Later today, the White House is expected to announce that President Trump has signed an executive order to reinstate the National Space Council. This should finally kick off the much-anticipated formulation of a space policy from the Trump administration, which will encompass military, civil, and commercial interests. The new council, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has the potential to do a great deal of good—or it could further muddy the waters of what already is kind of a mess.

Space policy experts are hoping for the former. "I think bringing back the National Space Council could be an improvement, but it's not guaranteed," Brian Weeden, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation, told Ars. "Much depends on what the Council will focus on and how it interacts with the other inter-agency processes," he said. Weeden's organization promotes sustainable and peaceful uses of outer space.

Pence

The key member of the council will be its chairman, Pence, who has shown a burgeoning interest in space matters. In early June, the vice president visited Johnson Space Center in Houston to address NASA's newest class of astronaut candidates. And last week, Pence visited two key space command facilities in Colorado, Schriever Air Force Base, and Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station. Two sources have also told Ars that he will visit NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida next week.

President Kennedy established the tradition of a National Space Council, and he gave it significance by installing Vice President Lyndon Johnson as its chair. During that time, the council considered mostly civil space matters, leaving military matters and cross-cutting issues to the National Security Council. After Kennedy, the council's influence waned, before it was resurrected by the Reagan and Bush administrations in the 1980s. Later under Dan Quayle's leadership, it failed to implement Bush's Space Exploration Initiative to send humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. The Clinton administration discarded it.

But from the outset of the Trump administration, Pence has signaled that the space council would return and have a significant voice in the direction of America's activities in space. And indeed, it is an important time for clarity in national space policy matters.

"There are several high-level, cross-cutting space policy issues that need attention, and if the National Space Council were to focus on addressing those, I think it could do a lot of good," Weeden said. "These are issues like modernizing the oversight and licensing regime for commercial space, launch policy, export controls, space traffic management, space debris mitigation and remediation, spectrum management, and how government can better leverage commercial capabilities."

The space council would also likely play a role in coordinating national goals in space, from the military's desire to assert itself in low Earth and higher orbits to establishing a civil policy that keeps NASA at the forefront of exploration to bringing along international partners. It seems plausible that, to meet these aims, the council will refocus NASA more on activities near and on the Moon in the next decade or two rather than pushing aggressively for Mars.

However, Weeden warned, the council needs to be part of a coalition around these goals, rather than dictating them to the aerospace community at large. Such an arrangement undermined the space council under Quayle, who sought to make big changes to NASA policy as the space agency resisted. "I think if the Space Council focuses its efforts on human spaceflight and telling NASA where to send humans, I think that will not be very productive," Weeden said. "That is a very high-profile issue, and it will thus attract a lot of media and public attention. It's also very politically charged."

Commercial space

One of the big changes over the last decade is the rise of commercial space companies. That most notably includes SpaceX and Blue Origin, but today there are dozens of other players in the fields of launch, remote sensing, and in-space operations. These companies have, in some cases, offered the government services at a significantly lower cost than traditional aerospace contractors.

To some degree, both NASA and the military have shown interest in these commercial opportunities. For example, NASA has turned to private providers, with fixed-price contracts, to deliver supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It has also opened the station to businesses that want to experiment with microgravity for commercial gain. The military, too, has begun launching national security payloads on private rockets, and it has praised the reusable launch technology being pioneered by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

But there are tensions, as well. So far NASA has been reluctant to embrace reusable rockets, preferring to press ahead with its large, costly, and expendable Space Launch System. The agency spends more than $2 billion annually on development costs for the rocket, without a clear sense of how it will ultimately be used. At the same time, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance are all developing lower-cost, at least partially reusable rockets that could support almost all of the country's needs were NASA to focus its activities on and around the Moon.

"I'm not inherently negative on a space council," said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science and an Obama White House space policy official. "The council's usefulness largely depends on the policy it implements. If they develop a national space policy that grows opportunities in the commercial sector and extends more agile, entrepreneurial, and innovative space capabilities to the national security realm, taxpayers will benefit and our country could be safer as a result. This council could further their goal of running government more like a business."