The House Appropriations Committee recently released its planned budget allocations for fiscal year 2024. If these budget caps are maintained, they would reduce discretionary spending to the level of FY 2022.

This would shrink the allocation assigned to the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies — which oversees NASA’s budget — by more than a quarter. The committee could fund NASA at present levels (or increase its budget to match the agency’s request) by cutting other agencies it oversees even more aggressively. Bearing its fair share, however, would shrink NASA by about $7 billion.

In a letter outlining the effect of several proposed budgets, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that even a less significant cut than currently proposed would “defer lunar exploration beyond Artemis IV” and “halt any potential Mars development efforts.”

Congress should ensure that those delays don’t happen. As lawmakers made clear in an April hearing on NASA, the restoration of America’s lunar program has important implications for national security.

The new cold war between the United States and China has spawned a new space race. China plans to put boots on the moon by 2030, and some experts are concerned that China will attempt to interfere with further American lunar efforts. China has even successfully destroyed “one of its own satellites in orbit,” an implicit threat against the satellite networks that enable America’s global communication network. If the Chinese are going to militarize space, we cannot allow them to technologically outpace us.

The Artemis manned-spaceflight missions are also important as a means of reinvigorating a sense of national pride. Armstrong and Aldrin planting our flag in the lunar dust in the name of “all mankind” was the perfect symbol of the American century. I can only imagine the sense of awe when man first stepped onto the face of the moon — a sense shared by the entire nation, all at once. I await a similar feeling when we take our next giant leap. In a time of tired spirits, we need it desperately.

That all requires keeping Artemis on track. While reducing the size of the federal deficit is vitally important, Congress should find somewhere else to cut those seven billion dollars. The federal budget should refrain both from mortgaging our future and from defunding the programs designed to bring us into it.