Since Vice President Mike Pence slashed NASA’s timeline to return to the moon by four years, the agency has been working to secure the financing that would make an accelerated lunar landing even a possibility worth exploring.
After all, it’s not the first time an administration has suggested returning to the moon. Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush both tried to make the next giant leap on the lunar surface, and both saw their plans grounded.
During a speech in March, Pence echoed the Bushes’ lunar ambitions and gave NASA a tighter deadline: The administration wanted to see boots on the moon by 2024, not 2028 as originally planned.
Financing is the first major piece that has to fall into place for lunar ambitions to leave the drawing board, and on Monday evening, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine finally had an answer to that multi-million dollar question.
In an amendment to the fiscal year 2020 budget, the White House requested an additional $1.6 billion for NASA to begin — in earnest — speeding up its lunar mission. And with new direction comes a new name. NASA is doubling down on its resolve to have a modern Apollo mission by naming the new program after the Greek God’s twin sister: Artemis.
Bridenstine said Monday that NASA gave the White House a figure for what it thought it would need in the coming fiscal year to make a lunar landing by 2024 possible and the administration gave NASA what it requested.
But during a keynote address Tuesday at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C., Bridenstine clarified that NASA’s request is “at the low end of what we believe it takes to accomplish this.”
“It is also true that this is year one and year one, if you look at any kind of development in the history of NASA, it follows a traditional bell curve,” he said, in that the funding typically increases as the agency gets closer to the mission date.
But that hasn’t been the case historically with attempted moon programs, which is a large part of the reason they’ve stalled. The last time humans visited the lunar surface was in 1972.
During the Apollo program, with the tensions of the Cold War as its backdrop, NASA’s budget ballooned to accommodate the development needed to reach the objective set by then President John F. Kennedy at the start of the decade. From 1960 to 1961, the budget grew by 84 percent.
It grew by an additional 89 percent year-over-year in 1962 and another 101 percent by 1963. At the height of the Apollo program, in the mid-1960s, NASA’s budget accounted for more than 4 percent of the national budget. Today, it makes up less than half of one percent.
“$1.6 billion is a down payment and a relatively small down payment, probably,” said Roger Launius, NASA’s former chief historian. “Maybe it’s the first of several plus-ups that will come over the next five years, but if the administration is intent on doing it by 2024, they will need to ramp up the activity.”
John Logsdon, professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, called the budget request a “reasonable start,” but what will really be telling is the budget proposals in the next several years.
It’s likely NASA will have to request considerably more money to in the next two or three years for a lunar landing to be feasible on the current timeline. But for now, it appears the agency is still taking a more conservative approach to avoid giving Congress sticker shock, said Laura Seward Forczyk, owner of space consulting firm Astrolytical.
“The strategy NASA is taking right now is to take a more incremental approach,” she said. “This does not seem like enough money to conduct the Artemis lunar program given everything else that needs to go into it.”
But, she cautioned, Congress could come back and give NASA more money to complete the mission — or less. It will be up to Capitol Hill to approve the final budget.
Legislators will be coming against one major wrinkle when considering the money to NASA, though. According to the Associated Press, the money for the NASA budget amendment will come from surplus Pell Grant money that is otherwise destined to help low-income students pay for college. The administration said the redirecting of funds won’t affect those currently receiving Pell Grants.
Seward Forczyk called it a “miscalculation” that could hamper discussions moving forward.
“This is going to serve to polarize,” she said. “That is going to be a distraction where instead of discussing the merits of the lunar program, they would discuss where the money should come from.”
NASA’s budget request
For the first year, the bulk of NASA’s request will go to development of a lunar lander system, which the agency plans to purchase through contracts with commercial companies. Several are working on lander concepts, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which last week unveiled its planned lander, Blue Moon.
“I love this, it’s the right thing to do,” Bezos said of the administration’s moon vision. “We can help meet that timeline, but only because we started three years ago.”
The other part of the architecture calls for an orbiting space station around the moon, called the Gateway, which NASA has been touting for several years. Under the budget request, Gateway would get $321 million less in funding, so that the money that goes into it in 2020 is only focused on “just the initial components needed to land on the moon,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations at NASA.
The other two major aspects of NASA’s moonshot, which have received blow back for cost overruns and delays, will also get a boost in funding. Under the amended budget, the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion astronaut capsule, will receive $651 million for the two programs in addition to the $1.78 billion for SLS and $1.3 billion for Orion already allocated in NASA’s original budget request.
Increases for SLS and Orion will mean more work at Kennedy Space Center, where many of the components for the rocket and spacecraft are being built and from which SLS will launch.
“The Space Coast is more central to human lunar exploration plans than it ever has been,” Seward Forczyk said. Commercial industry and government alike are expected to play major roles in the effort, both of which have a strong presence on the Cape, too.
And, as the future of the lunar program continues to develop, it does so at a time when the growing commercial industry and the international space community have their eyes set on the moon, including major players such as China and Russia.
“At least in modern times,” Seward Forczyk said, “there is unprecedented unity internationally with support on the moon.”
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