Space Policy Edition: Are Democrats falling behind on space policy?

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Our guest, Mary Guenther, argues that the Democratic Party is ceding leadership in space policy, and how linking space to jobs, supply chains, and climate could help refocus the party’s relationship with the Cosmos.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreyer, the
0:24.8	chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society. Between 2009 to 2011, the early years of Barack
0:34.6	Obama's presidency, U.S. space policy went through some dramatic changes.
0:39.7	The administration canceled the Constellation Program, the effort to return humans to the moon
0:44.9	that began under George W. Bush. They oversaw the end of the space shuttle program, and
0:51.9	made perhaps most notably an aggressive push to support commercial
0:56.8	partnerships for not just cargo, but newly crew, to the International Space Station.
1:03.9	Pushing these policies through took a lot of work and dramatically changed the course of
1:09.7	NASA and spaceflight in this country.
1:12.4	They also codified many of these changes into National Space Policy Framework that they
1:17.5	released, and the NASA Authorization Act passed by a Democratic-led Congress in 2010.
1:24.7	Again, these policies around commercial investment and commercial partnerships
1:29.9	fundamentally transformed that market and, frankly, fundamentally transformed the idea and
1:37.0	the role of commercial partners in spaceflight, not just in the United States, but around
1:42.0	the world. Obviously, with the billions of dollars of contracts
1:45.8	and investments made by NASA, companies like SpaceX and most notably SpaceX went on to
1:53.0	fundamentally revolutionize various technologies of launch and overturn the existing dynamics
1:59.6	of launch markets in the United States and worldwide.
2:03.8	In recent years, though, the number of new policies put forward by democratic-leaning groups and
2:09.5	administrations and members of Congress has declined somewhat, and the Biden administration
2:15.4	in particular, had a relatively lower- key approach to space policy than their predecessors in the Trump administration, which went very strong into not just commercial partnerships, but lots of new policy ideas and a reinvigorated National Space Council that crossed the gamut of a variety of commercial, civil, and
2:36.1	defense-related space policy reforms. Now, this is not to say that there wasn't good policy
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Planetary Society, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Planetary Society and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.