I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).
This is strange:
According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.
Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.
[Update a while later]
Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.
The Council may not amount to anything, but I favor its resurrection because there are a lot of issues now before the U.S. that do cross the traditional boundaries of NASA, NOAA, DoD, NRO, etc.
We’re about 25 years into an era in which space-related decisions have been, for the most part, determined, at the federal level, by the parochial interests and/or enthusiasms of a small minority of Congressmen and Senators with NASA centers and/or major contractor facilities within their districts or states. Most of the rest have been the product of “business as usual” within the various “stovepiped” federal agencies with some interest in space. How’ve we been doing? Pretty well on the private side, but rarely worse on the government side would be my evaluation.
I see at least a reasonable probability that a reconstituted National Space Council could do some good and not much chance it would mess things up even more than they already are on the government side.
If people are not going to mars to colonize, what’s the point?