Artemis astronauts engage in lunar surface operations a short distance from a generic lander and rover in this NASA artist’s concept.

While moving up the date of a human lunar landing may have been well intentioned, providing the urgency needed to make decisions and more forward, budgets that have not kept pace with projections and inevitable future technical problems make it unlikely NASA can get everything in place to land humans on the moon in 2024.

This post is only available to members.

Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...