirety. Whilst the intentions are exciting, there has clearly been a lack of administration that may have been left too late to fix before the planned personnel moon landing in 2025.
There's a 50% chance that NASA will next land astronauts on the Moon by August 2029, according to the Metaculus Prediction Community.