Trump space plans may restore U.S. optimism

Last year, candidate Donald Trump’s team and running mate Mike Pence floated the idea of restoring the National Space Council, a body that hadn’t existed since former president Bill Clinton abolished it in 1993. Trump kept that promise as president, and now it’s up and running. Chaired by Vice President Pence, with a White House office and a small staff, the council is intended to bring order and priorities to America’s space program.

I’m glad Trump did this. The council played an important role in the late 1980s and early 1990s in establishing conditions for successful commercial space industries, which are now thriving, and in managing the consequences of the end of the Cold War.

As we enter a new period of change — this one marked by the twin phenomena of explosive commercial growth and increased space militarization — it’s a good idea to have someone in the White House thinking about and coordinating these issues.

That said, space policy is, to my mind, one of the Obama administration’s greatest successes. Simply by mostly leaving things alone, except to clear a few legal and regulatory hurdles, the Obama administration, as The Washington Post noted, brought capitalism to outer space. And there’s a lesson in that for the Trump administration.

Where once pretty much everything in space was government-controlled, either via NASA or the Department of Defense, now we have numerous commercial concerns, ranging from oldline space companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to the many exciting new space companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources and more.

At the first council meeting Thursday, Pence announced a full review to ensure that regulatory barriers aren’t holding back progress in commercial space. He also announced a plan to return to the moon, at long last.

Expanding humanity’s presence — and in particular, America’s presence — beyond the Earth and throughout the solar system offers a lot of benefits. Asteroid resources alone are valued in the quintillions, and there are already companies in business to exploit them.

Moving humanity beyond a single planet makes it much less likely that a major disaster could wipe out the human race (and gives us the capabilities to prevent some disasters, like a major cometary or asteroidal impact of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs).

Most important, I think, expansion into an open frontier means opening minds. As Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in his classic biography of Christopher Columbus, when Columbus set sail in 1492, Europe was in a funk. Christian civilization was shrinking and dividing, and people were growing cynical and desperate.

All that changed in short order, he wrote. Columbus became a symbol of “hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: expansion.”

Morison’s description of preColumbian Europe sounds distressingly like our current-day civilization. What worked for them could work for us. It’s time.