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How far can it last? I don't think we have that answer.'Д«ridenstine also cast doubt on how long authorities should expect it to take for another American-led orbiting facility to be available.

'There's no guarantee we're going to make it to 2030,' former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. Meanwhile, although many hope to see the space station last until 2030, engineering realities may cut that timeline short, increasing the risk of a gap in the U.S.'s ability to support humans in orbit. (Axiom intends to fly a private module to the space stationВ in 2024 as the seed of a future free-flying outpost, although Dittmar noted at the beginning of the hearing that her comments reflected her own views, not the company's.) 'NASA has yet to clearly define its needs for services after the ISS ends, nor does it plan to do so for some time,' Mary Lynne Dittmar, an executive vice president at Houston company Axiom Space, said during the hearing. Instead, NASA's currently operating human spaceflight program, its participation in the International Space StationВ (ISS), was a key topic of the hearing. (NASA went with SpaceX and its Starship transportation system.) Space station uncertainties

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So how is that a good strategy?'Д«ut otherwise, the path to the moon made up a surprisingly small portion of the hearing - just a little chatter about how to approach the Human Landing System, which is currently stymied by legal objections from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which was not chosen for the program. 'Why are we in a situation where the dates that are on a piece of paper right now make no sense?' Cantwell said. (Perhaps of note, the program's 2024 target for a human landing on the moon was established in 2019, two years after the most recent NASA authorization act.) She had sharp words in particular for the state of the Artemis lunar exploration program Congress has long pushed NASA for more elaborate - and realistic - timelines and schedules. It is not going to serve the Artemis programВ or NASA well.' 'We're not going to continue to have this game where you just get appropriations. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said during the hearing as she pushed panelists to speak to the importance of an authorization bill. That debate hinges around passing not just an appropriations bill to fund NASA, but an authorization bill that can shape the agency's activities. The wide-ranging conversation came as the Senate and the House of Representatives attempt to reconcile how they want NASAВ to move forward.

21) held by a Senate committee focused on space and science. The risk of collisions in space, the fate of the United States in orbit after the space station retires and continuing debates over NASA's path back to the moon dominated a two-hour hearing on Thursday (Oct.

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