Negotiations between Senate and House Republicans over a bill to reauthorize NASA have stalled as President Trump is scheduled to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday.

The split between the two chambers is a problem for the president, as it could put in jeopardy his priority of establishing a permanent moon base.

Trump issued an executive order in December calling for NASA to establish the initial elements of a moon base by 2030 under the Artemis program.

The president is expected to discuss the importance of the Artemis program and his goal of beginning the construction of a moon base before the end of the decade during his visit to Houston, according to an administration official familiar with the event.

Trump is going to Houston to give the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the crew of Artemis II, which earlier this year flew around the moon on a 10-day mission, marking the first time a crewed spacecraft left low Earth orbit since 1972.

Trump last week signed a memo to dramatically increase the number of commercial U.S. space launches over the next few years, aiming for at least 1,000 launches and reentries by 2030. There were fewer than 200 launches in 2025.

But progress on Trump’s lunar ambitions is being threatened by a spat between the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which are both chaired by Texas Republicans — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas).

People familiar with the talks — which were initially envisioned to be completed this spring — say they have broken down over disagreements on language in the Senate bill to lay the groundwork for a moon base close to the Shackleton crater near the lunar south pole and to extend the operations of the International Space Station (ISS) through 2032.

One person familiar with the discussions said the House is “slow rolling” the Senate bill, which is causing tensions to flare as the 119th Congress winds to a close.

A person close to the House Science Committee, however, insisted that a NASA reauthorization bill will get done by the end of the year. The source said the Senate and House panels are still trading paper in hopes of hammering out an agreement before Christmas.

“It’s not the House just sitting on things. We’re waiting on the Senate,” said the source.

Babin views the NASA reauthorization as his top legislative priority, House sources say, even though Senate negotiators think the House is moving far too slowly on the bill.

The House panel passed its own bill in February, but it did not include language to pave the way for construction of the moon base or to lock in two more years of service of the space station.

House Republicans also point out that they passed a NASA reauthorization bill in the last Congress and the Senate didn’t act on it when the chamber was under Democratic control.

If Democrats capture the House in the midterm election, as political handicappers project, it could put the negotiations over reauthorizing NASA back to square one.

Brian Freedman, the president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, said congressional passage of a NASA reauthorization would provide important certainty to the space industry.

“The authorization bill is critically important to NASA. We haven’t had one in nine years and we support the House and Senate finding common ground to get a bill done,” he said. “Both the bills have a lot of great things in them.”

Freedman said it’s “a big deal” that Trump is visiting the Johnson Space Center on Friday.

He said “it’s clear” that NASA is “a priority for the administration.”

Congress passed what’s sometimes called a “mini” NASA reauthorization bill in 2022 and hasn’t passed a full reauthorization measure since 2017.

The Senate bill, which passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee with bipartisan support in March, was crafted in close consultation with NASA and takes a major step toward fulfilling NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s ambitious $20-billion plan announced earlier this year to build a moon base.

“This time, the goal is not flags and footprints. This time, the goal is to stay,” Isaacman announced in March.

He announced that NASA would seek to work with at least two commercial launch providers “with the aim of crewed landings every six months, with additional opportunities for new entrants in the years ahead.”

“America will never again give up on the moon,” he declared.

But the House Science Committee is pushing back on Senate provisions that it worries could send NASA rushing into an expensive commitment to build a moon base before the concept is fully vetted.

“Frankly, what are the costs? Love it, but it is frankly an expensive undertaking. We want to make sure we’re not tying the hands of NASA in future years,” said one person familiar with the House panel’s thinking.

Senate and House lawmakers in both parties received a briefing last week on the plans for a moon base.

House Republicans are also balking at locking NASA into keeping the ISS manned and operating through 2032 when doing so costs a few billion dollars a year and NASA may decide in the future that those resources are better spent elsewhere.

Cruz and Senate Republicans view keeping the ISS continuously manned in low Earth orbit as a matter of remaining faithful to long-standing U.S. policy.

The ISS is primarily managed by the Christopher Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week with flight controllers who monitor it. The space station is a major point of pride for the Johnson Space Center.

The Johnson Space Center is located in Babin’s congressional district, Texas’s 36th District, which leaves some senators and staff scratching their heads about why he hasn’t embraced the Senate’s provision to extend operations of the International Space Station until the end of 2032.

A person close to the House Science Committee noted that if NASA wants to continue operating ISS beyond 2030, the agency would be allowed to do so under the House bill.

But the House Science Committee doesn’t want to force NASA to continue to spend billions on the space station if it would prefer to redirect future resources to the commercial successor of the low Earth orbit platform.

“Every year we’re doing that, that’s money that’s not going to support the transition to commercial vehicles,” said a source familiar with the panel’s thinking.

Another major difference between the two bills is that the Senate bill would reauthorize NASA for two years while the House would reauthorize the agency for one year.

House Republican negotiators worry that a two-year reauthorization would be more difficult to pass on the lower chamber’s suspensions calendar, which allows legislation to pass on a fast track if it receives two-thirds support on the floor.

But House Republicans don’t view the length of the reauthorization as a big issue because it wouldn’t constrain future appropriations, given how the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 is crafted.

“The Senate bill has the benefit of timeliness. I would say it provides more certainty in its direction while I’d put the House bill as more oversight and reporting,” said Mike French, the founder of the Space Policy Group and a former NASA chief of staff.

He noted that when the House passed its bill, it was before Isaacman announced the goals of the Artemis program.

“The Senate bill is much more aligned with the overall vision that Administrator Isaacman put out earlier this year,” he said. “The moon base is the key component there.”