Policy Lab / Space exploration & development
The capacity to discover.
The responsibility to endure.
Federal discussion draft · Not introduced or enacted
Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration
A long-term science and exploration framework connecting protected NASA and DARPA funding to laboratories, skilled people, open knowledge, responsible technology, and international cooperation.
Illustrative authority in FY2025 dollars · No official budget score · Foundation analysis dated September 27, 2026
31 titles · 282 sections · 10 source annexes. Internal Foundation record; no official congressional assignment is claimed.
A guide to this proposal
The proposal would expand the public capacity to discover, build, explore, and preserve knowledge. Its funding machinery still needs a reconciled budget, certified baselines, tax drafting, and independent scoring before the promise can become an executable program.
Analysis is commentary. Model text is a proposal. Fiscal scenarios, where provided, are illustrative.
Foundation Analysis
The SPACE Act connects exploration to the laboratories, institutions, people, and shared knowledge that make discovery possible. It proposes a durable public-science system, with protected funding and safeguards for scientific independence. Several fiscal and legal mechanisms need further drafting before introduction.
In plain language: The proposal would expand the public capacity to discover, build, explore, and preserve knowledge. Its funding machinery still needs a reconciled budget, certified baselines, tax drafting, and independent scoring before the promise can become an executable program.
Protected NASA and DARPA planning floors sit alongside a Frontier Science Network, a capital-delivery authority, long-horizon research, and a model international convention. Publication, safety, and continuity provisions connect scientific ambition to public responsibilities.
Staffing, contracting, launch facilities, test capacity, power, and supply chains determine how much new funding can be used well. The 75% first funding step and subsequent 42.9% step require execution plans; greater budget authority alone cannot triple mission output.
The $154.874 billion annual envelope adds correctly, but it is an illustrative program total. A $217.185 billion reserve and $7.7437 trillion endowment target require separate accumulation. No official score establishes revenue sufficiency or deficit neutrality.
Specify appropriations and transfer mechanics, the tax base and collection rules, corporate-board appointments, immigration categories, safety jurisdiction, and enforceable review procedures. Make data-minimization duties, impoundment safeguards, and inventor and laboratory royalty rights explicit.
Advance the Act’s public-science and stewardship agenda while treating the finance model, agency readiness, rights enforcement, and statutory crosswalk as conditions for introduction-ready legislation. The Foundation’s role is research, public-interest standards, education, and convening; this publication establishes no federal authority or funded Foundation program.
Foundation policy analysis dated September 27, 2026. No official counsel authorship, congressional introduction, enactment, agency endorsement, or CBO/JCT score is established. Numerical scenarios are reproducible illustrations in FY2025 dollars, not forecasts.
02 / Policy mechanisms
The Act brings funding, scientific independence, institutions, and shared knowledge into one long-term framework.
Titles II, VI–IX
Set separate NASA and DARPA floors at three times their real FY2025 planning baselines. Connect mission-led research with a $25 billion Frontier Science Network and investigator-led basic science.
Agency baselines require certification; a funding floor is not a guarantee of mission output.
Titles V, XI–XIX
Coordinate laboratories, common user facilities, computing, launch infrastructure, and the systems needed for Earth science and exploration. The illustrative infrastructure account is $15 billion a year.
Facilities need lifecycle budgets, skilled operators, safety review, and evidence of usable capacity.
Title X; Titles XXIX–XXX
Support ambitious experiments and preserve knowledge across generations. A $5 billion far-horizon allocation sits within the $10 billion Grand Challenges envelope.
Independent replication and measured milestones govern expansion; speculative concepts still need testable evidence.
Titles XX–XXIV, XXVII
Connect scientific careers, apprenticeships, education, talent mobility, procurement, and technology transition. The workforce and education planning account is $10 billion a year.
Personnel and immigration changes need operative statutory language, and public-return terms need clear rights and responsibilities.
Titles III, XXV–XXVI, XXIX
Pair scientific independence and publication protections with research security, safety, civil liberties, open data, and public oversight.
Safeguards need named decision-makers, evidence standards, deadlines, and workable review routes.
Titles IV, XXVIII–XXX; Annexes A–B
Propose shared international projects, a model convention, and a national implementation framework. A reserve and long-run endowment target aim to support institutional continuity.
International participation requires state consent; reserve and endowment targets require actual capital accumulation.
03 / Fiscal analysis
Three different quantities: an annual program envelope, a liquid reserve, and a long-run investment target.
Illustrative gross authority at full implementation, including both protected agency floors.
Thirty months of the $86.874B protected core. Only 16.83 months if used to finance the full envelope.
Fifty times the full annual envelope. A target to accumulate, with no funded starting balance assumed.
The annual allocation
The protected agency core is $86.874 billion. The other six accounts total $68 billion, connecting discovery to infrastructure, people, cooperation, and oversight.
The $5 billion far-horizon allocation is part of Grand Challenges; it is not an additional account.
Download the funding chart ↓| Component | Annual amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| NASA | $74.514B | 48.1% |
| DARPA planning floor | $12.360B | 8.0% |
| Frontier Science Network | $25.000B | 16.1% |
| Infrastructure | $15.000B | 9.7% |
| Workforce and education | $10.000B | 6.5% |
| Grand Challenges | $10.000B | 6.5% |
| International projects | $5.000B | 3.2% |
| Safety, oversight and data | $3.000B | 1.9% |
| Total | $154.874B | 100% |
The full envelope is $125.916B above a flat $28.958B NASA-and-DARPA planning baseline. That comparison is not the bill’s net incremental federal cost: ordinary agency appropriations, cross-agency overlap, and Fund transfers still need reconciliation.
The source annex multiplies the full envelope by the number of years. The Foundation example instead applies the statutory agency ramp and assumes the other $68B phases at 50%, 75%, and 100%. This complementary-account ramp is an analyst assumption.
| Window beginning FY2027 | Full envelope each year | Agency ramp; other accounts fully funded | Agency ramp; other accounts phased |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 years | $774.370B | $723.694B | $672.694B |
| 10 years | $1,548.740B | $1,498.064B | $1,447.064B |
| 30 years | $4,646.220B | $4,595.544B | $4,544.544B |
Budget authority is permission to obligate; obligations and cash outlays occur on different schedules. These are gross authority illustrations, not estimates of cash outlays or official incremental costs. The source’s $77.437T over 500 years is multiplication only, not a forecast or a funding requirement payable today.
| Fiscal year | NASA | DARPA | Other accounts | Total real authority | Nominal at assumed 3% inflation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | $43.467B | $7.210B | $34.000B | $84.677B | $89.833B |
| 2028 | $62.095B | $10.300B | $51.000B | $123.395B | $134.837B |
| 2029 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $174.312B |
| 2030 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $179.541B |
| 2031 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $184.928B |
| 2032 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $190.475B |
| 2033 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $196.190B |
| 2034 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $202.075B |
| 2035 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $208.138B |
| 2036 | $74.514B | $12.360B | $68.000B | $154.874B | $214.382B |
Nominal values use real authority × 1.03^(fiscal year − 2025); this is a hypothetical inflation path, not the published GDP price index. The CSV also gives 2% and 4% cases. If a $15B facilities budget faces costs 20% above plan, it buys $12.5B of planned-price work; maintaining scope would require $18B. This is a cost-pressure example, not a forecast.
The agency ramp increases funding 75% from the baseline to FY2027, 42.86% in FY2028, and 20% in FY2029. Section 211’s above-25% execution-plan trigger therefore applies to the first two steps when compared with the assumed preceding funding level.
A 2% payout on $7.7437T equals $154.874B. At the 25× threshold where ordinary payouts begin, the maximum is only $77.437B before accounting for the trailing-average definition. Constant spending would require other revenue. Following a 30% market loss, a payout based on the unrevised pre-shock average would equal 2.86% of current principal. A smoothing rule can protect programs temporarily while increasing pressure on capital.
| Annual contribution | 0% net real return | 2% net real return | 4% net real return |
|---|---|---|---|
| $25.000B | 310 | 100 | 67 |
| $50.000B | 155 | 72 | 51 |
| $100.000B | 78 | 48 | 36 |
A ten-year reserve build alone requires $21.7185B a year before returns or withdrawals. Funding operations, that reserve build, and $50B of endowment capitalization requires $226.5925B in annual cash allocation before the additional coverage margin and other costs. The 105% operating hurdle is $162.6177B; that margin is not a substitute for a complete capitalization plan.
04 / Interactive calculations
Change explicit assumptions to test the scale of the funding requirement. The taxable base and returns below are hypothetical inputs. This does not estimate market behavior or assign probabilities.
