The Trump administration wants American astronauts back on the Moon before Chinese astronauts get there, and further delays in Boeing's Space Launch System will not be tolerated
Share to twitterThe National Space Council held its fifth meeting Tuesday at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and chairman Mike Pence used the occasion to press for an accelerated return of U.S. astronauts to the Moon. The plan had been to land Americans near the Moon’s south pole in 2028—56 years after the last Apollo Moon walk—but Pence wants that mission accomplished four years sooner.
There isn’t much mystery about why Pence has lit a fire under NASA, the nation’s civilian space agency, to move faster. China has begun sending missions to the Moon, and might even land its own astronauts there ahead of the U.S. That would be a huge blow to U.S. prestige, and would signal that America is no longer preeminent in space. The Pentagon was already worried about the strides China and Russia are making in negating U.S.
This could have been done decades ago, but there was no political consensus concerning the future of NASA’s human exploration program once the Moon race was won. The Space Shuttle was an impressive achievement, but it was only designed to reach low earth orbit. A Bush administration effort to go further was canceled by the Obama administration, at which point Congress directed that any technology acquired for use in that earlier effort be applied to a follow-on program.
These are the kinds of issues that crop up when you are trying to build a system to unprecedented scale and precision using new tools and workers. Other sources of delay included a funding shortfall early in the program and a damaging tornado. The end result was over two years of schedule slippage, but NASA consistently awarded Boeing high marks for the quality of its work.
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