Jurczyk and Bruno Speak at the First Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium Meeting, February 2020

NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk and United Launch Alliance (ULA) President and CEO Tory Bruno were among the speakers at the first meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on February 28, 2020.

SpacePolicyOnline.com published a summary of their remarks on March 1, 2020, including Jurczyk’s comment that the first launch of the Space Launch System with an uncrewed Orion spacecraft, Artemis I, will take place in mid-to-late 2021.  The date for that launch has been delayed many times and NASA had been insisting it would take place in 2020 even though that seemed very unlikely.  He also spoke about the acquisition strategy for the Human Landing Systems needed to take astronauts down to and back from the lunar surface.  Instead of building and owning the systems itself, NASA plans to contract for services from commercial companies, but it all must be done quickly to meet the Trump Administration’s goal of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024 — the Artemis program.

Bruno spoke about his vision of a multi-trillion dollar cislunar space economy and said supporting Artemis is the first step towards realizing it.