The effective base means taxable transactions remaining after behavioral response and exemptions. Do not substitute derivatives notional value.
Statutory corridor: 0.01%–0.10%. Each upward step is 0.005 percentage points.
Default zero; buyback-tax yield, fees, and other receipts have not been scored. Reserve draws are not recurring receipts.
Reserve accumulation is an arithmetic illustration from zero, with no returns, withdrawals, or endowment transfers; it does not authorize spending when the statutory coverage test fails.
This assumed cash case does not clear the 105% operating-coverage hurdle.
Formula: receipts = effective base × rate + other receipts. Required base = (1.05 × $154.874B − other receipts) ÷ rate. Other-tax offsets, collection delays, and administration are excluded. Gross cash coverage is not a net federal budget score.
Begin with no principal after the reserve has been funded. Assume fixed end-of-year contributions, a constant net real return after fees, and no payouts while accumulating.
This is an accumulation example, not a simulation of the draft’s payout rule or a return forecast.
Formula: Pₙ = C × ((1 + r)ⁿ − 1) ÷ r; when r = 0, Pₙ = C × n. Market losses, changing contributions, program growth, and withdrawals can delay or prevent the target.
05 / Primary evidence
The FY2025 Agency Financial Report identifies $24.838 billion in discretionary appropriations. The draft appropriately distinguishes that recurring planning base from disaster and mandatory amounts. Multiplying by three gives $74.514 billion.
DARPA’s April 2026 FY2027 justification book reports a FY2025 discretionary spend plan of $4.408991 billion (printed page xix), above the draft’s $4.120 billion. A spend plan is not automatically the bill’s certified enacted baseline. If that larger figure were certified, the agency floor would rise by $866.973 million and the whole envelope to $155.740973 billion. Preserve the draft figure pending the section 207 reconciliation.
NASA OIG’s June 2026 assessment says Kennedy and Wallops could approach capacity in 2028–2029. GAO’s July 2026 review reports staffing effects on 25 of 36 major projects following NASA’s 2025 workforce reduction. These findings support capacity planning; they do not establish how quickly the proposed expansion could be delivered.
CBO’s December 2024 option uses a 0.01% rate and reports $296.8 billion in net deficit reduction over 2025–2034, with income and payroll tax offsets and early timing effects. It is neither gross cash receipts nor a score of this bill. Multiplying that amount by four cannot establish that a 0.04% tax funds the SPACE envelope.
The cited August 2026 CBO report records nearly $9 billion in corporate stock-repurchase tax receipts in 2025. Its accessible text does not establish the source annex’s claimed $9 billion annual forward average. More fundamentally, collections under the existing 1% tax do not score the proposed additional percentage point. The model therefore leaves other dedicated receipts as an explicit assumption.
NCSES reports that the federal government funded 40% of U.S. basic research in 2024. DARPA describes program managers serving typically less than five years. These support complementary investigator-led and mission-led pathways, rather than applying one management model to every scientific discipline.
NIST’s November 2025 framework supports mission-focused, risk-balanced research security alongside international collaboration. The bill’s nationality-alone prohibition, appeals, and publication protections fit that direction; implementation still needs named decision-makers, evidence standards, and deadlines.
ESA’s mandatory programs use economic-capacity contributions alongside optional programs. The SPACE model adapts that structure. Existing space-treaty duties still need a project-level crosswalk for authorization and supervision, liability, nonappropriation, and harmful interference. Publishing a model convention does not secure state consent.
06 / Legal and institutional review
These are Foundation findings and recommended drafting decisions. They do not amend the canonical source and are not an opinion of congressional counsel.
§§201–205, 210, 401, 406, 3102
Sections 201–202 state funding floors, but section 401 appropriates deposited amounts and section 406 permits conditional reductions. Decide which annual appropriations satisfy the floors, how Fund transfers reach agency accounts, whether the full envelope or only incremental expansion is financed by new receipts, and how existing appropriations are protected without paying the same activity twice. A fund balance is not a new tax receipt and a reserve draw is not deficit-neutral revenue.
§§203–205, 1003; introductory fiscal table
The phrase illustrative steady-state minimum blurs a legal minimum and a planning example. The $10B Grand Challenges, $5B international, and $3B safety/data envelope lines lack an equally clear consolidated annual allocation schedule in the bill. Define mandatory and discretionary accounts, phased amounts, administrative costs, and boundaries. Count the $5B far-horizon requirement inside Grand Challenges. The 20% basic-research and replication requirements are shares, not extra appropriations.
§§403–406, 3103
Specify taxpayer and collection agent, territorial nexus, derivatives valuation, taxable event, anti-cascading rules, exemptions, refunds, penalties, administration, and Internal Revenue Code amendments. Define the forward resource-coverage ratio, forecast method, reserve treatment, publication date, and appeals. A half-basis-point annual rate step cannot promptly cover a sudden large shortfall. Define interim cash authority and the temporary floor-reduction process rather than assuming the cap generates enough money.
§§201–202, 403, 408, 3002–3004, 3110
A January 1 tax start at least 180 days after enactment can occur after the FY2027 ramp begins. For example, enactment on September 27, 2026 makes the earliest qualifying tax start January 1, 2028. Existing appropriations, a startup appropriation, an explicitly authorized transfer, or a revised funding clock would be needed; no startup reserve may be assumed. Align fiscal-year deadlines with enactment timing and rulemaking lead times.
§§407–411
Specify investment limits, custody, valuation, fees, voting rules, public audit, liquidity, loss recognition, and nominal-to-real conversion. A trailing 20-quarter average can exceed current market value after a crash. At the 25× entry threshold, a 2% payout funds only half of the target annual distribution. Set stress rules and the source of the other half. Capital transfers and asset purchases need unified-budget treatment, separate from program outlays.
§§304, 409, 501–502, 1001
The infrastructure board’s two presidential appointees lack express confirmation, supervision, removal, vacancy, and term rules. Determine whether each role is a principal officer, inferior officer, or adviser; match appointment methods to its actual powers. Specify the corporation’s chief executive, procurement and personnel regime, property powers, audit jurisdiction, and claims process. Advisory scientific councils should remain advisory as the draft provides.
Titles XX–XXII
A new visa and immigrant category need Immigration and Nationality Act amendments, numerical rules, eligibility, duration, sponsoring authority, status adjustment, portability, dependent status, and work authorization. The personnel system needs explicit Title 5 exceptions and treatment of merit principles, labor relations, pay limits, appeals, and retirement. General savings clauses do not settle these details.
§§303–306, 2501–2504, 2601–2613, 3104–3107
Identify who investigates retaliation, orders corrective action, resolves publication appeals, and reviews security designations; specify deadlines and review routes. The no-implied-private-right clause means a safeguard is not automatically a new damages remedy. Specify personal-data minimization, retention, and purpose limits, and reconcile spending protections with existing impoundment law.
Titles XI–XIX, XXIII, XXVI
Crosswalk NASA, FAA, FCC, NOAA, DOE, defense, environmental, and relevant nuclear authorities. Identify the lead regulator for launch, spectrum, remote sensing, orbital servicing, nuclear systems, and sample return. A general research authorization is not an operating license. Define responsibility for shared infrastructure, incident reporting, insurance, indemnity, debris, and end-of-life liabilities.
Title XXVIII; Annex A
Supply depositary, authentic languages, signature, ratification, entry-into-force threshold, accession, reservations, legal seat, contribution ceilings, voting thresholds, immunity boundaries, sanctions, dispute rules, and withdrawal accounting. Reconcile the two-year withdrawal notice with outstanding capital and cleanup duties. Preserve applicable treaty and implementing-law processes.
§§2303–2309, 2404–2408
Reconcile the $2M simplified-award path with $5M concept grants, and specify research other-transaction eligibility, follow-on authority, audits, protests, and government data rights. Loans and guarantees need credit-subsidy appropriations and commitment limits. Public-return and royalty terms require an explicit crosswalk to existing inventor and laboratory distributions.
§§2701–2710, 2910; Annex I
Assess trading costs and asset-price effects for pension and retirement savers, concentration among contractors, wage competition with universities and firms, housing pressure near facilities, and access for small institutions and lower-resource partners. No supplied evidence supports a net jobs, GDP multiplier, emissions reduction, or benefit-cost estimate for the whole package. Define comparators and collect evidence before making those claims.
