“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. On the stage nearby was a model of an Apollo landing module that first transported American astronauts to the lunar surface 50 years ago.
Pence described a need for NASA to adopt greater urgency in returning to the moon. But an accelerated pace has not been evident in the Trump administration’s NASA budget requests to Congress, raising many questions about how it will be possible for the agency to accomplish this ambitious goal.
The vice president’s remarks called for changes in the agency's approach and culture, reflecting frustration within the 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.
Two weeks ago, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced at a Senate subcommittee hearing that the timetable for the rocket had slipped again and that it would not be ready in time for the first scheduled test flight, without any astronauts aboard, in June next year.
He added that NASA was instead considering using smaller commercial rockets to launch Orion for that test flight.
Bridenstine later said that Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS, was looking to accelerate its work.
“I am confident we can get to that first launch in 2020 for SLS and actually fly the crew capsule around the moon,” Bridenstine said at the space council meeting.
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.
At present, the space agency plans to first build a small outpost orbiting the moon, called Gateway. Astronauts would travel between the outpost and the lunar surface.
“Ladies and gentleman, that is just not good enough,” Pence said of the timeline, laid out in budget documents weeks ago. “We are better than that.”
Lockheed Martin, which is building the Orion capsule, said in a statement Tuesday that it could help put astronauts on the moon by 2024 with an incomplete version of Gateway.
Pence and other critics point out that only eight years elapsed between President John F. Kennedy’s famous announcement in 1961 of a plan to reach the moon and the landing of Apollo 11.
Pence raised the specter of China, which landed this year on the moon's far side and is also hoping to land astronauts on the moon in the 2020s.
He also fretted over 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 Bridenstine had developed a plan to get back to the moon. But how this could be accomplished by the end of 2024 was far from clear.
NASA, for instance, has not started work on a lunar lander nor issued any contracts to commercial companies to work on one.
Pence said the astronauts would land near the lunar south pole, where water ice exists in eternally shadowed craters, adding to the technical complexity.
The 1960s Apollo program was given sizable financial resources to achieve its ambitious goals. The NASA budget this year is $21.5 billion, its largest in years. But the Trump administration has proposed trimming that to $21 billion next year and then providing annual 1 percent increases.
Although Pence lauded the work of the Marshall Space Flight Center, which leads NASA’s rocket development, he also made clear that the agency should shift to alternatives if those are quicker and cheaper.
“If a commercial company can deliver a rocket or a lunar lander or any other capability faster at a lower cost to the taxpayer than the status quo, NASA needs to have the authority and the courage to change course quickly and decisively to achieve that goal,” Pence said.
He said he was challenging everyone in America’s space effort to “think bigger, fail smarter and work harder than ever before.”
While the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s were successful, NASA has since been criticized for overlooking risks that led to the loss of two space shuttles, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Fourteen astronauts died in those failures.
Daniel L. Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said that NASA has over the years become too cautious.
“NASA needs to be allowed to fail,” he said in an interview. “You don’t do exploration without failure.”
Dumbacher, who once served as a top NASA official and helped lead early development of Orion and the Space Launch System, said the agency must be willing to defend its engineers when failures do occur.
One of the options under consideration for putting the SLS back on schedule is to skip a series of test firings of the rocket’s first stage.
Dumbacher said he did not have the data to decide when that would be a smart trade-off to make, but “I think it’s worth taking a good hard look at it.”
At the same meeting, members of the National Space Council proposed other ideas separate from the discussion about returning to the moon.
Kelvin Droegemeier, the science adviser to President Donald Trump, talked of nuclear powered rockets that would more efficiently propel people through the solar system.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced the publication of 580 pages of proposed streamlined regulations for the launching and re-entry of spacecraft, a key concern of rocket companies like SpaceX.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.