NASA will not send an astronaut mission to the moon until 2025 at the earliest (File)

NASA will not send an astronaut mission to the moon until 2025 at the earliest, the U.S. space agency’s administrator said on Tuesday, pushing back by at least a year a timeline originally set under former President Donald Trump.

“We are estimating no earlier than 2025 for Artemis 3, which would be the human lander on the first demonstration lander that was won in the competition by SpaceX,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a teleconference.

Nelson was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the space agency. NASA is making plans to send humans to the moon for the first time since the 1970s.

Biden had agreed to continue a program, known as Artemis, that began under Trump to put astronauts on the moon by 2024, intended as a prelude to an even-more-ambitious human Mars landing in the future.

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