Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA on Tuesday to put humans on the moon again within the next five years, using
Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA on Tuesday to put humans on the moon again within the next five years, using “any means necessary.”
“To accomplish this we must redouble our efforts,” Pence said in his opening remarks at the National Space Council meeting at the U. S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. “President Trump knows this will require a great investment of time, talent and resources, but the cost of inaction is greater.”
And when Americans return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, Pence said, they will land at the moon’s South Pole.
Pence is chairman of the council, a group that has been defunct since 1993 until Trump revived it soon after taking office.
Since taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump has pushed for a return to the moon as a stepping stone for a mission to Mars.
Prior to Pence’s speech Tuesday, the administration’s plans were to build a mini-space station orbiting the moon, known as the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway, and build and send commercial lunar probes to the surface before humans left boot prints on the celestial body again.
Based on that, humans would have returned to the surface by 2028.
