National Security Council Gets New Space Policy Guru

Peter Marquez, the White House National Security Council (NSC) staffer who spearheaded interagency consensus-building that led to President Obama’s new National Space Policy, is moving on. Where he’s headed was not publicly announced, but his successor is Chirag Parikh, who made his debut at the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies’ National Space Forum. Marquez’ last day in the job is this coming Friday.

The annual Eisenhower Center forum, the fifth in a series on national space issues, followed “Chatham House” rules where everything is said on a non-attribution basis. So we cannot report on what Mr. Parikh said, but we can report that he is an aerospace engineer with 14 years of experience in the Air Force and intelligence communities, and a very approachable person eager to engage with the space community.

He will have the task of developing the implementation strategy to go along with the policy, as well as efforts to update three other specific U.S. space policies on space transportation, commercial remote sensing, and positioning, navigation and timing satellites (i.e., GPS).

U.S. space policy is coordinated at the White House level by the NSC and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Marquez and Parikh each call OSTP’s Damon Wells their partner in the process.