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| Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and former Deputy Space Force Commander John Shaw testified on U.S.-China's space competition. | ||
| This before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. | ||
| They discussed NASA funding and the importance of U.S. leadership in low-Earth orbit. | ||
| The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will come to order. | ||
| Today we will discuss NASA's progress, its challenges, and the path forward on the first comprehensive NASA authorization bill since 2017. | ||
| When I was chairman of this committee's space subcommittee, Senator Bill Nelson and I worked together on several pieces of space legislation that were signed into law by both Presidents Obama and President Trump. | ||
| Continuing that bipartisan tradition, this past March, my colleagues and I together introduced a short-term NASA authorization bill. | ||
| All of these efforts reveal an important truth, which is this. | ||
| There exists a strong bipartisan consensus in Congress for backing the critical mission of NASA. | ||
| When it comes to the final frontier, we're not Republicans or Democrats. | ||
| Rather, we are Americans first. | ||
| And all of us know that for our nation to continue doing incredible things in space, we must rely on and empower NASA's ingenuity and determination. | ||
| NASA has always been one of America's greatest engines of innovation. | ||
| From Apollo to Artemis, from the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station, our space program reflects the very best of American leadership. | ||
| I look forward to continuing that tradition by working and enacting into law a longer-term reauthorization of NASA with my colleagues. | ||
| This is a pivotal moment for our nation's space program. | ||
| America must maintain leadership in low Earth orbit while also embarking on a new era of exploration with Artemis. | ||
| Make no mistake, we are in a new space race with China. | ||
| And if we fail, there will be a bad moon on the rise. | ||
| China has made no secrets of its goals. | ||
| It is investing heavily in space capabilities, maintaining a permanent presence in low Earth orbit, and working to plant its flag on the moon by 2030. | ||
| The stakes could not be higher. | ||
| Space is no longer reserved simply for peaceful exploration. | ||
| It is today a strategic frontier with direct consequences for national security, economic growth, and technological leadership. | ||
| If our adversaries achieve dominant space capabilities, it would pose a profound risk to America. | ||
| This is not just about exploration. | ||
| The choices we make today will determine whether the United States leads in space or cedes space to an authoritarian regime. | ||
| That is why continuity in NASA's programs is not simply good practice. | ||
| It is a matter of national security. | ||
| Any drastic changes in NASA's architecture at this stage threaten United States leadership in space. | ||
| Delays or disruptions only serve our competitors' interests. | ||
| Congress has spoken clearly on this matter. | ||
| In the one big beautiful bill, which I was proud to champion, we reaffirm strong support for NASA's exploration programs. | ||
| At a time when some have sought to prematurely dismantle the International Space Station, despite China's presence in low Earth orbit, Congress provided ample funding to continue the safe operations of the ISS, as well as to provide an on-ramp for follow-on commercial stations. | ||
| And Congress also provided the funds necessary to sustain a presence on the moon. | ||
| Artemis IV will deliver and assemble the first major elements of the gateway station in lunar orbit, and Artemis 5 will expand surface exploration using that platform. | ||
| These missions rely on the Space Launch System and Orion capsule to reach the Moon and to reach the Gateway Station. | ||
| It would be folly to cut short these missions after much of the hardware has already been purchased and in some cases delivered and with no commercial alternative readily available. | ||
| I look forward to working hand in hand with the administration to ensure that those funds are utilized in full accordance with congressional intent. | ||
| We have seen overwhelming support for maintaining these programs from senators, Republicans, and Democrats alike. | ||
| Congress supports NASA's exploration goals, and we do not want sudden or disruptive changes that undermine America's leadership. | ||
| NASA is more than just a symbol of national pride. | ||
| It is a strategic capability that advances our economy, security, and values. | ||
| The milestones ahead, maintaining continuous human presence in low Earth orbit, returning American astronauts to the moon, landing the first female astronaut in history on the surface of the moon, as the father of daughters, that is particularly near and dear to my heart, and preparing for human missions to Mars. | ||
| These are not just scientific achievements. | ||
| They are fundamental to America's role as the world's leading space-faring nation. | ||
| America must remain the world's leader in space. | ||
| With steady leadership and clear direction, I'm confident that we will. | ||
| I now turn to Ranking Member Cantwell. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I'm glad to join you today in this fight to say we must maintain our focus on returning to the moon. | ||
| It's good to see the witnesses here, Mr. Cutler, Mr. Golden, Mr. Bridenstein, and Lieutenant General Shaw, but I also want to recognize Bill Nye, also a Northwest Planetary Society individual who is here today as well. | ||
| I look forward to all your testimony. | ||
| Today, we're here in a race with China to return to the moon and stay there. | ||
| Beating China back to the moon isn't just about bragging rights, and it's certainly not just about grabbing headlines. | ||
| But today, it's clear that President Xi, President Putin, and Prime Minister Modi are all in China having a big national security and strategic discussion that could easily, easily include space and defense and security and defense implications. | ||
| No surprise, actually, that Kim Jong-young is also there. | ||
| Let's just take for a consideration that he would like to figure out how to improve his rocket technology with more accuracy, more distance, more tracking. | ||
| I don't like the scenario. | ||
| The strategic value of maintaining our position to live and work on space in space is critical. | ||
| It's critical to our future economic and national security. | ||
| Returning to the moon requires us to push the limits of technology to find the solutions that we can solve and maintain our national defense and innovation economy. | ||
| All you have to do is look back to the 1960s and look at the development of technologies that created an ecosystem within the United States of America that led to discoveries and innovations that we're still now counting on today. | ||
| So we must not waver in this important mission of technology and national security defense. | ||
| I believe each of the witnesses will tell us something about this today and why the consequences of failing to achieve this goal will be monumental. | ||
| We know we need to go back to the moon, and we know we need to do there before China establishes a permanent presence. | ||
| I want to hear importantly about the expertise these individuals think that we must pull together so that we won't fall short of this goal. | ||
| It's clear in some of your testimony you're already articulating the strategic advantage China has of being so uniform on their government structure. | ||
| We, on the other hand, are trying to work both within the government and within the commercial sector on a partnership that allows all of us to creatively work together and move forward. | ||
| That is why, Lieutenant General Shaw, I found your statement in your testimony quite compelling. | ||
| Quote, I believe if we do not unify and synchronize our efforts, we will find ourselves rather than the space leaders we are today, instead in a position of increasing disadvantage in space as we progress further into this century, end quote. | ||
| I don't want to see that reality either. | ||
| I want us to explore how to get the most out of NASA's commercial partnership and determine if sufficient redundancy in the provisions of commercial space are there to ensure that. | ||
| The state of Washington plays a very proud role in the exploration of the space and space economy, about 77,000 people employed today just in the space economy, obviously more than 100,000 employed in aerospace in general. | ||
| So these are important companies to us, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Blue Origin, all working on rocket infrastructure, crew capsules, gateway lunar landing orbit stations, and human landers. | ||
| All of these are so important. | ||
| And also just a shout out to the returning Colonel Ann McLean from Spokane, who just returned from serving as the commander on the IS mission from March through August of this year. | ||
| So yes, we have a lot of people thinking about space in the Northwest. | ||
| So I am concerned about the current plan and what we are doing to make sure that we continue to push forward. | ||
| I would love to see the continued focus on dual landers, given how important they are going to be for the future. | ||
| It's not just one time, it's many times. | ||
| This is an operation where we're going to continue to return and be an operational system. | ||
| So I want to make sure that we have the best. | ||
| I want to make sure that NASA has backup plans that takes advantage and ensures that the already delayed mission does not slip any further. | ||
| I don't know that it takes a genius to figure out that while China may be projecting 2030 or some time period, there's nothing to say that they won't go sooner. | ||
| There are people we talked to in trying to brief the press about this today who are betting that they are going to go sooner and that they are going to beat us. | ||
| So we don't need another Sputnik moment. | ||
| It's already happened. | ||
| The only thing we have to do is make sure we in Congress get the budget right and support the Artemis mission. | ||
| I appreciate everything the chair has done in putting money towards the Artemis mission, and I appreciate everything that we are doing collectively to assure that the administration spends it. | ||
| But I also want to point out that as Lieutenant General Shaw also says, this whole cislunar communication architecture, that is the space between the Earth and the Moon, that is what China would love to do, go dominate the communication system between the space and the moon. | ||
| That's what they're already working on. | ||
| We can't allow that to happen. | ||
| We need to continue to move forward quickly, fastly with these investments because our national security and defense depends on it. | ||
| I thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I look forward to asking the witnesses more detailed questions about this, the President's budget, and why we need to make sure that we are funding this appropriate mission for the future, not just of our innovation, but also for our national security. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I thank the Ranking Member. | ||
| I'd now like to introduce our witnesses for today. | ||
| Each witness exemplifies essential elements of maintaining U.S. leadership in space. | ||
| Our first witness is Mr. Alan Cutler, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, a national organization comprising more than 50 space industry businesses and stakeholders dedicated to ensuring that the U.S. remains the leader in space exploration. | ||
| Our second witness is Mr. Michael Gold, President of Civil and International Space for Redwire, where he leads a variety of commercial space activities. | ||
| Prior to Redwire, he served as NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships, where he directed the development and implementation of the Artemis Accords and the negotiations for the Lunar Gateway. | ||
| Our third witness is a good friend, the Honorable Jim Bridenstine, managing partner of the Artemis Group. | ||
| He previously served as the 13th Administrator of NASA. | ||
| Under Mr. Bridenstine's strong leadership, NASA launched the Artemis program to explore the moon and to prepare for missions to Mars. | ||
| And our final witness is Lieutenant General John Shaw, the former deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command, where he was responsible for conducting operations in, from, and to space to deter conflict. | ||
| Mr. Cutler, you are recognized for five minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to testify today and for your consistent bipartisan support of NASA. | ||
| That support has been critical to advancing our mission to return American astronauts to the moon and building a sustained presence there. | ||
| The most recent example of this support is the funding of NASA in the Budget Reconciliation Bill that supports facilities and activities from Earth to Mars, including funds for the Artemis IV and Artemis V missions. | ||
| Artis is more than a space program. | ||
| It is a statement of American leadership to the rest of the world. | ||
| It ensures that the United States, not our competitors or adversaries, sets the rules for lunar exploration and resource utilization. | ||
| Without a successful Artemis program, we risk ceding the moon to China, a nation working diligently to land before we return and looking to establish control over key lunar regions and resources. | ||
| Their intent is clear, their progress is real, and time is not on our side. | ||
| This is a race the United States cannot afford to lose. | ||
| China's capabilities in space cannot be underestimated. | ||
| Whether in their activities orbiting Earth or its ambitious lunar program, China's persistence in achieving its national goals in space underscores its unfaltering intent to be the leader in space. | ||
| Recent progress by China includes a successful static fire test of the Long March 10 rocket, as well as successful early lunar lander tests to determine its capabilities. | ||
| The United States still retains advantages with the space launch system, Orion, gateway development, and exploration ground systems processing, but appears to trail China for the critical final leg in space to the moon's surface, the development of a lander. | ||
| Let me be very clear: the country that lands astronauts on the moon next shapes the rules of engagement in space for decades to come. | ||
| The current Artemis program is making strong progress, but we need every element to execute its role. | ||
| The technical challenges that need to be overcome to land on the lunar surface cannot be ignored, and Congress must keep a watchful eye on how that effort progresses if we are to win. | ||
| Artemis II is preparing for its crewed launch next year, but the work does not stop there. | ||
| There is mission hardware being built today from Artemis 3 through Artemis 9. | ||
| Factories are running, hardware is being manufactured, and thousands of Americans across the country are at work to make this campaign successful. | ||
| Additionally, the United States is leading a growing coalition of 56 partner nations under the Artemis Accords, a global community initiated under President Trump's first term, focused on supporting a set of principles for peaceful, sustainable, and cooperative space exploration. | ||
| The rewards of advancing our lunar program extend beyond beating China. | ||
| Artemis is an economic engine here at home. | ||
| For every dollar invested in Artemis, $3 flow back into our economy, supporting advanced manufacturing, creating high-quality jobs, and driving innovation that benefits Americans in their daily lives. | ||
| Supporting Artemis to beat China creates stronger communities, a stronger industrial base, and a stronger America. | ||
| This race is not just about the moon. | ||
| It is about economic growth, global competitiveness, and national security. | ||
| Congress can strengthen our national capabilities with a robust NASA authorization bill to reaffirm our commitment to the current plan and make improvements where necessary. | ||
| It should continue the direction for lunar exploration found in the President's Space Policy Directive 1, which calls for the United States to lead the return of humans to the moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars. | ||
| A multi-year authorization bill with these elements will provide the long-term certainty needed to keep NASA focused and our workforce, our partners, and our allies aligned. | ||
| Great strides are being made from lessons learned after the Artemis 1 mission, and even greater efficiencies and cost reductions could be realized by cutting unnecessary requirements that are not safety critical, requiring a plan for a phased approach to commercial services for future Artemis missions to further drive down costs, and ensuring that decision-making at NASA centers and industry sites is available when the work is happening, increasing efficiency. | ||
