NASA chief says budget keeps Artemis moon program on track

The Biden administration's $24.8 billion fiscal 2022 budget request for NASA will keep the agency on track to send the the first woman and the next man to the moon as early as 2024, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Friday, but he warned that target date is far from certain.

"Space is hard," he said. "As you see the development of various space systems in the past, there have been delays. When you go farther and farther away from the Earth with new technologies, we have seen historically, delays. Will they occur? I can't answer that question. "I know the goal is 2024. But I think we have to be brutally realistic, that history would tell us, because space development is so hard, that there could be delays to that schedule for the first demonstration flight of landing humans and returning them safely to Earth."