The hearing, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race,” had no witnesses who disagreed with this perspective. They consisted of Allen Cutler, CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, the primary lobbying company for SLS, Orion, and Gateway; Jim Bridenstine, previous NASA Administrator who now leads federal government operations for United Launch Alliance; Mike Gold of Redwire, a Gateway specialist; and Lt. General John Shaw, previous Space Command authorities.

The hearing before the committee chaired by Cruz, Commerce, Science, and Transportation, consisted of the typical collection of parochial politics, lobbying for conventional area, back slapping, and fawning– at one point, Gold, a Star Trek fan, presumed regarding assert that Cruz is the “Captain Kirk” of the United States Senate.

Beyond this, nevertheless, there was a reasonable quantity of teeth gnashing about the reality that the United States deals with a major danger from China, which seems on course to put human beings on the Moon before NASA can return there with the Artemis Program. China intends to land people at the South Pole before the year 2030.

NASA most likely to lose “race”

Bridenstine, who managed the development of the Artemis Program half a years earlier, put it most candidly: “Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface,” he stated.

Bridenstine and others on the panel slammed the complicated nature of SpaceX’s Starship-based lunar lander, which NASA chose in April 2021 as a method to get astronauts down to the lunar surface area and back. The proposition counts on Starship being refueled in low-Earth orbit by several Starship tanker launches.