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By Michael Puttre [ [link removed] ]
While the future of the space program might not have topped the list of voter priorities in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s victory will likely have far-reaching implications for space exploration and exploitation. In fact, the last vestiges of the government-directed space program as we have known it may be swept away in a new era of free enterprise.
Elon Musk, the Cape buffalo in the room, loomed large in Trump’s campaign and looks likely to play a big role in the 47th president’s new administration. But while most pundits during the campaign were fixated on Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his subsequent reform of its left-skewing censorship policies, only a few were curious about what influence on space policy the founder and creative force behind SpaceX will wield in the new administration. The short answer is: profound. But that’s not why Trump tapped him.
The president-elect clearly sees Musk as a force of creative destruction with practical ideas for his meta-project of "draining the swamp" into which, in his view, American greatness has been sinking. To this end, Musk and fellow rebel business leader Vivek Ramaswamy will direct the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) [ [link removed] ], an advisory body to identify opportunities for eliminating wasteful spending and regulations. Likewise, as with his role in DOGE, Musk will have an informal but important role in shaping space policy. Expect the emphasis to shift from government direction to government getting out of the way of private enterprise.
The best way of appreciating the president-elect’s space priorities is to look at what he did during his last administration. In a nutshell, Trump repudiated existing international norms as exemplified in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, created the Space Force as the first new branch of the armed forces since the Air Force in 1947, and enthusiastically continued the trend toward privatization of non-military space activities begun under his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
America First, Not Alone
Without presuming to interpret Trump’s motivations too deeply, his reputation as a repudiator of international cooperation is vastly overstated and even misunderstood. Rather, he seems prone to reject ossified organizations and agreements that codify U.S. disadvantages in favor of new ones he has a hand in negotiating himself that provide what he regards as a better deal for America and those who come along for the big win. In space exploration, this is exemplified in the Artemis Accords [ [link removed] ] Trump put in place as the 45th president.
The U.N. Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. is still a signatory, essentially says nobody can own anything in outer space. No sovereignty. No property. No rights to what you might be standing on in your space suit millions of miles from Turtle Bay. All of outer space must be administered by the United Nations for the benefit of all, and all that that entails. Of course, given how little influence the U.N. has here on terra firma, it’s hard to imagine that it’ll be very effective policing a place millions of miles away that it likely won’t be able to reach.
At the same time, you don’t want a free-for-all in outer space. This was what the treaty was trying to prevent. It’s easy to imagine conflicts in space sparking eruptions on Earth. For instance, despite the Outer Space Treaty, Chinese officials have compared [ [link removed] ] the moon, Mars and space itself to islands in the South China Sea, as realms of international competition ripe for the taking. At the same time, treaties are very attractive and easy to sign when the technology for violating them doesn’t exist or is cost prohibitive. Think of the ABM Treaty [ [link removed] ].
The Artemis Accords stem from Trump’s executive order in 2020 committing the United States to a framework for spacefaring nations and private entities to use resources in space without claiming specific ownership of them and thereby technically violating the Outer Space Treaty. Legal scholars differ on whether the U.N. provisions would not in fact be violated, but the new agreement asserts a difference between fair use of raw materials in space and sovereign ownership of the celestial bodies they came from.
Moreover, the Artemis Accords built on a law signed [ [link removed] ] by President Obama in 2015 “to facilitate a pro-growth environment for the developing commercial space industry,” essentially authorizing private companies to profit from their explorations and commercial operations, such as asteroid mining.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Artemis Accords and their future under the second Trump administration is that countries continued to sign [ [link removed] ] onto them during the four years Joe Biden has been president. The continuity of space privatization and commercialization, reaching back to Bush 43 and refreshingly through Obama, Trump 45 and Biden, bodes well for an expansion of private enterprise driving space activity through Trump 47. As a result, the U.N.’s Outer Space Treaty will become even more irrelevant than it is now.
Robert Zimmerman, space journalist, author and creator of the website Behind the Black [ [link removed] ], thinks the Artemis Accords will totally transform the dynamics of space exploration, particularly under a second Trump administration. “Even if we were to establish control over an area due to our presence, we could not allow our legal framework to work there; the Outer Space Treaty forbids that,” Zimmerman said. “The bottom line is that Trump is going to have to use the Artemis Accords alliance to force through a major change, either in the Outer Space Treaty or to get the alliance to ignore the Outer Space Treaty.”
Join the Orbit Guard
While bureaucracies are supposed to be anathema to Trump, he created the Space Force [ [link removed] ] in his first term amid much fanfare and snickering. Much of the amusement at the expense of this new uniformed service was born of the unfamiliarity of most people with the growing threats to U.S. satellites on which we are existentially dependent as a society, and that are growing more vulnerable to enemy action [ [link removed] ].
