Lawmakers seek to accelerate asteroid finder and want more Mars helicopters

Enlarge / NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a closeup taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This week, the US House of Representatives will release a detailed blueprint of its budget for Commerce, Justice, Science, and related agencies, including information about NASA's budget. The House proposes to provide 25.446 billion for NASA for fiscal year 2023, which is $1.4 billion more than what NASA received this year but $527 million less than what the agency asked for.

In advance of its release, Ars obtained a copy of the 208-page budget blueprint, which represents the opening salvo in the process of funding the federal government. The Senate must still release its budget blueprint later this summer, and then the House and Senate must reconcile their budgets. This may not happen until the fall or winter, after the start of the new fiscal year on October 1, 2022. (Update: The document has now been released).

However, the preliminary document nonetheless provides some sense of lawmaker priorities. And in general, the House budget writers appear to largely support NASA's activities, including the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon this decade.