NASA Gets a $10 Billion Windfall From the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’
The pork-barrel spending of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) doesn’t just fund terrestrial programs like military spending and immigration enforcement, it also rockets taxpayer money to outer space. Under the bill, which the president signed into law on Friday, NASA will receive nearly $10 billion, $7.4 billion of which will be allocated to finance the agency’s Moon to Mars program.Â
The Moon to Mars program launched in November 2022 to establish humanity’s presence “on and around the Moon before embarking on the first human missions to Mars” in the coming decades, according to NASA. To that end, the OBBBA allocates $700 million for the “procurement…of a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter,” $2.6 billion for the Gateway lunar space station, and $4.1 billion for the Artemis IV and V missions, currently scheduled to launch in 2028 and 2029, respectively.
The prospect of a lunar colony and a Mars expedition may seem intriguing, but the OBBBA’s funding for these objectives will likely lead to even more wasteful spending at NASA.
Since its launch in 2017, the Artemis program has completed just one mission: Artemis I, a 25-day unmanned lunar orbital flight in December 2022. Artemis II and III, which will actually carry humans to the moon, are scheduled for April 2026 and mid-2027, respectively. Though it’s yet to transport anyone to space, the cost of the Artemis program is expected to reach $93 billion through FY 2025.
In July, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that three Artemis projects were responsible for nearly $7 billion in cost overruns since the agency began measuring the cost of NASA’s major projects in 2009. This accounts for roughly half of all cost overruns across NASA’s 53 current projects, according to the GAO.
The Gateway lunar space station, with a baseline cost estimate of $5.3 bill
Article from Reason.com
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