CNN Business reports that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, Artemis, will cost $20-30 billion over the next 5 years. Until now, no one in the Administration has been willing to say publicly what the cost estimate is, citing only the $1.6 billion FY2020 supplemental budget request as a down payment.

CNN’s Jackie Wattles and Rachel Crane say that Bridenstine told them the number yesterday and comment that it is “less expensive that some had predicted.”

The $20-30 billion would be about $4-6 billion per year. In April, Eric Berger at Ars Technia reported that NASA told the White House that it would be $8 billion per year for the next 5 years, but Bridenstine told the Senate Appropriations Committee that “It is nowhere close to that amount.”

Congress has been waiting for that cost estimate as it readies both a new NASA authorization bill and a FY2020 appropriations bill. The House Appropriations Committee has completed action on NASA’s FY2020 request already in the Commerce-Justice-Sciene (CJS) bill. It ignored the $1.6 billion supplemental request. The House plans to take up the CJS bill as part of its second “minibus” appropriations bill next week.

A top Republican on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) tried to elicit an answer about Artemis’s cost from NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) head Thomas Zurbuchen at a hearing earlier this week, but without success. (SMD is involved in only a small part of the Artemis program. Artemis is managed by the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.)

A NASA spokesman confirmed the CNN report re Bridenstine’s comments.