Ted Cruz and Bill Nelson give NASA a reality check on privatizing International Space Station
By Mark Whittington, opinion contributor — 05/20/18 02:00 PM EDT Recently the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness held a hearing on the future of the International Space Station. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the chair of the subcommittee, and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), the ranking member of the full Senate Commerce Committee, were in attendance. Bill Gerstenmaier, the NASA associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, and Paul Martin, the NASA Inspector General, were the witnesses.
The actual title of the hearing should have been “Why the Trump administration’s plan to privatize the ISS by 2025 is not happening.†Both Cruz and Nelson were absolute on this in a rare display of bi-partisan agreement.
It is not that Cruz and Nelson are against commercializing low Earth orbit operations in principle. They are highly skeptical of whether the ISS could be taken private or whether it could be replaced by one or more commercial space stations by 2025. The bottom line is that both mean for the ISS to remain operating as it traditionally has been, as a facility paid for by NASA and its international partners, through 2028 if not longer.
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http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/388518-ted-cruz-and-bill-nelson-provide-a-reality-check-on-nasa-iss-privatization
