NASA would get $26 billion in new budget request

Photo by Loren Grush / The Verge

According to the White House budget documents, President Joe Biden is requesting $26 billion for NASA in the next fiscal year, which is $2 billion more than the space agency received in the current fiscal year. NASA's ambitious initiative to send humans back to the Moon would get a third of the budget if enacted.

Artemis aims to send the first woman and first person of color to the moon by the year 2025. A recent addition to the Artemis master plan is the development of a new lunar lander that can take humans to and from the lunar surface.

NASA is trying to get humans back to the Moon. The first two include a mega-rocket and a crew capsule. The pair have been in development for a decade and are designed to take humans to the vicinity of the Moon. A lunar lander is the third critical item needed to complete the journey. NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract to develop the company's new vehicle into a lander for Artemis.

Last week, NASA announced plans to partner with another commercial company to develop a second lunar lander. The agency was forced to choose one company to build human landing systems for Artemis after only getting a fraction of the funding it asked for. NASA requested funds for the second moon from the beginning, but the exact amount was not disclosed in the new budget documents.

Along with hardware for human missions, the new budget request calls for an additional $480 million to fund robotic lunar missions to help better understand the Moon's terrain. One such mission would include arover to investigate ice deposits that could provide future astronauts with fuel and oxygen.

The White House is setting aside $224 million to encourage the development of new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, where the International Space Station currently resides. The Biden administration announced at the end of last year that they would continue operations through the year 2030. When the program ends, the agency wants private space stations to be ready as replacements for astronauts.

Russia has agreed to operate the International Space Station through the year 2024. The lifetime of the International Space Station is in question with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The head of Russia's space program made hostile threats about ending the country's partnership with the International Space Station after the United States imposed sanctions on Russia. Since the space station is designed to be run by both Russia and the United States, the country's departure after 2024 could bring an early end to it. While NASA is partnering with three private companies to develop space stations, those projects are not likely to be ready for several years.

Within the budget, nearly $8 billion has been set aside for science, with more than $2 billion going toward Earth science and the study of climate change with satellites. The White House wants to create a new Earth System Observatory that will provide a three-dimensional,holistic view of Earth that is needed to better understand natural hazards and climate change.

$822 million is being set aside for NASA to work on getting samples back from Mars. Last year, the agency successfully landed its Perseverance rover on the Red Planet, a bot designed to collect samples of Martian terrain and leave them on the surface of the planet. NASA and the European Space Agency are working together to develop a suite of vehicles that can bring samples back to Earth, so that scientists can study them in greater detail and possibly understand if Mars ever hosted life.

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