US to speed up astronaut return to Moon: Target 2024

washington — Donald Trump’s administration announced on Tuesday it was speeding up plans to send US astronauts back to the Moon, from 2028 to 2024, calling for a “spark of urgency” to prevail over delays that have plagued Nasa’s lunar return plans.

“It is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the Moon, within the next five years,” Vice-President Mike Pence vowed in a speech in Huntsville, Alabama, the “Rocket City” where American launchers have been built since the 1960s.

“Let me be clear, the first woman and the next man on the Moon will both be American astronauts launched by American rockets from American soil,” he said, echoing previous declarations by Nasa chief Jim Bridenstine that a woman could be the next human to set foot on the Moon.

The first manned Moon flight since the last Apollo mission in 1972 had been scheduled for 2028.

But the programme has encountered frustrating delays in the development of a new heavy rocket for the Moon missions, the Space Launch System (SLS), whose first uncrewed flight was recently pushed back beyond 2020.

Within months of taking office, President Trump made clear his desire to reinvigorate the American space agency, which had been somewhat adrift since the 2011 end of its shuttle programme.

In 2017, Trump set a goal of returning to the Moon as a first step before moving on to human exploration of Mars. Nasa then adopted a schedule of launching a manned mission to the Moon in 2028.

“That’s just not good enough. We’re better than that. It took us eight years to get to the moon, the first time, 50 years ago, when we had never done it before,” said Pence.

“It shouldn’t take us 11 years to get back.” In his speech, Pence criticised the ‘bureaucratic inertia’ and ‘paralysis by analysis’ that he said had resulted in the SLS delays.

Included in that criticism, though unnamed, was Boeing, who is building the SLS rocket that was scheduled to launch for its first flight in 2020, until Nasa recently announced it would not be ready in time.