Space regulation always seems to be a bit behind the curve. It is difficult to keep up with policy when innovation, especially here in the US, is moving at a lightning pace. But are we that far behind, and where do we need to improve? Well, let's take a look then, shall we? Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmasas. The Space Agenda 2025 is an effort by the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation to highlight and provide insights into some of the major space challenges facing policymakers. Written primarily for US government and space sector leaders, this compendium of 16 chapters offers an accessible introduction to space policy issues that affect national security, civil space, and commercial space developments. We're going to dive into the chapter on space regulation with Brian Whedon. My name is Brian Whedon. I'm a relatively new addition to the Aerospace Center for Space Policy and Strategy. I joined at the beginning of May of this year, and I previously spent about 15 years at another nonprofit called the Secure World Foundation, where I worked quite a bit on space policy or long lines of long-term sustainability space. Before that, I spent nine years in the US Air Force doing both a variety of nuclear and space operations missions. It's been a very interesting journey over my career so far. My goodness, and it continues. Thank you, Brian, so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time. What's bringing us together today, I feel like I'm officiating a wedding, but no. We're talking about one component of this really impressive group of documents from the Aerospace Corp. Space Agenda 2025. There's a lot to it, but in our case, we're going to stick to a certain lane. We're talking about space regulatory reform, which are words that I know, like everyone's hurt the flame. It is so important. It's a real kitchen table topic, right? I know. But no matter who I speak to, it trickles through in every conversation, because it is that impactful. There is so much yet to be done. I don't want to get ahead of myself here. You've done a ton of work. You are an expert on this. I am not. Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, the thesis statement, if I can use that phrase. For Space Agenda 2025, specifically regarding space regulatory reform, what would you say would be the high-level highlight of what you want people to know? Sure. We start from a position that the commercial space activities in the private sector space in the US is becoming ever more important. It's growing in terms of size, in terms of jobs, in terms of impact on the economy, and also what kind of capabilities are being delivered. Also, in terms of how the US government is looking at leveraging those commercial space capabilities for both civil purposes as well as now street purposes. With that as the background, how we provide oversight of that commercial space sector has a really big impact on its ability to grow, its ability to innovate, and how we make use of it, and whether or not it's even there to make use of it. We approach this topic within that context of saying, "Yes, commercial is big. It's growing. It's important. How does the oversight, how does the regulation to use a specific word affect that, and how can we shape that regulation and reform it to enable that continued growth and innovation so that we can rely on commercial for all the great things to capabilities in the future?" Great. Yes, so how do we do that? Well, it's hard. That's a million-dollar question. Yeah. Okay, great. We're done. One of the big things we do in the chapter is to do a quick recap of how this effort has been, or how this topic has been tackled by multiple administrations over the last 20-plus years. None of this is new. None of these problems are really all that new. They're very persistent problems, or what we call in the policy world, wicked problems that are really hard to solve. We first wanted to start by providing that background of, "Here's what was done by the Clinton administration, by the George W. Bush administration. Here's what was done by the Obama administration. Here's what was done by the Trump administration. Here's what was done by the Biden administration." And talk through the efforts that were done both in the executive branch as well as by Congress during those periods, what worked, what is still an unresolved problem, and lay all that out there. My opinion, it's very hard to say, "We should go do this without having any good graphs of what has been attempted and what that history is." Yeah, I was looking at that graph actually in the PDF, and it's really interesting to sort of see, I mean, nobody can do everything at once. No administration can do everything at once, but it is interesting to see sort of how the emphases change for administration. It's really fascinating to see that graphically. I appreciate that. I just, as a bit of a nerd, I appreciate that. Well, and also, honestly, that graphic is a little bit difficult to create because first you got to define what do you consider focus on or what do you consider working on? And we have a little bit of more detail in the chapter explaining on how we can build those definitions. But I'll just say up front, it's not hard and fast. I'm sure there are people out there that'll disagree with, "Oh, you forgot this," or, "You should have mentioned this," and frankly, in part because how do you define worked on, is it talked, is it discussed, is it actually making a decision. In some cases here in Washington, talking about stuff is working on it. In other cases, you can point to a specific bill or a specific presidential policy decision. So even just trying to come up with this, that graph was not easy to do. I believe it. And yeah, I appreciate that sort of fraught situation. In almost every conversation I have with people, wherever they are in the space industry, regulations come up and it's sort of either the person is annoyed or they feel hopeless. If I were to characterize the two emotions, overarching emotions, but there is sort of this general hope that things will get better, maybe an optimism that in the future, that