Executive Order 13803:National Space Council

What the Executive Order Says

Executive Order (EO) 13803 is entitled "Reviving the National Space Council" and was released June 30th, 2017.  The EO has 9 sections and supersedes Executive Order 12675.  This EO re-establishes the National Space Council, which as it mentioned in the order, effectively ceased operations in 1993.

Section 1

This section describes the National Space Council and some of its history.  It was originally established under G.H.W. Bush and died under Clinton.

Section 2

This section defines who sits on the council.  The first subsection lists 13 permanent members but the Vice President can invite others as needed.

Section 3

This section describes the functions of the Council which consists of developing a strategy for the implementation of the current space policy.  The Council has to meet annually or more frequently and will be given a staff.

Section 4

This section describes the role, responsibilities and authority of the Chair who is the Vice-President.  The Chair will be the person who drives space policy for the President.  This section also includes a requirement that a quarterly report to the President is made of the council's activities.

Section 5

This section seems to indicate that for the agencies who are involved in the Council, the Council becomes an additional approval point prior to doing anything.  Interagency co-ordination is important and perhaps this section is intending to use the Council in this fashion, but it is not clear because of the discretion that the Chair can exercise.

Section 6

This section establishes a Users' Advisory Group.  These are usually used to get feedback from industry, the general public and other non-governmental stakeholders.  The last subsection here though does strike alarm bells as it states that the Group cannot produce any advice or reports that go anywhere but the Council, so in that fashion, it is quite opaque.

Section 7

This section defines that support for the Council will come from the Office of the President.  Additional support can be extracted from the participating agencies by request from the Chair.

Section 8

This section mandates an annual report of the Council regarding recommendations on space policy and implementation strategy.

Section 9

This section essentially revokes EO 12675 and includes the usual legal fine print to assure the constitutionality of the EO.

My commentary

NASA and the Whitehouse have had disagreements.  This EO seems to be an attempt to run space policy out of the Whitehouse rather than leavening in the hands of NASA.  A director for NASA has not been nominated by this Administration.  This EO, in my opinion, bodes poorly for continued excellence in space exploration.
The Vice President has not been known, as far as I know, for expressing goals of getting off this planet.  The President does not mention any specific goals in the EO.  Things that could have been talked about include: establishing permanent habitations in orbit, going back to the moon and going to Mars.  Clearly from the press conference held at the signing of this EO, all the President wants to do is to go to "infinity".
Space exploration is hard and quite costly because of the fact that it involves solving problems that have not previously been solved or even defined.  The future of mankind, if it will be a truly long term future, is in space.  In the shorter term, population levels cannot continue at their current rate of growth for very much longer and migration into space colonies is about the only way to prevent some other force reducing human population, be that famine, war, or pestilence.
In summary, my opinion is that this is much more about internal power struggles in the Executive Branch than about promoting Space exploration and travel.