NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine brought his hopes for expanded U.S. space travel to Oklahoma City this week, speaking at the Oklahoma Aerospace Forum.
He repeated his push for a plan unveiled months ago of using commercial rockets for more American space exploration and travel.
“Then NASA can use its money–we can use government resources—to go further and do more than we’ve ever done before, especially in areas where the commercial markets don’t yet exist, namely go to the Moon and then Mars.”
Even as he went through nomination hearings, the former 1st District U.S. Representative from Tulsa spoke of returning American space travelers to the moon. Now he’s speaking of it as the man in charge of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“We’re not going back to the moon, we’re going forward to the moon—and this time we’re going to stay,” he told the Forum. He is proposing to use the moon as a gas station to fuel manned missions to Mars and elsewhere.
“Hydrogen and oxygen, put into cryogenic liquid form, that’s rocket propulations. So we have hundreds of billions of tons of rocket propellants on the surface of the moon,” he said.
The last time an American astronaut was on the moon was in 1972.
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