| These steps will make Artemis more agile, more sustainable, while keeping the United States on track. | ||
| But passing a bill on its own will not be sufficient. | ||
| Congress must hold NASA accountable for implementing the laws Congress enacts. | ||
| Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, the progress we have made is invaluable. | ||
| The investments you have supported are paying off. | ||
| The industrial base is ready and capable, and the Artemis generation is being inspired. | ||
| If we lose momentum now, that progress will not be easily regained. | ||
| But when successful, Artemis will deliver historic achievements that secure America's leadership for generations. | ||
| With your continued support, Artemis will secure a place on the moon before China, strengthen our economy here at home, and keep America strong. | ||
| Thank you for your time, your attention, and for your commitment to Artemis, NASA, and America's leadership in space. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Gold, you're recognized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and distinguished members of this committee. | |
| I'm grateful to all of you, as well as your intrepid staff, for the opportunity to testify. | ||
| But I am even more grateful for the work this committee has done to support American leadership in space via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. | ||
| Also, I would be remiss if I didn't thank Senator Cruz in particular for your leadership. | ||
| Senator Cruz and I both share a strong affinity for Star Trek, and the highest compliment I can pay the Chairman is that he is the captain Kirk of the Senate. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| Your time is extended to 10 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Chairman, I think that could be a new nickname in the Senate here. | |
| Well said, Mr. Spock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, with your leadership, we'll live long and prosper. | |
| And I'm so grateful that while others sat down, Senator Cruz, Senator Cantwell, and all of you have chosen to stand up and to fight for this nation's future in space. | ||
| Specifically, per the direction of the One Big Beautiful Bill, NASA must complete and launch the Lunar Gateway. | ||
| Just last month, along with NASA officials and representatives from all of our international partners, I watched the successful deployment test of Redwire's massive rollout solar arrays for the Gateway's power and propulsion element. | ||
| These arrays, which will be some of the largest ever deployed by humanity in space, will power the gateway, representing the pinnacle of solar electric propulsion technology, a key capability for both future civil space exploration and national security activities. | ||
| Without the funding and direction of the One Big Beautiful bill, this critical work would be in jeopardy. | ||
| And I'm sure China would like nothing more than for the U.S. to abandon its lead in solar electric propulsion and to lose the benefits of Gateway in orbit and on the lunar surface. | ||
| With Gateway and full commercial logistic services, the Artemis program can support lunar surface operations for 60 to 90 days, enabling robust activities and transforming the dream of lunar resource extraction and utilization into reality. | ||
| Without Gateway, lunar surface activities will be limited to five to seven days, dramatically curtailing the very nature of NASA operations. | ||
| Additionally, while not a military facility, the presence of Gateway in cislunar space will provide a platform that will inherently allow America and its partners to monitor Chinese activities. | ||
| A permanent spacecraft orbiting the moon will project American influence and power forward, discouraging illicit Chinese operations that may otherwise occur in the shadows. | ||
| Moreover, Gateway is critical for projecting American power not only in space, but here on Earth. | ||
| Over 60% of the Gateway's costs are being borne by our international partners, representing billions that have already been spent building hardware. | ||
| Turning away from Gateway now would squander this unprecedented global investment in Artemis and force our international allies to seek partnerships with America's geopolitical rivals. | ||
| Conversely, if NASA reaffirms its commitment to Gateway, we can unlock billions of dollars of additional international investments, creating even more robust capabilities for Artemis, along with a windfall for the American taxpayer. | ||
| The combined Gateway PPE and Halo modules can be completed and launched in 2027, a mere two years from now. | ||
| We can achieve an early win in this competition if America can simply demonstrate the wherewithal not to give up on the race when we are so close to the finish line. | ||
| Additionally, the success of our lunar and Martian exploration efforts depend upon maintaining a strong foundation in low Earth orbit. | ||
| The technologies, experience, and partnerships that occur in LEO drives the capabilities of our entire space enterprise. | ||
| For example, at Redwire, using our biofabrication facility on the International Space Station, we have printed the first ever human meniscus in space. | ||
| Who doesn't need a meniscus? | ||
| We followed this up with printing live cardiovascular tissue and bringing it back still live. | ||
| Eventually, we could print whole organs in space, and that would save countless lives. | ||
| We're also at Redwire making even more progress in drug development. | ||
| With our pillbox system that has now flown 32 times on the International Space Station, we've demonstrated how larger and more uniform seed crystals can be grown in space, leading to the development of enhanced pharmaceuticals with better efficacy, longevity, and fewer side effects. | ||
| There is no question in my mind that microgravity manufacturing will transform the pharmaceutical and biotech fields. | ||
| The only question is: will those benefits be enjoyed in China or here in the United States? | ||
| Without the funding of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and explicit action by NASA within the next few months, we run the risk of reducing the number of American astronauts on the ISS from four to three and then down to two. | ||
| If this committee's directives are not followed, for the first time in history, there will be more Chinese astronauts in space than Americans. | ||
| This should be unacceptable, unacceptable to Congress, unacceptable to NASA, and unacceptable to this nation. | ||
| Again, I'm grateful to this committee for the support of Artemis, the ISS, and NASA science. | ||
| Together, we must speak out with one unified voice that we will not cede LEO, our international partnerships, and the moon to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| I urge us, all of us here today and listening online, to fight, fight for the ISS, fight for Artemis, and fight for America's future in space. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Gold. | ||
| Mr. Bradenshead. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, members of the committee. | ||
| It's an honor to be here. | ||
| After hearing Mike Gold's testimony, I want to comment on a few things in my five minutes. | ||
| Number one, everything he said about medicine and microgravity is correct. | ||
| We are seeing transformational capabilities in pharmaceuticals because atoms and molecules organize differently in microgravity than they do here on Earth. | ||
| There are drugs that we are demonstrating on the International Space Station that we can create. | ||
| They can do things like, you know, we had a drug, a Merck drug, Kytruda, which is for lung cancer. | ||
| And we were able to make that drug so that instead of trying to find out if within two or three months if it's going to be efficacious, you can find out within two to three weeks whether or not it's going to be efficacious. | ||
| Instead of administering it with an infusion, which takes time and is painful and is costly, you can do it with a pill. | ||
| These are transfer, and that's just one drug that is improved. | ||
| We're talking about drugs to treat diseases that have never been treatable before. | ||
| To piggyback on what Mike Gold just said, we are either going to have that capability in the United States because we have a permanent human presence in space with a fully mission-capable space station, or we're going to cede that to China. | ||
| It is really that simple. | ||
| Now, that's just on the pharmaceutical side. | ||
| Then we also talk about regenerative medicine, where we're actually 3D printing tissue. | ||
| Mike mentioned the meniscus, where we're growing in 3D tissue like cardiovascular tissue and vein tissue and other things. | ||
| This type of regenerative medicine is critical to the future economy of the United States of America. | ||
| And if we want to not have a fully mission-capable system, if we want to not have a permanent human presence in space, then not only does that capability go to China, but all of our international partners go to China as well because they want that capability. | ||
| This is a big deal. | ||
| So that's on the low Earth orbit side of things. | ||
| And Senator Cruz, I want to, I know you're getting a lot of accolades today, but it is absolutely true. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill with the $10 billion additional dollars for NASA human spaceflight was in large part you're doing, and I know it was bipartisan. | ||
| I know the one big, beautiful bill might not have been bipartisan, but that element was in fact bipartisan. | ||
| And I know senators on both sides of the aisle are grateful for your leadership on that. | ||
| So very important. | ||
| I would also say the purpose of this hearing is: you know, are we going to be able to get to the moon first? | ||
| I mean, that's the title of the hearing. | ||
| And I will tell you, and I know there's going to be questions, and I'll go into more depth later, but look at the architecture that we have developed to land human astronauts or American astronauts on the moon. | ||
| Look at the architecture. | ||
| It is extraordinarily complex. | ||
| In some cases, it hinges on us, me saying here today that it is highly unlikely that we will land on the moon before China. | ||
| And I'm going to explain it in the next two minutes. | ||
| So, number one, we have the SLS rocket, which is the most powerful rocket ever built. | ||
| And Senator Cruz mentioned, yes, it has had its problems in the past. | ||
| It has been expensive. | ||
| It had overruns, all those things, but it's behind us. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| We need to use it. | ||
| We have the Orion crew capsule, which quite frankly is a shiny object in this whole thing. | ||
| The Orion crew capsule is not only usable today, but ultimately the cost is going down because more and more of it is reusable every time we use the Orion crew capsule. | ||
| Those two elements are in good shape. | ||
| I will tell you, I have been critical of both in the past in front of this committee and other places, and I'm more than happy to be critical of all of our contractors, just to be really clear. | ||
| But I will say what we don't have today. | ||
| Here's what we don't have today. | ||
| We don't have a landing system for the moon. | ||
| And there was a moment in time when we had no NASA administrator. | ||
| It was after I was gone and before Senator Nelson became the NASA administrator, an architecture was selected. | ||
| And I don't know how this happens, but the biggest decision in the history of NASA, at least since I've been paying attention, the biggest decision happened in the absence of a NASA administrator. | ||
| And that decision was, instead of buying a moon lander, we're going to buy a big rocket. | ||
| And I want to be clear, we need this rocket to be successful. | ||
| It's important for the country and it's transformational. | ||
| But in the meantime, the architecture is as such. | ||
| We need to launch Starship. | ||
| That first Starship is a fueling depot that's in orbit around the Earth. | ||
| Then we need to launch, nobody really knows, nobody knows, but it could be up to dozens of additional Starships to refuel the first Starship. | ||
| So imagine launching Starship over and over, dozens of times, no delays, no explosions, to refuel the first Starship. | ||
| Then once it's fully refueled, then that Starship has to fuel another Starship that is in fact human-rated, which that process hasn't even started yet. | ||
| By the way, that whole in-space refueling thing has never been tested either. | ||
| We're talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen, cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space, never been done before, and we're going to do it dozens of times. | ||
| And then we're going to have a human-rated Starship that is refueled that goes all the way to the moon. | ||
| Now, when it goes to the moon, we don't know how long it can be there because it's boiling off the entire time it's in orbit around the moon. | ||
| We don't know how long it can be there. | ||
| But while it's there, we have to launch the SLS, we have to launch the Orion, the European Service Module, we have to have astronauts and crew all ready to go. | ||
| And they have to orbit the moon themselves in that window, that window when Starship is around the moon, and then they have to dock around the moon. | ||
| They have to transfer from the Orion into the Starship. | ||
| It has to go down and land. | ||
| When it's on the surface of the moon, Starship is gone, or Orion is gone for the next seven days until it comes back around in near-rectilinear halo orbit. | ||
| So our astronauts are right now planning to be on the surface of the moon for a period of seven days without any way home. | ||
| This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I'm aware of would have selected had they had the choice. | ||
| But it was a decision that was made in the absence of the NASA administrator in the last administration. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| It needs to be solved. | ||
| And that puts us as a nation at risk of not being the first on the moon. | ||
| I should say the first next on the moon because we did land in 1969 and 1972. | ||
| And Chairman Cruz, I would like to compliment you. | ||
| I've heard that you have said that we need to put it into law that the Wrath of Khan is in fact the greatest Star Trek movie in history. | ||
| And we are in agreement with that. | ||
| So with that, I yield back the time that I took from the general. | ||
| I thank the administrator. | ||
| I will say I'm not sure we need to codify the Wrath of Khan any more than we need to codify gravity or that the sky is blue. | ||
| There are some things that are indisputably true, and that would be one of them. | ||
| General Shaw. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, Chairman Cruz, or do I say Captain Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and members of the committee, thanks for the opportunity today. | |
| And by the way, I'm also grateful to share the table with some amazing people here and look forward to our session and what they have to say today. | ||
| It was the honor and time of my life to serve our great nation and lead our phenomenal warfighters for 33 years in uniform in our United States Air Force and United States Space Force. | ||
| Throughout my military service, I also had the privilege to work closely with NASA, NOAA, and other governmental civil organizations across many endeavors. | ||
| But I'm also grateful to have had the opportunity the last two years since my departure from uniform service to work with and in the commercial side of our nation's space business. | ||
| It's given me a fresh and broader perspective on how to both envision and realize our nation's future in space in totality and how to bring to bear our combined national strengths to best thwart China in the years to come in this crucial arena. | ||
| My bottom line up front for the committee today is that I am an advocate for and a champion of a unified grand space strategy for our nation, for the Earth-Moon system and beyond. | ||
| Yet such a grand strategy, which would unify and synergize our national efforts across civil, commercial, and national security activities in pursuit of common goals, opportunities, and capabilities, does not currently exist. | ||
| And I believe our mission to return Americans to the moon can be a powerful and a central driver, as well as a beneficiary of such a strategy. | ||
| During my military career, I watched and studied, as any good soldier would, of a potential adversary, as China slowly but surely developed and deployed its own civilian and military space capabilities and set its own agenda for space achievements. | ||
| It is clear to me that the Chinese Communist Party is already employing its own integrated grand strategy for the Earth-Moon system with only superficial distinction between civil, commercial, and national security activities and all focused on a common purpose. | ||
