Project Artemis has cleared two hurdles that felled prior attempts to return humans to the Moon: the first was surviving a Presidential transition in 2021; the second, in 2024, was securing a congressional budget that grew funding for Artemis despite a decrease in NASA’s topline. The diverse political coalition behind Artemis has proven resilient, and will likely do so again. That doesn’t spare Artemis from feeling the pinch, though its overall funding position remains strong. Compared to 2024, Artemis’s budget would decrease by only ½ of 1%. Funding does shift around some, with Orion and SLS’s shift into production status freeing up funds used to bump up funding for new lunar spacesuits (+14%) and continue the Gateway station development, and $1.9 billion to support the two companies creating the new human lunar landers, SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Of course, inflation impacts Artemis as much as any other directorate at NASA, and a flat budget relative to 2024 still amounts to a loss of nearly $200 million in buying power. Artemis, however, is structured quite differently than NASA’s science missions, having leveraged fixed-price or services-based contracts for the majority of its components. This means that Artemis is, in theory, somewhat protected from inflation, as these contracts generally place the onus of cost growth on the industry partner, not NASA. The SLS and Orion projects are moving out of development and into a regular production cadence, meaning that their costs are unlikely to spike, barring some significant hardware failure or as-of-yet-undiscovered design flaw.
Conclusions
This is not a growth budget. Most projects continue, few are started, and some are cancelled or delayed. The Biden Administration was placed in a difficult position due to the spending limits imposed by Congress, but still made questionable choices that will exacerbate festering funding problems — particularly in its science directorate. Inflation further undermines NASA’s upcoming agenda; even modest-seeming funding downturns are more painful as a consequence.
Congress, though the ultimate source of NASA’s budgetary problems due to the 2023 spending caps, can also be the solution. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate budget must grow relative to inflation, not shrink, to both ensure the nation’s continued leadership in space and the pursuit of transformative scientific discoveries, as well as maintain the cohesion and stability of its scientific and engineering workforce.
In ideal circumstances, we’d want to see a Science Mission Directorate budget closer to $9 billion, a modest 4% increase over its inflation-adjusted peak in 2020. That would enable the pursuit of all top-priority science projects across the science portfolio, along with strong support for fundamental research and small- and medium-class missions in all divisions.
That is an optimistic scenario given the spending limits already in law and the upcoming election season in the U.S., which will very soon come to dominate the political process and very likely delay any budgetary resolution until late 2024 or early 2025.
The Planetary Society will engage with Congress in the coming year to address these budgetary shortfalls and to ensure direction and support for top-priority missions within a balanced NASA science directorate.