07 / Engineering and delivery
The legislation describes program authorities, not flight-ready architectures. Without mission mass, power, reliability, trajectory, test, and cost data, a mission feasibility calculation or launch schedule would be invented. The appropriate technical result is a staged evidence requirement.
| System | Required evidence | Decision gate | Source provisions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch sites and common facilities | Independent capacity model covering pad occupancy, turnaround, weather, range and airspace coordination, utilities, and simultaneous operations | Demonstrated throughput and recovery margin under realistic demand; funded maintenance and local mitigation | §§204, 506, 603 |
| Crewed deep-space systems | Architecture-level mass, power, thermal, radiation, life-support, logistics, communications, and return/abort budgets | Integrated tests, independent mission-readiness review, closed critical hazards, and affordable lifecycle support | §§605–606, 1103, 1106 |
| Compute and autonomous laboratories | Measured compute utilization, grid and water demand, cybersecurity, reproducibility, and scientific bottlenecks | Demonstrated scientific value and independent safety evaluation before consequential deployment | §§1401–1408, 2606 |
| Propulsion and speculative physics | Falsifiable hypothesis and instrumented experiment with calibrated uncertainty and an energy/momentum accounting | Independent replication before demonstration scale; no presumption that an extraordinary concept works | §§1002–1004, 1901–1904 |
| Earth observation and hazard systems | Calibration overlap, latency, uncertainty, availability, archive and operational handoff requirements | Validated warning performance and continuity through sensor retirement or supplier failure | §§1701–1705, 1802–1805 |
| People and acquisition | Skills inventory, time-to-hire, contracting capacity, training completion, and supplier readiness | Budget growth released through staffed and independently reviewed portfolios rather than project-count targets | §§211, 602, 2008–2010, 2307 |
For portfolios, report baseline and actual schedule, uncertainty, independent cost estimates, readiness, failure lessons, supplier concentration, and maintained government technical competence. Count benefits only when measured against a stated comparator.
08 / True Tomorrow Foundation
A policy instrument for the Foundation’s space agenda: shared infrastructure, responsible exploration, usable knowledge, and wider participation.
§§1101, 1105–1108, 1902, 1906
Connect the Foundation’s orbital-safety work to open interface specifications, public risk ledgers, debris and contamination duties, and lifecycle responsibility. The bill advances shared systems but still needs explicit operator obligations and regulatory coordination.
Read The Orbital Commons ↗Titles XVI–XVIII, XXV
Use Earth observations, hazard warning, closed-loop systems, and open data as public-interest research themes. Evaluate whether communities can use the outputs, with measures for access, reliability, and decision value rather than launch or publication counts alone.
Explore sustainable-Earth research ↗§§505, 901–903; Titles XX–XXII
Develop prospective apprenticeship, teacher, and shared-facility access models with community colleges and small research organizations. Philanthropy could support early feasibility work, reproducibility, public data tools, and independent evaluation. These are proposed roles, not announced grants or partnerships.
Connect to education ↗Titles XXVI, XXVIII–XXX
Convene discussion of contribution formulas, reciprocal access, scientific mobility, archives, and withdrawal duties. Keep civilian public-benefit work distinct from DARPA’s defense mission and conditioned on rights, export, and security safeguards.
See the Foundation’s space agenda ↗Research and proposal stage. No current grant, mission, government role, funded partnership, or service-delivery outcome is asserted.
09 / Sequencing
| Stage | Lead responsibility | Required work |
|---|---|---|
| Before introduction | Legislative counsel; tax and budget staff; agencies | Resolve the account ledger, certified baseline, startup finance, tax code, officer appointments, visa categories, and statutory crosswalk; commission official CBO/JCT scoring. |
| Enactment to 90 days | OMB; NASA; defense comptroller; Treasury; OPM | Certify baselines; inventory skills and critical facilities; identify startup cash and appoint responsible officials. GAO review follows the certification timetable. |
| First year | Agencies; Treasury; infrastructure and network bodies | Publish readiness plans, tax rules, public reporting definitions, privacy and safety procedures; start limited award and apprenticeship pilots. Do not assume tax receipts have begun. |
| FY2027 to FY2029 | Congress; OMB; NASA; DARPA | Source multipliers are 1.75×, 2.50×, and 3×. Rebase this clock if enactment timing makes it impracticable. Tie actual obligations to legal resources and demonstrated execution capacity. |
| Years four to ten | Agency program leads; Fund Board; independent reviewers | Expand validated facilities and portfolios; build the reserve before the endowment; review competition, workforce, lifecycle costs, access, and measurable public value. |
| Beyond ten years | Existing institutions; Congress; international partners | Transfer temporary-office duties, audit sustainability, refresh five-year reviews, and preserve 25- to 500-year scenario planning as adaptive stewardship. |
10 / Methods and downloads
The review examines the SPACE Act’s legislative provisions and annexes, reproduces its fiscal arithmetic, and investigates selected material claims against primary sources available on September 27, 2026. The web reader and DOCX present the same bill and annexes; nonoperative introductory material has been streamlined. Source references support particular claims, not endorsement of the complete proposal.
The review does not supply an official tax score, bill-wide benefit-cost ratio, engineering certification, or full conforming-code substitute. Revenue behavior, outlay timing, net budget effects, and legal enforceability require specialist work with the final statutory text.
Discretionary baseline; additional funding categories are distinct.
FY2025 spend plan $4.408991B; requires reconciliation to the statutory certification definition.
Conditional 2028–2029 capacity finding.
Workforce and project-management evidence; no estimate of SPACE outcomes.
A different policy at 0.01%; net budget effects include other-tax offsets.
Historical 2025 buyback receipts; not a score of the additional contribution.
Existing 1% stock-repurchase tax and administration.
Basic-research funding context.
Milestone leadership and short appointments.
Risk-balanced international research guidance.
Mandatory and optional contribution structures.
Existing treaty principles; project-level legal review remains necessary.
Appointment method must match statutory powers and supervision.
Appropriations-law reference for counsel; not an opinion on this draft.
Full Text
Read the legislation.
The complete proposed U.S. bill occupies Titles I–XXXI, followed by Annexes A–J: model international instruments and explanatory material. Annex A is a model convention, not an enacted treaty. All legislative provisions and substantive annex content are preserved in order. The document’s cover and introductory editorial material have been streamlined for publication.
SPACE ACT OF 2026
Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration Act
A long-horizon framework for frontier science, engineering, exploration, and institutional continuity
Model United States Federal Legislation with a Global Adoption and Treaty Framework
Model legislative draft - September 2026
TITLE I. GENERAL PROVISIONS, PURPOSES, FINDINGS, AND DEFINITIONS
TITLE II. NATIONAL SCIENCE AND EXPLORATION FUNDING COMPACT
TITLE III. SCIENTIFIC AUTONOMY, RESEARCH FREEDOM, AND INSTITUTIONAL GOVERNANCE
TITLE IV. SPACE FUTURE FUND AND INTERGENERATIONAL FINANCE
TITLE V. NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC INFRASTRUCTURE AUTHORITY AND RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS
TITLE VI. NASA CAPACITY, SCIENCE, EXPLORATION, AND AERONAUTICS
TITLE VII. DARPA CAPACITY AND HIGH-RISK RESEARCH
TITLE VIII. FEDERAL FRONTIER SCIENCE NETWORK
TITLE IX. FUNDAMENTAL SCIENCE, GRAND INSTRUMENTS, AND DISCOVERY
TITLE X. GRAND CHALLENGES, MOONSHOTS, AND FAR-HORIZON RESEARCH
TITLE XI. CISLUNAR, LUNAR, MARS, AND DEEP-SPACE SYSTEMS
TITLE XII. ASTRONOMY, ASTROPHYSICS, HELIOPHYSICS, AND PLANETARY SCIENCE
TITLE XIII. AERONAUTICS, ADVANCED MOBILITY, AND TRANSPORT
TITLE XIV. COMPUTING, AI, QUANTUM, ROBOTICS, AND CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS
TITLE XV. ENERGY, MATERIALS, MICROELECTRONICS, AND ADVANCED MANUFACTURING
TITLE XVI. BIOLOGY, BIOTECHNOLOGY, HUMAN PERFORMANCE, AND CLOSED-LOOP LIFE SUPPORT
TITLE XVII. EARTH, OCEAN, ATMOSPHERIC, POLAR, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
TITLE XVIII. PLANETARY DEFENSE, SPACE WEATHER, AND CATASTROPHIC-RISK SCIENCE
TITLE XIX. ADVANCED PROPULSION, IN-SPACE INDUSTRY, AND INTERSTELLAR PRECURSOR RESEARCH
TITLE XX. FEDERAL FRONTIER SCIENCE WORKFORCE
TITLE XXI. EDUCATION, APPRENTICESHIPS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND PUBLIC SCIENCE
TITLE XXII. GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC TALENT AND MOBILITY
TITLE XXIII. FRONTIER PROCUREMENT, GRANTS, OTHER TRANSACTIONS, PRIZES, AND RAPID EXPERIMENTATION
TITLE XXIV. TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, STANDARDS, AND PUBLIC RETURN
TITLE XXV. OPEN SCIENCE, DATA, SOFTWARE, PUBLICATION, AND KNOWLEDGE PRESERVATION
TITLE XXVI. SAFETY, ETHICS, CIVIL LIBERTIES, RESEARCH SECURITY, AND DUAL-USE GOVERNANCE
TITLE XXVII. REGIONAL SCIENCE CAPACITY, SMALL BUSINESS, AND LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE
TITLE XXVIII. INTERNATIONAL SPACE COMPACT AND GLOBAL ADOPTION
TITLE XXIX. OVERSIGHT, AUDIT, PERFORMANCE, TRANSPARENCY, AND ANTI-CAPTURE
TITLE XXX. IMPLEMENTATION, ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE, CONTINUITY, AND LONG-HORIZON PLANNING
TITLE XXXI. LEGAL PROVISIONS, JUDICIAL REVIEW, SEVERABILITY, AND EFFECTIVE DATES
ANNEX A. MODEL INTERNATIONAL SPACE CONVENTION
ANNEX B. MODEL NATIONAL SPACE FRAMEWORK LAW
ANNEX C. PRELIMINARY FISCAL NOTE AND SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS
ANNEX D. IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP AND RESPONSIBILITY MATRIX
ANNEX E. CONSTITUTIONAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE-LAW ANALYSIS
ANNEX F. SECTION-BY-SECTION COMMENTARY
ANNEX G. RESEARCH SOURCES AND EVIDENTIARY NOTES
ANNEX H. QUALITY-CHECK AND OPEN QUESTIONS
ANNEX I. STAKEHOLDER AND IMPACT ANALYSIS
ANNEX J. PLAIN-LANGUAGE SUMMARY AND FAQ
A BILL
To establish permanent national capacity for scientific discovery, advanced engineering, peaceful exploration, high-risk research, resilient scientific institutions, and the development of future generations of scientists, engineers, technicians, operators, educators, and support professionals; to provide protected real-dollar funding floors for NASA and DARPA; to create an intergenerational science fund and research infrastructure system; to establish models for international scientific cooperation; and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
(a) This Act may be cited as the "Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration Act of 2026" or the "SPACE Act of 2026".
