White House ‘making good progress’ on revising space transportation policy, official says
AIAA ASCEND, Washington, D.C. — A White House official involved in revising the U.S. National Space Transportation Policy said the document is behind schedule but “mature.”
“We’re actually a month or so behind on that, but we’re still making good progress,” Charlie Powell, the assistant director for space policy in the White House’s Office for Science and Technology Policy, said here during a Tuesday panel organized by the Commercial Space Federation.
The Trump administration’s directive to update the National Space Transportation Policy, last revised in 2013, was part of a December executive order that described priorities for lunar exploration, including landing astronauts on the moon by 2028 and establishing the initial elements of a lunar surface base by 2030. The order laid out a 120-day timeline for the proposed revisions, a deadline that passed in April.
“It’s a pretty mature document at this point in time,” Powell said.
“We went to departments and agencies at pretty senior and technical levels and asked them to sort of revisit all their fundamental priors about the space transportation business,” he said. “What would it take for us to launch 1,000 launches a year? What are the rate limiting factors here? What could use investment? Where is the deferred maintenance really piling up? What are the regulatory fixes? What are the incentive mechanisms?”
As part of this, “we’ve been doing a lot of deep dives on America’s spaceport infrastructure,” he added.
Powell said he “can’t preview any of the contents” of the updated policy, but is “really excited where this might land.”
“I’m really impressed with the refreshing and candid evaluations and analysis that the interagency teams have brought together,” he said, “and our ability to engage with what-if scenarios that are nowhere near the present.”
