As the international competition heats up over the future of space exploration, U.S. leaders are bullish on their ability to shape it — especially with a president in the next White House who might be sympathetic to the current NASA administration. “I had lengthy talks with her about space,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday of Vice President Kamala Harris. “She’s a space aficionado.” That optimism from Nelson, a former Democratic Florida senator, came as Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said VP shortlister Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former astronaut, is “close to a national hero.” NASA is looking for White House allies to help it achieve its ambitious space projects even as Congress has trimmed the agency’s budget. There’s the Artemis program that plans to return astronauts to the moon; a mission to put humans on Mars by the 2040s; contending with a sky rapidly filling with satellites; and countering Russia’s increasing, potentially nuclear belligerence beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. (Although Democrats are in control now, space has been a bipartisan ambition: Former President Donald Trump has also won plaudits from the space sector for his investment in landing astronauts on the moon, reviving the Space Force and reestablishing the National Space Council.) Speaking at a POLITICO conference in Washington, Nelson, Hickenlooper and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) outlined how America could lead the “space economy” — provided it can navigate competition abroad and rising private sector influence at home. The private sector has never pulled more weight in the American space program than it does today. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, as well as Lockheed Martin and Boeing have stepped in to fill in gaps in NASA’s budget and capabilities. Moran said the sheer number of these partnerships keeps any one company from exerting too much control over American priorities in space (like, for example, one that might happen to be owned by a partisan owner of X). “We do not want to have a circumstance in which all eggs are in a basket,” Moran said. Hickenlooper echoed his good feelings, saying “we’ve gone through a revolution in the past decade or so,” creating a “robust and healthy” new status quo. The future of the U.S. and its foreign rivals in space is more complicated. After reports earlier this year of Russia aspiring to put a nuclear weapon in low orbit that would target other satellites and spacecraft, the space community is on high alert. “You’re going to have thousands of assets suddenly… cease functioning,” in the case of a nuclear attack in outer space, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce at the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. “It would be a long period of tremendous dysfunction.” Meghan Allen, senior vice president of the space industry nonprofit the Space Foundation, observed a shift from a focus on NASA and science to one increasingly concerned with the world of defense and geopolitics. She said Russia had long been seen as a key driver of U.S. competition in space, going back to the launch of Sputnik — but that China has been rising as an ambitious and aloof rival. “It’s no secret we have invited China on several occasions to sit down and have a technical conversation about space traffic control and space traffic safety, and to date they haven’t accepted that invitation,” said NOAA's DalBello. In particular, he pointed to China’s May announcement of a plan to launch a 10,000-satellite constellation that could come perilously close to already-existing American and Chinese space assets. “There's a huge safety issue looming if they do that,” DalBello said. “I believe they will be prudent, I have to believe that because … the results could technically be catastrophic for all concerned.”
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