(b) In this Act, "SPACE" means Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration.
(c) This Act is a long-horizon institutional framework and does not guarantee that any particular scientific theory, mission architecture, technology, or discovery will succeed.
(1) To maintain frontier science and engineering as permanent capabilities of the United States.
(2) To provide NASA and DARPA not less than three times their FY2025 real funding baselines and to build the people, facilities, software, acquisition capacity, and institutional resilience needed to use those resources effectively.
(3) To protect legitimate scientific and engineering judgment from improper interference while preserving democratic control, fiscal accountability, safety, ethics, national security, and judicial review.
(4) To support basic science, applied research, experimental development, demonstration, deployment, standards, scientific software, and major infrastructure as distinct but connected public functions.
(5) To protect lawful research whose usefulness may be uncertain or decades away.
(6) To create a multigenerational workforce strategy covering scientists, engineers, technicians, trades, operators, mission controllers, software professionals, acquisition staff, safety experts, educators, archivists, and support personnel.
(7) To maintain a rolling planning horizon of not less than 500 years and a policy objective of perpetual scientific continuity.
(8) To create a model adaptable by other sovereign states and regional organizations without transferring sovereign authority absent lawful treaty or legislation.
(1) Public institutions are uniquely positioned to support basic research, high technical risk, long time horizons, shared scientific infrastructure, national-scale data, and mission work whose benefits cannot be captured fully by private investors.
(2) Physical infrastructure, acquisition capacity, scientific labor, software, test access, and institutional knowledge can become binding constraints even when nominal appropriations rise.
(3) Scientific progress benefits from plural institutions with different missions, risk tolerances, cultures, time horizons, and accountability structures.
(4) The ability to terminate failing technical approaches without terminating the broader mission is a core capability of effective high-risk research.
(5) Open international exchange strengthens science when balanced with proportionate research-security, export-control, sanctions, and classified-information safeguards.
(6) Long-lived scientific institutions require maintenance, workforce renewal, transparent governance, durable archives, and fiscal rules capable of surviving technological and political change.
(7) Future generations benefit when current institutions preserve scientific optionality rather than locking public resources into one technology, vendor, destination, or theory.
(a) It is the policy of the United States to create sufficient scientific capacity that meritorious research is not routinely abandoned solely because laboratory space, compute, test access, instrument time, technical staff, or exploratory funding is unavailable.
(b) Subsection (a) does not authorize wasteful duplication, evasion of law, or indefinite continuation of programs that fail reasonable scientific, technical, safety, or fiscal review.
(1) "Basic research" means systematic study directed principally toward fuller knowledge or understanding of fundamental aspects of phenomena and observable facts without a specific application necessarily in view.
(2) "Frontier research" means research, engineering, exploration, or technical demonstration characterized by material uncertainty, long time horizon, high capital intensity, integration complexity, national-scale externalities, or unusually large public-good characteristics.
(3) "Protected technical function" means a scientific, engineering, safety, peer-review, publication, or portfolio judgment designated under Title III.
(4) "Covered frontier institution" means NASA, DARPA, and any institution designated under section 208.
(5) "Frontier Science Network" means the coordinated but institutionally plural network established by Title VIII.
(6) "Real dollars" means amounts adjusted by the GDP chain-type price index or a successor measure selected under section 206.
(7) "Scientific infrastructure" includes laboratories, launch and test facilities, observatories, field stations, research vessels, aircraft, clean rooms, fabrication facilities, high-performance computing, networks, power systems, utilities, data repositories, software, instruments, and associated support systems.
(8) "Portfolio" means related projects managed toward a common technical or scientific objective and evaluated together for learning, risk, cost, transition, and mission value.
(9) "Fund" means the SPACE Future Fund established under section 401.
(10) "Intergenerational principal" means assets allocated to the long-run endowment account under section 407.
(a) No provision requiring ambitious research shall be construed as requiring a predetermined scientific result.
(b) No autonomy provision exempts a person or institution from civil-rights law, labor law, environmental law, ethics law, appropriations law, criminal law, research-integrity requirements, export controls, sanctions, classified-information law, or proportionate safety requirements.
(c) No reference to a 500-year horizon shall be construed as binding a future Congress or guaranteeing future economic, scientific, or political conditions.
(a) Beginning not later than FY2029, NASA shall receive annual budget authority of not less than 300 percent of its certified FY2025 discretionary baseline in real dollars.
(b) For planning before certification, the FY2025 NASA discretionary baseline is $24,838,000,000, corresponding to a 3x planning floor of $74,514,000,000.
(c) The minimum multiple is 1.75 in FY2027, 2.50 in FY2028, and 3.00 in FY2029 and thereafter.
(d) One-time FY2025 disaster or mandatory appropriations shall not inflate the recurring baseline unless the certification process determines that the amounts represented recurring operating capacity.
(a) Beginning not later than FY2029, DARPA shall receive annual budget authority of not less than 300 percent of its certified FY2025 enacted RDT&E baseline in real dollars.
(b) For initial planning only, $4,120,000,000 shall be used pending certification, corresponding to a 3x planning floor of $12,360,000,000.
(c) The minimum multiple is 1.75 in FY2027, 2.50 in FY2028, and 3.00 in FY2029 and thereafter.
(d) Not less than 70 percent of DARPA budget authority shall support technical programs, performers, test, validation, transition, and direct program-management support rather than permanent headquarters overhead.
(a) A Frontier Science Network Account is established with an illustrative steady-state minimum of $25,000,000,000 in FY2025 real dollars.
(b) Eligible institutions include NSF, DOE Office of Science and national laboratories, NIST, NOAA research laboratories, selected NIH and ARPA-H cross-cutting programs, USGS science functions, and other Federal scientific entities designated by law.
(c) Funds shall supplement ordinary appropriations and prioritize basic research, shared instruments, scientific software, metrology, data, early-stage technical work, and cross-agency capability gaps.
(d) No participating agency shall be required to adopt DARPA-style program management where investigator-led peer review, long-duration observation, or facility science is more appropriate.
(a) A Scientific Infrastructure Account is established within the Fund with an illustrative steady-state authority of $15,000,000,000 in FY2025 real dollars.
(b) Eligible costs include planning, land, environmental review, design, construction, equipment, maintenance, recapitalization, utilities, cyber infrastructure, test facilities, field stations, housing at remote sites, and decommissioning reserves.
