NEW YORK, July 31. /TASS/. The US plans to land astronauts on the Moon before the end of Donald Trump's presidency, in three and a half years, Sean Duffy, US secretary of transportation and acting National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) director, said.

"Next year we are going to go back to the Moon. We're not going to land. We're going to go around the Moon, and then about a year later, we're going to land back on the Moon, under Donald Trump's tenure," he said in an interview with the Fox News TV channel. "And then after that, we're going to set up a base camp. We're going to stay on the Moon. And what we learn on the Moon is what's going to take us to Mars," Duffy added.

In the spring of 2019, NASA announced the Artemis lunar program project, consisting of three stages. The first of them (Artemis I) envisaged an unmanned flight of the Orion spacecraft around the Moon and its return to Earth. The flight took place from November 16 to December 11, 2022. The second stage (Artemis II) is a crewed flight around the Earth's natural satellite. In the third stage (Artemis III), NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon and send them to Mars.

Initially Artemis II and Artemis III were planned for 2022 and 2024, respectively. However, those dates have been repeatedly pushed back. Last December NASA moved them to April 2026 and mid-2027.