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Mike Pence needs to retire this bizarrely explicit rocket launch story Mashable From announcing the reestablishment of the National Space Council with him as the head, to congratulating and welcoming NASA's newest class of astronauts, Pence has been spending a lot of time talking about NASA and American spaceflight. With all that ...

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Mike Pence needs to retire this bizarrely explicit rocket launch story - Mashable

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the recently re-established National Space Council, toured the Kennedy Space Center Thursday and vowed to renew American leadership on the high frontier, telling spaceport workers "our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars."

Speaking to a throng of spaceport workers inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building where Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were once put together -- and where NASA's gargantuan Space Launch System rockets will be assembled -- Pence provided no details about the Trump administration's space policy or what changes might be in the offing.

But as the chairman of the re-formed National Space Council, the vice president promised that under President Donald Trump, "America will lead in space once again."

"For nearly 25 years, our government's commitment seems to have not matched the spirit of the American people," he said. "But I'm here to tell you, that as we still enter this new century, we will beat back any disadvantage that our lack of attention has placed, and American will once again lead in space for the benefit and security of all of our people and all of the world."

Positioned directly behind the podium were a SpaceX Dragon capsule, a Boeing CST-100 spacecraft -- both being commercially developed to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station -- and NASA's Orion capsule, being built to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit and on to the moon or Mars.

Vice President Mike Pence addresses workers at the Kennedy Space Center

NASA TV

The Boeing and SpaceX ferry ships are expected to make their first piloted test flights next year while the first flight of the new SLS booster and an unpiloted Orion capsule is scheduled for 2019. The first crewed flight of the Orion/SLS system is targeted for the 2021 timeframe.

Speaking in general terms with frequent references and praise for the president, Pence seemed to re-emphasize NASA's current goals, saying "we will re-orient America's space program toward human space exploration and discovery for the benefit of the American people and all of the world."

"We will return our nation to the moon, we will go to Mars and we will still go farther to places that our children's children can only imagine," he said. "We will maintain a constant presence in low-Earth orbit and we'll develop policies that will carry human space exploration across our solar system. As the president has said, space is, in his words, the next great American frontier."

Pence made it clear that he plans to take an active role as chairman of the National Space Council and that he plans to hold the group's first meeting later this summer.

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"We'll review our current policy and our long-range goals and coordinate national space activities from national security to commerce to exploration and beyond," he said. "And crucially, at the president's direction, we will, in his words, foster close coordination, cooperation, technology and information exchange among all the stake holders and sectors involved in space activity."

That includes government agencies, the military and "leaders from the realms of private industry and the academic world. We will bring the best of America together once again to lead with Americans in space."

Current U.S. national space policy evolved in the wake of the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster and President George Bush's decision in 2004 to complete the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle by the end of the decade and develop new rockets and spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon by the early 2020s for long-duration stays.

The Obama administration concluded the resulting Constellation moon program was not affordable and ordered a major change of course. The Orion spacecraft developed for the Constellation program was retained and NASA eventually won approval to design the heavy lift SLS booster.

But the moon was taken off the table in favor of a more nebulous "flexible path" strategy that called for visiting an asteroid in the mid 2020s before eventual flights to the vicinity of Mars in the mid 2030s.

President Trump canceled the asteroid retrieval mission that was a centerpiece of the Obama administration's policy and NASA managers have been quietly studying plans for a base of some sort in lunar orbit that could serve as a jumping off point for eventual deep space missions.

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But the Trump administration has not yet articulated a detailed space policy or named a NASA administrator to replace Charles Bolden, a former shuttle commander who led the agency during the Obama era.

But during a White House ceremony June 30, Trump signed an executive order re-establishing the National Space Council, a panel of civilian and military leaders responsible for coordinating civil, military and commercial space policies and programs.

"The National Space Council will be a central hub guiding space policy within the administration," Trump said. "And I will draw on it for advice and information and recommendations for action. And the Vice President, myself, and a few others are going to pick some private people to be on the board. ... Some of the most successful people in the world want to be on this board."

Chaired by Pence, the council will include the secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security and Transportation, along with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the director of the White House Science and Technology Policy office, the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The yet-to-be-named administrator of NASA also will be on the panel, along with other senior government and industry leaders.

