NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is politely asking the bipartisan leadership of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to work together and modify its recently introduced 2020 NASA authorization bill. The bill, released Friday, will be marked up at subcommittee level on Wednesday. It takes a completely different approach to the future of human space exploration than what NASA and the White House are proposing as the Artemis program.

The bill, H.R. 5666, rejects not only the White House’s 2024 deadline to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but just about everything else about it. It focuses on getting people to Mars, first to orbit the Red Planet in 2033 and to land “in a sustainable manner as soon as practicable.” Thus it embraces only those lunar surface activities essential to accomplishing the Mars goal, eschewing lunar outposts and resource exploitation that NASA wants the Artemis program to enable.

It does support a return to the Moon, but by 2028, NASA’s original plan. The Trump Administration is aiming for 2024 because it is the end of a second Trump term if he wins reelection this fall.

The framers of the bill are not in such a hurry to get back to the surface, and they do not want to stay any longer than necessary because Mars is the goal.

The legislation also sharply limits the role that entrepreneurial companies would play in human exploration. NASA and the White House are embracing capabilities being developed by SpaceX, Blue Origin and others, as well as expanding the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) instead of traditional government cost-plus contracts. Building on its experience with the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs for the International Space Station, it similarly wants to buy services from companies to ferry astronauts between a lunar-orbiting space station, Gateway, and the lunar surface instead of owning the systems itself.

The bill rejects all of that. It requires that the government own them and that the human lunar landers be launched as integrated systems on Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Exploration Upper Stage (SLS/EUS), not multi-component landers launched on commercial rockets and integrated at the Gateway.

Before becoming Administrator of NASA, Bridenstine was a member of Congress from Oklahoma and a member of this committee. The fact that he has not been able to convince his former colleagues, including two from his own state (Horn and Lucas), of the merits of the Administration’s plan may foreshadow the challenges ahead in winning over others in Congress. But first, he wants another chance with those who wrote this bill.

Today he posted his carefully worded views on his NASA blog. The text is reproduced here in its entirety.