(c) Major facilities require full lifecycle cost and workforce plans before construction obligations exceed 20 percent of estimated total project cost.
(a) A Workforce, Education, and Mobility Account is established with an illustrative steady-state authority of $10,000,000,000 in FY2025 real dollars.
(b) Funds may support scholarships, fellowships, apprenticeships, recruitment, special pay, relocation, childcare, housing assistance, teacher programs, university partnerships, community colleges, scientific exchanges, and technician training.
(a) OMB shall calculate annual real-dollar adjustments using the GDP chain-type price index unless Congress adopts a research-cost index recommended by the President.
(b) OMB shall publish the index, base year, methodology, and resulting statutory floors at least 120 days before each fiscal year.
(c) A technical index change may not be used to reduce real purchasing power.
(a) Within 90 days after enactment, OMB, NASA, and the Department of Defense Comptroller shall certify FY2025 baselines under transparent accounting rules.
(b) GAO shall review the certification within 60 days and identify any treatment of transfers, rescissions, supplementals, unobligated balances, or mandatory appropriations that materially changes recurring capacity.
(c) Certified amounts supersede planning figures without further amendment.
(a) Congress may designate additional covered frontier institutions and provide institution-specific funding floors.
(b) The President may recommend designations based on mission distinctiveness, public-good characteristics, high-risk or long-horizon need, governance quality, and insufficiency of ordinary funding pathways.
(c) No executive designation alone creates a mandatory funding floor.
(a) Basic and applied research accounts shall ordinarily remain available for five fiscal years.
(b) Major facility, spacecraft, instrument, test infrastructure, compute, and construction accounts shall remain available until expended, subject to milestone review.
(c) Programs shall not be forced into artificial year-end expenditures merely to prevent expiration when multiyear authority is lawfully available.
(a) Protected SPACE funds may not be counted as satisfying an unrelated reduction in a recipient agency's ordinary scientific baseline.
(b) Transfers from civilian scientific accounts to defense accounts, or the reverse, require express statutory authority except for jointly approved projects with documented cost shares.
(c) No agency may use the Fund as a reason to cancel ordinary maintenance, scientific computing, or workforce appropriations otherwise necessary for core operations.
(a) Before annual funding growth above 25 percent, an institution shall publish an execution-capacity plan covering staffing, contracting, facilities, risk controls, project management, and expected obligation timing.
(b) Unexecuted capacity shall be carried forward or shifted among eligible portfolios rather than forcing low-quality year-end spending.
(a) Within a portfolio, up to 15 percent may be reprogrammed among technical approaches without prior approval, subject to notice above 7.5 percent.
(b) No reprogramming may violate an express statutory prohibition or transfer resources between agencies without authority.
(c) This section permits technical adaptation without converting broad appropriations into unreviewable discretion.
(a) Protected technical functions shall be exercised by qualified scientific, engineering, medical, technical, safety, or program personnel under written procedures.
(b) Protected functions include peer-review scoring; experiment design; technical milestone setting; scientific interpretation; safety findings; internal program termination; selection among lawful technical approaches; and publication decisions for unclassified fundamental research.
(c) Congress and the President retain authority to establish missions, appropriations, national-security priorities, lawful program objectives, and generally applicable policy.
(a) No Federal officer or recipient may knowingly direct alteration or suppression of a technical conclusion, safety finding, scientific result, peer-review score, or research-integrity determination for partisan, personal, retaliatory, or financial reasons.
(b) A lawful policy decision may differ from scientific advice if the decision-maker identifies the policy basis and does not falsify the underlying technical record.
(a) Covered institutions shall maintain confidential, nonretaliatory channels for scientific and engineering dissent.
(b) For major safety, cost, architecture, or scientific disagreements, qualified dissenters may place a concise minority view in the decision record.
(c) Classified dissent shall be handled through secure channels with access to Inspectors General and appropriate congressional committees.
(a) NASA shall maintain a Science and Engineering Council; DARPA shall maintain external portfolio review panels; and the Frontier Science Network shall maintain an Independent Frontier Science Council.
(b) Members shall be selected for expertise rather than partisan affiliation and shall disclose financial conflicts.
(c) Councils may advise, publish, and recommend but may not substitute themselves for lawfully responsible executive officials.
(a) The head of a covered institution may waive internal administrative policies that materially burden research and are not required by statute, regulation, binding governmentwide policy, contract, safety requirement, or appropriations law.
(b) Waivers shall be written, time-limited, auditable, and reported in aggregate.
(c) Nonwaivable matters include civil rights, labor protections, ethics, conflicts of interest, human-subject protection, biosafety, nuclear safety, environmental law, export controls, sanctions, classified-information protection, and anti-fraud controls.
(a) Each covered institution shall appoint a senior Scientific Integrity Officer independent of program chains of command for integrity investigations and policy.
(b) The officer shall distinguish fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts, and manipulation from good-faith methodological disagreement.
(a) The NASA Administrator shall be appointed for a six-year term and may serve at the pleasure of the President.
(b) DARPA shall preserve term-limited program leadership as a core operating principle.
(c) Senior scientific leadership transitions shall include documented handover of technical risks, commitments, and institutional knowledge.
(a) No central coordinating body created by this Act may dictate a single research-management model across all institutions.
(b) Peer-reviewed investigator-led science, mission science, operational laboratories, DARPA-style programs, prizes, user facilities, and long-duration observatories may use different governance appropriate to function.
(a) There is established in the Treasury the SPACE Future Fund.
(b) Amounts deposited are permanently appropriated to the Fund for authorized purposes and remain available without fiscal-year limitation.
(c) The Fund shall contain an Operating Account, Stabilization Reserve, Scientific Infrastructure Account, and Intergenerational Endowment Account.
(a) The Fund shall receive Frontier Transactions Contribution receipts, the incremental SPACE stock-repurchase contribution, investment earnings, designated Federal royalties, authorized user fees, international reimbursements, recoveries, gifts lawfully accepted, and amounts otherwise appropriated.
(b) Receipts shall be separately accounted for enough to permit annual public reconciliation by source and use.
(a) Beginning on the first January 1 occurring at least 180 days after enactment, a Federal excise contribution of 0.04 percent is imposed on covered secondary-market financial transactions.
(b) Covered transactions include purchases of stocks, exchange-traded funds, bonds and other debt obligations, and payments under derivatives using statutory and Treasury valuation rules.
(c) Initial issuance, ordinary deposits and withdrawals, Federal benefit payments, spot currency transactions, and obligations with fixed maturities of 100 days or less are excluded.
(d) Treasury shall adopt anti-avoidance, cross-border, netting, market-maker, clearing, and derivatives rules designed to prevent double taxation and artificial migration of equivalent transactions.
(a) In addition to any tax otherwise imposed under section 4501 of the Internal Revenue Code, an additional 1 percentage point excise contribution is imposed on covered corporate stock repurchases.
(b) Receipts attributable to the additional contribution shall be deposited into the Fund.
(c) Congress states no finding as to the exact revenue yield; formal Joint Committee on Taxation scoring is required for budget enforcement.
(a) If the three-year forward resource-coverage ratio falls below 1.05, the Frontier Transactions Contribution shall increase by 0.005 percentage points for the next calendar year, not to exceed 0.10 percent.
(b) If the ratio exceeds 1.30 for three consecutive fiscal years, the Reserve equals at least 30 months of protected obligations, and endowment capitalization is on schedule, the rate shall decline by 0.005 percentage points, not below 0.01 percent.
(c) Treasury's role is ministerial; it shall publish the calculation and may not alter the statutory thresholds.
(a) Treasury and OMB shall annually certify projected dedicated receipts, Fund earnings, balances, reserves, and obligations.
(b) SPACE obligations shall be planned so dedicated resources equal at least 105 percent of projected obligations on a rolling three-year basis.
(c) If projected resources are insufficient, nonprotected expansion and new endowment transfers shall be reduced before protected NASA and DARPA floors.
(d) A temporary reduction of a protected floor may occur only after statutory automatic rate adjustments and reserve use are exhausted and shall trigger expedited congressional review.
(a) The long-run target real principal equals 50 times the certified sustainable annual SPACE distribution.
(b) Ordinary distributions from the Endowment shall not exceed 2 percent of the trailing 20-quarter average real market value after the Account reaches 25 times annual distribution.
(c) Before the target is reached, excess receipts after annual obligations and reserve requirements shall be transferred under a published capitalization schedule.
(d) The 50x target is a stewardship target and not a claim that a particular real return will persist for five centuries.
