Letter to Chairman Haridopolos and Ranking Member Foushee

This is the letter that the Space Frontier Foundation sent to Chairman Haridopolos and Ranking Member Foushee about our future in space. It was accepted into the Congressional Record on Feb 26, 2025.

Chairman Mike Haridopolos1039 Longworth House Office BuildingWashington D.C., 20515Ranking Member Valerie Foushee2452 Rayburn House Office BuildingWashington D.C., 20515

Dear Chairman Haridopolos, Ranking Member Foushee, and distinguished members of Congress,

Thank you for this opportunity to provide letter for the record for the Subcommittee’s hearing, Step by Step: The Artemis Program and NASA's Path to Human Exploration of the Moon, Mars, and Beyond. It is our goal to provide a public interest context to the issues Congress faces in helping to set America’s civil space strategy.

The Space Frontier Foundation believes that the American people deserve a civil space enterprise that boldly leads a free humanity into the space frontier to occupy the solar system. A frontier-opening approach will not only outpace the People’s Republic of China’s space program; it will serve as a powerful demonstration of why Western values of freedom, popular sovereignty, and capitalism are superior to Red China’s 21^st century restyling of the same old communist tyranny. It is not enough for America’s government space agency to go further and faster than the Chinese Communist Party’s government space agency. We want the American people, and democracy-loving people everywhere, to be able to explore, develop, and settle space.

At his recent inauguration, President Trump declared, “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” We believe that statement was an addition, not a subtraction, to America’s civil space vision. Indeed, we believe the U.S. needs to boldly lead the world in every major human space domain – launch, Low Earth Orbit, cislunar space, and Mars – in order to dominate the future. And while progress in the first helps enable the second, and so on, these need to be worked on in parallel, not sequentially.

First in Launch – Thanks to American private investment and previous policy reforms championed by this Committee, the U.S. has won a vast share of the global launch market. But hostile adversaries like China are moving quickly with a quasi-commercial approach that provides their “companies” with unlimited access to State funds. We cannot assume that continued U.S. dominance is a given. We must ambitiously pursue every opportunity to press our current advantage and build on it. Therefore, we recommend making ultra-low-cost access to space an explicit national priority. There are multiple U.S. companies working to transform the economics of launch, and some are already flying prototypes. We need a vibrant, innovative, competitive industry increasing capability and affordability across all market segments of space transportation with enabling regulations and low barriers to entry.

The Trump administration could easily partner with our commercial launch sector to accelerate innovation, continue to improve reliability and resultant safety, fund appropriate infrastructure, and streamline the DOT licensing process. But the federal government would be supporting, not dictating. Incentivizing, not managing. Instead of the European approach of trying to own and manage launch supply, NASA and other space agencies should promote new and ambitious public and private sector applications for that launch capacity by fostering new markets for new commercial space goods and services.

First in LEO Development – The International Space Station, a testament to U.S. technological and diplomatic ingenuity initiated four decades ago by President Reagan, has served us well as America’s beachhead in low Earth Orbit. But as its retirement looms at the end of this decade, our next logical step must be an ambitious leap: transitioning from a single, government-funded space station to a complementary network of organic, privately-owned orbital platforms that add up to much more than ISS’ limited capabilities. These Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Destinations (CLDs) will serve not only NASA’s needs but a growing list of public and private users eager to use the space environment to innovate and serve new customers and stakeholders.

These new orbital hubs will host scientific research, facilitate economic activity, and incubate new industries that we can scarcely imagine today. If the Administration and Congress accelerate NASA’s transition to CLDs and ramp down our dependence on the ISS, we can ensure the presence of not just astronauts but an entire ecosystem of scientists, entrepreneurs, and industrial pioneers in space. A flourishing LEO economy will be the engine that powers America’s leadership in the broader space economy.

First to Lunar Markets – China has set its sights on the Moon, and its ‘taikonauts’ will likely set foot there within five years. Should our response to this challenge be a replay of Apollo—rushing back for a fleeting moment of glory— only to leave the lunar surface for others with more ambition and perseverance to develop and settle?

No. America’s vision must be far bolder. We must realize that the real competition is accessing and exploiting the high ground and resources of the moon. If we expand our economy into cislunar space, building outposts and then communities of lunar pioneers, we will win the real prize: leading the industrial development and human settlement of Earth’s Moon.

First for Mars – America has a proud history of robotic exploration of the red planet. But the horizon goal of sending humans to Mars is always just over the horizon. Perhaps people want to delay the culmination of actually planting the flag, seeing it as the end of something. But the flag is a bold claim that we humans seek to expand our civilization to another world. Mars is where we will permanently expand life itself, creating a new offspring of our precious blue marble of Earth. Mars is where the American experiment will leap ahead toward the rest of the Solar System, and yes, eventually worlds around other stars.

U.S.-led human missions to Mars cannot be a repeat of Apollo. It’s not about outdoing what we have already done, it’s about doing what humanity has never done before. Early humans explored and migrated to new lands, but those lands already had life. Mars does not have a breathable atmosphere or edible flora and fauna. We must create a biosphere where there is none and transplant our society to that new home. Mars will require the full talents and energies of Western civilization to expand humanity to a new second planet. It’s not something that one federal agency or even national government can plan out in detail; it will require a lot of different experiments and approaches. If some private company initiates its own Mars effort, then government should not only enable it but avail taxpayers of opportunities for financial and technological leverage, just as NASA buys rides for experiments on board suborbital reusable launch vehicles and commercial lunar landers today.

The Time is Now

Human spaceflight is not just a series of connected actions. It is not a project or program. It is a gloriously chaotic birthing process for a spacefaring civilization. The space frontier is a continuing test of our leadership, our values, and our vision. The technology necessary to economically develop and permanently settle space is being developed now, not twenty years from now. Whether it's the Moon, Mars, or other planetary bodies and stars beyond, humans will one day develop and settle these places. The question is whether they do this as an expression of values like freedom, opportunity, and innovation—or some darker, more hierarchically-controlled and static ideology.

We believe America, a nation born in turmoil on the edge of a New World, must lead humanity into President Kennedy’s New Frontier. That will not only ensure our nation’s prosperity and security here at home, but grant generations hence a legacy of hope and opportunity for millennia to come. At stake is not just Artemis or NASA or even scientific knowledge, but the future of western civilization. That should be the measure of what we do today in 2025.

If you wish additional comments or questions, feel free to reach out to myself (aaron.oesterle@spacefrontier.org) at any point.

Sincerely,

Aaron Oesterle

Policy Director

Originally posted on Substack on March 18, 2025.