| And as the senator has already made my next point, I think if we don't unify and synchronize efforts, we may find ourselves rather than a leadership position, in a position of increasing disadvantage as we get further into this century. | ||
| Human progression in any domain both has and will involve a robust mixture of exploration, economic opportunities and growth, and security activities to set conditions for success. | ||
| Space is no different. | ||
| And by the way, I realize I'm probably representing those three things, exploration and commercial and economic growth and national security. | ||
| I'm representing the national security end here, but I also want to say I am passionate and excited about all three of those things. | ||
| And that's how we're going to succeed as a nation. | ||
| A notable example for a grand space strategy example objective would be to set the condition standards and proper incentives for the establishment of an orbital and lunar logistics infrastructure, one that would enable increased capabilities and performance for space activities of all kinds throughout the Earth-Moon system. | ||
| Such an infrastructure would include on-orbit manufacturing, assembly, refueling, replenishment, and other forms of servicing. | ||
| We already know that we will need such an infrastructure to sustain human presence on the moon, solely from just the exploration approach. | ||
| But such an infrastructure could also benefit dynamic space operations for national security platforms as well as for commercial endeavors. | ||
| Yet our national approach to space logistics to date has appeared disjointed and inconsistent to those in the commercial community, and I hope my panelists maybe address this and see their perspective, is seen as inconsistent to those who might want to invest in those capabilities. | ||
| The Chinese are already matching and perhaps even outpacing us in this logistics pursuit. | ||
| Here's a recent example. | ||
| Just in the last few weeks, this summer, as observed by open sources and reported in media, we have seen China perform a docking and apparent refueling operation between its SJ-21 and SJ-25 platforms in geosynchronous orbit. | ||
| Following that fuel transfer activity, the docked spacecraft together, this is just last month, performed the largest single maneuver in geosynchronous orbit ever yet conducted, likely in excess of 330 meters per second. | ||
| That's a lot, actually. | ||
| Well, at least by today's standards. | ||
| Someday that will be a pittance, but today that's a lot. | ||
| Other examples of area where I believe we can move faster and more effectively under a unified strategy include CISLUR Space Domain Awareness and a CISLUNAR communications architecture, both again necessary for sustained human presence on the moon. | ||
| I'm also supportive of swiftly developing nuclear fusion power solutions in space, which are compelling to sustain operations on the lunar surface, but could also better enable national security activities, such as in the form of nuclear propulsion, and could unlock new commercial opportunities and benefits as well. | ||
| I will point out that China is developing or has already fielded capabilities in each of these example areas: cislunar domain awareness, cislunar communications, and space nuclear power. | ||
| The challenges are great, the matter is urgent, but I'm optimistic we can indeed, via a unified grand strategy for space, thwart China's ambitions and continue the United States' leadership in this ultimate high ground. | ||
| In the words of a different Star Trek captain, let's engage and make it so. | ||
| I look forward to your questions. | ||
| Thank you to each of you. | ||
| Mr. Bradenstein, let's start with China, a topic you addressed at some considerable length. | ||
| China is on an aggressive timeline to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030, and they appear on track to do so. | ||
| They're also currently operating a space station right now in low Earth orbit. | ||
| Mr. Bridenstein, China is racing to control the moon and low Earth orbit, and they're not shy about using space to expand their power on Earth. | ||
| If America doesn't beat them, if we cede the lunar surface or continuous presence in orbit to Beijing, what does that mean for our national security, our economy, and America's leadership? | ||
| Very important question. | ||
| So here's how I view things. | ||
| And I think the general will appreciate this from my time as a lieutenant in the Navy. | ||
| We did joint professional military education, and we learned this thing called the dime theory of national power. | ||
| And in each of those elements, you have, you know, it's an acronym, dime, diplomatic, information, military, economic power. | ||
| When I was at the helm of NASA, my goal was to always think about what we're doing in those elements. | ||
| How does this advance diplomatic power? | ||
| How does it advance information power, military power, and economic power? | ||
| On the diplomatic side, you mentioned the International Space Station and the next generation commercial space stations. | ||
| On the diplomatic side, we have 15 different countries that are operating the International Space Station today. | ||
| We've had astronauts from, I think, 21 different countries at this point. | ||
| We've had agreements with over, actively, I think we've got over 600 or 700 agreements now internationally as it relates to missions. | ||
| NASA is a key element of diplomatic power for this country. | ||
| I will tell you, I don't think it's often used correctly. | ||
| I mean, we could put it on the table for a whole host of kind of carrot and stick kind of activities to benefit the United States of America in an America-first policy. | ||
| That's the way I thought about it when I was the NASA administrator. | ||
| On the information power side of things, one of my big things that I had, one of my first eye-opening experiences at NASA, when we landed Insight on Mars, this was a lander that was going to land on Mars and help us understand Mars quakes. | ||
| Like, how does Mars, how is it organized inside? | ||
| Well, when we landed InSight on Mars, it was on the cover of every newspaper worldwide. | ||
| That's amazing information power, including one newspaper was the, it was the hardline newspaper of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying we want to win their press, but at the end of the day, it was a story about how we landed on Mars. | ||
| But their Sunday comics are excellent. | ||
| But it was a story about how we landed on Mars. | ||
| And it was a story about how we did it, when we did it, what we were doing, and it had a list at the end. | ||
| The last was all of our international partners that participated with us in that. | ||
| This is a newspaper in Iran where they don't get good information about the United States of America, but when we land on Mars, it changes things. | ||
| It changes the perception of young people towards this country that we love. | ||
| And I think that's an important power, information power. | ||
| Of course, everybody likes to talk, you know, Apollo 11 when we landed on the moon and the whole world watched. | ||
| I mean, that's information power that we reference even today. | ||
| You know, if we can land on the moon, why can't we do these things? | ||
| You know, that kind of thing. | ||
| On the military side, NASA is not strong. | ||
| We don't play military. | ||
| We don't report to the Secretary of Defense, but a lot of our technologies and capabilities, in fact, have dual-use capability. | ||
| One thing that concerns me greatly right now is the devastating consequences happening to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in California, JPL. | ||
| They're the ones that build all the Mars landers. | ||
| They're the ones that have landed on Mars nine times in history. | ||
| But a lot of that technology, make no mistake, has military application, and we're at risk of losing a lot of that. | ||
| So I think that's important to note as well. | ||
| Finally, that's the military side of things, but it's really not where NASA plays. | ||
| NASA plays in exploration, science, and discovery. | ||
| The E, and this goes back to the opening statements: the E is economic power. | ||
| When it comes to pharmaceuticals, regenerative medicines, advanced materials, article came out: China is using their space station to create new advanced materials for hypersonics, materials that my understanding is we don't have right now, although maybe somebody knows something I don't know. | ||
| At the end of the day, we have to use microgravity, where we know atoms and molecules organized differently. | ||
| We have to use it to our advantage. | ||
| And advanced materials, China is doing that. | ||
| And we're not doing it the way we should, and we're at risk of losing it. | ||
| So all of those elements I think are important. | ||
| When we think about the great power competition with China, we need to think about NASA being used for diplomatic power, information power, military power, and economic power. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Gateway will be America's eye in the sky in cislunar space, extending our lunar surface program by enabling longer missions, heavy equipment delivery, and protection of U.S. assets, while paving the way for advanced infrastructure like Interim Administrator Duffy's goal of a lunar nuclear reactor by 2030. | ||
| Meanwhile, China has made it clear that it intends to build its own cislunar station as a platform to dominate the moon and to pursue critical resources such as Helium-3. | ||
| Mr. Gold, in your judgment, why is it critical that the United States lead with Gateway and cislunar before China builds its own cislunar station and uses it to control the moon? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Senator. | |
| When I was at NASA, I got a briefing on our ability, or should I say inability, to monitor Chinese activities in cislunar space. | ||
| I didn't sleep for a week. | ||
| You hear democracy dies in darkness. | ||
| Our freedom could die in the depths of space if we are not able to monitor and understand what's happening with space situational awareness around the moon. | ||
| And relative to nuclear on the moon, you mentioned helium-3. | ||
| It's not just about the moon, it's about Earth. | ||
| The countries and companies that control the moon will control the Earth. | ||
| It's just a matter of time. | ||
| Rare Earth elements, Helium-3. | ||
| We need to be able to extract these resources. | ||
| We need to be able to learn to live off the land. | ||
| I'm a native of the great state of Montana. | ||
| I did a lot of camping and fishing back in the day. | ||
| I can't imagine going on those camping trips if I had to bring all of my air, all of my water, all of my food, all of my oxygen. | ||
| You can't have a sustainable, robust presence or support economic activities if you can't live off the land. | ||
| And we can't do that without nuclear. | ||
| And I cannot praise Secretary Duffy enough for acknowledging that this isn't about just going back to the moon. | ||
| This is about going back to the moon, harnessing its resources for the Earth, and establishing infrastructure and a permanent presence. | ||
| The Secretary gets that, and I applaud him for moving forward with nuclear. | ||
| And by the way, breaking news, our friend Ahmed is now the Associate Administrator of NASA. | ||
| And again, I very much appreciate Secretary Duffy's decisive action, his decisive leadership in elevating the head of the moon Mars program to associate administrator, the highest civil servant post at NASA. | ||
| That sends an important message, not just to NASA, but to our international partners and even to China, that we're back. | ||
| We are reigniting the torch of Artemis and we're going to go forward to the moon. | ||
| I can tell you the NASA civil servants needed to hear that. | ||
| And again, I'm very grateful to Secretary Duffy for making that point. | ||
| At Redwire, we're developing a system called Mason that's going to use microwaves to center regolith, to create landing pads, berms, roads. | ||
| We need to be able to build that infrastructure. | ||
| But more than anything, we need to be able to rebuild our credibility here on Earth. | ||
| When I was negotiating the Gateway Agreements with the European Space Agency, and thank you for that privilege, Jim, they learned one thing about popular culture, maybe from the comics and the Tehran Times there, Lucy and the football. | ||
| They told me, Lucy and the football. | ||
| Why should we sign up with you? | ||
| Trump administration will be gone in a year and a half. | ||
| We would look foolish for making that investment. | ||
| And I told them, you know what, you're right. | ||
| Don't listen to me. | ||
| They're justifiably skeptical. | ||
| NASA has failed to sustain a Beyond Leo human spaceflight program since Apollo. | ||
| Failure hasn't just been an option, it's been a certainty. | ||
| So how did I convince the Europeans? | ||
| Senator Cantwell, I had your help. | ||
| And I told them, don't listen to me. | ||
| Listen to Senator Cantwell. | ||
| Listen to Senator Nelson. | ||
| Listen to the bipartisan coalition that Jim Bridenstine created. | ||
| Because if we lose, then they will carry forward. | ||
| And if we cannot show that we can be a good partner, that we can be a reliable partner, all the benefits that we talked about diplomatically, economically, will go to others. | ||
| We're talking a lot about Star Trek. | ||
| The reason I love Star Trek, not just the adventure, not just the stories, but because it said we're not going to have just better technology, but a better future in space. | ||
| We launch not just our astronauts and hardware, we launch our values. | ||
| And if we can't move forward with Gateway, if we can't move forward with Artemis, we will lose that future to the Chinese. | ||
| Well, thank you both for your testimony. | ||
| I will say I was disappointed with both of you that you guys left Matt Damon on the surface of Mars. | ||
| But other than that, you both did an excellent job. | ||
| Ranking Member Cantwell. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for illuminating this issue of why we need a grand strategy. | ||
| I think it's a good terminology that equates to the notion that the time is here to think bigger about the implementation of all the things. | ||
| It reminds me sitting here how a colleague once said to me, you know, your state should be called Jefferson. | ||
| I said, my state should be called Jefferson. | ||
| He said, yes, it was President Jefferson who basically made the big decision to send Lewis and Clark at a critical moment in our country's history to go all the way across the United States, try to find if there was a faster path and lay claim to the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| Because other people were already there, obviously by ship. | ||
| And the President, Jefferson, saw the importance of America's expansion all the way to the Pacific coast. | ||
| So anyway, we're still proud we're called Washington. | ||
| But it brings up this point about the predicate of getting there first. | ||
| And I don't know if this is you, Mr. Gold or Lieutenant General Shaw, but there are areas, particularly the south pole of the moon, that are critically and strategically important. | ||
| And getting there in a timely fashion to claim those resources or claim that space seems to be just as critical as Jefferson's decision to get us all the way out to the Pacific. | ||
| I don't know if one of you want to comment on that. | ||
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unidentified
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Senator, I would say even more critical than Jeff Remidens' decision because this doesn't affect the country, this affects the whole world. | |
| And you're exactly right. | ||
| The moon is a large place, but the number of locations that have the combination of water ice, sunlight, and other aspects that we need are actually relatively limited. | ||
| And we could lose those to the Chinese if we don't move quickly. | ||
| Additionally, the countries that get there first will write the rules of the road for what we can do on the moon, how we act. | ||
| We've had tremendous success with the Artemis Accords. | ||
| 56 countries have signed. | ||
| The Chinese only have 13 for their International Lunar Space Research Station program. | ||
| But if we're not first, trust me, those numbers will change. | ||
| And the fear, China will eventually outspend us in space. | ||
| It's inevitable. | ||
| We must out-entrepreneur them. | ||
| And that's why I'm so grateful for one of your constituents, Blue Origin, for example. | ||
| And for some reason, this doesn't get, I think, enough play. | ||
| They have spent billions, billions of their own money to support the HLS system. | ||
| They're going to launch a Mark I spacecraft to the moon, paid for all on their own dime. | ||
