Congress prepares to continue throwing money at NASA’s Space Launch System

Congress will pour billions more dollars into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its associated architecture, even as NASA science missions remain vulnerable to cuts.

Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees recommend earmarking around $25 billion for NASA for the next fiscal year (FY 24), which is in line with the amount of funding the agency received this year (FY 23). However, both branches of Congress recommend increasing the portion of that funding that would go toward the Artemis program and its transportation cornerstones, SLS and the Orion crew capsule.

Those programs would receive $7.9 billion per the House bill or $7.74 billion per the Senate bill, an increase of about $440 million from FY 2023 levels.

Meanwhile, science missions are looking at cuts of around that same amount, with the House recommending a budget of $7.38 billion versus $7.79 billion in FY 2023.

The increase in funding is just the latest sign that Congress is not backing down from the mission architecture of the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon by 2025. That…