** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

NASA has delayed the Artemis 2 and 3 missions

Artemis 2 is now set for no earlier than September 2025

The Artemis 3 delay is to give Space X more time to demonstrate that it can refuel a starship in LEO and successfully land a starship on the Moon. Its delayed to no earlier than September 2026

Now for the Artemis 2 delay, that has nothing to do with Space X. The delay is because the Orion had some issue with its valves during Artemis 1 and also when the lander was doing its re-entry burn some of the heat shields came off - Orion still had enough heat shields to survive, obviously, but the delay is to fix the valve and heat shield issue before putting humans onboard


I've rewatched that video to see if I can spot the heatshield coming off and the only thing I noticed is around 4:45 you start to see black stuff flying off Orion and then two object appear behind burning up in the atmosphere so maybe it's that



 
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Elon Musk has revealed the reason why the Starship 2nd stage blew up just before reaching orbit during the last test.

Elon says they wanted to simulate a live payload and the way they did it was by filling the 2nd stage with additional liquid oxygen to increase the ship's weight. And then they wanted to dump the liquid oxygen as they're getting into orbit as they needed to lose the payload before re-entering the atmosphere but as they started venting the liquid oxygen, this started a fire which led to the explosion.

To prevent this, on the next Starship test instead of filling it with a liquid oxygen payload, they are going to put an actual payload on it, whatever that means and Elon says he's very confident they will be in orbit this time
 
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Seems like it soft-landed, but they're not sure of the current status of the lander (like which way up it is).
 
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