OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 10:22 AM PT — Friday, August 16, 2019
GOP lawmakers in Texas are working to convince NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine to reconsider the location for its new moon program. NASA is looking to move parts of the program development from the Johnson Space Center in Houston to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Marshall Space Flight Center will oversee two of the three elements necessary for this program: the transfer element and the descent element. This initiative comes as President Trump is eager to complete another man-made flight to The Moon by 2024.
“We’ll be going to The Moon. We’ll be going to Mars very soon. It’s very exciting and from a military stand point, there is nothing more important right now than space.” — President Trump
Senator Ted Cruz and Senator John Cornyn, along with Representative Brian Babin, expressed concerns in a letter. They say the move discredits the history of the Johnson Space Center, and that splitting the production to two centers is counterproductive. They believe Houston should be the place where the next moon landing is developed and launched given that “Houston was one of the first words ever uttered on The Moon,” and the Johnson Space Center developed the last moon-landed rocket.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine talks to reporters in front of the core stage of the Space Launch System, which will power the Artemis 1 lunar mission, as he visits the NASA Michaud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Back in May, NASA officials asked Congress to increase its fiscal budget for 2020 by $1.6 billion, most of which will go toward the development of this human lunar landing system.
“And when we do what we call Artemis 2, we will in fact, have American astronauts launching on American rockets around the moon, and then Artemis 3 will be the mission in 2024 that lands our humans for the first time on the surface of the moon,” explained Bridenstine.
The NASA administrator is scheduled to announce the new location Friday, but lawmakers requested NASA hold off on any formal announcement until they have been fully briefed on the subject and the timeline.
