NASA will discuss its allocated budget for fiscal year 2024 during a news conference on Monday (March 13), and you can watch it live.
The White House unveiled its 2024 federal budget request on Thursday (March 9), revealing that it had earmarked $27.2 billion for NASA in the coming fiscal year — $1.8 billion more than the agency got for 2023.
The document released on Thursday was a "skinny budget," an overview lacking many granular details. Those details will come with the full budget release, which is expected to occur Monday morning — and NASA will discuss them in the news conference.
The event will start at 1 p.m. EST (1700 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency.
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The skinny budget did reveal some interesting specifics about the budget request. For example, the proposed NASA budget allocates $8.1 billion for the Artemis program of moon exploration, which aims to establish a research outpost on the lunar surface by the end of the 2020s.
The budget request also gives $949 million to NASA for its Mars sample-return project, which is a collaboration with the European Space Agency. This effort is already well underway, thanks to NASA's life-hunting, sample-collecting Perseverance rover.
Intriguingly, the budget request "also supports NASA's contribution toward U.S. collaboration with the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover mission, which had previously been a cooperative mission with Russia," the document states.
The life-hunting ExoMars rover, named Rosalind Franklin, had been slated to launch atop a Russian rocket and roll onto the Red Planet from a Russian-built lander. But the collaboration fell apart after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, leaving ESA to look for new partnerships. The skinny budget doesn't go into detail about "NASA's contribution" to ExoMars; perhaps that will be divulged with the release of the full budget request on Monday.
NASA isn't guaranteed to get $27.2 billion in fiscal year 2024, which begins on Oct. 1 of this year: Congress has the power of the purse in Washington, so it must approve a budget for it to be enacted.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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