NASA’s human Moon lander program finally gets full funding in new budget bill

Photo by Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images

The new spending bill would provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been under funded over the last few years. NASA's program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations.

The new bill will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022, and NASA will receive $24.041 billion. President Joe Biden's budget request called for $24.8 billion, but NASA's portion is about $800 million less. NASA's total funding for fiscal year 2021, which ended in June, was $23.27 billion.

There are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety, despite the fact that Congress's plan wouldn't fully meet the president's budget request. The full $1.195 billion that the request was for would be given by the bill. NASA wants to send the first woman and first person of color to the moon as part of its Artemis program. Congress was reluctant to give NASA money for the lander. Appropriators only gave $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion.

NASA made some changes to its Artemis plans because of the cash shortfall. The space agency wanted to choose at least two commercial companies to build human lunar landers for Artemis as a way to spark competition and have more options. The company that NASA chose to develop its Starship vehicle into a lander was only able to get a fraction of the money for the program.

Congress wants NASA to give a publicly available plan explaining how it will ensure safety, redundancy, and competition in the human lunar lander if it gets money for it this year. Congress wants NASA to provide a detailed list of resources it needs to meet its goals. An earlier version of a House appropriation bill expressed concern at the agency's decision to pick just one company to develop a human lander.

NASA's program to develop a successor to the International Space Station has been notoriously underfunded. The Biden administration announced plans to extend operations through 2030. Considering the current circumstances, it's not clear whether Russia will join that. NASA hopes that the private space industry will develop their own commercial space stations once the space station program ends. In the post-ISS era, they could provide platforms for NASA's astronauts to visit.

NASA has been unable to get money for this program. Congress only appropriated $17 million for the fiscal years of 2020 and 2021. NASA requested $101 million for this year, and the appropriationators allotted the full amount in the new bill.

Funding for NASA's other programs is stable. NASA's biggest human spaceflight projects, the Space Launch System rocket and the crew capsule, would receive their full funding amount, with a little more than requested. The budget for science is $7.614 billion, but it is up from last year. The full $653 million requested by the space agency would be used to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. NASA's SOFIA program, a flying observatory on a modified Boeing 747, still receives funding despite calls for its cancelation.

There are gaps in other areas. Even the big-budget items, including the human lunar lander and commercial space station development, can't use all of their money just yet. The bill states that NASA's administrator must submit a multi-year plan for Artemis and NASA's Moon efforts along with funding estimates in order to receive 40 percent of the allotted amounts. Some NASA programs are seeing a boost in funding, but there is still more work to be done before that money can be put to use.