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 President Al Gore assumed was to be his Administration's space guru and, if you know anything about young Al Gore, he didn't need anybody else to tell him what to do and certainly not a bunch of NASA nerds and Department head flunkies. I remembered one of first things Al did was to direct us sods at NASA to get busy and build a space station with the Russians. This we did and I wrote about my part in that in my memoir Don't Blow Yourself Up.

 

Go here to find out more about Don't Blow Yourself Up

 

In case you haven't read it, I got along great with the former Soviets since their Sputnik had inspired me to build rockets when I was in high school.  This led directly to me writing Rocket Boys and then the movie October Sky which pretty much let me retire from NASA and start my writing career which I was more than ready to do. But I digress.

 

So the reason I was hearing about the National Space Council in 2017 was the Donald J. Trump Administration had decided to reestablish it under Vice President Pence and wanted me join it as an advisor on something called the Users Advisory Group (UAG). That sounded interesting. "What are my duties?" I asked. "Give advice about space and stuff," came the answer. I could do that.

 

There were about thirty members of the UAG which included former astronauts and big hitters in the aerospace industry so I figured I was in good company. When asked what subcommittee I wanted to be on, I looked them over and decided on Exploration and Discovery. "Any others?" I was asked. "How about Technology and Innovation? Oh, and Education and Outreach." "You got it," came the reply and I was happy. I had no idea what those subcommittees did to advise the NSC but I figured I had a fairly good background in all of them. After all, I had explored the Montana badlands and found a T.rex (Exploration and Discovery), I had built my own rockets out of scrap (Technology and Innovation), and I had been educated by some great teachers and I had also worked at Space Camp (Education and Outreach). I was all set to advise!

 

The first NSC meeting that I attended was in 2018 at Kennedy Space Center. It mostly consisted of meetings of our various subcommittees where NASA Headquarters told us advisors what it was going to do and didn't actually, you know, ask for our advice. That was kind of boring but OK. Later, however, I met Mike Pence, the Vice President of the entire United States, and gave him an autographed copy of Rocket Boys. He immediately recalled not only that book but to my surprise another one I wrote, a fiction thriller titled Back to the Moon. He excitedly engaged me about my works before being dragged away to make a speech where he mentioned meeting me like in the last ten minutes. I was standing at the time between moon-walkers Buzz Aldrin and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt who looked at me like, "Who the heck are you?" I just smiled. It was nice the Vice President knew about me and I immediately liked him (and his wife Karen, a school teacher) but didn't expect much else to happen between us. I just thought, "Well, that was interesting!"

Me and Vice President Pence at KSC in front of the Apollo 11 Quarantine Trailer. I'm wearing my tie that has microscopic photos of the cells from the T.rex I found while exploring and discovering.

 

After a few months, I was surprised to find myself talking on the phone to "Mike," as he told me to call him. He said he was looking for new space goals and what did I think? We talked about Back to the Moon and I told him my opinion was that our destiny lay on the moon, not just to land there but to gather its resources. As for Mars, I said robots were doing a fine job of studying it for now but it would be better to just focus on the moon. This surprised him. He said that NASA Headquarters people told him Mars should be the goal for human landings because we'd already been to the moon. I told him that would be like the Pilgrims landing on New England and then heading off to Antarctica. Mike liked that metaphor and I was kind of proud of coming up with it on the fly.

 

Go here to learn more about my novel Back to the Moon

 

 

Not too long after, Mike called again to say he was going to make an important announcement at another NSC meeting and he wanted it to be at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center (USSRC) in Huntsville, Alabama (where I live) while also celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He told me that he thought I would really like what he was going to say.

 

Since I'm on the board of the USSRC which includes Space Camp, I instantly got on the phone with Dr. Deborah Barnhart, the CEO at the time, to get things organized in a hurry. It took a lot of work but she and her staff pulled it off.

 

On March 26, 2019, the NSC met in Huntsville. The UAG had some nice internal meetings of our subcommittees which didn't amount to much and then, when it came time for Vice President Pence to speak beneath a fully-assembled Saturn V in our Davidson Hall, I found myself seated beside Buzz Aldrin. We had a nice chat before the VP's speech and then, while Buzz and I sat attentive, my friend Mike announced that it was his plan to have the United States land Americans on the moon by 2024 "by any means necessary." When Mike finished, Buzz leaned over to me and said, "We won't make it." Before I could reply, not that I had a reply, we all got up and filed out. Later, Mike's idea would be called Artemis, a nice name with echoes of Apollo. It worked for me.

Buzz and me listening to the VP in Huntsville

 

When Mike came up to me and asked what I thought of his speech, I agreed with his goal but what I didn't say and maybe should have was I didn't think it was a good idea to hand it over to NASA exclusively to do. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was there that day and, after Mike's speech, I noticed he had mostly a worried expression and was slumping a little. My take on Jim was he was a very nice, earnest fellow with a tough job that he happened to love but I also imagine he didn't much like folks like me going around putting ideas in the head of his boss.

NASA Administrator Bridenstine looking worried after the Artemis speech, VP Pence looking thoughtful, and moi nattering on about something

 

Looking back on it, in the very brief moment I had Mike's attention, what I should have said to him was I believed the best approach for going back to the moon was a consortium of the federal agencies in the NSC plus commercial companies and International partners. NASA would be a member who would supply some funding and expertise but would not be in charge. The consortium would raise funds across its members, be led by the a strong, tough executive board, and its focus would be the construction of a permanent Lunar outpost similar to our South Pole Station. This reflected the 1993 moon study I made for NASA and I hadn't changed my mind since.