maybe things will catch up to where they should be or get a little closer. Anyway, before I go pying on any of that, because that's really not what we're here for. We are very close to the national election. Presumably, something's going to change in some direction somehow after that election happens. Spaces notoriously, famously bipartisan though, hopefully that will continue. The incoming administration, whoever they may be, what do we hope they will be focusing on given the numerous priorities that need to be addressed? I mean, one cannot do everything or maybe can not. Let me just, there are such expectations here. For all those of us in the space world, I think this is the most important thing on the planet, it is, I would say, not by any reasonable sense at the top of anyone's overall national policy list, either from economics or from national security. There's many, many other issues that are being debated on. Most people notice probably that space hasn't really come up in this election at all, because it's just not a topic that is on voters, most vote voters' minds, and it's not something that the politicians really think is going to swing voters. First let's keep that in the background. We talk about this in the important space, keep that realism. We do think, however, that in the context of space, there are some important decisions that are going to need to be done, mainly because, as I mentioned earlier, some of these decisions, we haven't made decisions. We've been talking about a problem, we've been talking about an issue, we've been proposing one option or another, and in some cases, it's been going on for 10 or 15 years. The issue is, how do we actually get to a decision? That could be very difficult because there's lots of different constituencies within the administration itself. You have the challenges of the White House working with Congress, especially if they're being controlled by different parties. There's of course different constituencies outside the government, in the private sector, there's international foreign policy concerns. All of that feeds back into why, again, we were right away, this is a wicked problem. This is not easy. We're not solving it because we're ignoring it. We're not solving some of these challenges because they are truly hard. In many cases, there is no solving. There is just putting in a slightly better version that improves things and then iterating that and improving over time. Often case, wicked problem, that's the way you get to things. Yeah, mitigation. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. As an example, I'll talk a little bit about export controls, which is one of the areas that we talk about, which interestingly is not something that often comes up as a regulatory issue. When you look at talk to companies and you look at what they spend their time on and what they spend their legal fees on, it is a huge part of what they have to deal with. The long story short, in the late 1990s, there were some issues with technology transfers from US commercial companies to China. As a result, Congress moved everything related to space under the strictest export controls possible, what we call the US Mutations List and the International Technology Site ITAR list and required a legislative department. It was that way for a long time. During the Obama administration, there was a huge multi-year effort to change that. They succeeded in a couple of things. One, they got Congress to hand permission back to the executive branch to determine what technologies go on that state-controlled munitions list versus the commerce-controlled list that is slightly easier to get licenses on. That was a big deal. Then they went through a huge process of actually sorting through what goes either place, and they moved a bunch of commercial space things, particularly commercial communication satellites over to the CCL, which reduced the requirements. But it certainly didn't end the issue. The Trump administration under the face policy director, too, said they're going to look at this again, but there was not actually any decision. Just a couple of weeks ago, we got an announcement from the Biden administration that they are proposing a bunch of other changes of shifting technologies for one list of the other and also waiving license requirements for certain close allies and partners. Now, none of that is all final. There's still some that needs to go through a process, but that just gives a little bit of flavor for the complexity of this and how long this issue dates back in time. I'll be right back. One question that I can't help but ask, do we know if there is a definitive difference between a potential Trump administration or a potential Harris administration incoming in terms of space policy? Do we know one or another? It's just way too nuanced an issue to declaratively say one way or the other. We don't get into that in the chapter. In fact, we're putting forward these recommendations regardless of who wins. I can say looking backwards, there is, I would say, more bipartisanship or continuity over Republican Democratic administrations, broadly than there is differences. I mentioned the extra control. That was an issue that both the Obama administration and the Trump administration worked on and now the Biden administration worked on. Another example is remote sensing licensing reform. The Obama administration started something there. The Trump administration really made some massive changes there. Now under the Biden administration, they're working on implementation of that. Another good example is space traffic management. The Obama administration really started the first formal interagency process on that but didn't reach a formal presidential decision. The Trump administration picked it up. They kept quite a bit of the prep work that had been done in terms of definitions and terms, but they made some tweaks to which agencies were going to be the lead for that. Then they published Space Policy Directive 3, which was the first US presidential policy on space traffic management. Now under the Biden administration, they have kept up implementation of that through the