A former NASA administrator says he is \u201cencouraged\u201d that the US Congress is considering legislation to prevent NASA from spending more than 50 percent of its launch funding on any single provider.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica succeeds in space when American companies compete, innovate, and grow,\u201d former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on LinkedIn. \u201cI\u2019m encouraged to see Congress taking meaningful steps to strengthen the industrial base that underpins both our civil and national security space missions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bridenstine commended the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) on a new provision that appears in the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2025. Cruz plans to hold a markup hearing for the legislation on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongress is reinforcing competition and protecting the small and medium-sized manufacturers, propulsion companies, avionics developers, and suppliers that make up the backbone of America\u2019s space enterprise,\u201d Bridenstine wrote. \u201cCompetition lowers costs, accelerates innovation and provides redundancy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The provision appears to target SpaceX, which currently launches the only crewed vehicle capable of reaching the space station, Dragon; both US cargo vehicles (Dragon and Cygnus); as well as a majority of NASA\u2019s science missions. If passed into law, this language could effectively prohibit SpaceX from launching crewed lunar missions from Earth on Dragon or Starship for NASA in addition to its existing portfolio.<\/p>\n
What Bridenstine did not say on social media is that his consulting firm, The Artemis Group, netted $990,000 from United Launch Alliance in 2025, according to public records. This was nearly a third of all revenue raised by his lobbying last year, a total of $3,385,000. United Launch Alliance was formerly a major competitor to SpaceX in the US launch industry.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The Senate\u2019s provision targets launch revenues but excludes space transportation services (such as the human landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin).<\/p>\n
Another former NASA official, Phil McAlister, replied to Bridenstine\u2019s post that it was \u201cdisappointing\u201d to see him attach his name to the provision. Instead of promoting competition, McAlister said the new language is actually anti-competitive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat it supports is using the political process to funnel money to favored companies with inferior products,\u201d said McAlister, who directed commercial space at NASA from 2005 to 2024. \u201cCompetition is a full and open match between companies where the best company wins. If this legislation passes as is, it ensures that the best company will not win. Instead the second or third place company will get an award because they could not compete and win fairly. And the country will see that superior performance does not win, having the best lobbyist does.\u201d<\/p>\n
McAlister and other critics of the provision say no one wants a launch monopoly and that NASA has sought to on-ramp new providers through programs such as its venture class services program that allocates payloads to riskier providers. However, they note that, as United Launch Alliance has struggled to bring its Vulcan rocket online over the past five years, SpaceX has stepped up to keep the International Space Station flying and to launch critical missions like NASA\u2019s $4 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Ironically, United Launch Alliance held a US launch monopoly earlier this century before SpaceX came along and disrupted its business with lower-cost, more frequent access to space. Now United Launch Alliance must compete not only with SpaceX but a newer generation of more nimble companies building reusable rockets, including Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly, and Stoke Space. NASA has made it clear to these companies that it is eager to buy launch services at competitive prices from them.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
A former Republican House member from Oklahoma, Bridenstine served a generally well-regarded term as NASA administrator from April 2018 to January 2021 during President Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n
The high point of his tenure in office came in May 2020, thanks to SpaceX. That summer, with the Crew Dragon vehicle, SpaceX and NASA successfully flew two astronauts to the International Space Station, breaking America\u2019s dependence on Russia for low-Earth orbit transportation. Bridenstine relished this with an oft-repeated mantra of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil.<\/p>\n
However, after leaving NASA, Bridenstine has appeared to become hostile to the dominant company founded by Elon Musk. He joined the board of a competitor, Viasat. Later, Bridenstine became the executive of Government Operations for United Launch Alliance, while his firm also collected a hefty lobbying fee.<\/p>\n
All of this is not particularly abnormal for the revolving door in Washington, DC, where senior officials go between government positions and industry. Nevertheless, some observers were surprised by the striking nature of Bridenstine\u2019s attack on NASA for the decision to award a Human Landing System contract to SpaceX in April 2021, three months after he left office. A new administrator had not yet been confirmed at NASA at the time, so a senior NASA engineer, Steve Jurczyk, served as acting administrator for the space agency.<\/p>\n
Bridenstine sharply criticized this lander decision during testimony before Cruz\u2019s committee last September.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a moment in time when we had no NASA administrator,\u201d he said at 42 minutes into the hearing. \u201cIt was after I was gone, and before Senator Nelson became the NASA administrator. An architecture was selected. And I don\u2019t know how this happens, but the biggest decision in the history of NASA, at least since I\u2019ve been paying attention, the biggest decision happened in the absence of a NASA administrator. And that decision was, instead of buying a Moon lander, we\u2019re gonna buy a big rocket.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
He was referring to Starship and the plan to use the vehicle as a lunar lander.<\/p>\n
Almost everyone in the space industry agrees that Starship offers a cumbersome solution to get two humans to the lunar surface, especially if the goal is to do so as quickly as possible rather than building a sustainable transportation system over time. However, Bridenstine\u2019s criticism of its selection process omitted some key facts.<\/p>\n
He oversaw the initial selection of Starship as one of three options for a lunar lander in April 2020. He made the appointment of Kathy Lueders as head of human exploration in June 2020, knowing she would be the source selection official for the lunar lander contract. And Lueders ended up selecting the one company with a proposal that fit within the NASA budget allocation for a lunar lander that Bridenstine had obtained from Congress.<\/p>\n
The reality is that Bridenstine was the architect of the Artemis program; he obtained its budget from Congress, he wanted the human lander to be a commercial partnership, and the team he put in place made the final decision. The implication that Jurczyk was effectively not a real administrator capable of making the right decisions is unfortunate, as Jurczyk is not alive to defend himself. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2023.<\/p>\n
However, Bridenstine\u2019s comments are in line with criticism of NASA leadership in 2021 by United Launch Alliance, which characterized it as \u201cincompetent and unpredictable\u201d in leaked emails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former NASA administrator says he is \u201cencouraged\u201d that the US Congress is considering legislation to prevent NASA from spending more than 50 percent of its launch funding on any single provider. \u201cAmerica succeeds in space when American companies compete, innovate, and grow,\u201d former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on LinkedIn. \u201cI\u2019m encouraged to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9508,25,190,21,316],"class_list":["post-44065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-bridenstine","tag-launch","tag-nasa","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}