Pleading with Congress how to spend our money is the job of the NASA administrator and this year on Capitol Hill, Bill Nelson is asking for $25 billion even as Washington cuts spending.
As NASA faces its challenges working to return astronauts to the moon, and later returning samples from Mars, some employees around the country are missing out on making history.
They’ve been laid off.
“We’ve lost, I mean, decades of experience,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) said. “Really tragic to lose that kind of talent.”
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Exploring deep space is the biggest chunk of the budget request, but Nelson seemed to have the most urgency Tuesday talking about the future of the International Space Station.
NASA wants commercial space stations from companies like Axiom Space and Blue Origin to replace the ISS in the next six or seven years, and before that’s possible, they’ll need a new spacecraft that can deorbit the ISS, bringing it back to Earth.
All of those factors, plus the uncertainty of America’s relationship in space with Russia in the future, and Nelson said that could complicate things even more.
“We don’t know what the president of Russia is going to do and we could be in an emergency situation that we have to get this structure that is as big as a football stadium down, and down safely, in 2031,” Nelson said.
Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) offered his support to Nelson.
“It’s a been a tough year working with the budget, and the last that we want to do is to cut down anyone, but we have to make sure that we’re being responsible and efficient for the country. But yes, administrator, I’m with you a thousand percent,” Miller said.
Another young congressman, Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) from Orlando asked Nelson about the Artemis delays.
Nelson continued to say the Artemis II astronauts will fly around the moon next year, and then the moon landing of two astronauts on the SpaceX Starship is under contract for September of 2026.
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