Critics of the new service wondered why it was needed when all of its functions were already encompassed by existing structures and assets. The answer is emphasis. During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps established that it was needed to undertake roles completely independent of the needs of the Army, particularly air superiority and strategic bombing, leading to the creation of the Air Force right after the war, in 1947. Likewise, the Space Force focuses on orbit and cislunar space [ [link removed] ] independently of the Air Force, which has other problems not related to space domain awareness, attack and defense.
Low earth orbit, in particular, is literally the next frontier in human conflict. A dedicated service is needed to monitor and if necessary respond to rivals’ emerging capabilities, many of which involve “dual-use” technologies [ [link removed] ]. For example, satellites capable of pacing and docking with other satellites may service them or interfere with their operations. Space vehicles may release payloads that could be research instruments or anti-satellite weapons. New space technologies may be innocent or threatening, depending on the operator’s intentions, and the Space Force will specialize in sorting these capabilities and what they mean for U.S. security.
More nations are gaining access to space, as is their right, and not all of them wish us well. A key problem is developing an awareness of what is going on in space and who is doing what and why. This requires technical means and a specific focus on space as its own domain.
Another benefit of having a Space Force as a separate organization is that it is able to craft its own acquisitions policies and program management structures to take advantage of technologies and services from the private sector. This is already taking shape with the Space Force contracting for smaller satellites to cover a broader range [ [link removed] ] of threats with systems that are easier to replace than the huge, expensive Air Force reconnaissance birds.
Expect Trump to endow his fledgling creation with keener eyes, greater endurance and eventually talons. While campaigning, he said he supports the creation of a National Guard [ [link removed] ] organization to support Space Force personnel and missions, as well as new weapons and capabilities to counter growing threats from China, Russia and other rivals.
Free Space
Going forward, space exploration is likely to be unburdened by what has been. Since before the Mercury program in the early 1960s, the government has set the agenda, called the tune and created the glory for Americans in space. When I was a kid in Winchester, Massachusetts, my next-door neighbor and I would get the times for Skylab to fly over from the Cambridge Observatory and induce our neighbors to come outside to watch. And they did.
NASA had the right stuff. They still do. [ [link removed] ]
But increasingly, space is opening to entrepreneurs with their own agendas [ [link removed] ]. The power of the private sector in opening up the new space age has been well documented [ [link removed] ]. While NASA missions do and will continue to inspire, the old mold of exclusive government direction of space activities is already coming to an end. The 2024 election will only make that happen faster and more definitively.
Of course, private space launch companies, including coalitions of established contractors and newcomers [ [link removed] ]—like those making up United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin—will continue to benefit from government contracts, exactly as SpaceX does. But increasingly, private companies will pursue their own objectives for their own motives, from profit to the dreams of their founders.
This is where Trump may excel in unlocking America’s space potential. Musk will be a beneficiary of the new administration, not because he can expect more government contracts, but because he can expect fewer regulations and thus more opportunities to advance SpaceX’s agenda. Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post of “Democracy dies in darkness” fame, can also expect his space launch company Blue Origin to have more opportunities to advance, as can the owners of Rocket Lab and other American space entrepreneurs. All of this will happen, not because Trump will make more government money available, but because he will restrain government agencies from preventing this advancement.
Behind the Black’s Zimmerman said he thought removing the regulatory interference on private launch operations will have an immediate positive effect on the future of space travel. “A lot of reasons have to do with the failures of the companies that exist,” he said, citing Boeing and the other legacy aerospace firms behind NASA’s Space Launch System white elephant.
“But I think a lot of it has to do with how investors look at the regulatory culture and realize a particular company is not going to be able to function well here. And there’s no point putting money into it because it’s going to be blocked. I think Trump, with a stroke of a pen, is going to get all of those regulatory agencies back to where they were in 2020.”
And thus, with an election and a stroke of a pen, America’s already bright future in space may well become even brighter. The fate of individual programs such as Space Launch System and even future moon landings under a DOGE purge are less important than the overall end of the ossified government-directed contractor system. U.S. space advances will happen because visionaries will be able to experiment, learn and progress on their own timetables, not those of government agencies.
All space progress is good. I’m even happy when the Chinese do well on their non-military space activities. (Of course, it’s all military, but that applies to us as well.) There is an opportunity to advance humanity into the solar system. Trump and maybe his future new best friend, Xi Jinping, may be just the leaders to make it happen.
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