U.S. Space Policy Review Under Way
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By Frank Morring, Jr.

National Security Adviser James Jones is conducting a government-wide review of U.S. space policy at the request of President Barack Obama, as former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine heads into the final set of public hearings on the review he is conducting of human spaceflight options.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Aviation Week July 21 that Jones - like Bolden a retired Marine Corps general officer - was directed to "review our present policy and decide whether it is in keeping with our vision of the 21st century and where we want to go, and try to come up with a coherent space policy into which NASA and our plans fit, and ideally they would fit perfectly.
"He has already started getting together representatives from all the space communities in the country - thats DOD, NASA, commercial space, Department of Transportation and anybody else that has space assets, and science people," Bolden said in a telephone interview.
The new NASA administrator and Lori Garver, the new deputy administrator, were to meet with White House Science Adviser John Holdren later in the afternoon of July 21 to establish their agency's role in the White House review. Earlier, Bolden told agency employees the two reviews of NASA programs that are under way are comparable to what happens every time a new commandant takes over the Marine Corps., and are "not something to fear."
No deadline has been set for completing the top-level White House review, which Garver said she did not believe foreshadows re-establishment of the National Space Council used in the past to oversee broad space policy. The Augustine report on human spaceflight is due by the end of August, and Bolden said he and Augustine are scheduled to testify in House and Senate committee hearings on the options it contains soon thereafter, "so it will be public, and it will be public pretty quickly.
"My hope is that Dr. Holdren and I will have had an opportunity to sit down with our staffs, enough time really to digest what's in the report," he said. "I am optimistic about what's going to be in it, to be quite honest. What we have to decide this afternoon is the approach we take in getting the information to the president. I don't want to presuppose how the president's going to want to handle that, whether he wants us to give him recommendations in order, or a single recommendation, or whether he says, 'Thanks a lot, I'll go do this myself.' I don't anticipate that, but that's not my prerogative."
Bolden said he expects the options for U.S. human space access presented in the Augustine report to cover a range of alternatives to the Ares I crew launch vehicle now in development, and expressed confidence that "whatever comes in we can work with.
"The understanding that I have with the president ... is he believes in NASA's mission," Bolden said. "As he told the Apollo astronauts and their families yesterday, he has been inspired by this agency through the years from the time that he was a child, and he pledged to do everything he could to support our ability to carry out his charge to us to continue to inspire people."
Artist's concept of Ares I: NASA