Vice President Mike Pence announced today that he’d be heading up the recently revived National Space Council, which his boss Donald Trump brought back this week as part of a general push in support of space exploration. (The theory, we guess, being that we should probably start lining up our next planet before the expiration date on this one comes fully to term.) Historians will note that there’s nothing especially unusual about Pence being asked to head up the NSC—it’s been a traditional “keep the VP busy” job since as far back as the Kennedy administration—but this does mark the first time the council’s been led by a man whose policy positions presumably include “fire rockets at Heaven to find the actual, physical location of God.”
The committee, which was last in session during the administration of George H.W. Bush, exists to coordinate the U.S. government’s various space-facing agencies, including NASA and the Department of Defense. It’s made up of a number of high-ranking officials from those departments, none of which, hopefully, are women, lest Pence be forced to invite his wife along to all its lunch or dinner meetings.