Posey Reintroduces REAL Space Act to Return Astronauts to Moon

On a day already chock full of space news — release of the FY2014 budget request and a hearing on the threat to Earth posed by asteroids — Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) decided to reintroduce his RE-asserting American Leadership in Space Act, or REAL Space Act.  

The bill was introduced in the last Congress.  No action was taken, but that clearly did not dissuade Posey and eight other Republican and Democratic House members from trying again this year.  Co-sponsors include Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.   The legislation would direct NASA to develop a plan for returning to the Moon and establishing a human presence there.

Posey argues that a “moon presence offers us the ability to develop and test technologies to cope with the realities of operating on an extraterrestrial surface.”

As reported by Jeff Foust at SpacePolitics.com last week, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden continues to stress that NASA has no plans to return humans to the Moon.  Foust quotes Bolden as saying “I don’t know how to say it any more plainly…NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one” and if the next administration tries to change course again “in the lifetime of everyone sitting in this room, we are probably never again going to see Americans on the Moon, or Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere. We cannot continue to change the course of human exploration.”