FPI / July 23, 2024
By Richard Fisher
While the ongoing and unpredictable United States presidential campaign promises to highlight partisan political divisions on numerous issues, the last decade has seen U.S. space policy tending toward a basic consensus stressing three pillars that can be credited, two to Republicans and one to Democrats.
What is unique about the 2024 campaign is that both candidates have taken considerable personal interest in U.S. space policy, such as Republican Donald J. Trump’s revival of the U.S. Moon program and his founding the U.S. Space Force.
Trump also revived the 1989 National Space Council, a high-level advisory body under the Office of the President, that is led by the Vice President and currently includes the Secretaries of State, Defense, Energy, Transportation, the Director of Central Intelligence and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Democrat Vice President, now presumptive presidential candidate Kamala Harris, followed the example of her predecessor Republican Mike Pence in chairing the National Space Council, providing a justification for her to spend time gaining insights into U.S. space policy priorities.
The Moon. It was former Democrat President Barack Obama who in April 2010 cancelled Republican President George W. Bush’s Constellation Program, a 2005 initiative to pick up from the last U.S. Apollo-17 mission to the Moon in 1972, to develop a new architecture for putting Americans back on the Moon.
But in December 2017 the Trump Administration issued its Space Policy Directive One, creating the Artemis Program that recommitted the U.S. to put people on the Moon, and also created the Artemis Accords, a statement of principles to guide behavior on the Moon now signed by 43 nations — but not China and Russia.
In the main, the Biden Administration and Vice President Harris have supported U.S. funding of the Artemis Program, though the planned goal for the next U.S. manned mission to the Moon has slipped from 2025 to 2026 and may have be delayed further.
The Biden Administrations has also continued U.S. leadership that has seen Artemis Accords signatories grow by 34 nations, up from 9 at the end of 2020.
In his April 15, 2010 cancellation speech, given at Cape Canaveral, Obama dismissed the geostrategic competition with China that in part propelled Bush’s initiative.
This was a mistake, as the decade of the 2010s gradually revealed China’s expansive ambitions for control of the Earth-Moon System, starting with their intention to start sending Chinese to the Moon by 2029 or 2030.
Obama’s refusal to continue the U.S. Moon program gave China years to advance its program.
Both the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration have warned of China’s potential threats on the Moon and in orbits closer to Earth.
Space Force. A second pillar of consensus and continuity between the Trump and Biden Administrations has been support for the latest and 6th branch of the U.S. military, the U.S. Space Force, created in December 2017 when President Trump signed legislation that enacted structure and funding for the new service.
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