(a) The Fund shall maintain liquid, low-risk assets equal to at least 30 months of protected NASA and DARPA floor obligations after full phase-in.
(b) The Reserve may be used during recession, market disruption, revenue shortfall, disaster, war, or severe interruption to avoid destructive scientific shutdowns.
(c) Following use, reserve restoration shall take precedence over discretionary growth and new endowment capitalization.
(a) A nine-member Board shall govern the Endowment: the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of OMB, and seven presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed members serving staggered 12-year terms.
(b) Appointed members shall have expertise in public finance, long-horizon investment, risk management, institutional governance, science policy, or fiduciary administration.
(c) Investment decisions shall be fiduciary and may not reward or punish private actors for political reasons.
(a) The Board may hold Treasury securities and diversified market instruments subject to statutory diversification, fee, concentration, liquidity, conflict, and national-security rules.
(b) The Fund shall not acquire control of an operating company or use ownership rights to direct ordinary corporate policy except as necessary to protect value or comply with law.
(c) Private-market investments shall be limited to a disclosed minority share and require independent valuation and fee transparency.
(a) Every five years the Board shall publish 10-, 30-, 100-, and 500-year stochastic sustainability analyses using multiple real-return, inflation, tax-base, and program-growth scenarios.
(b) The 500-year analysis shall be identified as a resilience scenario rather than a forecast.
(a) Congress intends the Fund to be permanent but acknowledges that a future Congress may amend or repeal this Act by law.
(b) A later general provision shall not be construed to repeal a protected floor or Endowment rule unless the later law expressly identifies the section affected.
(a) There is established a National Scientific Infrastructure Authority, an executive-branch government corporation for delivery and lifecycle management of major civilian research infrastructure.
(b) The Authority may plan, design, construct, acquire, lease, modernize, maintain, and decommission scientific facilities when designated by a participating agency and funded by law.
(c) The Authority shall not select scientific research awards or displace agency ownership of scientific missions.
(a) The Authority shall be governed by a seven-member board including representatives of GSA, NASA, DOE, NSF, NIST, and two presidentially appointed infrastructure experts.
(b) Inspector General audit coverage shall be assigned by law or interagency agreement.
(c) Major projects shall use independent cost and schedule estimates before final investment decisions.
(a) GSA shall identify suitable Federal property for future laboratories, test sites, observatories, launch and landing facilities, housing, energy systems, and related infrastructure.
(b) The land bank does not itself authorize construction, environmental harm, withdrawal of protected lands, or displacement.
(c) Agencies shall prioritize compatible underused Federal property before acquiring private land unless mission need requires otherwise.
(a) SPACE campuses may integrate laboratories, offices, fabrication, test, computing, libraries, collaboration space, housing for remote or visiting personnel, childcare, food, transportation, recreation, emergency response, and resilient utilities.
(b) Residence shall not be a general condition of employment.
(c) Campuses shall be designed for interdisciplinary collaboration, hands-on prototyping, safe experimentation, accessibility, and sustainable work patterns.
(a) The Authority and agencies may operate user facilities accessible to Federal, university, nonprofit, small-business, international, and commercial researchers.
(b) Access shall be based on scientific merit, mission need, capacity, security, safety, and transparent cost-recovery rules.
(c) At least 15 percent of competitively allocable time shall be reserved for first-time, small-scale, or emerging users where technically feasible.
(a) No major facility shall receive full construction authorization without an operations, maintenance, cyber, workforce, upgrade, decommissioning, and archival plan.
(b) Agencies shall establish lifecycle reserves where predictable future decommissioning or hazardous cleanup costs are material.
(a) Agencies shall use early programmatic review, concurrent permitting, common data, and interagency schedules to reduce unnecessary delay.
(b) Nothing in this section waives substantive environmental law, historic-preservation law, tribal consultation, public participation, or judicial review.
(c) A lead agency should target completion of ordinary Federal reviews within two years where the record permits.
(a) For major Federal expansion that materially burdens local housing, roads, schools, emergency services, water, or utilities, agencies may enter cost-sharing or mitigation agreements with State, tribal, territorial, and local governments.
(b) Agreements shall not condition Federal scientific decisions on local political favoritism.
(a) Covered institutions shall report deferred maintenance by mission criticality, estimated cost, asset condition, and expected risk.
(b) Annual recapitalization plans shall be based on lifecycle need rather than arbitrary spending percentages.
(a) NASA shall maintain balanced portfolios in Earth science, planetary science, astrophysics, heliophysics, biological and physical sciences, aeronautics, space technology, human exploration, operations, planetary defense, and advanced concepts.
(b) No single human-exploration architecture may consume more than 35 percent of NASA annual authority without specific congressional approval.
(c) NASA shall maintain opportunities at small, medium, flagship, suborbital, airborne, hosted-payload, and technology-demonstration scales.
(a) NASA shall prepare a five-year workforce plan to restore critical skills and scale staffing for a 3x resource environment.
(b) Priority shall include systems engineering, project management, software, cybersecurity, mission assurance, science, procurement, facilities, launch operations, flight operations, and technical trades.
(c) NASA shall report contractor and civil-service dependency risks and identify functions for which Government technical competence must be retained.
(a) NASA shall execute a ten-year mission-critical deferred-maintenance elimination plan.
(b) Kennedy, Wallops, major test centers, deep-space communications, laboratories, ranges, and common-use utilities shall receive capacity plans tied to projected Government and commercial demand.
(c) Commercial users may pay equitable common-use infrastructure charges while scientific and small public-interest missions may receive reduced fees.
(a) NASA shall maintain rolling ten-year mission opportunity calendars by major science division.
(b) At least every five years NASA shall provide open on-ramps for scientific questions that emerged after the most recent decadal or strategic review.
(a) Exploration systems shall be modular, interoperable, evolvable, and assessed for lifecycle logistics rather than launch-only cost.
(b) NASA may reorder, replace, or terminate obsolete architectures based on safety, readiness, scientific value, cost, or international opportunity.
(c) Sunk cost alone is not a statutory reason to continue a technically inferior architecture.
(a) NASA shall maintain independent cost, schedule, and technical-readiness assessment functions for major projects.
(b) For projects above $1,000,000,000 lifecycle cost, independent estimates shall be refreshed at major design and commitment points.
(a) NASA shall maintain an Advanced Concepts Office capable of funding highly speculative mission and technology studies at low initial cost.
(b) Selection shall focus on testable assumptions, scientific plausibility, and learning value rather than near-term commercialization.
(a) NASA may use service contracts, fixed-price development, milestone agreements, hosted payloads, shared missions, and international contributions where those models allocate risk rationally.
(b) NASA shall preserve enough internal capability to remain an intelligent buyer, integrator, and safety authority.
(a) Increased resources shall primarily expand ambitious technical portfolios, program-manager capacity, performer diversity, test and validation, transition, and technical support rather than layers of approval.
(b) DARPA shall preserve compact decision chains and direct access between program managers and senior leadership.
(a) Program managers may propose programs, define technical milestones, recommend performers, allocate resources within delegated limits, terminate approaches, and redirect portfolios.
(b) Program managers shall receive contracting, legal, security, test, transition, and financial support sufficient to keep technical leadership focused on outcomes.
(a) A substantial majority of DARPA program managers shall serve fixed appointments ordinarily not exceeding four years, with limited extensions for exceptional continuity.
(b) DARPA shall actively recruit from academia, industry, government laboratories, startups, and technical operations communities.
(a) Each technical office shall maintain a rapid seed fund for experiments capable of resolving a material technical uncertainty within 18 months.
(b) Applications may use short technical proposals and simplified cost information proportionate to award size.
(a) Technical failure alone is not waste when an authorized high-risk program was competently managed, milestones were meaningful, and learning was documented.
(b) Fraud, falsification, reckless safety conduct, conflicts, and persistent control failures remain fully subject to law.
(a) At least 1.5 percent of DARPA program funding shall support replication, independent testing, adversarial evaluation, transition analysis, or red-team functions.
(b) Validation performers should be organizationally distinct from principal performers where practicable.
(a) A military service or intended recipient may decline transition, but DARPA may pursue alternative lawful Federal, commercial, standards, open-source, or allied transition paths.
(b) DARPA agreements shall preserve sufficient Government data and intellectual-property rights to prevent avoidable post-success lock-in.
(a) The Director may establish, merge, rename, or sunset technical offices with 60 days notice to Congress.
(b) Office structure shall follow technical opportunity rather than organizational permanence.
(a) The Frontier Science Network is established as a federated coordination framework and not a new super-agency.
(b) Participating institutions retain mission, personnel, property, grant, and security authorities except as expressly shared.
