SPACE POLICY IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION:
The incoming Trump administration has offered few statements about its plans for NASA or Defense Department space programs in the two weeks since the election. That includes not announcing an official “agency review team” for NASA, the members of the transition team who come into the agency to learn about its activities and, in some cases, identify problems.
“The job of the teams coming in, first of all, is just to get a sense about where the agencies are,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who served on the NASA transition team for incoming president George W. Bush. “Part of what you’re trying to do is figure out what are going to be some of the immediate landmines that are going to come up in the first six months. Political people hate surprises.”
An example of that, he noted, was the discovery during the Bush transition that the space station program was $4.8 billion over budget. “So, at 11 o’clock at night, I go over to the OMB team and say, ‘Hi, I’m Scott. I’m from the NASA team. Got a spare $4.8 bil? We’re a little short,’” he recalled during a panel discussion Nov. 12 at the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington.
A similar landmine may be persistent air leaks in a Russian module of the ISS. At a Nov. 13 meeting of the ISS Advisory Committee, Bob Cabana, the new chair of the committee, noted disagreements between Russian and American officials on the cause and severity of the leaks. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the U.S. believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove to the Russians’ satisfaction that that’s the case,” Cabana said.
“I certainly believe that NASA is paying a lot of attention to it,” Pace said of those air leaks, “but if I was an incoming transition person, I would want to do my own forensics on that and understand very deeply what was going on because nothing will ratchet to the top of a list faster than anything involving human spaceflight safety.”
Pace said he didn’t see a problem with Musk pursuing Starship launches to Mars. “If you want to put a couple Starships on the surface of Mars, I think that is eminently doable and would be inspiring and interesting,” he said. “I’m not so sure about putting people on those missions because I think a lot of other things would have to happen first.”
Some, though, are worried that this strategy might be done at the expense of the current Artemis lunar exploration campaign.
I’m not so much worried about that as hopeful. Artemis, as it stands now, is mostly a jobs program for contractors, with deadlines being pushed back approximately 12 months every year.