CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A top executive in charge of returning NASA astronauts to the moon is suddenly retiring. After 35 years, NASA announced Wednesday that Associate Administrator Jim Free is leaving the space agency in the coming days.

Four NASA senior officials working on the agency’s moon program, Artemis, will retire this week. These officials were part of the team that succeeded in launching Artemis I as “the first flight test of the integrated Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket,

The US space agency is losing four senior officials, insiders say, including a key defender of the Artemis missions Nasa is losing four key senior officials close to its flagship moon programme, according to people familiar with the changes,