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The odds that NASA will send humans back to the Moon by 2024 are high, not zero, but pretty close.
Probably the biggest short-term impediment facing the space agency is funding. Specifically, NASA requires an additional $ 3.2 billion in fiscal year 2021 to allow contractors to begin building one or more landers to carry astronauts to the surface of the Moon from high lunar orbit. This is a 12 percent increase from NASA’s overall budget.
Fiscal year 2021 begins in one week, on October 1. The US Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” that will keep the government funded until December 11. By that time, after the 2020 elections, it is expected that the House and Senate can agree on a budget that would fund priorities for the remainder of the fiscal year.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said this week that funding for the Artemis Moon program before the end of this year would be feasible. “If we can do that before Christmas, we are still on track for a moon landing in 2024,” he said in a call with reporters.
The real question is whether Congress, if it can agree to a budget for fiscal year 2021 in this very partisan era, is so inclined to support lander funding. This is a completely new program that will eventually require many billions of dollars to come to fruition. In deliberations earlier this year, the US House of Representatives provided just $ 600 million, or less than a fifth of the budget NASA said it needs for next year.
So says the Senate
Wednesday provided the first opportunity to assess, publicly at least, whether the Senate will further support the Artemis Program and its aggressive 2024 goal.
In his opening statement, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA’s budget, Jerry Moran, had kind words to say about Artemis. But he noted that NASA’s request for a larger budget came amid the backdrop of a pandemic and the resulting financial crisis.
“Our world has changed significantly since the initial release of the budget, and I look forward to discussing how NASA is adapting to our new and unprecedented environment as it moves forward with Artemis,” Moran said.
The highest-ranking Democratic member of the committee seemed to support even less. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire noted that NASA’s proposed budget again cut funding for STEM education and did not support the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope. “We know that NASA has to be more than just a Moonshot,” he chided Bridenstine. Shaheen called the sought 12 percent budget increase “generous”.
Later, during a question-and-answer period, Moran asked Bridenstine if it would be more practical for NASA to quickly pick a single contractor to build the lander so that the agency could focus its resources.
Bridenstine rejected this, citing the value of the competition. Earlier this year, the space agency selected three teams, led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, to develop the lander proposals and tell NASA how much government funding they thought would be needed to complete the projects by 2024. With This information, NASA plans to “select downward” from this initial group of three landing teams in February.
One, two or three?
There have been rumors in the aerospace community, in recent months, that one or more of the landing teams are pushing for full funding in this February downline selection by hinting that the other teams cannot meet the technical challenge.
But Bridenstine seems committed to moving forward with two or more teams. “I’m worried about going down to one,” he said. “When you eliminate the competition, you end up with programs that are inevitably delayed and face excessive costs.” With at least two vendors competing, Bridenstine said, NASA would end up in a “virtuous cycle” in which teams are pouring their own money and pushing as hard as they can.
As a model of recent success, he cited the commercial crew program, in which SpaceX and Boeing competed to get astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX won that competition and did so within the “fixed price” contract that NASA awarded in 2014. Having two competitors spurred companies to keep moving forward despite technical challenges, Bridenstine said.
While considering the possibility of funding Artemis, lawmakers will finally have some hard figures to consider for the program. In an “Artemis Plan” document released Monday, NASA for the first time put specific dollar figures on the projected cost of landing on the Moon by 2024: $ 27.9 billion. $ 16.1 billion of that would go towards the cost of developing an “initial” Human Landing System. Here are the funding requirements through fiscal year 2025.