| I'm assuming everybody's for the redundancy of the lunar system, the lander system. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| And we're grateful for your leadership to make that happen. | ||
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Which we desperately need, because you have to have two. | |
| You need that for efficiency, you need that for competition, you need that for safety. | ||
| But again, if we don't get out there and get there first, we'll lose real estate, we'll lose the rules of the road, and we'll lose the international partnerships and the economic benefits. | ||
| And Helium-3, that could be a new clean power revolution that we're going to let the Chinese Communist Party have. | ||
| Let's step up. | ||
| We do have some companies already working on this in the Northwest, so we're very proud of that. | ||
| So, Lieutenant General Shaw, so this notion, I get up this morning and see all the headlines from China, and everybody's there together, including Prime Minister Modi and Kim Jong-un, although we don't have all the photos of this. | ||
| And you can see that somebody could really start focusing on new alliances. | ||
| What is it about the grand strategy that is so critical for us to implement from a military perspective? | ||
| How can you describe it in the context of losing this first mover advantage that would be so critical to the alliances and partnerships that would help us? | ||
|
unidentified
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Senator, I think, as some of the other panelists have said, this Earth-Moon system, these opportunities in the moon are not just for exploration alone anymore that the Lewis and Clark expeditions were just to, oh, I wonder what's out there. | |
| No, they were about to understand the environment, to scope it for economic growth, and of course, there are security issues along the way. | ||
| I point out that Clark was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and representing, but they're to provide security and understanding of what our borders and frontiers were. | ||
| And so we need to approach the moon the same way that it's all of these pieces, all of the dime that Honorable Bridenstine mentioned. | ||
| So one of these examples that we've talked about of where I don't think where we could do this better as a nation would be cislunar domain awareness. | ||
| There are going to be needs for that, just for human presence in and around the moon to understand that domain. | ||
| What debris might be in lunar orbit? | ||
| It's a different kind of regime than low Earth orbit that we're used to, but there are the possibility that we'll be things in orbit. | ||
| We'll understand what's there. | ||
| We'll want to understand what possible mischief could be going on. | ||
| It's easy to hide things way, way out there. | ||
| We'll want to understand that. | ||
| So, not only protecting humans in human exploration, but there is a national security need to understand that environment as part of the full Earth-Moon system. | ||
| And to my knowledge, right now, the Department of Defense isn't really focusing that much on that. | ||
| If there's a national need to do it, why not have the Department of Defense perhaps be part of that solution and develop the capabilities it's going to ultimately need anyway? | ||
| So, that's this idea of where we probably could do things in a much more coordinated and synergistic fashion than we're currently doing. | ||
| Well, I'm definitely very concerned about our communication security writ large, and I do think more of defense is moving into space and satellite effects of communication. | ||
| And then, I worry that if somebody is going to be on that frontier of the latest of technology communication in a cis-lunar environment, that has to be us. | ||
| And we have to understand what the ramifications are of that system. | ||
| Is that not correct? | ||
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unidentified
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That is absolutely correct. | |
| And again, I'd like to point out that China sent seven payloads to the moon last year. | ||
| Six of them were communications-focused. | ||
| They weren't scientific experiments, they were communications-focused, the building blocks of a communications architecture. | ||
| So, they're already demonstrating the fact they are trying to build that infrastructure that I talked about before. | ||
| And do you have any idea of what that infrastructure could do that would be a military concern? | ||
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unidentified
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The term dual use has already been brought up by the panel. | |
| Any capability that could be used for scientific or exploration or even economic purposes invariably is going to have some sort of national security use to it of some kind. | ||
| As an example, in this particular case, if there are Chinese national security payloads operating in the broader Earth-Moon system, they could leverage that communication architecture network to have continuous communications with those platforms rather than relying on strictly terrestrial relays. | ||
| Oh, well, big advantage there. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Senator Taylor, thank you. | ||
| Senator Fisher. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, General, for your comments about defense. | ||
| I chair the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces on Armed Services, and we've had numerous discussions on that since we have jurisdiction over space as a war-fighting domain. | ||
| So, I appreciated your comments. | ||
| You guys are really good storytellers. | ||
| I have a short amount of time here, so I'd like specific answers. | ||
| I need to leave for another hearing, and there are some things I'd like to get through. | ||
| So, Mr. Gold, I'm not picking on you first, but Mr. Gold, should China be the first to establish a permanent presence on the moon, there would be serious consequences for Americans. | ||
| You've spoken to that in the past, as had the administrator. | ||
| I want to hear some specific examples from you on how the lives of Americans would be impacted should China establish control of the moon's resources so Americans can reach out and touch what would really happen to their lives. | ||
|
unidentified
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The potential wealth of the moon is extraordinary and candidly even unknown. | |
| You're telling me a story. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, let me put it this way: China lands on the moon. | |
| The next day, we see tremendous benefits to China geopolitically, where our allies turn to them not only for space exploration, but for national security agreements, for trade agreements. | ||
| The meeting that's occurring now between China, India, and Russia that you're seeing today. | ||
| If China lands on the moon first, that will deepen and strengthen those economic ties. | ||
| China is very good at leveraging space to drive the dime assets that Jim Bryinstein and the general are talking about. | ||
| If they get there first, we will see a global realignment that will impact our economy, our tax base, our ability to innovate, and our national security in terms of diplomacy and geopolitics that will affect security and many other aspects of our daily lives. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Administrator, while at NASA, you helped lead the Artemis Accords and establish that framework for the principles to guide civil space exploration. | ||
| China has their own framework, the internal lunar research station that's there. | ||
| Can you, first of all, speak to the importance of the accords and then speak to the risk that we would see with those principles if they start to erode the risk we have there for future deep space exploration since China then would establish that permanent presence on the moon? | ||
| Excellent question. | ||
| A couple of things that I think are important to note. | ||
| You know, when we established the Artemis Accords, it was because, and this is important, so important. | ||
| We went to an event where there was a lot of international players in the space domain, and we said, hey, we're thinking about creating a moon program. | ||
| In fact, we are going to create a moon program. | ||
| If you'd like to participate, come to a meeting. | ||
| We had like 26 countries show up, and they were so enthusiastic about being part of the moon program, it was overwhelming. | ||
| And so when that was over, I came back and I called Mike Gold, and I said, look, we need to figure out a way to use this as a compelling way to get people to behave properly in space, because in many ways they don't. | ||
| And so I actually got Mike Gold to come to NASA to run this effort called what he termed the Artemis Accords. | ||
| And at the end of the day, what we have to have is rules. | ||
| So if we're going to go extract resources from the moon, there have to be rules around that. | ||
| And those rules, I think, are established in law and precedent when you think about international waters. | ||
| You know, just because you extract tuna from the ocean doesn't mean you own the ocean, but you get to own the tuna. | ||
| And if you extract energy from the ocean, you don't own the ocean, but you own the energy. | ||
| Those same principles should apply to the moon. | ||
| If you extract platinum group metals or what we call rare earth metals, or in this case, rare lunar metals, if you extract that from the moon and you apply your sweat and your equity and your effort to get those resources, you don't own the moon. | ||
| The outer space treaty says you can't appropriate the moon for national sovereignty. | ||
| However, you can own the resources that you extract from the moon. | ||
| And I think that's an important principle that we as Americans need to be leading the world on. | ||
| And that's what the Artemis Accords were all about. | ||
| And that's why I got Mike Gold to come lead that effort. | ||
|
unidentified
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Great. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Also, Administrator, when we look at trying to remain competitive with China in deep space, there's going to be an increased demand for commercial launches. | ||
| Do you assess that demand will outstrip existing launch capacity? | ||
| And if so, what can be done in order to expand that capacity that we currently have? | ||
| Oh my gosh, that's an important question and very challenging. | ||
| The answer is yes, we're already over capacity. | ||
| Our launch facilities are basically stretching and twisting and doing everything they can to put more launch capability into the same amount of space. | ||
| A couple of things I think is important to note. | ||
| I want to be clear, the architecture for the Artemis program is strained, to say the least. | ||
| I would also say that we need, in many cases, we need Starship to be successful for a whole host of capabilities. | ||
| It's also true that if they do what they're setting out to do, there's going to be over 100 launches from Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center per year from Starship. | ||
| And in each one of those launches, that also means there's going to be testing, there's going to be landing, there's going to be a lot of different things happening. | ||
| Each time that's going to end up shutting down those facilities. | ||
| And it puts us in a position where we could end up with basically one launch provider if we don't figure out how to solve this problem. | ||
| I do believe that over time, there's going to be other opportunities to launch from different locations. | ||
| We're not there right now. | ||
| I'm talking about inland launch. | ||
| From Oklahoma, we have a spaceport. | ||
| Right now, we'd have to drop something on Kansas. | ||
| And I know Senator Moran doesn't want us dropping anything on Kansas. | ||
| So we don't want to do that. | ||
| But I do think it's important that we try to find alternative solutions for launch initially on the coasts, but eventually we're going to have to come to inland launch at some point. | ||
| When you look at overall launch capacity and the impact that these heavy launch vehicles have on the existing infrastructure, I think, yes, we do have to be able to look beyond where we are now. | ||
| And Space Force determines the launch pad allocations. | ||
| So we have a tie-in there between these committees, each within their own jurisdiction, specific, specific jurisdiction over different parts of what we're discussing here today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sir Kim. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you all for coming on out here. | |
| Mr. Bridenstein, I'd love to just start with you. | ||
| There's been a lot of conversation about the different national security implications, and I agree with that as someone who've worked in national security my whole career. | ||
| It's important that we keep our foot on the gas. | ||
| As I'm trying to explain to the people in my state of New Jersey what the benefit we get out of the space program, especially from a commercial aspect in terms of just implications to people's daily lives, our economy, how do we go about doing it? | ||
|
unidentified
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What's the best argument that you've come across? | |
| You raised some of the potential exploration benefits of microgravity, of biotech. | ||
| I'd love for you to expound on this and really try to help us hit home to the American people the importance of this. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I would summarize it. | ||
| There's a lot of ways to talk about it, but I would say the way we communicate. | ||
| A lot of us use internet broadband from space. | ||
| People here are familiar with DirecTV Dish Network as well. | ||
| The way we communicate now is highly dependent on space. | ||
| Even our terrestrial wireless networks, our cell phones, are dependent on a timing signal that comes from GPS. | ||
| So even our wireless networks are dependent on space. | ||
| But the way we communicate, the way we navigate, GPS, for example, is critically important. | ||
| The way we produce food, we're increasing crop yields, reducing water usage, the way we produce energy and the way we do it cleanly, the way we predict weather, the way we understand climate. | ||
| And there's a lot of partisanship around the climate issue, but at the end of the day, we've got to know what's happening. | ||
| And there's ways that we can use our space assets to understand how the climate is affected by what we do here on Earth. | ||
| Well, one thing I saw NASA do that I wasn't fully aware of was just how much the applications are for agriculture, for instance, especially when it comes to what you were just saying about climate and understanding crops, storm systems, et cetera. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I want to just bring in something else. | |
| I just took, I did a CODEL trip out to South Korea and Japan. | ||
| And it really just got me thinking as I'm listening to you and this panel, thinking about just our space cooperation, just the role that it plays with other countries. | ||
| And Minister, I'd like to start with you, but open it up. | ||
| Just what you see in terms of South Korea and Japan, places where we can build upon, especially when it comes to accelerating Artemis, building a counterweight to China's space partnership with Russia. | ||
|
unidentified
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And look, there's no doubt we saw those images with Modi standing next to a lot of these leaders. | |
| How can NASA work with India to build on the NISAR partnership to advance shared space science and exploration goals? | ||
| I'm just trying to think about how it is that we can try to anchor that relationship as well. | ||
| Yeah, wonderful question. | ||
| I think when it comes to South Korea and Japan, Japan specifically has been a long partner with the United States on space exploration from the International Space Station. | ||
| They have modules on the International Space Station. | ||
| They've got experiments on the International Space Station. | ||
| They have rockets that resupply the International Space Station. | ||
| They are among our best partners on the International Space Station. | ||
| And of course, they're one of the early adopters of the Artemis Accords. | ||
| In fact, I think, Mike, weren't they the first eight? | ||
|
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They were the first to sign. | |
| The first, the first. | ||
|
unidentified
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And the reason the English is so good in the accords is because of the corrections that Japanese made. | |
| They speak English better than we do. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So the... | ||
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I don't know if I feel super great about that, what it says about us. | |
