President Trump has reconstituted the National Space Council, a step towards fulfilling his emphasis on restoring America’s lead in space exploration and utilization, a hope he included in his inaugural address.
During his tenure in the Oval Office, Barack Obama prematurely ended the Space Shuttle program, then eliminated funding for developing the Constellation system, which had been scheduled to replace the Shuttle as America’s manned space effort. This rendered the United States dependent on Russia for manned access to orbit. He changed NASA’s budgetary focus from human exploration to endeavors meant to bolster his climate change beliefs. The National Space Council was disbanded.
Writing for The Hill, Mark R. Whittington reported:
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In a dramatic reversal of the prior administration, Vice President Pence’s announcement this month of the restoration of the National Space Council, which he will chair, (the secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and State, will be members) outlined its role in coordinating the White House’s ambitious scientific, commercial and security goals beyond Earth. In his opening remarks to the restored Council, Pence noted “…in recent years, the clarity of our purpose and the confidence of our conviction that propelled the United States to be a vanguard of space exploration seems to have waned. America seems to have lost our edge in space — and those days are over… for too long our government’s commitment has failed to match our people’s spirit and meet our nation’s needs. The truth is that America entered this new millennium without a coherent policy, a coherent vision for outer space. And in the absence of American leadership, other nations have seized the opportunity to stake their claim in the infinite frontier. Rather than lead in space, too often, we have chosen to drift. And, as we learned 60 years ago, when we drift, we fall behind…
“…sending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated. Every passing year that the moon remained squarely in the rearview mirror further eroded our ability to return to the lunar domain and made it more likely that we would forget why we ever wanted to go in the first place. And now we find ourselves in a position where the United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect. “When the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets to the International Space Station. But four years turned into five, and five years turned into six, and here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station — at a cost-per-seat that now stands at more than $76 million…rather than competing with other nations to create the best space technology, the previous administration chose capitulation. According to the U.S. intelligence community, Russia and China are pursuing a full range of anti-satellite technology to reduce U.S. military effectiveness, and they are increasingly considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine.”