Your Moon Ticket Costs 40 Missions
Jared Isaacman wants to put humans back on the Moon by 2028. The White House budget he helped write says NASA can do that on $18.8 billion — the same budget Congress refused to give the agency nine weeks ago.
The Office of Management and Budget released its fiscal year 2027 proposal Monday, requesting $18.8 billion for NASA, a 23 percent cut from the $24.4 billion Congress enacted in January. It is the second consecutive year OMB has asked for $18.8 billion, and the second consecutive year that number has been rejected on Capitol Hill. This time, the agency is asking NASA to gut its science division to pay for it.
Under the proposal, NASA's Science Mission Directorate loses $3.4 billion, a 47 percent reduction. More than 40 missions would be terminated, according to SpaceNews. STEM Engagement (a program funding educational partnerships around space) is zeroed entirely, cutting $143 million that went to universities and museums. The International Space Station loses $1.1 billion in operations funding, and space technology development, which includes critical flight hardware, is cut by $297 million, nearly a third of its current appropriation.
That money flows to Exploration. The Artemis program, which encompasses crewed lunar missions, would receive $8.5 billion, a 10 percent increase. Of that, $175 million funds robotic lunar surface missions as a down payment on a permanent Moon base. OMB also wants to repurpose $2.6 billion previously designated for the Gateway lunar space station and direct it to the base instead.
The split reveals Isaacman's priorities. At an agency event called Ignition in early March, the NASA administrator unveiled a plan calling for a permanent crewed outpost near the lunar south pole. The base alone carries an estimated cost of roughly $20 billion over seven years, The Planetary Society reported. He wants annual crewed lunar landings by 2028, with Artemis III targeted for 2027 and Artemis IV, the first crewed surface mission, targeted for 2028. The Gateway, a NASA-led orbital station intended to serve as a waypoint for lunar missions, would be paused in its current form and the budget asks to redirect its funding to surface infrastructure instead.
Isaacman took over NASA in December, sworn in December 18, 2025. He inherited an agency that had just navigated the departure of roughly 4,000 civil servants, about 20 percent of NASA's workforce, under the Trump administration's deferred resignation program in 2025, as Payload Space reported. He has the backing of a White House that wants a Moon-by-2028 headline before this administration ends. He does not have the money Congress gave the agency in January, and he does not have the civil servants who would have helped build what he's selling.
On the Hill, the reaction has already been sharp. One hundred and two members of the House, both Democrats and Republicans, signed a bipartisan letter led by Representative Don Bacon requesting $9 billion for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, a 25 percent increase over current funding. That number is more than double what OMB proposes to spend on science.
Congress has shown no appetite for this approach in practice. The FY2026 appropriations process ended with NASA receiving $24.44 billion, with the science division funded at $7.25 billion. The Planetary Society documented the advocacy campaign that killed OMB's $18.8 billion request. The FY2027 proposal is the same number. The players have not changed. The outcome, unless Congress has fundamentally shifted, will not either.
The physics of the timeline is also worth examining. Artemis III and Artemis IV have roughly two to three years of schedule runway. The Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket NASA has been building for a decade, has yet to fly crew. Orion, the crew capsule, has had service module issues across two uncrewed test flights. The human landing system contracts with SpaceX are progressing but have not demonstrated their final configuration. Annual crewed lunar landings is a schedule assertion, not a hardware assertion. Isaacman is asking to run a marathon in the time it takes to build the shoes.
None of this is secret, and none of it is unsolvable in theory. The question is whether $18.8 billion in an agency that Congress has already told you is too low buys enough time to close the gap between the plan and the hardware. Last year, Congress answered that question with $24.4 billion and a pointed rejection of the alternative. This year's budget asks the same question again, with less runway and fewer people working the problem.
† Add footnote: "The 2028 Moon landing goal reflects this administration's stated objective. NASA has officially targeted Artemis III for 2027 and Artemis IV (first crewed lunar landing) for 2028, per NASA's March 2026 initiative announcement."