| But I think all of those are important international partnerships. | ||
| And then, of course, on the South Korean side, they also signed on to the Artemis Accords. | ||
| And they want to do more and more in space. | ||
| And they have the capability to do that. | ||
| And since they signed the Artemis Accords, we want to bring them into that fold and have them participate fully in the missions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| And Senator, in regard to the Artemis Accords, what's really wonderful to see is it's created an ecosystem, a family of nations. | ||
| When we were back at NASA during the launch of the aptly named HOPE mission by United Arab Emirates, that was a spacecraft built by UAE that was powered by a partnership that began between UAE and Korea, where UAE didn't have the technical capability. | ||
| They went to Korea, they helped them build these spacecrafts, then they brought it domestic, and then it was launched on a Japanese spacecraft with American assistance from Colorado. | ||
| During this launch, we heard overlapping Japanese, Arabic, English, and even Korean back during some of the technical conversations. | ||
| That's the future that we want. | ||
| And when it comes to national security, that's the coalition that will keep us safe in China if we can continue with the Artemis program. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, I'm almost out of time here, so I'll just say, you know, I worked in diplomacy before, did a lot in terms of different bilateral, multilateral relationships. | ||
| I've never seen another issue that can really solidify some of these relationships and stay out of the day-to-day politics, stay out of some of the geostrategic conversations, and really just be able to have that kind of pure expert science-to-science kind of partnerships. | ||
|
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I think there's a lot here to build off from. | |
| I'm excited about some of the energy I see on this committee. | ||
| So thank you for your testimonies today, and I'll yield back. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Kim. | ||
| On behalf of Senator Cantwell, she has an article from Aaron Space Forces magazine dated March the 28th she'd like to have admitted to our record. | ||
| Is there any objection? | ||
| Without objection, so ordered. | ||
| Gentlemen, thank you very much for your presence here today. | ||
| All of you have served our country. | ||
| Mr. Gold and Mr. Bridenstein, Lieutenant General. | ||
| Mr. Cutler, you served the United States Senate as part of our staff in Commerce, Justice, Science. | ||
| And I thank you all for the knowledge that you bring forward to us today. | ||
| I want to start first with the appropriations process. | ||
| And Mr. Gold, maybe Mr. Bridenstein or others would care to comment. | ||
| I'm worried that once again we'll end up in a continuing resolution. | ||
| I'm worried that Commerce Justice Science is stalled and I would welcome your efforts in the work that you now do to make certain that's not the case by encouraging support from all of my colleagues. | ||
| But I'd like to have you tell me what you see occurring, good and or bad, from the passage of the Commerce Justice Science Bill, particularly as it relates to the funding of NASA. | ||
|
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Mr. Bridenstine. | |
| So first of all, I think it's important that to the extent that we have a CR, it's better than a shutdown. | ||
| And I think we all understand that. | ||
| But CR is also, it's stunning to me that people are now advocating for CRs. | ||
| I want to be clear, we need to be advocating for appropriations because ultimately technology is changing, capabilities are changing, and we need to be able to change programs commensurate with the times and not just fund things the way they used to be because then we buy obsolete things and we don't buy the right things. | ||
| So 100% we need to do appropriations. | ||
| I do worry that when we think about how we get the NASA funded, the reconciliation bill went a long way to supporting human spaceflight. | ||
| But there's a lot of other parts of NASA that are critically important. | ||
| And I would say the science mission directorate largely is not partisan. | ||
| It's not political. | ||
| There's a lot of bipartisan consensus around it. | ||
| We're talking, you know, the gentleman behind me, Bill Nye, he does not like my politics. | ||
| You're probably aware of this. | ||
| But I will also tell you that he and I agree strongly that we need planetary defense. | ||
| We need the ability to look out in space and see large objects that could really hit Earth and do it damage. | ||
| And not only that, but we need to be able to intercept those if necessary. | ||
| And that's what our space program is capable of doing. | ||
| It's an element of the science mission directorate inside NASA, and it needs to be funded. | ||
| But all this capability largely comes from our ability to do planetary science. | ||
| When we go to Mars and we land on Mars and we go to every planet in the solar system, these are unique capabilities that only this nation can and has done. | ||
| Every planet in the solar system. | ||
| And beyond that, we've got missions to the sun for heliophysics and we've got astrophysics. | ||
| You know, I got beat up in this committee, Senator, a lot over the James Webb Space Telescope, probably because of this guy down here on the end, Mr. Cutler. | ||
| But I will also tell you that now that it's in space, everybody knows that it sets America apart from the rest of the world by 50 years when it comes to physics. | ||
| Like that's the impact, 50 years when it comes to physics. | ||
| People say, well, why do we need to look at the stars anyway? | ||
| There's a great story I like to tell about Einstein and his understanding of time-space continuum, which ultimately is critical for how we use GPS today. | ||
| Basic science resulted in us understanding time and space in a way that we otherwise wouldn't, and it enables GPS to function. | ||
| That's the type of science that we get from NASA, and that's the type of capability. | ||
| James Webb, we're going to learn things about things like dark matter and which I hate to even use that term because nobody really understands it or knows what it is. | ||
| But dark energy and all these different capabilities, we're learning things that have never been discovered before, and it sets us apart. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| A couple of observations. | ||
| The web came close to being terminated for lack of progress, and the decision was made to continue. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And it seems well worth the difficulties that we went through. | ||
| Secondly, I have not said this publicly, but I can intend to vote against a CR, which would mean a shutdown. | ||
| And I've said this in previous years. | ||
| We've gotten to the point at which it's easier, as long as it's easier to do a CR than it is to do appropriation bills, we apparently are not going to do them. | ||
| And it is a mistake for this Congress to get in the habit of continuing resolutions. | ||
| And unless there's a consequence, we're going to do them every year. | ||
| So I think my hope is that I'll have colleagues who join me in the effort to make sure the appropriations process does not end its early time, end its time early in this 2005 session. | ||
| A couple of other things that I want to ask before I turn it over to my Democratic colleague, Mr. Liu Han. | ||
| What let me make sure because a couple of my questions have now been answered and you've talked so long, Mr. Bridenstine, that I've run out of time. | ||
| Let me go to you. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I'm surprised that you were never served in the United States Senate. | ||
| General Shaw, your testimony, you speak to the necessity of establishing a grand strategy of which the Chinese have already adopted, quote, to unify and synergize our national efforts across civil, commercial, and national security activities, and that we risk losing our domination in space without one. | ||
| What are the pillars of a successful grand strategy capable of beating the Chinese in space? | ||
| And it's also important that we concentrate some time and energy, some effort in knowing what follows once we get back to the moon in our long-term goals, what they should be. | ||
| How does the strategy deal with getting us back to the moon and then also the long-term strategy of what happens next? | ||
|
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So I would think that if in the formulation of such a strategy, probably the overarching objectives extend well beyond us returning to the moon. | |
| It is about what do we want to accomplish in this century or in the Earth-Moon system and beyond for the benefit of the nation. | ||
| And those are not going to be solely exploration objectives. | ||
| They are going to be about economic growth and about the appropriate security framework to ensure that we can set the conditions for that economic success against all of the forces that this panel has already talked about and against the challenge, the additional challenges we face if China gets there first and starts to establish the ground rules almost literally on the surface of the moon. | ||
| And so I say that if we think of it, it's just that strategy has to be something that now establishes an architecture and a framework that lasts to the end of the century and beyond. | ||
| That has to involve all of the elements of national power and all of those key pieces I mentioned in progress in any domain, exploration, economic growth, and security measures. | ||
| We don't really do that today with regard to space. | ||
| We do it sometimes by accident, but it's never by design. | ||
| And I would love to see us approach that from a national perspective by design. | ||
| And then as you lay out the objectives and subject objectives and you now identify the ways and means to achieve those objectives, assigning those to the appropriate part of our nation, not necessarily our government. | ||
| But maybe we rely on industry or commercial to help with some of those or the scientific community to help with some of those objectives. | ||
| I just lay out that framework for you, Center, as something that doesn't really exist today that could help us. | ||
| The Chinese do have that kind of framework. | ||
| They have exactly that kind of framework. | ||
| And that's what's enabling them to continue to meet their milestones and goals that they have put out. | ||
| By the way, they are amazingly consistent. | ||
| They predict what they're going to do, they say what they're going to do, and then they do what they said they were going to do. | ||
| We should actually use that to our advantage to really kind of understand how that's going to lay out. | ||
| And so I hope I've answered your question, but that's how I would approach such a strategy and looking at it long term and how we can bring all of the nation to bear on that. | ||
| General, I appreciate your answer, and I've run out of time, but in the meantime, while we develop that strategy that we should already have and we implement it and we follow it, I worry about what happens to our supply chain as we provide such uncertainty in today's world, the current problems. | ||
| And that supply chain across the country is really the way that we do get back to the moon and the way that we continue our efforts. | ||
| So a lot of long-term and short-term concerns. | ||
| Senator Luhan, I recognize you. | ||
| Oh, Senator Peters has joined us. | ||
| Senator Peters. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Cutler, thank you for being here today. | ||
| You know, programs and contracts like those and the Artemis support thousands of jobs across the U.S. manufacturing supply chain. | ||
| I'm proud that Michigan is actually one of the top 10 states in aerospace manufacturing. | ||
| It's home to over 600 aerospace-related companies, and we're looking to that to grow considerably in the years ahead. | ||
| It's estimated that the moon to Mars activities have generated over $20 billion of economic output nationwide. | ||
| However, the President's budget creates uncertainty about the future, as you know, for Artemis program after the next launch. | ||
| Amanding this program or disrupting the existing project plan jeopardizes our efforts in the space race, hinders the development of our domestic aerospace supply chain, and potentially leaves billions on the table in future economic benefits. | ||
| So, my question for you, sir, is the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration has noted its commitment to supporting the inclusion of small businesses in the NASA programs. | ||
| And in your experience, how have NASA programs like Artemis been beneficial to the small businesses in our states and to our local economies? | ||
| And what can we do to better support efforts to include more small businesses in this important supply chain? | ||
|
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Well, absolutely. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Senator, for the question. | ||
| If you look at Artemis, just the program itself, there are 2,700 suppliers that are part of the Artemis program. | ||
| That covers everything from small mom and pop shops making valves, nuts, washers, all the way up to the big integrators. | ||
| We can't have this program without small businesses. | ||
| They absolutely are critical. | ||
| And if you think about it, these missions, they need every single piece to work. | ||
| It's common to hear something like: you need a million things to go right for a mission to be accomplished. | ||
| You just need one to go wrong. | ||
| That stems all the way up and down the supply chain, and it starts with small businesses. | ||
| They are making those initial components that make Artemis possible. | ||
| So absolutely critical on the small business side. | ||
| And I think as we go and talked about this a little bit with Senator Moran when he's talking about CRs and that sort of thing, the instability that comes from uncertain funding, be it from not knowing if we're going to shut down, continuing resolution, are we going to continue the program after Artemis III with SLS and Orion? | ||
| All of these things insert instability into a business's understanding. | ||
| And when that happens, maybe larger companies can weather that sort of thing. | ||
| Small businesses, that's hard. | ||
| I'm at the coalition. | ||
| It's a small outfit. | ||
| We don't have a massive staff. | ||
| And essentially, I run a small business. | ||
| I understand what these small guys do. | ||
| They're busy. | ||
| If they're working, that's their lives. | ||
| It's their livelihoods. | ||
| It's the livelihood of their workers. | ||
| And if we're not doing things to help them. | ||
| So one of the things we've done from the small business side, from the coalition, we've brought in some of the prime contractors. | ||
| We've had them talk to our members of our coalition, small businesses. | ||
| What can they do? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Ellert. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So we want to continue to focus on that. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| Mr. Brightenstein, it's great to see you here today. | ||
| It was certainly a pleasure to work with you in your previous capacity as a NASA administrator. | ||
| And as you're well aware, in 2020, the President signed the Pro-SWIFT Act into law. | ||
| I authored this bipartisan legislation to strengthen the nation's ability to predict severe space weather events and mitigate the harmful events. | ||
| And I appreciate you championing that with me. | ||
| You were very helpful in getting that bill across the finish line. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| As you know, a space weather event can have implications for power systems, for GPS, other assets in low Earth orbit. | ||
| And on Monday, the National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Center actually just recently issued a watch for a potential geomagnetic storm, as you're aware. | ||
| Continued research is needed to strengthen our space weather prediction capabilities to ensure that we can have these accurate warnings. | ||
| Unfortunately, the President budget includes cuts to this funding that could jeopardize these efforts and could have major implications for those communication systems in particular. | ||
| So my question for you, sir, is: can you speak to how NASA's science missions, like the Space Weather Program, play a critical role in our everyday lives? | ||
| This is non-political. | ||
| This is straightforward. | ||
| Why do we need to make sure funding for space weather prediction? | ||
| There's a lot of different reasons to do it. | ||
| Just from a pure human spaceflight perspective, when we start putting NASA astronauts on the other side of the Van Allen radiation belt in orbit around the moon, on the surface of the moon, those astronauts are in jeopardy of things like a solar flare hitting them or a coronal mass ejection, which would be, of course, even more devastating. | ||