John Logsdon, a noted space historian, author and space policy analyst, said the National Space Council has had a checkered on-again, off-again history. The National Aeronautics and Space Council was established by Congress in the act that created NASA in 1958. Originally chaired by the president, it was intended to coordinate civilian space projects and national security space initiatives.

President John F. Kennedy made his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, the chairman of the panel. Logsdon credited the council with playing a key role in Kennedy's decision to send astronauts to the moon in what became the Apollo program.

The council fell into disuse after Kennedy's assassination when subsequent vice presidents Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew expressed little interest in space. President Richard Nixon ultimately did away with the council in 1973.

But congressional interest revived it toward the end of the Reagan administration and President George H.W. Bush brought the new panel into being under the leadership of Vice President Dan Quayle.

Logsdon said the National Space Council played an initially strong role, but the panel was eliminated by President Bill Clinton in a broader move to cut costs across the executive branch.

The National Space Council, Logsdon said, has a "mixed record, and it totally depends on how the president relates to the vice president and how the vice president chooses to use his limited influence, whether he makes this an area of priority for him, which Humphrey and Agnew did not, Bush-Quayle did. You can't really predict."

As for what Pence and the council might do in the near term, Logsdon cautioned not to expect any immediate changes in direction.

"Obama came in in '09 having been warned by his transition team that there were problems with Constellation, and his first step was to carry out a major review of Constellation, which was the Augustine committee," Logsdon said. "Then a year later, a year after taking office, he made his big space policy decision.

"I think it's entirely plausible that maybe the first task for the Space Council is to review the program as it now exists, make some recommendations with changes six or nine months down the line."

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Vice President Mike Pence vows to make space program great again - CBS News

The national drama over a federal commission on election integrity has come home to roost at the White House.

Most of the darts flying over the panel and its massive request for voter data have been aimed at the panels vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

But the actual boss of the panel, created after President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that millions of voted illegally in the 2016 elections, is Vice President Mike Pence. And until now, hes ducked the negative attention in the face of whats become a nationwide backlash against the commission.

On Thursday, a spokesman for Pence went on television to confront the matter of Kobachs request for sensitive voter data including Americans election participation records, party affiliation, military and criminal history and even partial Social Security numbers.

One of the things I think youre seeing is a little bit of partisanship and some gamesmanship by a few states, Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said during an appearance on Fox & Friends.

It should be noted that most states, about 36 right now, are actively working with the commission or are looking at the request from the commission to see what they can release publicly under their state laws, Lotter continued. Its important to note that all the commission is seeking is publicly available data data that states on a regular basis provide to campaigns, state political parties and other national groups.

Really, the question you have to ask is for those 14 states that say they are not going to comply is, What are they trying to hide? Lotter asked. What are they covering up, or is this just pure partisanship that they may be ignoring their own state laws and their own public records laws in terms of what they can release and should release to the commission?

Lotters argument is at odds with published reports that officials from more than 40 states both Republican and Democrat have refused to cooperate with the commissions data request, citing privacy or legal concerns. Meanwhile, watchdog groups are calling the commission as a whole a racist dog whistle geared at voter suppression.

Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, who has been sharply critical of the voter panel on his Election Law Blog and in writings elsewhere, told Mic the Lotter appearance certainly ties the vice president closely to the work of the commission.

It is most unusual to have a commission headed by someone who is a candidate for re-election, debating the best election rules for an election the chair himself will run in, he added, dryly.

This is hardly the first time Pence, who didnt even have the current president as his first choice for GOP nominee last year, has had to use the skills he gleaned from years in both media and radio to defend Trumps positioning.

Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said on Thursday that Pence has to take responsibility because he is the formal chair of the group.

[Members of Pences team] are the ones guiding the effort and pushing for further analysis, West said. They clearly see this as a vehicle to crack down on fraud and enact more stringent voter-suppression rules in the future. People should not ignore Pence in all the discussion over Kobach, because he also has spoken about fraud and exaggerated its scope and impact.

Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, arrive for a visit to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in June.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginias Center for Politics said in an email interview that it was absolutely Pences problem.

He knows very well that there is nothing to Trumps claim of 3 to 5 million illegal votes, or even any substantial vote fraud in 2016, Sabato said. Yet hell have to find a way to create enough doubt about fraud to please the boss and give Trump enough facts to justify his bluster.

On the flip side, Robert Popper, who heads the Election Integrity Project at Judicial Watch a self-described conservative, nonpartisan educational foundation insisted theres nothing to see here.

