Congress to weigh extending space station life, NASA moon base

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, Feb 25 (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee next week will consider extending the planned life of the International Space Station by two years to give companies more time to develop a replacement, one of a few changes to a NASA bill focused on rivaling China’s growing footprint in space.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation plans to take up legislation on March 4 that would amend a NASA authorization bill with the ISS extension, and add a requirement that NASA build a base on the moon’s surface as part of its Artemis program.

The ISS extension, which has bipartisan backing from the committee’s chair Ted Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell, is part of the committee’s focus on rivaling China, as Beijing considers foreign partners on its own Tiangong space station and a 2030 crewed moon landing.

NASA had planned to retire the ISS, which has been in orbit for more than two decades, by 2030. The proposed extension would set its retirement at 2032.

The ISS has sprung small leaks in recent years that the space agency sees as signs of its age, as the U.S. private sector increasingly appears capable of taking over its role.

NASA is funding early company concepts of a commercial focused replacement, drawing involvement from firms such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Voyager. But some of those companies have made little progress toward 2030 deployment, raising concerns about a gap in U.S.-crewed activity in low-Earth orbit as geopolitical competition in the domain soars.

The space agency last year tapped Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a spacecraft that could attach to the ISS and drag it into Earth’s atmosphere for a controlled destruction, opting against preserving it as an orbital landmark to avoid debris risks and potentially costly maintenance.

Adding the requirement for a moon base to NASA’s authorization would help cement the agency’s desire to establish a long-term presence on the moon, using that experience as practice for future missions to Mars.

SpaceX’s CEO Musk expressed his support for such an architecture earlier this month after previously advocating for a direct-to-Mars space exploration approach.

SpaceX is developing its Starship rocket to serve as a moon lander under NASA’s Artemis program, alongside Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

NASA has in recent months cultivated an air of competition between the two billionaire-backed space companies to get them to speed up their lunar lander development timelines, as China signals progress in its own lunar program.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Michael Perry)