LAS VEGAS — The sudden ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president will likely have at least a modest impact on space policy, including a potential choice of her running mate.
President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race July 21 and his endorsement of Harris to be the Democratic party nominee in his place has radically altered the 2024 campaign. It brings with it new attention to Harris’s role in space policy as the chair of the National Space Council during the Biden administration.
“I believe that she’s a space aficionado,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at a July 30 event on space policy held by Politico in Washington. That conclusion, he said, was based both his relationship with Harris as vice president as well as when they served together in the Senate in 2017 and 2018.
“I had lengthy talks with her about space” while in the Senate, he recalled. As chair of the National Space Council, he added, “she’s picked that up with gusto.”
Those in industry have mixed perceptions of Harris and her work on the space council. Some note the efforts she led to push for a “mission authorization” regime to end uncertainty about how emerging space applications will be regulated, although those efforts have stalled in Congress. She also, in an April 2022 speech, declared that the United States would not perform destructive tests of direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, a decision later adopted by dozens of other countries as a norm of responsible space behavior.
Others note that the space council has, at least publicly, been less active in the current administration than in the previous one, when Vice President Mike Pence chaired a series of public meetings. The National Space Council has held only three public meetings in the Biden administration, most recently in December 2023. Harris spoke at the start of that meeting but left immediately thereafter, leaving an adviser to chair the meeting.
The work of the council itself is unlikely to change now that Harris is running for president, said Mike French, former vice president of space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association in an interview. He said the staff has worked to ensure space issues remain bipartisan.
“I think what it does change is the energy around that, which is now fundamentally different,” he said. “It doesn’t change what they’re doing, but it does definitely change the environment in which they’re operating.”
It’s unclear what differences, if any, a Harris administration would have in space policy versus the Biden administration. Even if there are few changes, French said the space community should expect some kind of transition regardless of who wins the election now that Biden is no longer running.
“I think you should expect a continuation of a lot of policies should you have Harris win, but you still have to think of this as a transition, because at the end of the day, it’s a new chief executive,” he said. “You’ll likely see different people in different places.”
It is also uncertain what changes to space Donald Trump would make should he return to the presidency. The Republican party platform approved in July does include one paragraph on space that mentions both human space exploration and space commercialization: “Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.”
Kelly as vice president
One of the upcoming major decisions for Harris will be to select a running mate. One leading contender is Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former NASA astronaut. While Kelly has not been very active on space issues since being elected to the Senate in 2020, the prospect of an astronaut becoming vice president has excited sectors of the space community.
He has the support of Nelson. “Yes, he would,” Nelson said when asked at the Politico event if Kelly would make a good vice president, discussing Kelly’s role as commander of the STS-134 shuttle mission in 2011 as his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, recovered from a near-fatal shooting. “I think Mark would be good at whatever.”
Earlier in the event, Kelly got an endorsement from another senator. “Mark Kelly is, I would say, one of the most impressive people that I know,” said Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) “I think he’s as close to a national hero as we’ve got right now. I think he would be a perfect, amazing pick.”
At the same event, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) noted that Kelly was part of a congressional delegation to the Farnborough International Airshow when Biden announced he was not running for reelection. “I was watching to see if he immediately got on a plane and came home, but he did not,” he recalled. “He stayed with us. He was an integral and significant part of our visit.” (Kelly, though, did not attend a press conference that Moran and other members of the delegation participated in at the air show about 12 hours after Biden’s announcement.)
