Over the last two months, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has repeatedly said the agency's ambitious new Artemis plan for sending humans to the Moon in 2024 will not require raiding other areas of its budget, such as its broad array of science programs, technology research, or aeronautics work.

The reason, he said, is simple. The surest way to torpedo support for a program inside the agency is to take funding from someone else to pay for the new plan, and the surest way to lose support in Congress is to take work away from various field centers around the country.

"We can't cannibalize one part of the agency to feed another part of the agency," Bridenstine told Ars in April, which reflects comments he has made many times. "We can't cut the Science Mission Directorate to feed human exploration. We can't cannibalize the International Space Station to feed the Moon mission. So if we go in those directions, which have all been tried in the past, it never works politically. We can't do the same thing again and be upset that it didn't work."

"Make some cuts"

However, that may be exactly what happens. On Friday, during a meeting of NASA's Advisory Council, the agency's senior human spaceflight official characterized the challenge of paying for a plan to accelerate human landings on the Moon from the late 2020s to 2024, as Vice President Mike Pence has directed the agency to do.

"I don’t think we’re going to be able to get the entire budget as new money," NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier said. "We’re going to have to look for some efficiencies, and make some cuts internal to the agency, and that’s where it’s gonna be hard. Everybody can be on board when everything is going forward, and there’s an infinite amount of new money coming in to the agency."

Neither Bridenstine nor Gerstenmaier has said how much the accelerated lunar program—bringing forward development of the Space Launch System rocket, elements of a Lunar Gateway, building a three-stage Lunar Lander, and upgrading spacesuits—would cost. However, sources have told Ars the real cost of the Artemis Program is probably as much as $6 billion to $8 billion a year beyond NASA's annual budget of $20 billion a year.

"I know what the all new money number is, but now the question is can we find some other things to gain some efficiencies," Gerstenmaier told the council, which is chaired by Lester Lyles, a former Air Force General. "We’ve had a series of meetings already where we’re starting to discuss what other things can we cut, or where can we slow some things down to focus. We’re going to do that even within my own directorate. It’s not that your thing isn’t a priority any more, it’s still a priority, but we’ve got to have it moved back so we can do these other objectives."

The council's meetings are generally not broadcast or recorded, but the media and general public can listen in via a teleconference line. Gerstenmaier's remarks came as part of a presentation on how he wants to keep NASA's budget and deep space planning grounded within "fiscal realism" and how he does not want to devise lavish plans and then hope the funding materializes. The extent of Gerstenmaier's comments, and his deliberate manner, suggest he did not misspeak about the potential for cuts.

"We’re not going to get a huge upper," he told the council about NASA's budget. "We can get 1 or 2 percent increases, which are significant, but we’re not going to get a major, brand-new, multi-billion dollar program injected on top of us, and we’re going to have to make those hard decisions. The first thing is, we used to say, if we just had a compelling, inspirational program, a dump truck of money would back up to us and we would be swimming in dollars. My entire career, that’s never happened."

A "frugal" approach?

After Gerstenmaier's remarks, Ars reached out to NASA to ask how this talk of "cuts" squared with Bridenstine's view that some areas of NASA's budget would not be raided to pay for other programs. In response, the agency released a statement that included the following comment about "frugal approaches" to budget planning:

"The recent budget amendment has demonstrated this administration’s unprecedented commitment to request the resources NASA needs to achieve the goal of landing humans on the surface of the Moon in 2024, and Congress has shown bipartisan support towards the agency’s goals as well. However, as a part of prudent budget planning, we must also protect for alternate scenarios and consider frugal approaches to make the most of every dollar in order to sustain the effort to meet our goal."

Note: After this story was published, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs offered a more direct statement about Gerstenmaier's comments: “Everyone looks for efficiencies when managing budgets, and that is what Mr. Gerstenmaier was talking about in his presentation before the NASA Advisory Council. However, the Administrator said we would not raid Science or other programs to pay for Artemis and that is the agency’s position.”