The US space agency NASA has postponed a planned landing of US astronauts on the moon until at least 2025.
"Returning to the Moon as quickly and safely as possible is an agency priority," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a press conference on Tuesday.
He noted that the first human landing under the agency's Artemis programme "is likely no earlier than 2025."
The Artemis timeline originally called for US astronauts to land on the moon for the first time in almost 50 years by 2024. This was announced by the Trump administration in 2019.
Because the mission has already significantly exceeded its budget in terms of money and time, observers have long doubted that this schedule will be adhered to.
Legal disputes are another factor behind the delay. After Elon Musk's space company SpaceX received an order from NASA to develop the first commercial lunar landing device in April, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin filed a lawsuit which was tied up in the courts for months.
A federal court finally ruled in NASA's favour on Friday, and the US space agency said it would keep working with SpaceX.
The Artemis mission is to bring four astronauts into lunar orbit in the Orion spacecraft, where two of them will transfer to a SpaceX landing vehicle for the final approach to the moon.
The United States is the only country so far to bring humans to the moon, landing twelve astronauts on the Earth's satellite in its Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.