(a) The Council shall include NASA, DARPA, NSF, DOE, NIST, NOAA, NIH, USGS, OSTP, and other participating institutions.
(b) The Council shall coordinate shared facilities, scientific software, standards, compute, workforce, major instruments, and cross-agency moonshots.
(c) The Council may not rank individual investigator grants or override lawful peer review.
(a) The Network may establish common legal templates, security reviews, data repositories, instrument scheduling, scientific cloud services, procurement catalogs, and technical staff pools.
(b) Common services remain optional where agency-specific systems are materially better suited to mission.
(a) DOE national laboratories, NASA centers, DoD laboratories, NIST, NOAA laboratories, FFRDCs, and participating universities may enter reciprocal user and staff agreements.
(b) Standardized interagency agreements shall reduce duplicative negotiation without erasing different security or mission requirements.
(a) NIST shall receive dedicated resources for metrology, reference materials, test methods, measurement science, interoperability standards, and validation needed for frontier technologies.
(b) Standards work shall remain open, consensus-oriented, and internationally compatible where security and mission permit.
(a) The Network shall maintain a program for long-lived scientific software, workflow engines, simulation codes, repositories, and open standards.
(b) Maintenance funding may be awarded without requiring artificial novelty when continued operation produces clear scientific value.
(a) Every two years the Council shall publish a map of major facilities, instrument capacity, test ranges, compute, data assets, and known bottlenecks.
(b) Classified assets shall be addressed in a separate classified annex.
(a) Not less than 20 percent of non-NASA, non-DARPA Frontier Science Network program funding shall support investigator-led or institution-led basic research.
(b) The requirement may not be satisfied by relabeling near-term product development as basic research.
(a) A Grand Instrument Program shall support observatories, detectors, accelerators, experimental facilities, telescopes, research vessels, field networks, and instruments beyond ordinary grant scale.
(b) Project approval requires an independent science case, engineering assessment, lifecycle cost estimate, operating plan, data plan, workforce plan, and decommissioning strategy.
(a) Participating civilian agencies shall reserve a combined amount of not less than 2 percent of applicable research funding for replication, benchmark development, negative-result validation, and scientific quality infrastructure.
(b) Replication awards shall not be treated as lower-status science for career or grant evaluation.
(a) Agencies may support scientifically plausible hypotheses that lack near-term application or have low expected success probability.
(b) Review shall emphasize whether the question is important, the experiment is informative, and failure will still produce useful knowledge.
(a) The Fund may support scientific observations and archives whose value increases through decades of continuity.
(b) Termination of an irreplaceable long-duration dataset requires a continuity and archival assessment.
(a) NSF and participating agencies shall identify important fields suffering from fragile workforce, facility, instrument, or training pipelines.
(b) Temporary capacity grants may restore a field without dictating its scientific conclusions.
(a) A National Grand Challenges Board shall recommend a rotating portfolio of ambitious, measurable challenges spanning civilian and defense research.
(b) The Board shall include scientists, engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs, ethicists, public administrators, and major-facility operators.
(c) Congress or responsible agencies shall approve funding; Board recommendations are not self-executing.
(a) A moonshot shall state a concrete capability target, why ordinary programs are inadequate, intermediate milestones, failure criteria, independent validation, safety constraints, and transition options.
(b) Moonshots may pursue outcomes previously considered impractical but may not assume violation of established physical law without testable evidence.
(a) Not less than $5,000,000,000 annually in FY2025 real dollars from the Grand Challenges account shall support work with expected utility horizons longer than 20 years or applications that cannot yet be specified.
(b) Projects may include fundamental physics, new computation paradigms, radically new materials, advanced life support, extreme-environment systems, novel propulsion physics, and other lawful fields selected competitively.
(a) Individuals, small teams, nonprofits, universities, laboratories, and companies may receive concept grants up to $5,000,000 for 24 months to test high-leverage assumptions.
(b) Concept grants shall use short applications, milestone review, and fast termination when the core hypothesis fails.
(a) Agencies may offer large outcome-based prizes where performance can be objectively measured and multiple approaches should compete.
(b) Prize rules shall identify testing, safety, intellectual-property, dispute, and anti-collusion requirements before competition.
(a) Terminated moonshots shall produce technical failure reports, preserved data, and lessons learned to the maximum extent consistent with law.
(b) The purpose is to reduce future repetition of expensive dead ends.
(a) Up to 5 percent of Grand Challenges funding may support opportunities that emerge too quickly for the ordinary annual planning cycle.
(b) Wild-card awards require a written scientific rationale, conflict review, milestone plan, and public summary unless classified.
(a) NASA shall support interoperable communications, navigation, timing, power, logistics, debris monitoring, science, and emergency-support systems in cislunar space.
(b) Open interfaces and multi-vendor interoperability shall be preferred where feasible.
(a) NASA may develop surface power, mobility, communications, laboratories, resource characterization, construction demonstrations, radiation monitoring, habitation research, and logistics required for sustained lunar science.
(b) Resource-utilization experiments shall comply with applicable international obligations and avoid unnecessary harmful contamination.
(a) NASA shall maintain an evolvable Mars architecture emphasizing precursor robotics, closed-loop life support, radiation protection, entry-descent-landing, power, surface mobility, communications, autonomy, logistics, return capability, and scientific integrity.
(b) No crewed Mars launch shall occur without an independent safety and mission-readiness review transmitted to Congress.
(a) NASA shall modernize deep-space communications using optical, radio, autonomous routing, navigation, and distributed ground assets.
(b) The network shall maintain redundancy against single-point geographic, cyber, and provider failures.
(a) NASA may provide shared orbital servicing, refueling demonstrations, communications, navigation, power, payload hosting, and logistics as public or mixed-use infrastructure.
(b) Commercial users may pay cost-based fees; scientific and public-interest missions may receive reduced fees.
(a) NASA shall maintain risk-tiered planetary-protection protocols for forward and backward contamination.
(b) Sample-return missions with plausible biological risk require independent containment and emergency plans.
(a) NASA shall develop interoperable standards for docking, power, communications, cargo interfaces, propellant transfer, emergency support, and robotic servicing where common standards improve resilience.
(a) Long-lived lunar or planetary assets shall include plans for repair, replacement, waste, power, communications, environmental effects, and end-of-life disposition.
(a) NASA and NSF shall maintain a pipeline of major space- and ground-based observatories without waiting until the previous generation is near retirement before beginning successor planning.
(b) Planning shall include servicing, modularity, technology maturation, data infrastructure, and international participation.
(a) Federal agencies may coordinate electromagnetic, gravitational-wave, neutrino, cosmic-ray, and other messenger observatories.
(b) Time-domain alerts and nonproprietary event data should be rapidly interoperable.
(a) NASA, NOAA, NSF, and DoD shall maintain coordinated research from fundamental solar physics through operational space-weather forecasting.
(b) Operational forecasting shall remain sufficiently distinct from research to preserve scientific experimentation while enabling transition.
(a) NASA shall maintain recurring competed mission lines at multiple cost classes.
(b) Mission opportunities shall address terrestrial planets, giant planets, small bodies, ocean worlds, primitive bodies, and planetary systems beyond the solar system according to scientific review.
(a) NASA and participating agencies may support life-detection science, biosignature measurement, origin-of-life research, and technosignature research using scientifically reviewable methods.
(b) No scientific conclusion regarding life beyond Earth shall be prescribed by statute.
(a) NASA and NSF may study or construct observatories in space, on the Moon, or at other scientifically advantageous locations when environmental, radio-frequency, thermal, or geometric conditions justify the site.
(a) Flagship missions shall budget for archives, calibration products, software, documentation, and long-term public usability of scientific data.
(a) NASA shall maintain high-risk aeronautics programs in low-emission flight, quiet high-speed flight, vertical lift, advanced propulsion, autonomy, airspace integration, extreme efficiency, and novel aircraft structures.
(b) Full-scale demonstrators may be built where simulation cannot resolve system-level uncertainty.
(a) Civilian research may support thermal management, materials, propulsion, acoustics, atmospheric effects, safety, and air-traffic integration for high-speed and hypersonic flight.
(b) Civilian funds may not be used as a disguised substitute for classified weapons development.
(a) FAA, NASA, State, tribal, territorial, and local partners may establish controlled test corridors for autonomous and advanced aircraft.
(b) Testing shall protect uninvolved persons, privacy, noise standards, and existing airspace users.
(a) Programs may include propulsion efficiency, electric and hybrid systems, hydrogen, sustainable fuels, contrail science, lightweight structures, and operations optimization.
(a) NASA may maintain, modify, or acquire research aircraft and remotely piloted systems needed to test advanced concepts in realistic environments.
