US Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday an accelerated goal of putting Americans back on the moon within five years “by any means necessary”, and NASA’s top official immediately embraced the challenge.
Pence, chairing a meeting of the National Space Council at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, borrowed from the vocabulary of the Cold War era in declaring, “We’re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s.”
Setting such an ambitious goal – one likely to cost tens of billions of dollars – comes as NASA has struggled with the help of private partners to resume human space missions from US soil for the first time since the shuttle program ended in 2011.