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user17945
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Just so you're aware, not every author insists that a momentum map be infinitesimally equivariant (Prof. Figueroa-O'Farrill's condition 2), although it is part of da Silva's definition. The literature isn't uniform - for example, Marsden just requires the first condition. I'm biased towards this definition since Jerry Marsden, who unfortunately passed away a year ago today, was my advisor.

To answer your main question, yes the map $X\in\mathfrak{g}\mapsto X^* \in\mathfrak{X}(M)$ is always linear, regardless of whether the action is Hamiltonian. To see this explicitly, let $\Phi^p:G\rightarrow M$ be the map $g\mapsto g\cdot p$. By definition $X^* _p$ is precisely $T_e\Phi^p(X)$ (you can see this agrees with your definition by writing $\exp(tX)\cdot p$ as $\Phi^p(\exp(tX))$, and using the chain rule to calculate $\frac{d}{dt}$), and derivative maps $T_xf$ are always linear. So yes, it's enough to check condition 1 on a basis.

user17945
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