Appears To Shift Manned Spaceflight To Boeing

The House Science Committee late last week released H.R. 5666, the authorization bill for NASA. An authorization bill does not appropriate funds, but does give insight to other legislators and affected agencies as to what the committee is willing to fund in future budgets.

ArsTechnica reports that, in its analysis of the bill, H.R. 5666 appears to essentially reject NASA's Artemis program, which is supported by the Trump administration, which would place a base on the moon as a test and training site for astronauts in anticipation of a Mars mission in the next 10 to 20 years. The bill supports a strategy that would have astronauts making short visits to the Moon staring in 2028, and launching a Mars orbit mission by 2033.

Artemis would have had humans landing back on the Moon b 2024, and includes commercial space players like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and smaller companies along with such giants as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It encouraged competition for contracts, and placed an emphasis on fixed-price contracts to lower costs.

But H.R. 5666 proposes a "Human Landing System" that seems to favor Boeing, saying plans for a Moon mission should use "the Orion vehicle and an integrated lunar landing system carried on an Exploration Upper Stage-enhanced Space Launch System for the human lunar landing missions." Only Boeing has proposed such a system. The bill also says that the Gateway to Mars would not be a requirement for landing humans on the Moon. Boeing also minimizes use of the Gateway, according to the report.

ArsTechnica posits that it does not appear that the Committee members are serious about sending humans to Mars unless the human exploration budget is at least doubled, and requires that funding to be targeted at solving major technical challenges. The end result, the report suggests, would be NASA spending billions on hardware to use on Lunar or Mars missions without actually expanding beyond Low Earth Orbit.

The bi-partisan bill is scheduled for markup by the committee this week.

(Images from file)

FMI: Source report