My Perhaps Somewhat Interesting Experience as a National Space Council Advisor Under Two Vice Presidents
This is the story of my experience as an advisor to the National Space Council under Vice President Mike Pence and Vice President Kamala Harris. One day in 2017, I got an email from a fellow at NASA Headquarters. Astonishingly, the note said this Coalwood, West Virginia boy was being asked to be a National Space Council advisor! Since I had never encountered the National Space Council in all the years I worked for NASA, I quickly looked it up. It turned out the National Space Council included all the federal organizations that had a foot in the space business. That meant not only the NASA Administrator but the Secretaries of Defense, Labor, Transportation, Education, Commerce, Treasury, Management and Budget, plus a bunch of staff members at the White House. Reading on, I saw the National Space Council was abolished in 1993 during the Clinton/Gore Administration. That kind of rang a bell and now that I gave it some thought, I did recall a little about it. One of the roles Vice Presid