Office of Space Commerce and the Department of Commerce. They renamed what it is from something called this orbital database of data to something called TRAC. Again, some tweaks at the margins, but the general thrust has been pretty much the same. It's a lot to keep track of. It's quite a lot. An overarching theme that often comes up is also the patchwork quilt for lack of better terms of who owns what and how confusing that is for people to navigate. Not that you necessarily have a crystal ball into it. Is that going to ever get better? But do you think that will ever ever get better? Yeah, because across the US government, there are multiple departments and agencies that all have a say in some way. Some have explicit regulatory authorities. Some have policy authorities. Some are involved in, for example, national review of technologies, in terms of whether they might not pose a threat or not. Many of them, if they don't have any formal role, might have a consulting role in some of these decisions. Yeah, it's complicated. Look, I'll just say that as a scholar of public administration, the odds of having a single, unified department of space that handles all this is probably not going to happen anytime soon. Even if that were politically possible, that might actually introduce other challenges. For example, if you pulled the part of the FAA that does launch licensing out of the FAA, moved into the Department of Space, well, a big part of their job is actually coordinating space launches with air traffic and how to manage those. If you pull them out and make them separate, are you now introducing additional friction points or what we call transaction costs and how they do their job with that airspace integration? Those are the sorts of things that the nerds like me that study this sort of stuff have to discuss and debate when it comes to making recommendations about really big changes like that. That's a great point because those of us, the nerds on the outside who don't know anything about that, I had no idea how would I have known that. That's a really important point that I think a lot of people definitely are not considering, so I appreciate that very much. I think that the, and a lot of these conversations about policy, there's sort of an underlying fear about the loss of competitiveness in the global arena, especially as we see China continuing its incredible pace of innovation. The underlying statement is, are we going to fall behind as the United States? Are we going to be second fiddle? How much, how bad is it out there? I mean, I'm asking you some wild questions, I'm sorry. Are we on red alert right now for, hey, our situation is really holding us back or are we still going to be able to hobble along and innovate or how urgent of a situation are we in right now with this? No, it's a great question. It's absolutely something that's on everyone's minds. It's really interesting to kind of look at different perspectives. You're perfectly correct. You hear a lot in the US that we are falling behind, that the industry is being hampered, and there are some concerns there. But we look broadly, America has by far the biggest and most dominant and most innovative commercial space sector. When you look at other countries and read what they are saying internally, they are all desperately trying to put in place policies or find ways to echo, mirror, to try to copy, replicate what we're doing, and even in China. There's a lot of things the government is doing to try and incentivize and spark their commercial sector to create their SpaceX. It's interesting, there's another chapter we have in the book that looks at the question of commercial competitiveness. They note that when you talk to Chinese commercial companies, they complain to no end about the bureaucracy and the regulations and the paperwork they have to deal with. Some things are universal. Right? Which, frankly, if you look at them and you can actually look at them, are quite a bit more stronger than what was in place here in the US. A lot of this is relative. Again, that's not to say that there aren't issues that we have to deal with and we have to get the quit. At the moment, I can pretty firmly say our commercial sector is not behind. The question though is, how can we maintain that advantage? How can we maintain or even increase the level of innovation that we've been seeing over the last 10 years or so? That's really what we're getting at in our chapter. I appreciate that. Brian, I've thrown some really weird and wild questions at you. I appreciate you handling them like a pro. If there's anything that you wanted to address, anything that I maybe missed that you wanted to make sure the audience hears, by all means, you get the final word. Yeah. I'll just make one point I'll say. One of the points we make in our conclusion area of the chapter is, we need to think about implementation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of applause given to making policy announcements, which are good. Coming to a policy decision, aligning the executive branch on a certain issue is great. We need to focus as much on implementation. That's often where the public loses focus, the media loses focus. Even the policymakers lose focus because all the effort was put on getting to a decision and announcing the decision. I'll just highlight that point from our report. We need to find a way to highlight, emphasize, maybe even reward implementation of these policy decisions as much as we do announcing the policy itself. As always, the devil's in the details with this stuff. Brian, thank you so, so much. It's not often I get to talk policy and I am very, very, very much a basic understanding with this, but you've informed me quite a bit here and I really appreciate you answering so many of my questions and helping me better understand all of this. So thank you for your expertise and for your time today. My pleasure. That's it for T-minus deep space brought to you by N2K cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. T-minus deep space is produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmasas. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
