NASA announced this week that it was delaying the first manned spaceflight of its Orion spacecraft to April 2023. He added that eventually this will enable humans to travel to the Red Planet, and NASA was committed to making this real by building the spacecraft and other necessary elements.

“Every day, teams around the country are moving at full speed to get ready for Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) when we will flight test Orion and SLS together in the proving ground of space, far away from the safety of Earth”, said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Nasa told reporters in a teleconference that delays “historically pop up” on most missions, at that its August 2021 date for the first crewed missions as now overly optimistic. However, the first crewed flight of the craft – might have to wait a while longer.

Back in December 2014 when NASA conducted a successful test of an uncrewed Orion capsule, it managed to collect vital data and the agency said that this allowed its engineers to incorporate improvements to minimize risks associated with deep space flight and re-entry while also carrying out critical design improvements for next flights. However, there are still factors that need to be straightened out, such as management issues, technical drawbacks and budgetary problems (this is the most expensive project in US space exploration history) before the agency’s plan can be carried out safely and efficiently. Development difficulties means future delays to NASA’s deep space exploration program were a possibility. NASA researchers hope to use the information gleaned from these initial missions as it prepares for its first manned flight in 2023.

Before astronauts fly on Orion, they are expected to launch from KSC and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on commercial capsules bound for the worldwide Space Station in low Earth orbit.

NASA plans to spend $6.seventy seven billion between October and April 2023 for 2 of the brand new Orion capsules, that are at the moment beneath growth by lead contractor Lockheed Martin Corp.

Orion survived the transition, shifting from rides on the canceled Ares I rocket to NASA’s Saturn V-class Space Launch System rocket. Didn’t we go to the moon and invent the space program from whole cloth in 9 years?

The delay was attributed to a “rigorous technical and programmatic review,” which mentioned that NASA is keeping the project in line with current “funding levels in the president’s budget request.”