“It is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return astronauts to the moon within the next five years,” Pence said at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Pence described a need for NASA to take on greater urgency in returning to the moon. At the same time, the goal of accelerating that pace has not been reflected in the administration’s NASA budget requests to Congress.
The vice president’s remarks reflected frustration within the Trump administration at repeated delays in the development of NASA’s giant rocket, the Space Launch System, and Orion, a capsule for taking astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to the moon and possibly, eventually, to Mars.
NASA’s current schedule sets 2023 for the first flight of Orion with astronauts aboard. A moon landing would not occur until 2028, almost a decade from now.
Critics, including Pence, say that pace is too slow, pointing out that in the 1960s, only eight years elapsed between President John F. Kennedy’s pronouncement in 1961 of a goal of reaching the moon and the landing of Apollo 11 in 1969.
Pence raised the specter of China, which is also looking to land astronauts on the moon in the 2020s, as well as the cost of relying on Russia, which has provided transportation for NASA astronauts to the International Space Station since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011.
“We’re also racing against our worst enemy,” Pence said. “Complacency.”
Pence said Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, had developed a plan to get back to the moon, but how this could be accomplished by the end of 2024 is not clear. NASA, for instance, has not started work on a lunar lander nor issued any contracts to commercial companies to work on one.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.