In four years, the space agency plans to land the first woman ever on the Moon through its Artemis program, which calls for $28 billion in funding through 2025' for Stage I, NASA said in its news release. Artemis is named after the Greek goddess of the moon and twin sister of Apollo. NASA's Apollo 11 mission succeeded in landing the first 12 men on the moon on July 20, 1969.
One billion dollars of the budget will go directly to the development of a commercial human lunar system that will take humans to the moon's surface, NASA' said. A share of $651 million will be used to support the Orion Spacecraft and the rocket for the moon mission—called the Space Launch System or SLS.NASA has already spent at least $11.9 billion on the SLS, which was supposed to be ready by December 2017. The spacecraft is complete, NASA said, and the main stage and four attached rockets are undergoing final tests in preparation for a "critical hot fire test this fall."
NASA's Artemis I mission is on track to launch in 2021 with two test flights around the Moon without astronauts. However, NASA will send robots to the Moon twice in 2021 in order to "send dozens of new science investigations and technology demonstrations".
Artemis II is set to launch in 2023 with astronauts on board in preparation to have Artemis III bring astronauts back to the surface of the Moon. The astronauts will be fitted with modern spacesuits that allow for greater flexibility and movement than the spacesuits used by other Apollo-era astronauts, and they will be tasked with collecting samples and conducting a range of science experiments over the course of nearly seven days.
The Artemis program will search for and potentially explore resources' such as water that can be turned into other usable resources such as oxygen and fuel, and NASA hopes to develop new 'mobility capabilities that will allow astronauts to explore new regions of the Moon.