 

Here it is:. My 1993 Moon Study

My moon study cover

 

Mike had to rush back to DC but his staff hung around for the day. When they asked me about next steps, I told them that if they were serious about 2024, they should take the NASA-managed rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) out of the critical path as it took too long to manufacture and was way too expensive. Since a couple of SLS's were already tediously working their way through the pipeline, I recommended they use it instead for some big cargoes such as a Skylab-like commercial space station or big robots to Europa or Titan. I also mentioned my consortium idea and suggested they read my study of long ago. Attentively, they wrote my recommendations down and then apparently forgot them since, before a week had passed, Artemis got totally handed over to NASA which naturally favored the program it already had - SLS with an Orion capsule on top.

 

As I feared they might do, it didn't take too long before NASA HQ converted Artemis into a "Moon to Mars" concept with the moon depicted as mostly a training ground to get us on out to Mars, that glittering red squirrel of space. They dusted off something called Gateway, a space station in an eccentric halo orbit around the moon, where ships were to whiz in and out on their way to the moon (yuk) and Mars (yay). After building the Gateway, the Orion with astronauts was supposed to fly up there, rendezvous with it, and then use something not yet invented to go down to the lunar surface.Considering 2024 was supposed to be the goal and because I knew how difficult it had been to build a space station around the Earth much less in some kind of crazy orbit about the moon, I didn't think that was a good plan.

 

Here's NASA plans to land on the moon that I thought (and still think) is kind of harder than it needs to be. It's a pretty graph, though. I'll give them that. It also nicely reflects hope over experience.

 

In an internet meeting of the Exploration and Discovery subcommittee when a NASA somebody was briefing us about the Gateway concept, I spoke up and said I had my doubts about it. "Space is hard," he/she said or something like that. "Then don't make a hard thing even harder," should have been my reply but when nobody supported my initial comment, I let it go. In a big meeting like that over the Internet, it's nearly impossible to actually get into a real discussion. It also feels rude. My experience at NASA was nothing ever got done in a big meeting, anyway, That happens later out in the hall. Zoom meetings don't have halls. We sign off and go to the bathroom.

 

Before long, I found myself assigned to only the Education and Outreach Committee chaired by retired Astronaut Eileen Collins. Since the other subcommittees weren't doing anything anyway, I was fine with this. Over the following months, Eileen really tried hard to make our little segment of the UAG meaningful. We had many meetings over the Internet with guests from the education and aerospace sectors with our findings forwarded to the UAG chair. Her steady leadership also gave me a glimpse of someone truly prodigious. She also wrote a great book! 

 

Go here to read the memoir by fellow advice-giver Astronaut Eileen Collins

 

The Artemis Moon to Mars (sigh) program rocked on. Occasionally, I peeked in on it and saw it was getting more like a Rube Goldberg cartoon every day. By then, my friend Mike was immersed in a reelection campaign where nobody much cared about Artemis and there was also that Pandemic thing.

 

But then everything got really kind of weird. My friend Mike was gone along with earnest Jim Bridenstine and here came a new bunch to take over.

 

And this is what happened next.

For you young folks, when you used to pick up a phone and there was nobody there, you heard this tone that was kind of disappointing. You might say it was a kind of nothingness. I'm glad you haven't had to put up with that but here's what it sounded like:

 

Old timey dial tone

 

When the Biden/Harris Administration took over in January, 2021, we UAG advisors and, for that matter, the entire NSC heard nothing but that dial tone for a long time. Many months passed with no activity or guidance given to anybody. Eileen continued to hold our Education and Outreach meetings and forward our findings but the dial tone from the White House was pretty steady.

 

Finally, in May, 2021, Vice President Harris announced she was going to take charge of the National Space Council. When Politico asked me about it, I said this: "It is good news. The Vice President should chair the National Space Council... There is extremely important work to be done in space, not only by NASA but other interested departments within the federal government as well as commercial entities, and great decisions yet to be made. I expect VP Harris will fully inform herself of previous NSC decisions and take a fresh look at everything."

 

Dial tone.

 

When nothing happened for many more months, we advisors of the UAG began to talk amongst ourselves wondering if we, you know, still existed. Finally, there was an Internet meeting in December, 2021, seven months after VP Harris took official charge of the NSC. Admiral Ellis, the UAG chair, told us to be patient, that we advisors would have a role, that something would happen eventually.

 

Dial tone.

 

In August, 2022, a year and eight months into the new Administration - now not so new - the NASA/UAG coordinator emailed all of us advisors and apologized for the "radio silence" from the White House and asked us to continue to be patient, that he and his staff "did not have information that [they] were allowed to disseminate."

 

Dial tone. 

 

Finally, after a few more months of nothing from the White House, we heard the UAG would be reorganized to focus on "climate and work force issues."

Dial tone. 

 

In December, 2022, now two years in for the Biden/Harris folks, newly-appointed UAG chair Admiral Lyles sent me an email thanking me for my service and told me those services would no longer be required.

 

Eileen Collins also received the same email.

 

The metaphorical phone hung up.

 

Since I didn't think VP Harris cared a thing about space and also I didn't much agree with NASA's direction with Artemis, I took it as probably a good thing to be invited off the NSC/UAG. I therefore shrugged and went on with my life.

Thus ended my stint as an advisor to the National Space Council, an organization which, to my knowledge, has done little since.

 

All I know for sure is Buzz was right. It's 2024 and we are not landing on the moon.

 - Homer Hickam, Author, retired NASA engineer, Vietnam veteran, and prime advocate of not making a hard job even harder.