A hearing of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics was held on December 4 to discuss the issue of getting to the Moon before China. Democratic Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren gave a devastating critique of the way that the Trump Administration has been undercutting the U.S. science and technology capabilities through the cuts to NASA and the attacks on U.S. universities.
The tenor of the entire hearing was the issue of beating China to the Moon, but when taking a poll of the witnesses, not one of them was optimistic about the possibilities of the United States doing that. Most telling were the comments by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who simply said that there was no way of the US reasserting its role in space unless they scrapped the entire Artemis program and developed a real program for placing a permanent base on the Moon. Griffin has authored and co-authored with others papers indicating how that should be done. “The problem is not China’s rise,” Griffin said. “We can’t control what China will do. We can only control what we do, and in the present conditions, mediocrity would be an improvement.”
“We have squandered a 60-year head start in space,” he said. “And we can’t continue on a path that can’t work. Cancel Artemis and develop a program with all-deliberate speed.” The system architecture that he had submitted, would be based on the capabilities that already lie at hand within NASA. Griffin could not say whether the US would get to the Moon before China, since space is hard for any nation. He did say, however, that it would be folly if the US left space to China’s dominance.
