What Biden’s agenda is likely to be for NASA and space exploration

• President-elect Joe Biden named members of his NASA transition team on Tuesday.
• Ellen Stofan, a former NASA chief scientist, will chair the team, which also includes an astrophysicist and a climate researcher.
• Biden will likely postpone the timeline of NASA’s Artemis moon mission, extend funding for the International Space Station, and direct more resources to climate science.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

President-elect Joe Biden named members of his transition team for NASA on Tuesday, a critical step in setting his administration’s agenda for space exploration.

Ellen Stofan, who currently heads Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, will lead the team. Stofan was NASA’s chief scientist from 2013 to 2016.

Other members include Jedidah Isler, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College who studies supermassive black holes; Bhavya Lal, a space policy strategist who works with the White House Office of Science and Technology; and Waleed Abdalati, another former NASA chief scientist (he served from 2011 to 2012) who is now at the University of Colorado.

Aside from naming his team members, Biden has yet to release details of his plans for NASA. But based on the composition of the transition team, the priorities of the Obama administration and the 2020 Democratic Party platform, here are four ways Biden could approach space policy.

NASA will likely reduce the priority on climate research

As president, Barack Obama has prioritized NASA climate change research, funding missions to monitor global warming via satellites. Obama requested over $ 2 billion in funding for NASA’s Earth Sciences division for fiscal year 2017, although the division ultimately received $ 1.92 billion.

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, has consistently requested less funds for the Earth Sciences division than Obama. The current administration also said it wants to cut five Earth Science missions that focus primarily on climate change research.

Congress kept existing earth science programs in place during the Trump presidency, but allocated slightly less funds to the split overall. NASA’s earth science budget for fiscal 2020 was $ 1.78 billion, about $ 140 million less than in 2017.

Biden’s administration will likely attempt to reverse budget cuts and strengthen Earth science research. The move would align with the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, which has vowed to support NASA’s “Earth observation missions to better understand how climate change is affecting our home planet.”

The appointment of Abdalati’s Biden transition team, whose research focuses on using satellites to understand changes to Earth’s ice cover, is another sign of the president-elect’s commitment to this issue.

However, if Republicans retain control of the Senate, Biden’s ability to direct more funding to NASA’s Earth Sciences division may be limited.

Biden could extend funding for the space station

Under Trump, the government was supposed to stop funding the International Space Station by 2025, and then entrust control of the orbiting laboratory to private companies.

Biden will likely reverse this decision, according to Reuters. Instead, the president-elect intends to propose an extension of funding for the ISS, although it is not yet known for how long.

Continued federal funding for the space station could benefit companies like Boeing, which currently receives $ 225 million annually from its ISS operations support contract. Slowing down the timeline could also give companies more time to design and plan privately operated space stations. For example, Axiom Space, a Texas-based privately held aerospace company, has a contract with NASA to build its attachment to the space station.

Once the ISS retires, the Axiom module could theoretically detach to become an independent orbital outpost.

NASA will still aim to land people on the moon, but not so soon

In March 2019, Vice President Mike Pence promised that the administration would return people to the moon in 2024.

But that goal was hampered by funding shortages, as Congress failed to provide NASA with the $ 28 billion required to build hardware and train astronauts.

Biden’s administration is likely to postpone the date for a lunar landing by several years, a goal that is in line with the bill proposed by the House Science Committee that would aim to land astronauts on the moon by 2028.

“I don’t know anyone who thinks we’ll get there by 2024,” Lori Garver, who was a NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration, told Space News. “No matter who won, this would have been an impossible goal.”

However, the administration appears to have a lunar landing on its priority list. Stofan, the president of NASA’s transition team in Biden, helped NASA develop plans to commercialize spaceflight and human missions to Mars and the Moon.

Biden wrote in August that he hopes to lead “a daring space program that will continue to send astronaut heroes to expand our exploration and scientific frontiers.”

Continued competition between private space flight companies

Although Biden and Trump may differ on some priorities for NASA, the president-elect is likely to continue to encourage commercial activity in space, an effort also supported by the Obama administration.

According to Reuters, which spoke to officials close to Biden’s campaign in late October, the president-elect intends to continue promoting competition between companies like Boeing and SpaceX. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program funded Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft ready for astronauts to fly to and from the space station. Those contracted missions will almost certainly move forward.

However, officials pointed out to Reuters that Biden’s space agenda was still being formulated and would likely take a step back on more pressing issues like the coronavirus pandemic and the US economy.