“It's the committee that is not just about tomorrow, or the next day,” Oklahoma’s third congressional district representative said. “It's about the future. It's what happens in five years, or 50 years or 250 years from now.”
Federal agencies receive their authorization from Congress — guidance on their overall goals. The Science, Space, and Technology Committee is the authorizing committee for NASA.
Lucas authored a bill to reauthorize NASA this year. It recently passed out of the Science, Space and Technology Committee with bipartisan support and can now be heard by the full House of Representatives.
“Back to the moon, on to Mars,” Lucas said. “Taking us from being an earthbound people, to not just going as we did in 1969 to plant a flag on the moon. But to go back and live on the moon, and ultimately to move on and live on Mars.”
The bill prioritizes the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the 1970s. The ultimate goal is to have people stick around on the moon (or on a small space station orbiting it) for scientific exploration and economic development.
Lucas said it’s part of a new space race, and the stakes may be even higher than they were in the 1960s.
“It's not about planting a flag,” Lucas said. “It's about a permanent human presence on the moon and ultimately Mars. Who controls the offworld?”
The bill is also concerned with controlling a space economy in low-Earth orbit. That’s where the International Space Station hangs. Lucas said his bill asks NASA to address questions about the ISS’s future.
“How much longer do you keep the current space station functioning?” he said. “Because it's beginning to wear down. What kind of future generations of space stations do we have? Are they publicly owned? Are they privately owned?”
The bill leans towards privatization. Today, NASA is an owner-operator of the ISS. This reauthorization proposes a transition to a privatized low-Earth orbit economy, where NASA could contract commercial services from a variety of companies operating up there.
But that just leads to more questions for NASA to consider.
“If you're putting things into orbit, and you're using part of the low-Earth orbit opportunities, who should have regulatory oversight over that?” Lucas said. “Because it's the public streets, so to speak. Private entities can't just claim the sidewalk.”
All these space questions seem lofty, but Lucas said their impacts could be close to home, including in Oklahoma.
“Had we not had the space program, had we not spent the money on those technological advances and developments, you wouldn't have a smartphone in your pocket,” Lucas said. “You certainly wouldn't be receiving satellite television or communication, you wouldn't have the weather forecasting we have now.”
