A House appropriations subcommittee—the Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) Committee — advanced a spending bill on July 12, approving $25.04 billion for NASA in Fiscal Year 2022. This would be 7.6% higher than what NASA received in FY2021, but just 1% above the administration’s request of $24.8 billion released in May. The biggest change in the budget is in space exploration, giving almost $400 million above the requested amount, increasing the funding for the Space Launch System (SLS), Exploration Ground Systems and Exploration Research and Development.
But these problems are created for the Artemis or Moon-Mars mission. First, logistics for lunar development. SpaceNews reported July 12 that, despite the overall increase, “at a meeting of the steering committee of the planetary sciences decadal survey July 7, a NASA official said that the limited production rate of the SLS — currently one a year, and not slated to increase to two per year until as late as the early 2030s — meant that the cargo version of SLS would not be available until at least the late 2020s in order to support Artemis missions.”
