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Biden Space

Yet Another Pointless Users’ Advisory Group Meeting

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
NASAWatch
February 22, 2023
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Yet Another Pointless Users’ Advisory Group Meeting
NASA meeting room
NASA

Keith’s note: The National Space Council (NSpC) Users’ Advisory Group (UAG) Is meeting on Thursday 23 February from 9:00 am – 1:15 pm EST at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC. You can watch it live here. If you look at the Agenda you will see that it is filled with UAG members, space insiders, and NASA staff briefing one another in true echo chamber style. There is no scheduled outside input from the real world. There is a mention on the agenda that you can “submit a question, comment, or idea to the UAG, please use the following e-mail: [email protected]“. Just know that any questions you submit will be filtered and screened by lots of government people – so nothing provocative is likely to be asked at the meeting. And any answers you get back after the meeting will be bland and lacking in terms of having any worthwhile content. The UAG could have had real value. Instead it is mostly a pointless dog and pony show. More below.

With regard to the UAG membership, look at the list of members. Do you see anyone under 30? Under 40? With all this talk about the “Artemis Generation” you’d think that there’d be actual members of that group of prospective new “users” of America’s space infrastructure. But no.

Team Trump selected UAG membership that was filled with usual space suspects – industry, politics, and NASA. No one from the real world. Team Biden team has done the same. UAG chair Lester Lyles is also the chair / long-time member of NASA Advisory Council and moves in big aerospace circles as do all the members. No new ideas. Just old ones. And panel membership is overlapping, recycled, and stale.

The UAG events that Team Trump put on had lots of glitz and glamour with pretty backdrops but they were all highly scripted with known conclusions that were decided in advance. Indeed policy had already been written. The UAG was just an excuse for people to talk about things to check a NSpC box. Team Biden should have been able to pick up and run with the whole UAG thing and do a better job. Instead, it took them two years to name a panel and actually schedule a meeting. ANd the new UAG is as bland and full of insider membership as its predecessor. No doubt its output wil be similarly useless.

More choir practice of – and for – the usual suspects inside the space community echo chamber.

After 2 Years Of Fumbling – A New National Space Council Users’ Advisory Group (UAG) – 16 December 2022

Keith’s note: Hooray – we have a new National Space Council Users’ Advisory group. You have to wonder why it took so long for the National Space Council, Vice President’s Office, and NASA to come up with a simple panel of space people whose job is mostly to sit on telecons and read a few white papers. We’re already halfway though the first term of the Biden-Harris Administration. These committees move slower than a snail’s pace, become totally bogged down in white papers and endless consent cycles, and in the end they always defer to rubber stamping whatever talking points the White House staff wishes to have endorsed. We still have no idea when the UAG will meet. And when it does get started you can rest assured that it will take the rest of this Administration’s term to produce a report with actions items or something. Four years to make a difference with another UAG – wasted (again). Oh and the picture of the UAG posted online at NASA? (update: they fixed it 3 months later) Its the Trump UAG membership on a web page that is more than 2 years old. Here is the official release and list of names – followed by more commentary:

On 11 August 2022 NASA put out an apology memo to the old (Trump) UAG membership that said “All, apologies for the radio silence for so long. Just as all of you appointed members, we civil servants are also subject to the evolving plans and schedule of our Principals at the White House, and until now we did not have information that we were authorized to disseminate as transition activities were underway. That said, our new Administration has spent substantive time & energy to formulate their plans and priorities for space sector activities in the coming years, including the Space Council and it’s associated UAG. I will disseminate more details as soon as we are approved to do so.”

Why the apology? You see, a year earlier, there was a UAG recruitement notice published in the Federal Register on 14 September 2021. It was quickly obvious that the response was not good enough, so they extended the due date to 29 October 2021. Now, more than a year after nominations were due in – and 2 1/2 years after the last UAG meeting on 30 July 2020 – on a Friday afternoon a week before Christmas when everyone I s starting to burn unused annual leave – and the Biden Administration finally gets around to announcing new UAG.

If you go to the UAG membership roster page at the time this news was released, it still lists the same Trump UAG membership last updated on 8 June 2020 – with a picture of the Trump UAG panel. And of course if you go to the NASA Office of International and Interagency Relations (OIIR) who oversees all of those advisory committee things at NASA they make no mention of the National Space Council or the UAG – at all. Nor will they. They are asleep. Here are some previous updates on the whole UAG saga.

As for the actual panel – there are lots of big aerospace “customers” for NASA (as opposed to being “users”), a number of professional space advisory committee members (its an occupation here in Washington), political plants, and some interesting new faces. Its the new faces that are the only actual value this UAG has – especially if they get frustrated with the go-along-to-get-along chair practice in an echo chamber that these efforts inevitably steer toward – and speak some truth to power.

We’ll hear about a meeting date in a month or three and the event will be scripted with action items for another meeting in a month or tow. They will go have scripted field hearings at pretty locations. And then some Powerpoint slides will be delivered a year from now that maybe the Transition Team will read. Or not.

This is how we explore space in the 21st century.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

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