How much does Artemis II cost?

Artemis II flew from 1 to 10 April 2026, but NASA doesn't present its accounts mission by mission. The GAO, the US Congress's oversight office, reviewed the Space Launch System program and found that the agency maintains a five-year rolling estimate of production and operations costs, and that neither that estimate nor the annual budget request tracks costs by Artemis mission or by recurring production elements. Without that breakdown, any "price of Artemis II" in circulation is an outside reconstruction, not an agency figure.

The same report documents $11.8 billion spent developing the SLS's initial capability and $11.2 billion requested in the fiscal year 2024 budget request to fund the program through fiscal year 2028. And it includes an assessment unusual for an official document: senior NASA officials told the GAO that, at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable.

In its 2026 review of NASA's major projects, the GAO attributes more than half of that portfolio's annual cost overruns, and nearly 75% of its cumulative overruns, to the Orion capsule, with about $3.5 billion in development cost overrun. For scale, the life-cycle cost of the agency's 36 major projects is estimated at at least $70 billion. These are program-level figures, not the bill for a single flight — and that's precisely the distinction the GAO is asking NASA to make visible.