The Biden Presidency Could Fundamentally Change the U.S. Space Program

Nobody was thinking much about the newly elected junior senator from Delaware back in December of 1972, when the Apollo 17 moonwalkers collected lunar sample 76015, 43. The senator was Joseph Biden, the moon walkers were Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan, and the rock was a 3.9-billion-year-old, 332 gram (0.73 lb.) sample collected in the moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley. Today, Schmitt is 85, Cernan has passed away, Biden is the 46th President of the United States and the rock rests on a bookshelf in his newly redecorated Oval Office, after he requested a lunar sample from NASA for display. For space lovers looking for reasons to be optimistic about what a Biden Administration will mean for NASA in general and the push to have American astronauts back on the moon in the 2020s in particular, that’s a good portent. “I can’t conceive of Biden putting a moon rock in his office and then turning his back on a moon program,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. National policy is not built on such symbols. And the new president could be forgiven if he isn’t giving a thought to space. Inheriting a global pandemic, a stumbling economy, a climate in crisis and the scourge of racial inequity does not leave you a lot of room to get dreamy about the stars. But for all of the messes left behind by the last administration, former President Donald Trump did leave Biden a space sector in surprisingly...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news