THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA predicts delay: Starship grounded pending investigation.

According to a senior NASA official, the agency’s goal of returning astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years may be delayed yet again due to the Federal Aviation Administration’s investigation into the midair explosion of a SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy on April 20.

An autonomous flight termination system (AFTS) aboard the two-stage Starship-Super Heavy triggered the explosion, about four minutes into the prototype’s first orbital test flight, after the vehicle veered out of control after the two stages failed to separate. The mission called for Super Heavy to detach from Starship shortly after launch from Boca Chica and land in the Gulf of Mexico, while Starship was to have orbited once around the Earth before landing in the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility near Hawaii.

The incident automatically triggered an FAA investigation, and orbital flight tests from Boca Chica are on hold until the investigation is complete. NASA in 2021 awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop Starship as the human landing system (HLS) that will put U.S. astronauts back on the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 as part of the space agency’s Artemis program. The first moon landing of astronauts under the Artemis III mission was to have taken place in December 2025.

However, as reported June 9 by SpacePolicyOnline.com, Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, told a joint meeting of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and the Space Studies Board of the U.S. National National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that the Artemis III mission now isn’t likely to happen before 2026.

I’m not sure anyone thought Artemis III would be ready by 2026 even before today’s news.