Vice President Pence Chairs Space Council Meeting Today: Watch It Live

The National Space Council (NSC) will convene for the sixth time today morning (Aug. 20), and you can watch the proceedings live.

Vice President and NSC chairman Mike Pence will lead the meeting, which starts at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency.

"This meeting will address a whole-of-government effort for deep-space exploration, prospective cooperation with international partners and strengthening U.S. commercial space leadership," White House officials said in a statement.

"As chairman of the council, Vice President Pence will convene the meeting, receive reports from council members, hear from an expert panel on innovative space initiatives and human space exploration, lead a council discussion and present policy recommendations for the president," they added.

Those panelists are Rex Geveden, president and CEO of BWX Technologies Inc.; Clive Neal, professor  in the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame; Saralyn Mark, founder and president of iGIANT and SolaMed Solutions LLC; and Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The NSC helps steer and streamline American space policy. President Donald Trump reinstated the organization in 2017; it was last active in the early 1990s.

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Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.