
(Image: © NASA)
NASA’s Artemis program is an effort to place astronauts on the lunar surface and develop an ongoing presence there. The program’s name is derived from Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon and twin sister to Apollo, whose namesake program first brought crews to our natural satellite 50 years ago.
The Artemis program is a renaming of several earlier activities NASA was already undertaking to return humans to the moon. These were mandated by President Trump’s Space Policy Directive 1, which tasked the agency with focusing on missions to the moon. Earlier this year, vice president Mike Pence set an ambitious deadline to land humans at the lunar south pole by 2024.
How much will Artemis cost?
How many of these impressive plans will actually see fruition is difficult to tell at this point. Cost estimates are still being refined and the overall price tag of Artemis remains unknown. The Apollo program’s budget ended up being a total of $23.6 billion in 1973 dollars, according to NASA, the equivalent of more than $136 billion today. That means each Apollo moon landing cost around $22.6 billion in 2019 dollars. President Trump has recently sought an addition $1.6 billion for the Artemis program, on top of the $21 billion already allocated to NASA, but has yet to get the money approved by Congress.










