Published • loading... • Updated
NASA may not have new spacesuits in time for Moon landing
The watchdog said delays and the loss of Collins Aerospace leave NASA with one spacesuit contractor and little schedule margin for testing.
- On Monday, the NASA Office of Inspector General warned that spacesuit delays could push the 2028 Artemis moon landing into the 2030s, with suits potentially unavailable until 2031.
- NASA allocated $3.1 billion to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in 2022, but the agency's firm-fixed-price strategy conflicted with the developmental nature of the equipment, leading Collins Aerospace to drop out in 2024.
- Testing new suits on the International Space Station is planned before 2030, yet without standard interfaces, commercial designs may require costly hardware adjustments to the Blue Moon lander.
- NASA could appoint new suppliers, with SpaceX, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and ILC Dover working on alternatives, or risk reverting to the 'problematic' Extravehicular Mobility Unit suits if Axiom fails to meet deadlines.
- Delays threaten Artemis IV and subsequent missions to the moon or Mars, a situation Cathleen Lewis of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum described as the space suit being "historically, the last piece of the human spaceflight puzzle.
Insights by Ground AI
24 Articles
24 Articles
NASA looks at the Artemis III mission to bring astronauts into Earth orbit, thus testing the ability to meet and link between the Orion capsule and the commercial spacecraft required for Artemis IV landing in 2028. Until then, the US agency continues to test key technologies to integrate them into the central stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, while SpaceX and Blue Origin continue to develop the landing modules. However, a recent NAS…
·Madrid, Spain
Read Full ArticleCoverage Details
Total News Sources24
Leaning Left5Leaning Right1Center10Last UpdatedBias Distribution63% Center
Bias Distribution
- 63% of the sources are Center
63% Center
L 31%
C 63%
Factuality
To view factuality data please Upgrade to Premium



















