Congresswoman Kendra HornVerifizierter Account

It throws a grenade into the idea of bringing the moon into humankind's economic sphere. It will not pass the Senate or be signed into law by the @potus. The bill should be scrapped and your subcommittee should start over.

With due respect to General Stafford, a plan that calls for what is essentially a narrow minded repeat of Apollo is DOA. And even if begun (much later than current plan) wouldn’t be sustainable, considering that only 1 company wants to go that route. $ overruns would kill it.

1 / Reasons for going to the moon. Fuel production, using lunar ice, mining (He3 and rare earth metals), lunar research, radio telescopes on far side to negate earth radio chatter and much more.

2 / Reasons for not going to Mars. two and half years in high radiation, low G environment, no landing planned, it is very hard to land a large enough spacecraft that can take off again due to greater G. well. A mission without a lander achieves nothing. Also ...

3 / launch window every 2.5 years, whereas no launch window for moon. What I believe priorities should be Only use expensive SLS for Orion to moon. Use cheaper (but slower) option for Europa clipper.

4/ Pre staging using cheaper re-usable commercial rockets to moon as much as possible. Private owned landers, reusable if possible. Can sit in lunar orbit and Orion can dock to lander in orbit. Scrap gateway concept, additional unneeded concept.

5/ focus on finding lunar ice and getting equipment for converting it to Hydrogen and oxygen (electrolysis) onto the surface. Refuelled landers can do hops on the surface (exploration). Then need to get habitat modules etc on surface.

6/ Use private sector as much as possible. Hire starship (if it gets off ground and does not kick up too much lunar regolith) to get equipment onto surface. If manned starship developed could even hire and scrap more expensive SLS.