President Donald Trump on Jan. 12 issued his “Executive Order on Promoting Small Modular Reactors for National Defense and Space Exploration.” Two weeks earlier Congress passed a Fiscal 2021 government budget; that budget provided NASA with just $850 million for development of a lunar lander for the Artemis Moon-to-Mars mission, after Administrator James Bridenstine had made clear that in this, the third full year of Project Artemis, $3.3 billion was needed for the so far completely unfunded lunar lander, the core of the Moon mission.
The Washington Post (Jan. 12) and New York Times (Jan. 13) were quick to gloat and assert that Artemis’s goal of “landing the first woman and next man on the Moon in 2024” was now dead. Bridenstine, who is resigning Jan. 21, would say only that it “will make it that much more difficult to keep to the objective.” Joe Biden and key Congressional Democrats have said for a year that they opposed the 2024 target and wanted NASA to aim for 2028, as if scientific crash programs could be put into low gear and still achieve breakthroughs.