| And all of that radiation environment the astronauts are exposed to would be devastating. | ||
| In fact, if you go back to Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin narrowly missed being hit with a solar flare that could have been devastating for their lives. | ||
| So we didn't know what we didn't know back then. | ||
| Now we have the ability to learn and predict. | ||
| Thank you to you for your efforts to help us with that. | ||
| But beyond that, I mean, when you think about the capabilities of our satellites in orbit, they become, in many cases, at risk from a coronal mass ejection or solar flares. | ||
| So we need to be able to predict that. | ||
| We need to be able to respond before, you know, it's not a lot of lead time. | ||
| We're talking about a matter of maybe eight minutes or 10 minutes to be able to respond to something like that. | ||
| But the consequences of being hit with a Carrington event, which was 100 and some years ago now, 140 years ago or so. | ||
| But if that were to happen today, it would be far more devastating than even back then because today we're so dependent on technology. | ||
| And all that technology would be put at risk. | ||
| So I think it's important for us to be able to predict and respond and defend our power grid and defend our critical infrastructure and a lot of that infrastructure, including command and control in space, including GPS, which is important for a timing signal for a whole host of different capabilities here on Earth. | ||
| We've got to be able to respond to that. | ||
| And your bill, quite frankly, was right on point in helping us do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, thank you for that response. | ||
| Out of time, but that's if you look at the cost-benefit analysis to cut the relatively small cost and the huge of the program and the cost to society if we don't have the warning is astronomical. | ||
| So I appreciate your comments. | ||
| Literally astronautical. | ||
| Yeah, yes. | ||
| Astronomical. | ||
| Senator Blackburn. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for being here. | ||
| Mr. Cutler, I made some notes here. | ||
| You've got 2,700 suppliers. | ||
| You were noting impediments and talked about the need for a budget, not having a CR. | ||
| I'd like to hear more from you in writing, if you will. | ||
| You said you all are constantly looking at this. | ||
| What about regulations? | ||
| What about security clearances? | ||
| What about test beds? | ||
| What about other components? | ||
| And if you'll submit that to me for the record. | ||
|
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Sure, absolutely. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Mr. Bridenstein, always so good to see you. | ||
| Happy to see you back up here. | ||
| Let's talk about commercial space innovation and that importance, because you look at where we are, you look at where China is. | ||
| Is there anything that the U.S. should do immediately, that we in Congress should do immediately, that is going to encourage coordination among federal, state, commercial partners in order to advance innovation? | ||
| Yes, ma'am, that's a wonderful question. | ||
| In keeping with the spirit of the hearing regarding the moon, I think what we've got to be thinking about as a country is infrastructure. | ||
| What is the infrastructure we can create that will encourage private investment on the moon, around the moon, that kind of thing? | ||
| So part of that infrastructure, I think, would be, and Mike Gold has talked about it today extensively, is the gateway. | ||
| The gateway is designed to be open architecture. | ||
| It is designed so that the way we do power and communications and data and rendezvous and proximity operations and docking, all of that stuff is standardized so that commercial partners, if they want to build their own landing system that's compatible with it, they can. | ||
| And in fact, there's international partners that have an interest in doing that type of thing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And in the 90s, NASA and DOD did a collaboration on the X-37B, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, given that we're facing the kind of competition that we are, what about reinstating a program such as that and utilizing it? | ||
| I think it's a great idea. | ||
| I would say we do have, NASA and DARPA have been partnered on some capabilities in space as it relates to nuclear power in space for a lot of different capabilities, but we need nuclear power in space for sensors. | ||
| And in fact, if we're going to do directed energy from space, we're going to have to have nuclear power for that. | ||
| If we're thinking about Golden Dome and what the future of missile defense is. | ||
| Gold on lunar landers. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, those are things. | ||
| I think maybe we need to think differently and revisit some ideas that have worked that may open new opportunities. | ||
| Tennessee had a space grant consortium. | ||
| They did this with NASA, did it 27 years ago. | ||
| And it was there to promote space and science education throughout the state. | ||
| And 15 colleges and universities, two not-for-profit organizations. | ||
| And today the UT Space Institute is one of the leading hypersonic workforce programs in the country. | ||
| And we love the work that they're doing, that they're doing around Space Force, that they're doing around hypersonics and the testing that can be done at Arnold Engineering. | ||
| And we think this is something that is beneficial and it encourages that interdisciplinary training that needs to take place. | ||
| So talk a little bit about related items of education and how that affects some of the workforce that could go into some of these programs, like the program with DOD and NASA. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So when you're thinking about NASA projects, we find that when we have a university as a leader of a project, you'll have students working side by side with professional engineers in a way that you see a collaboration that is really beneficial to the students. | ||
| I would also say that in a university environment, you have the scientists side by side with the engineers. | ||
| So they're making trades in the development of a program early. | ||
| A lot of times you find that you start going down an engineering path and the science doesn't work and it gets too late in the program and it results in delays and cost overruns and everything else. | ||
| But in a university environment where you've got the scientists and the engineers working together side by side and you've got students in the mix learning a lot. | ||
| And you have students who are not afraid to fail. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They are looking for opportunities to try new concepts. | ||
| And I think that's why UT's program has been so successful. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Senator, I would also say if you look at university-led missions, overwhelmingly they're on budget and on schedule. | ||
| And that's not always the case outside of universities. | ||
| Senator Rosen. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today and quite a great conversation. | ||
| But I have real concerns over budget cuts because we're talking about research, amazing research, scientists not being afraid to fail. | ||
| That's how science happens, right? | ||
| Sometimes the failures lead you to a positive result down the line. | ||
| They tell you something. | ||
| And so we've seen how NASA's investments in research and innovation, STEM education, they fuel our economy, they strengthen our national security, and actually they're inspirational as they inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, dreamers, and thinkers, and all of those things. | ||
| We know what the space program has done for us through the decades. | ||
| And so I'm concerned about the President's proposed budget cuts to key programs that have long delivered value, well, right here on Terra Firma, right here on Earth, specifically aeronautics research at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, ISS payload operations at Marshall Space Flight Center, and science missions at Goddard Space Flight Center, excuse me, just to name a few. | ||
| So Administrator Bridenstine, can you talk about the potential impacts of proposed cuts to just some of these programs I've mentioned, particularly as we're building on what everyone's been asking about, innovation, scientific leadership, leadership in general, our ability to respond to these challenges, economic competitiveness, aerospace advancement, climate, and national security? | ||
| Yeah, so I think it is important when we think about, You know, when we think about NASA and the budget that it has, and you think about the size of the U.S. budget, we're talking about now an agency that has less than one-third of 1% of the federal budget. | ||
| And by the way, if you go back to Apollo, it was somewhere between 4% and 5%. | ||
| So we are significantly smaller as a percentage of the Federal Government than we were back in the Apollo era. | ||
| All that being said, not all of that is because of NASA cuts. | ||
| I want to be clear. | ||
| A lot of that is because of the growth of government in other areas. | ||
| And I certainly understand we have a huge deficit problem and we've got a debt problem. | ||
| And I know that the President is focused like a laser on trying to get control over that. | ||
| And by the way, I think everybody bipartisan understands that we've got to get control of it. | ||
| I would also say it's really hard to balance the budget when you're talking about cutting a few billion dollars from an agency that has less than one-third of 1% of the federal government. | ||
| And I would argue with you saying that the economic development, the inspiration, I'm a child of the 1960s and 70s. | ||
| I watched them walk on the moon. | ||
| I know people that went into careers because of what they saw. | ||
| And that still happens today. | ||
| And so I would argue that there's probably a pretty good return on the investment. | ||
| But we have a lot of other questions, so I'm going to just try to move on in my two minutes because I want to ask you again about the future this time of space stations. | ||
| Because the request for proposals for phase two of the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program, it's expected to define NASA's level of investment and commitment, awarding contracts to two or more commercial providers to ensure redundancy and competition for services. | ||
| That is essential for driving innovation. | ||
| Competition drives innovation and economic growth. | ||
| So given your previous role at NASA, again, Administrator, can you speak about the critical need for these providers to be operational before the ISS deorbits? | ||
| We can't wait to have nothing up there and then hope we're going to get something there. | ||
| So how do we ensure the timely development and deployment of these systems? | ||
| I think it's important to note that we need to have space stations that can, in effect, replace the International Space Station. | ||
| When I say that, I mean space stations that are fully mission capable and have a permanent human presence in space. | ||
| The capabilities and technologies that come from human spaceflight are significant. | ||
| We've talked about some of them today when we think about pharmaceutical development to treat diseases that have never been treatable before, regenerative medicine, the ability to print in 3D human tissue, to grow in 3D human tissue. | ||
| All of these capabilities, if we don't stay in front of it, our greatest competitor, China, will, and our international partners will join them in that effort. | ||
| So it is important for us to have fully mission-capable space stations that can replace the International Space Station. | ||
| And I would also say when it comes to advanced materials, whether we're talking about semiconductors or we're talking about hypersonics, microgravity is critical to all of these capabilities. | ||
| And we're at risk if we don't have a fully mission-capable system, if we don't have a permanent human presence at space, we're at risk of losing that to our greatest competitor. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Senator, if I may, it's not only you make an excellent point enough that we avoid the gap, but we must have orbital capabilities that are at least equal to the Chinese. | |
| We have to avoid the gap and make sure that we are equal or superior in LEO for all the reasons Jim just mentioned. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I think investing in innovation, research, public-private partnerships is really important. | ||
| Thank you for your time today. | ||
| Mr. Bridenstein, is that a bill nye approved beverage you have there? | ||
| Dyed Mountain Dew, that's a first. | ||
| I'm guessing not, but he's shaking his head. | ||
| So I grew up on Bill Nye, so I'm a child of the 90s, so I grew up on Bill Nye. | ||
| Senator Young. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| Thanks for our witnesses for being here, and good to see you again, Congressman. | ||
| As many of you know, Indiana has deep roots within our nation's space exploration history. | ||
| Purdue University likes to call itself, I think fairly, the cradle of astronauts. | ||
| I was up there actually over the weekend with some family members, and you see a lot of banners. | ||
| They advertise that to those who visit the community. | ||
| They inspire many of us, including the students with their 27 astronaut alumni, including Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who was a boilermaker. | ||
| So this is, of course, an effort to boast about my state, but it's also to highlight the opportunities I think that many U.S. universities provide to our young scientists and our engineers. | ||
| So as we look to reauthorize NASA, partially authorized through the Chips and Science Act, I'm proud to say, just a few years ago, I believe it's crucial to focus on implementing strategic investments in research to not only secure our STEM pipeline, | ||
| but to maintain a competitive edge in scientific research and development, which will eventually lead to commercialization and deployment of new technologies to bolster our space exploration. | ||
| Mr. Gold, thank you for your testimony and for highlighting the groundbreaking microgravity research that Redwire is advancing aboard the International Space Station. | ||
| This pioneering work, the world should know, is anchored in Greenville, Indiana. | ||
| The state of Indiana's growing leadership in space innovation. | ||
| Mr. Gold, could you speak to how space and biotech, also something associated increasingly with the state of Indiana, are converging and share your vision for the future of microgravity research in Indiana and beyond? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much, Senator. | |
| I believe you've been to our Greenville facility and even launches, and thank you for your support. | ||
| We are at a point where microgravity and pharmaceuticals are coming together in a way that will transform both fields. | ||
| In my opening comments, I talked about how we're printing meniscuses, how we're printing live cardiovascular tissue, bringing it back to the ISS, still live. | ||
|
unidentified
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At this most recent launch to the ISS, just a week ago, we launched liver cells, and we will print with liver cells. | |
| Drink all you want. | ||
| Redwire's got you covered. | ||
| We'll get you a new liver. | ||
| Enjoy some of that good Kentucky bourbon. | ||
| But think about it. | ||
| I mean, we've all had friends who are on the organ donor list, probably, you know, who have suffered or died. | ||
| Not only can we change that paradigm, but because these organs would be grown with your own stem cells, we could avoid the painful and expensive angsty rejection therapies. | ||
| Additionally, we have now flown 32 pillbox systems. | ||
| These are growing seed crystals for drugs. | ||
| Seed crystals are like a sourdough starter kit that we just need to bring down from space a thimbleful of these seed crystals, and then they lead to drugs that, because in microgravity, the seed crystals form larger, more uniform. | ||
| We get new versions of drugs, better efficacy, better longevity, and fewer side effects. | ||
| We partnered with Eli Lilly. | ||
| We flew a version of insulin. | ||
| Lilly said those were the prettiest crystals that they've ever seen. | ||
| This revolution is happening. | ||
| So let's not turn around now and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. | ||
| We are about to move into an even larger facility in Indiana. | ||
| So I appreciate the support and reassure you that the road to space goes through southern Indiana. | ||
| Well, it's great. | ||
| It's a road with many arteries. | ||
