Bea. Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show

where we explore the politics and processes behind space exploration. I'm Casey

Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society.

As I record this, we are mere months away from the 2024 presidential election here in the United States.

And as is normal, space isn't the highest on the priority topic list for most of the candidate

interviews.

Even though, as we will discuss,

space has grown as an area of concern

and priority for national security,

and of course the geopolitical symbolic aspect of space and the congestion and

activity in space has greatly increased in just the past decade.

Now the US President sets space policy. They nominate the personnel who lead

NASA and they propose annual budgets for space activities. Their vice president will chair the National Space Council

and help coordinate a broad governmental approach to outer space.

Regardless of who wins, the next president has a lot of significant

decisions to make about how to continue NASA's troubled Artemis

exploration efforts, how to prioritize scientific exploration, and how to manage this growing competitive and contested and congested space environment.

So in this episode and the next episode,

we will look to explore what a potential space policy could look like

under a second Trump administration or under a first Harris administration.

So we will have this episode we will focus on Trump and next episode we will focus on

Harris. Before we get to that though I want to briefly mention that the

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