Vice President Pence visits NASA Ames Research Center.
In visit to NASA Ames, veep repeats vow to return Americans to the lunar surface in 2024
MOUNTAIN VIEW » Vice President Mike Pence visited NASA Ames Research Center on Thursday to promote the most romantic of all infrastructure projects: our new home on the moon.
Prettier than a pothole fix, bolder than a bridge and fancier than a freeway, the moon project represents a return to a dream that largely was abandoned decades ago.
Pence’s visit signaled the continued commitment by President Donald Trump’s administration’s to putting people on the moon in 2024, first announced in March — and Ames’ role in advancing the project.
Though big on inspiration, it was short on specifics. The vice president repeated the administration’s pledge to include an additional $1.6 billion in the budget for a moon landing and habitation project, named Artemis.
On a tightly choreographed tour of the facility, the vice president peered into the test chamber of a lab that develops protective heat shields and admired a rover that will perform lunar experiments.
He piloted a simulator that practices moon landings. Then he spoke to a large crowd of NASA employees, commending their drive to explore the unknown.
“We are about to make history, and it will pass right through NASA Ames and all of you in this room,” he told the crowd, to cheers and applause. “You’ll be busier than ever before.”
He also expressed sadness and anger over the death of students in Thursday morning’s school shooting in Santa Clarita, saying, “This president and this administration will remain resolved to bring the scourge of mass shootings to an end.”
Pence’s visit was rare in the history of NASA Ames; top officials usually only borrow the facility’s aircraft runway. It was the only third time that a vice president has toured the Ames facilities. Previous guests were Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1961 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988.
It was part of a two- day visit to California and one of several NASA visits this year to advocate for the Artemis Project, named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology.
The Ames facility is home to two key projects that are essential to our moon stay.
One builds the panels that protect spacecraft from the extreme heat experienced during reentry into the atmosphere. Ames is a longstanding lead in the development of so-called Thermal Protection Systems, developing it for the Apollo, Viking,
Galileo, Mars Pathfinder and Exploration Rover and Mars’ Curiosity Science Laboratory, among others. Its high-energy wind tunnel can heat gases to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Thursday, Pence’s face had a pink glow emitted by the hypersonic shock wave created in a test chamber.
The other is the NASA Vertical Motion Simulator, a facility that will be integral in developing a lander needed for the Artemis program. This simulator provides the closest thing to landing on moon that we can experience on Earth. It also trains pilots.
Pence, an attorney and not a pilot, said to laughs, “I got it down OK.”
Former astronaut Karol Bobko, a veteran of three space flights who now lives in Half Moon Bay, was energized by Pence’s visit and thinks NASA should get moving.
“We’ve got a hard road to get back to the moon,” he said. “It is still a difficult journey. It’s nearly 250,000 miles away. So we have a lot do do. We’ve only sent six missions there.
“On other hand, we have a lot more experience, and capacity,” he said.
Unlike Apollo’s famed visit to the moon 50 years ago, humans eventually qill live there, doing research and setting up camp for an even bigger destination: Mars.
It is a multistep process. First, we’ll send a rocket, with no crew. Next, we’ll send up astronauts — but they’ll just fly around the moon, not landing.
The ultimate mission will land humans at the moon’s South Pole and set up a research station. We want to go there because there’s water, stored in ice, in its deep and shadowed craters.
But it’ll take hustle — plus money and political capital — to make it happen.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has estimated a price tag of $20 billion to $30 billion. The cost rose when the administration pushed up its landing date by four years, by the end of Trump’s second term, if he is reelected. The previous deadline was 2028. Skeptics say current funding is insufficient to get us there by the administration’s deadline.
Popular Bay Area astronomer Andrew Fraknoi, a retired Foothill College professor, agreed that it’s pricey to send humans to the moon.
“The expense of human exploration is orders of magnitude greater than robots,” he said. “If a robot gets snuffed, nobody cries any tears. A human injury or death is a terrible thing. We have to work superhard to protect humans.”