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Space is not one of the great battlefields of the presidential election.
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden didn’t talk much about the last frontier during the 2020 run, which culminates today (November 3) with Election Day. (That moniker is a bit misleading, however, given this more than 90 million people will vote early and more states will count the votes for the following days.)
But many of us care about US space policy and how the next four years could shape it. Here is a brief summary of the position of the two main candidates.
Related: Presidential visions for space: from Ike to Trump
Donald Trump
Trump has been quite active in the realm of space politics. For example, it resurrected the National Space Council, which had been inactive since the early 1990s. Vice President Mike Pence chairs the council, which serves to simplify the country’s off-Earth plans and priorities.
Trump has also signed five different space policy directives. The first of them, which amended and updated a directive issued by President Barack Obama in 2010, has firmly set the United States on a crewed route to the moon and beyond.
NASA is working to achieve these goals through its Artemis program of manned lunar exploration, which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028. Artemis’ first manned landing is currently slated for 2024, an ambitious timeline announced by Pence in 2019.
Two of the president’s other space policy directives seek to streamline commercial space industry regulation and space traffic control protocols. Another aimed to strengthen cybersecurity for space systems, and yet another directed the Department of Defense to create the US Space Force.
Related: The US astronaut votes early from the space station
The space force, which was officially established in December 2019, is the nation’s first new military branch since the Air Force stood up in 1947. The Space Force is part of the Air Force, as is the Marine Corps. US Navy.
The Space Force has been officially operating for less than a year, so at the moment it is not clear how much the way the United States does business in space will change, especially considering that many of its duties are what the Air Force once performed. But the existence of the Space Force signals a commitment to treat space as an increasingly contested domain and to defend the United States’ long-standing off-Earth dominance more vigorously. increasingly voiced by US military officials in the last few years.
Trump also signed a executive order earlier this year stating that space mining is compatible with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the backbone of international space law. This order affirmed a position previously taken by Congress, which passed a law in 2015 that explicitly allows American citizens and businesses to use asteroids and lunar resources, such as lunar ice water that could support lunar outposts.
The president has also constantly tried to do this increase NASA’s budget during his tenure. Much of the increased funding went to manned lunar thrust; Earth science, on the other hand, typically has been aimed at cuts.
So if a second Trump term resembles the first, we can probably expect continued stress on the commercialization of space, including the use of extra-terrestrial resources; an ongoing push to protect American space assets and space domination more generally; and the continued prioritization of NASA’s manned exploration programs, especially the drive to quickly get astronauts back to the moon.
“By any means necessary”: Vice President Pence urges NASA to the moon
Joe Biden
A discussion of Joe Biden’s space policy is obviously much more speculative, but we can make some plausible assumptions.
For example, some experts have predicted that US space policy will not change dramatically if Biden wins the election. Such predictions often cite the Democratic Party’s Official Platform, which promises to continue to support NASA and space exploration more generally.
“We support NASA’s work to bring Americans back to the moon and go further to Mars, taking the next step in exploring our solar system,” the platform reads, partly. (However, whether the same urgency – getting the boots back to the moon by 2024, for example – will apply, is another matter.)
But the next sentence highlights an important difference with the priorities of the current White House: “Democrats also support the strengthening of Earth observation missions of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to better understand how climate change is affecting the world. our home planet “.
It makes sense: Biden said he would fight climate change it will be a priority of your administration if the White House wins. It would be a departure from the current administration; President Trump did it he expressed skepticism on the reality and dangers of man-made climate change.
Going back to the similarity side, a President Biden may also be quite friendly towards commercial space flights. After all, Biden was vice president during President Barack Obama’s administration, whose federal budget demands prompted NASA to shift manned low-Earth orbit operations to private astronaut taxis like SpaceX. Crew Dragon capsule. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program went into operation in 2010 and awarded crew transportation contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014.
It is too early to speculate on other important issues, such as whether a Biden president will keep the current NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, or whether he will bring his choice. We just have to wait and see what they have in store on election day and beyond.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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