In a video released Thursday afternoon, Popper, a former deputy chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, said, We at Judicial Watch routinely ask states for their voter registration rolls. And we get them.

Private marketing groups get ahold of these voter registration lists all the time. Theyre for sale, theyre exchanged. The idea that the Trump administration is doing something outrageous is nonsense, Popper said. What theyre doing is gathering data on voter registration that weve needed for years.

Even if thats the case, the election integrity panel seems in no hurry to face in-person questions about its mission when it meets for the first time July 19. According to the Federal Register, the commission will only accept written comments from the public at this first meeting, though individuals will have the opportunity to make oral comments at future gatherings of the panel.

Neither a Pence spokesman nor the federal worker designated as the panels contact responded to Mics requests for comment.

Allegra Chapman, director of voting and elections for the government accountability group Common Cause, said keeping the public away is a way for the government here to control the narrative.

If the commission can quash questions about methods or tactics or the data that theyre using, Chapman said in a phone interview, it is more free to push a pre-ordained agenda.

What agenda might that be? Continuing to spread this fear, this myth, that there is widespread illegal voting going on across the country and that states should be sort of putting into place some new restrictions based on that, she said.

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The election commission's woes are Mike Pence's problem now - Mic

Media outlets seemed to take immense pleasure in tarring Pence as misogynistic, sexist and medieval for his efforts to be a faithful husband, with journalists comparing his actions to Sharia law with its subjugation of women as inherently inferior to men.

Referring to Pences 2002 statement that he never drinks in public unless his wife is with him and doesnt eat alone with a woman other than his wife, Erin Duffy slammed the Vice President in an article in Fortune, schooling him that women are people, too and accusing him of shifting the blame for extra-marital affairs to women. His dumb dinner rule puts women at a disadvantage, she huffed.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Emma Gray said that in Pences worldview, men have no self-control, and women are either temptresses or guardians of virtue. Moreover, the Pences Christianity is part of a system that works to prop up male power and keep women subordinate.

And yet as hard as the media tried to paint Pence as woefully out of touch for his antiquated views of marital fidelity, a new poll finds that most Americans actually agree with him.

It was none other than the New York Times, declared foe of the Trump administration, to publish the results of a survey showing that U.S. citizens believe that married people need to be careful in their dealings with the opposite sex if they want to be faithful to their spouses.

A majority of women, and nearly half of men, say its unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse, writes Claire Cain Miller in her analysis of the polls findings.

Over all, people thought dinner or drinks with a member of the opposite sex other than a spouse was the most inappropriate, with more people disapproving than approving, Miller said. Lunch and car rides were less objectionable, but more than a third of people said they were inappropriate.

As Mollie Hemingway noted in an insightfulessay following the poll, How out of touch are newsrooms that they thought this position was Sharia-like, as opposed to what it turns out to be: completely normal?

It is small wonder that the mainstream media were unable to fathom a Trump-Pence victory last November, since the bubble they live in excludes rank-and-file Americans who are trying to make a living, raise families and be true to their spouses and their friends.

It would seem like those who are truly out of touch with Americans are not the Pences, but the media that cannot abide them.

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NYT Poll: Americans Agree with Mike Pence's Rules About Dining with Women - Breitbart News

Vice President Mike Pence praised President Trump's speech in Poland Thursday, telling Fox News' "Hannity" that Trump demonstrated "a commitment of will that will never back down to the shared values that we in this trans-Atlantic alliance have shared for more than 75 years."

Trump's address in Warsaw's historic Krasinski Square called on the U.S. and its Western allies to confront common threats, declaring "Our values will prevail, our people will thrive and our civilization will triumph."

Pence told host Laura Ingraham that Trump's speech displayed "unapologetic American leadership."

"It really is remarkable to think that for the last eight years we had an administration that was, more often than not, apologizing for America around the world," the vice president said. "And today in Warsaw ... President Donald Trump reaffirmed our nations commitment to be the leader of the free world."

Pence noted that Trump had urged Russia to cease what the president called "its destabilizing activities ... and its support for hostile regimes" ahead of Friday's much-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

"For me, it was an example of the kind of bracing and direct and candid leadership that people across this country welcome in this president," said Pence, who later added, "frankly, ... leaders around the world, they are welcoming a President of the United States whos embracing his role as leader of the free world."

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Pence: Trump laid out a 'vision for the West' in Warsaw speech - Fox News