The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration stated difficulties in achieving this goal
NEW YORK, August 10. /TASS/. The head of the American company SpaceX, Elon Musk, offered the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) assistance in developing spacesuits.
Earlier on Tuesday, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said that the landing of astronauts on the Moon in 2024 is not possible due, in particular, to delays in the development of spacesuits. "SpaceX can do this if necessary," Musk wrote on Twitter, commenting on the publication outlining the findings of the NASA inspector.
Martin previously clarified that, according to NASA's plans, the first two new xEMU (Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit) spacesuits ready for flight should be manufactured by November 2024, but the management "faces significant difficulties in achieving this goal." We are talking about a delay in the planned work, which has already reached 20 months. It is associated with a lack of funding, the consequences of the pandemic and technical problems. Taking into account a number of requirements, the report notes, " the spacesuits will be ready for flights no earlier than April 2025." Moreover, by the time there are two ready-to-fly spacesuits, NASA "will spend more than a billion dollars on the development and assembly of next-generation spacesuits."
In the spring of 2019, NASA announced the project of the Artemis program, which will consist of three stages. The first of them (Artemis 1) provides for an unmanned flight of the Orion spacecraft installed on the Space Launch System rocket around the Moon and its return to Earth. The second stage (Artemis 2) is a flyby of a natural satellite of the Earth with a crew on board. At the third stage of the mission (Artemis 3), NASA expects to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024, and then send them to Mars approximately in the mid-2030s.