Jim Bridenstine

I am the first NASA Administrator from that day to this day that was not alive when that happened.

The inspiration that came from that moment in time was transformational for our Nation and transformational for people that, you know, went into the STEM fields that otherwise never would have done that.

We look back at Apollo, and we just celebrated 50 years of Apollo, everybody in America loved it.

Oh, it is huge. This, I think, goes to what the chairman was talking about earlier about the tradeoffs.

To be clear, I am confident that, given our current rate of production, we will have three SLSs available and the third one would be for Artemis III that takes us to the Moon in 2024.

It depends what Boeing is willing to invest, quite frankly. We don't have currently the appropriations necessary to achieve that.

My objective is to let everybody know that cannibalizing certain parts of NASA to fund another part of NASA, that is not my goal.

I have been very clear with everybody I have talked to on both sides of the aisle, the goal should be additional resources, not cannibalizing one part of NASA to feed another part of NASA.

The goal to get to the Moon needs to be bipartisan; it has to be apolitical.

As Representative Aderholt said, if we can't land on the Moon within 5 years, we need to change the organization.

There is two types of risk, there is technical risk and then there is political risk.

The challenge that we have as a Nation is that, the longer programs go, the more political risk that we have.

If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the Moon in 5 years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.

I really believe it would be in the interest of success to start off with at least three different human landing systems that we could then down-select to two human landing systems.

I think nothing concerns me more than politics getting into the middle of all of that.

The President and the Vice President determined that they wanted to go faster than that, so they gave us an objective to meet that deadline of 2024.

We're going to go to the moon sustainably. This time when we go, we're actually going to stay.

The folks that work at NASA do it because they absolutely love it, they're committed to what we do, it's unique in the world and everybody knows it and they want to be a part of it.

Congress is going to do what it's going to do, but this means a lot to people in my State, and in future years I hope it gets a little bit more respect and thought from this Administration.

That's correct. To--but I want to make sure, sir, you understand we will follow the law, and we are following the law.

This is a real issue for NASA, and we're dealing with it every day, especially in our--a lot of our centers are in expensive areas.

We did a 2-week study on commercial alternatives to the SLS, and what we found is that none of those commercial alternatives are going to help us save on cost or improve the schedule.

That is--as you correctly said at the beginning and I still believe 100 percent that that is the backbone of our ability to get to the moon.

As an agency, we're in the lead in a lot of different ways. As a country, we're in the lead in a lot of different ways.

We don't want to do anything asymmetric. If they're trying to go to the moon and it's in both of our interests for them to achieve that objective, then we want to continue to partner with them on that effort.