| So let me sort of end by being expansive here and inclusive. | ||
| I think your testimony here today, Mr. Gold, illustrates how parts of our country that people wouldn't perhaps associate as important components to the space economy are ready to go. | ||
| And they're on the cusp of achieving some amazing achievements scientifically, engineering-wise, and by extension that will benefit the economies, regional economies all around the country. | ||
| So these continued scientific investments through the CHIPS and Science Act by reauthorizing NASA, et cetera, are critical. | ||
| And I say that to a lot of my colleagues, but I also want the administration to know it's okay to have a pause on research funding, but unless they present an alternative plan to fund some of these research projects that collectively benefit all of us and are not internalized into individual companies, then we're really going to be missing the boat. | ||
| I would also say, just to add here, and now I'm over my time, but we do that in the Senate. | ||
| I would also say that our adversaries aren't slowing down. | ||
| Now, I received this, so it may be a little choppy here, about 30 seconds before I started speaking, but a little social media post pertaining to a comment that Vladimir Putin just made. | ||
| This was overheard, as I understand it, by a Chinese state media broadcaster. | ||
| And evidently, Vladimir Putin walking towards Tiananmen Square for a parade. | ||
| His translator could be heard saying in Chinese, biotechnology is continuously developing. | ||
| Translator added, after an audible passage by Putin to Xi Jinping, human organs can be continuously transplanted. | ||
| The longer you live, the younger you become, and you can even achieve immortality. | ||
| So these can seem like things that are abstract and removed from the daily lives I know of my own citizens, but they are here and now. | ||
| And we don't want our adversaries to get ahead of us in these areas of science. | ||
| And so all of you are testifying to things that will continue to, that I know my constituents will find compelling and lead many of us to continue investing in these critical areas. | ||
| So I thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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I appreciate Senator. | |
| If I can make a plea, we will lose the momentum, if not these capabilities entirely, if we drop from four to three astronauts. | ||
| And we need the Senate to stay on NASA and your excellent staff to make sure that we realize these commercial benefits and that America never, never drops below the number of Chinese in space. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Senator from Colorado. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank all of you. | ||
| This is really a stellar panel, if I could be so graceless. | ||
| General Shaw, you're a former deputy commander of SpaceComm, and you know better than most the threat that China poses to U.S. national security, our interests in space especially. | ||
| China's capabilities in this domain are accelerating rapidly. | ||
| The result of what you noted in your testimony, a complete fusion of civil, commercial, and national security expertise. | ||
| What is your assessment of the threat from China over the next four to five years, especially in light of their, as we just heard, the cozying up of Russia to China? | ||
| Thanks, Senator. | ||
| First, let me, just from a purely military perspective, what we have seen China do over basically the last couple decades is look at what we have done in space for our warfighters. | ||
| And I'm fond of saying that our joint warfighters today rely more on space than they did yesterday, and they will rely more on it tomorrow than they did today. | ||
| That is a curve that continues to move upward. | ||
| China has observed that. | ||
| That's exactly why they have developed capabilities to deprive us of our space assets and why they have built and deployed space weapons. | ||
| But they have also built their own space capabilities mirroring ours to enable their warfighting too. | ||
| And so this has been a progression, an emulation, and a surge. | ||
| And I recommended the committee, if they aren't regularly getting briefings from the U.S. Space Force S-II on China's capabilities, that it might be helpful to get that classified briefing on what they're doing from a military perspective. | ||
| We're getting that. | ||
| It is truly alarming. | ||
| Now, I'm sure, as you saw yesterday, the administration announced its intention to relocate U.S. Space Command, which is fully operational now in Colorado, to Alabama, citing political factors such as mail-in voting, some other things. | ||
| The DOD Inspector General said in a report earlier this year that it will take three to four years for the same mission-critical systems to be established in Alabama that our warfighters rely on every day in Colorado. | ||
| Given the threat picture you just shared, what's your assessment of the impact to readiness? | ||
| We're at full operational capability right now to readiness that this delay would have or could have during such a critical geopolitical window. | ||
| I would just say I know Troy Mink pretty well. | ||
| He's the Secretary of the Air Force, and he was probably involved in, very closely involved in the decision, and that I have known him to be a good thinker on those topics, and he probably made a good recommendation to the President. | ||
| We will see. | ||
| Switching to space debris, Mr. Bridenstein, let me ask you, obviously, you know today that we have over a million space debris objects over one centimeter, many of them, most of them traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, can do severe damage to aircrafts, satellites, at that speed, almost anything. | ||
| The space station has had to conduct 27 debris avoidance maneuvers since 1999. | ||
| Astronauts had to take emergency shelter as recently as June 24 of last year. | ||
| Do you believe it is a national security imperative that the United States develops and demonstrates technologies that can remediate space debris? | ||
| Remediation is the boy, that's really hard. | ||
| I think it's a capability that in some cases makes sense. | ||
| In other cases, maybe not. | ||
| You mentioned items that are one centimeter and bigger. | ||
| When you're talking about objects that are one centimeter and bigger, the cost of going up to space to remediate or bring down something like that is extraordinarily expensive for the return that you get. | ||
| If we can see it and we can track it, remediation probably is not the right approach. | ||
| But the alternative is if you can't see it and you can't track it, you wouldn't know that you need to remediate it. | ||
| So it is a double-edged sword here. | ||
| I would tell you that the cost is really expensive. | ||
| I would say what we've got to do is instead of remediate, we've got to mitigate. | ||
| We've got to make sure we're not putting more debris up. | ||
|
unidentified
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That too. | |
| I agree with that. | ||
| And then I also think we've got to be able to have space situation awareness, space domain awareness, and we've got to be able to maneuver. | ||
| I think it's critically important that we increase our ability to maneuver. | ||
| And I will also say here's the challenge that we face. | ||
| We're putting so many satellites into the same orbits. | ||
| We're talking about tens of thousands of satellites going into one orbit from one company in one country. | ||
| Well, you start adding another company that wants to do it, another company that wants to do it, and another company that wants to do it. | ||
| And then you start talking about, well, Europe wants to have their own LEO, low-Earth orbit mega-constellation, and China wants to have its own low-Earth orbit mega constellation. | ||
| And each of them have numerous projects that are, there is no organizational system around it that will prevent us from getting to what eventually is the Kessler syndrome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No, I got that. | ||
| Mr. Geller, I had a question for you as well, but I will put that off into the written since I'm out of time. | ||
| But I do think that some of the stuff, like the MAVEN mission out of the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, collecting essential data about the atmosphere on Mars and really getting into that deep research, there are a lot of things that we need to discuss about that. | ||
| I'll put that off till into the written. | ||
| Let me just say, Senator Redwire is happy to be in Longmont in Littleton, Colorado. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, it's my turn, and I actually wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. | ||
| It was my dream at the Naval Academy, which has produced more astronauts than anyone else. | ||
| Unfortunately, I wasn't smart enough, so I became a senator instead, which I fit in perfectly now here. | ||
| But, Mr. Bryan, say, you made a comment earlier. | ||
| We didn't know we didn't know in the 1960s. | ||
| We didn't know a lot of what we face as far as just the physics, the science of the universe literally that we were operating in. | ||
| And, you know, it was just about eight years from the time the first flight from Alan Shepard to when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. | ||
| And in eight years, we went from zero space flight capability to literally sending humans to another planetary body and bringing them back safely, which, as you remember, was Kennedy's initial writ when he laid out that vision. | ||
| And, you know, right now, this smartphone I carry and you all, I'm sure, have in your pocket has 10,000 times the computing power of what the Apollo 5 rocket had on board as far as its guidance systems and ability to determine its navigation routes. | ||
| We have computing capabilities and knowledge of the cosmos that far outweigh anything we thought we even could ever know in the 1960s. | ||
| And yet, we look at what our capabilities are now, and other than some bright spots like the James Webb Telescope and others, for the most part, we are far less capable at star voyaging today as a nation than we were 50 years ago. | ||
| And for a decade, we were paying the Russians taxi fare to send our own astronauts into space. | ||
| I mean, if you went back and told Rangan and Kennedy that, hey, in 50 years, we're going to be paying the Soviet Union $60 million a seat to take American astronauts to outer space, they'd laugh in your face. | ||
| There's no way they'd believe you. | ||
| And as a lifelong space enthusiast and someone who truly believes that not just our national security, but our economic security, our fundamental stability as a nation does depend on our ability to continue to lead in space, I'm very, very concerned about what the next decade looks like. | ||
| And I'm very concerned that the bureaucracy of NASA, of which I love NASA, I'm a supporter, but we have to be honest with ourselves: is the bureaucracy of NASA positioned to give us space dominance in the 21st century? | ||
| Just like we're seeing in the DOD right now, our legacy industrial age acquisition infrastructure is failing to keep pace with China. | ||
| They build ships 200 times faster than we do. | ||
| The Chinese are putting more satellites into space every day than we are every month. | ||
| We're looking at the ability for us to innovate, iterate, and deploy technologies that we're just not keeping up with the rest of the world. | ||
| So, as we look at systems like SLS, which I agree we need, we look at Orion, we look at the space liner, and we say to ourselves, is our acquisition, engineering, and development processes within NASA up to the task? | ||
| Meanwhile, we look across the street at SpaceX, and yes, NASA's involved in that, but that's a private, that's a private enterprise that is frankly innovating at astounding rates. | ||
| Starship's flight last week was a wonder to watch and incredible to see what's happening there. | ||
| So, assuming we all agree, which it sounds like we do, that we want America to lead the next space race, is NASA as it's currently configured? | ||
| Obviously, it doesn't have a leader right now, hopefully, soon it does, but is NASA, as it's currently configured, ready to lead that race, or do we have to rethink how America structures our space program? | ||
| So, I would say, first of all, you covered a lot, and I think I'm in agreement with primarily everything you said. | ||
| I think when you think about what has hindered us from going forward, you go back to George Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| We had the Space Exploration Initiative, which was a plan to go back to the moon and onto Mars, and then the next administration came in and canceled it. | ||
| And then we had George Herbert or George George Herbert Walker Bush was SEI, and then George W. Bush was the vision for space exploration, which is a plan to go back to the moon and then on to Mars. | ||
| The new administration came in and canceled it. | ||
| And then President Trump comes in and says, We're going to go to the moon and on to Mars. | ||
| And for the first time, the program sustained. | ||
| As I said earlier in the hearing, the architecture is challenged significantly in the current format. | ||
| That architecture is extraordinarily complex. | ||
| It, quite frankly, doesn't make a lot of sense if you're trying to go first to the moon, this time to beat China. | ||
| It does not make sense to do that. | ||
| But the question is, then what do we do? | ||
| And I think one thing we can do is we can say, look, we're not going just to put flags and footprints on the moon as we did back in 1969 through 1972. | ||
| What we're doing now is we're going to go forward to the moon. | ||
| Mike Gold, I think, correctly talked about the gateway and how that could be basically our moon base around the moon. | ||
| And then we can have commercial and international partners join that moon base to be able to have access anywhere on the surface of the moon at any time we want. | ||
| We can go to the North Pole, we can go to the South Pole, we can go to the equatorial regions. | ||
| Wherever the most valuable spots on the moon are that we need to go, we can go. | ||
| But we're building infrastructure and we're allowing private capital to go forward and build all of the things that we can do on the surface. | ||
| And that means extract resources, whether it's platinum group metals or other precious materials, whether it's helium-3 or water ice or other capabilities. | ||
| I think that is transformational. | ||
| And it also includes a lot more private companies. | ||
| It includes a lot more international partners. | ||
| And it's an open architecture system where we can actually have a sustainable path that goes forward regardless of administration. | ||
| So getting cast to and fro from one administration to the next has been very damaging over time. | ||
| And that's the challenge with NASA. | ||
| What we do is multi-decadal in nature, and sometimes it's multi-generational. | ||
| And you can't just have it go back and forth all the time. | ||
| Well, I'd be curious, especially your opinion, generally, the history of our space program. | ||
| There was periods of time where there was great tension between the Air Force and NASA as a push and pull between is it a military primacy or is it civilian? | ||
| And of course, we've always maintained that space should not be militarized, but that's a belief we hold. | ||
| Other nations don't necessarily hold that outlook. | ||
| How do you see the Space Force now weaving with NASA going forward to energize our ability to have a significant defense president in space? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first, I'd point out our adversaries have already militarized space and developed space weapons. | |
| I'd also point out that that sometimes is a logical progression in any domain where there's competing resources, competing economic growth, and general competition. | ||
| So I've always said when I was in the Space Force, I'll say it today, our mission is predominantly to deter such a space conflict from ever happening. | ||
| And if we do that job properly, maybe we would deter a broader terrestrial conflict, too, by just making an adversary think they can't achieve an objective. | ||
| As for the future, as I said in my opening statement, I don't think we've ever could envision that we would do exploration, economic growth without some sort of security measures around that for confidence to ensure that we have transparency so that people want to invest. | ||
| They're incentivized to do so in an environment that shows promise and shows security as opposed to a Wild West scenario that might be dissuasive. | ||
| Well, I'm over my time, but one other topic I'd love to throw, I'll throw it in the record, but hardening our space infrastructure. | ||
| There's a perception that if it's in space, it's safe, and the reality is we're incredibly vulnerable from our communications and navigation-based orbital infrastructure, and especially as we look at Golden Dome and space-based interceptors and space-based detection. | ||
| We need to make sure we're hardening our space infrastructure because it's pretty vulnerable. | ||
| Senator Luhan is up next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Mr. Chair. | |
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Very much appreciate the conversation today. | ||
|
unidentified
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One of the concerns that I have is the President's proposed budget slashes NASA's budget to levels like back to 61. | |
| Now, I appreciate what Chair Moran shared: that the current mark of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Committee has it at level funding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Back to a concern. | |
| This administration has been operating in a way where they are ignoring the law and saying if they want to cut something, they're going to do it and sue me in court. | ||
|
unidentified
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Come find me. | |
| Now, one of the concerns that I have in that space, there's been a lot of attention brought to the incredible work that takes place at universities, K through 12, STEM education, collaborations and partnerships that are strengthening America's competitiveness. | ||
| We've now seen 3,800 employees that have left NASA because of the financial uncertainty, 20% of the agency. | ||
|
unidentified
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That doesn't seem helpful. | |
| On STEM, states like New Mexico, clearly other colleagues who have spoken today, all benefit from incredible investment to allow these collaborations that I pointed out earlier. | ||
| Now, this hearing is dedicated to the United States beating China in a space race. | ||
| My questions to each of you today is: yes or no? | ||
| Would huge cuts to NASA and its STEM efforts harm America's ability to compete with China in the space race? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Cutler? | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| There's no question that it will harm our capabilities. | ||
| We've seen impacts already just by proposing this budget from the President in industry where companies are having to look at what do we do if our business goes away and project managers are looking it for other jobs. | ||
| I mean, we're absolutely just from an industry perspective. | ||
| I mean, right now, we need people working on Artemis, not working on their resumes. | ||
| And that is absolutely something that should worry all of us because if they're not doing the work that's going to for the missions that inspire those kids, where's that K through 12, that STEM education? | ||
| Why are they going to go into this business? | ||
| Why would you go to space if you see it's not going anywhere in China's where it's happening? | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| Mr. Gold, yes or no? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Appreciate that, Mr. Bridenstine? | ||
| No. | ||
| You can talk more, sir, if you want. | ||
| If you can explain to me how you complimented one of my colleagues, two of my colleagues, with your response as to the incredible importance of collaboration with students, scientists, and engineers to America's competitiveness, but you don't believe that this is harmful? | ||
| No, what I'm saying is when you think about STEM education, there's different ways to approach it. | ||
| And I think NASA's missions, when they partner with universities, that's a great thing to do. | ||
| I think when you think about the partnership where we've got scientists and engineers working side by side, you've got the students in the mix. | ||
| I think all of that is extraordinarily beneficial, but that's also within the program itself. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I don't know that NASA needs to be an... | ||
| It's not free. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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It takes investment. | |
| No, I agree with that. | ||
| I'm in agreement that we need to absolutely be involving students in the projects that NASA does at universities. | ||
| I'm in full agreement. | ||
| I just think it's when you think about education, we have a Department of Education. | ||
| We should have them focused on education. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| General? | ||
| My answer is yes, and I would hope that the current cuts we're seeing are temporary, as I think one of the other members mentioned earlier this morning, and are helping us refocus on what we really need to be concentrating on in order to beat China. | ||
| I appreciate, Lieutenant John. | ||
| I would agree there seems to be strong bipartisan support in all of these efforts. | ||
|
unidentified
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I appreciate that response. | |
| Representative, during your tenure as NASA Administrator, you created the sub-orbital crew or sub-sea program to leverage commercial sub-vehicle for science and technology development. | ||
| When fully implemented, what benefits will sub-sea provide to NASA and to the broader space economy? | ||
| Oh, I think that's a great question. | ||
| So there's a lot of when you're when you talk about sub-orbital space flight in general, you're really talking about microgravity. | ||
| So there's ways to get microgravity. | ||
| We can go up a tower and we can drop an object, and you can get maybe a second or two of microgravity. | ||
| Then we can put things on an airplane and put it on a parabolic trajectory, and you might be able to get 30 seconds to a minute of microgravity. | ||
| Then we can go to suborbital space. | ||
| And that's where I think we can have even more benefit, because you can get four, maybe even five minutes or more of microgravity. | ||
| And all of that enables us to do research and development on technologies and capabilities. | ||
| And then if all that works, then you send it to the International Space Station or you send it to commercial space stations. | ||
| You put all that together. | ||
| And just a sidebar of that, if that program was cut, how would the United States be ceding ground to China? | ||
| Well, I think it's important to recognize that without that program, there will be a lot of development capabilities that just get canceled. | ||
| And it becomes, quite frankly, more expensive, not less expensive, because now you've got to go to orbit to test things, and that's super expensive. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. Chairman, I have other questions. | |
| I'll submit them into the record because of time. | ||
| Thank you all for your responses today. | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| Yield back. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| So just you had May Dutch, Senator Cruz, Captain Kirk. | ||
| I'll be Captain Obvious. | ||
| The need to fund NASA in the One Big Beautiful bill was a big was something that was very important. | ||
| Would any of you disagree that without that $10 billion of funding, that it would be absolutely devastating to what we just talked about all morning? | ||
| All in agreement? | ||
| In agreement. | ||
| And again, just want to point out there wasn't a single Democrat that voted for that bill. | ||
| I think I just want to make sure that's crystal clear on the record. | ||
| So as important as we all said that is, as important as we say this is bipartisan, yet when the bill got presented, it was 100% of the Democrats voted against that bill. | ||
| Let me just also say that when we talk about sequencing, how do we get to the moon? | ||
| How do we get there before China? | ||
| As I'm still the optimist, I think we can get there before China gets there. | ||
| And there's sequencing that has to happen. | ||
| Something has to happen before something else. | ||
| And if we're going to have moon exploration, Mr. Cutler, you're going to be in Ohio next week. | ||
| I'm sorry, I'll miss you there. | ||
| I'm sure you're going there because you're going to celebrate the massive victory of Ohio State versus Texas. | ||
| But while you're celebrating that victory, talk about the importance of nuclear fission and the importance of really developing that program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first of all, I'm sure they're still celebrating. | |
| They've got a week, so it's great. | ||
| I think you're talking about nuclear fission. | ||
| This committee, this Congress, has been supportive of all forms of nuclear electronics. | ||
| Like if you're looking at propulsion, NTP, nuclear electric, it's something that we absolutely, if we want to open up our exploration of going beyond the moon, going to Mars, going even farther in the universe, we need to have better propulsion. | ||
| This is something that we need to be working on. | ||
| So the benefits, absolutely. | ||
| There's only so much you can do with chemical propulsion. | ||
| And if we want to really sit there and send ourselves out into the universe, we need to do something different. | ||
| Now, that's, you know, nuclear fission, you've got that surface power. | ||
| You need that too for the moon. | ||
| Astronauts are going to plug all the, you go home, plug all your stuff into the wall and recharge. | ||
| It's going to be the same on the moon. | ||
| You're going to need power. | ||
| This is technologies that we should be working on and through this committee have been supporting for years, and we need to kind of up our game on that. | ||
| It needs to be worked on, and it's absolutely critical. | ||
| And I saw you earlier talk about Secretary Duffy, Administrator Duffy, depending on what hat he's wearing. | ||
| Put some serious resources behind that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And where would you say is the center of excellence of nuclear fission for space power? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The only answer is Cleveland. | |
| I know that what you're doing. | ||
| Nuclear electric. | ||
| Cleveland is where you go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Make sure that that's highlighted in the record. | |
| So in terms of Lieutenant General, back to you, the coordination between the military and NASA, how important is it to us to really take that to the next level to really get this done and to compete with China? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Senator. | |
| First, I'd say the Department of Defense and NASA have always cooperated from the very beginning. | ||
| I mean, whether it was the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo missions, whether it's even under my recent commands that I had before I left uniform service, the Department of Defense was providing the debris situation to NASA to make sure that the astronauts on the ISS were safe. | ||
| And we actually had NASA representatives in the operations center at Vandenberg Space Force Base, where I was the commanding general, that watched that continuously communicating with Houston and letting them know if a maneuver would be necessary for the ISS. | ||
| So we've been part, and there are many, many more examples in ways that we've partnered in the past. | ||
| Those will only become more important as we look to put a permanent human presence in the lunar environment, as I expect there will be parallel efforts for commercial capabilities in the lunar environment that may or may not involve humans, but they're going to do the sorts of things that some of my panel members have mentioned here before. | ||
| And it's not just the lunar environment, it's the entire Earth moon system. | ||
| Again, you don't get economic growth without security as well. | ||
| And I do think as the Space Force matures, In addition to all the things it needs to do today to enable terrestrial warfighters and protect our capabilities in space, it's also going to involve a mission that provides awareness of hazards, awareness of threats, and a transparency in space that enables all of these activities. | ||
| We're going to see that happen. | ||
| It's happened in every other domain. | ||
| The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard have done it from the very beginning in the maritime domain. | ||
| You will see the U.S. Space Force do it in the future. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And obviously, taking that to the next level is critically important. | ||
| And I'll wrap up the last question with you, Mr. Bidenstein. | ||
| When you were the NASA administrator, you visited a lot of places. | ||
| What was your favorite place that you visited while you were a NASA administrator? | ||
| There's only one answer there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cleveland. | |
| Cleveland. | ||
| That's the right answer. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| And if you could end with us, how important is it for us to unleash the private sector? | ||
| Because we talked a lot about competing with China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And certainly China is a model. | ||
| It's not the model I choose. | ||
| It's not the model we would ever want to replicate. | ||
| And I think the advantage we have is that we have this strong, thriving private sector. | ||
| How do we really integrate that to accomplish the mission that we all want? | ||
| I think that's a great point and a great question. | ||
| I think we've got to, as an agency, NASA needs to build infrastructure that the private sector can see how they plug in and benefit from it. | ||
| And then you get these naturally forming public-private partnerships. | ||
| For example, the Gateway, if they can see themselves plugging into the Gateway, they can utilize it. | ||
| They'll make investments to do that. | ||
| When I was at NASA, we created commercial low-Earth orbit destinations. | ||
| Of course, that's a capability to replace the International Space Station. | ||
| We created commercial lunar payload services. | ||
| That's a way to get landers to the surface of the moon. | ||
| We have a commercial landing system for the moon. | ||
| I will tell you that the architecture for that is extraordinarily strained, but I think it's an important capability, and we need to have as much commercial as possible. | ||
| I will tell you that when it comes to commercial, we've got to make sure, and I said this a lot when I was at NASA, the only thing worse than a government monopoly is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on. | ||
| So when we think about commercial, we have to have multiple providers that are competing against each other on cost and innovation and safety. | ||
| And each of those providers has to go get customers that are not NASA. | ||
| And if they're willing to do that and capable of doing that, then we can have this very robust capability, this marketplace, that I think will be thriving. | ||
| But I think we've got to be really careful about how we frame that. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Well, I appreciate it. | ||
| Sorry, Mr. Gold, I didn't ask you a question, but you're the most enthusiastic witness in the history of the Commerce Committee in my time in the Senate, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me be briefly enthusiastic for Cleveland, not only great in nuclear, but the leader in solar electric propulsion on the PPE on Gateway. | |
| So thank you for the support, Cleveland and Glenn. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And as we're working through the Commerce Appropriations budget, let's make sure we keep that all at top of mind. | ||
| But I want to thank all the witnesses for the testimony today. | ||
| Senators will have until the close of business on September 10th to submit even more questions for the record, if that's possible. | ||
| Because you know in the Senate, not everybody's made a point. | ||
| Points have been made, but not by everybody is the mantra around here. | ||
| So we'll see if you get more of the same questions. | ||
| But the witnesses will have until the close of business, September 24th, to respond to those questions. | ||
| And this concludes today's hearings. | ||
| You guys, your stamina, two hours, fantastic. | ||
| And the committee is adjourned. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for all the comments. | |
| Good luck out here. | ||
| Christopher. | ||
| Hey, no one. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| This week on the C-SPAN networks, the House and the Senate are in session. | ||
| The House and Senate will work on their versions of 2026 defense programs and policy legislation known as the National Defense Authorization Act. | ||
| On Tuesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett launches her latest book, Listening to the Law, with a book signing hosted by the Reagan Foundation Center on Civility and Democracy. | ||
| And then on Wednesday, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratios, will testify before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on President Trump's artificial intelligence strategy. |