(b) Research aircraft shall receive predictable maintenance and instrument-refresh funding.
(a) FAA and NASA may establish deidentified datasets and simulation environments for air-traffic, safety, weather, autonomy, and human-factors research, subject to privacy and security rules.
(a) DOE, NSF, NASA, DARPA, and NIST shall establish a distributed reserve of advanced computing for scientific simulation, AI training and inference, validation, and data analysis.
(b) Capacity may include conventional HPC, specialized accelerators, neuromorphic systems, quantum testbeds, secure enclaves, and future architectures.
(c) Allocation shall consider scientific merit, urgency, reproducibility, national need, and absence of practical alternatives.
(a) Agencies may support AI systems for scientific inference, experiment control, theorem discovery, materials and drug discovery, simulation acceleration, autonomous laboratories, and data analysis.
(b) Results with material scientific consequences shall retain traceability to data, assumptions, code, models, and validation sufficient for appropriate review.
(a) The Fund may support foundational work in interpretability, robustness, alignment, efficiency, verification, security, agent behavior, human-AI interaction, and evaluation science.
(b) High-capability systems used in safety-critical settings shall undergo independent evaluation proportionate to risk.
(a) Programs may support quantum sensing, communications, computing, simulation, networking, materials, control, error correction, and benchmarking.
(b) Claims of quantum advantage shall be tested against strong classical baselines and independently reproducible methods.
(a) Programs may support robots for space, ocean, disaster response, manufacturing, science, medicine, agriculture, infrastructure, and hazardous environments.
(b) Systems making consequential decisions affecting persons shall include human oversight, testability, fail-safe behavior, and auditability appropriate to context.
(a) Agencies shall maintain secure identity, data-transfer, computing, storage, software-supply-chain, and incident-response systems proportionate to scientific use.
(b) Cybersecurity controls shall be tailored to data sensitivity rather than imposed uniformly on open fundamental research.
(a) The Network may support laboratories in which robotics, AI, simulation, and automated instrumentation accelerate experimental cycles.
(b) Autonomous experimentation shall preserve human responsibility for safety, research integrity, and consequential deployment decisions.
(a) Frontier compute programs shall track energy, water, cooling, utilization, hardware lifespan, and scientific output to reduce waste without imposing a fixed technological architecture.
(a) DOE and participating institutions may support fusion, advanced fission, geothermal, solar, storage, grid systems, power electronics, fuels, heat systems, and novel energy conversion.
(b) The portfolio shall include high-risk concepts and practical demonstration pathways without prescribing a single national energy technology.
(a) The program may support magnetic, inertial, magneto-inertial, alternative confinement, materials, tritium, blankets, power conversion, controls, and enabling technologies.
(b) Milestones shall distinguish scientific gain, engineering gain, plant feasibility, and commercial economics.
(a) Programs may support discovery, synthesis, characterization, scale-up, joining, repair, recycling, and qualification of structural, electronic, optical, quantum, biological, and extreme-environment materials.
(a) NIST, NSF, DOE, DARPA, and Commerce may support semiconductor process research, advanced packaging, photonics, chiplets, design tools, metrology, testbeds, and pilot manufacturing.
(b) Public facilities should support precompetitive capability and smaller entrants where private access barriers are high.
(a) The Infrastructure Authority may establish shared pilot lines for additive, subtractive, continuous, biological, microelectronic, photonic, composite, and extreme-precision manufacturing.
(b) Pilot facilities shall bridge laboratory proof and manufacturable process without guaranteeing any private company's market success.
(a) Research may support substitution, extraction science, processing, recycling, stockpile analytics, and material-efficient design for strategically important inputs.
(a) The Fund may support domestic and allied capacity for detectors, optics, cryogenics, vacuum systems, sensors, magnets, scientific electronics, and specialized components when fragile supply creates research bottlenecks.
(a) Large demonstration funding shall ordinarily follow independent evidence that the key scientific and engineering uncertainties have been reduced enough to justify scale.
(a) Programs may support synthetic biology, systems biology, biofabrication, biomaterials, computational biology, neurotechnology, diagnostics, regenerative science, and biological manufacturing consistent with applicable law.
(a) NASA and partners may research radiation, bone and muscle loss, immune change, behavioral health, circadian disruption, isolation, artificial gravity, emergency care, and autonomous medicine for remote missions.
(b) Human-subject research remains subject to informed consent and applicable protections.
(a) Programs may support air, water, food, waste, microbial, agricultural, recycling, and ecosystem technologies for remote, disaster, ocean, polar, lunar, and planetary environments.
(a) Biological work shall be assigned risk tiers based on pathogenicity, transmissibility, environmental release, host range, scale, dual-use capability, and reversibility.
(b) Higher tiers require independent biosafety, biosecurity, ethics, and legal review before funding and before material capability changes.
(a) Research involving invasive enhancement, neural data, brain-computer interfaces, or irreversible intervention shall use enhanced consent, privacy, security, and independent ethics controls.
(b) No authority in this Act permits coercive human experimentation or nonconsensual enhancement.
(a) The Infrastructure Authority may support shared fermentation, cell-culture, purification, biofabrication, analytical, and contained pilot facilities for lawful research and scale-up.
(b) Facilities shall use risk-appropriate physical and cyber safeguards.
(a) Programs may study microbial, plant, animal, and ecosystem function in extreme environments to improve understanding of life, resilience, agriculture, and planetary habitability.
(a) NASA, NOAA, USGS, NSF, and partner agencies shall maintain interoperable long-duration observations of atmosphere, oceans, land, ice, hydrology, ecosystems, geology, and natural hazards.
(b) Continuity plans shall address calibration overlap and archival preservation when time series cannot be recreated.
(a) NOAA, NSF, Navy research organizations, universities, and partners may expand deep-ocean mapping, autonomous observation, biology, chemistry, geology, acoustics, and extreme-environment engineering.
(b) Civil scientific data shall be open to the maximum extent consistent with law.
(a) NSF and partner agencies shall maintain long-term Antarctic and Arctic research logistics, stations, vessels, aircraft, communications, energy systems, and environmental protection.
(b) Major polar infrastructure shall include lifecycle and emergency-support plans suited to extreme remoteness.
(a) The Network may support high-resolution Earth-system models, attribution science, paleoclimate, impacts research, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation.
(b) Scientific modeling shall not be altered to reach a predetermined policy conclusion.
(a) Programs may support earthquake, volcano, tsunami, wildfire, severe weather, flood, drought, landslide, geomagnetic, and compound-hazard science.
(b) Research outputs should feed operational warning agencies through validated transition pathways.
(a) The United States may participate in interoperable international observing networks, open calibration standards, shared satellite data, ocean buoys, geodetic networks, and other peaceful global scientific systems.
(b) Participation shall preserve applicable security, privacy, and treaty obligations.
(a) The Infrastructure Authority may recapitalize ecological, geological, atmospheric, oceanic, agricultural, and remote field stations whose long-term records or geography provide unique scientific value.
(a) NASA shall maintain capabilities to detect, characterize, track, and assess near-Earth objects and other natural impact hazards.
(b) NASA and partners may conduct safe mitigation demonstrations with international notification and independent safety review.
(a) NASA, NOAA, NSF, DOE, DoD, and infrastructure regulators shall coordinate research and operational preparedness for severe solar and geomagnetic events.
(b) Research shall include forecasting, satellite resilience, grid effects, communications, navigation, aviation, and radiation exposure.
(a) A cross-agency program may support scientific analysis of low-probability, high-consequence natural and technological risks, including impact events, extreme solar storms, pandemics, supervolcanic events, and critical infrastructure cascades.
(b) The program shall not be used to create generalized emergency powers.
(a) The Fund may maintain emergency access to compute, communications, archives, biological repositories, instrument parts, and technical personnel needed to preserve critical research during major disruptions.
(a) Where a scientifically validated hazard materially threatens the public, agencies shall maintain protocols for rapid, accurate, nonpartisan communication of evidence, uncertainty, and recommended protective actions within existing legal authority.
(a) At least every five years, agencies shall test scientific and technical coordination for a low-probability, high-consequence scenario.
(b) Exercises shall identify missing sensors, models, decision thresholds, authorities, supply chains, and international interfaces.
(a) Competitive grants may support resilient communications, power, food systems, public-health science, emergency manufacturing, logistics, archives, and other capabilities whose value spans multiple severe hazards.
(a) NASA and partner agencies may support chemical, electric, nuclear thermal, nuclear electric, fusion, solar sail, beamed-energy, tether, in-space refueling, high-energy-density, and other physically plausible propulsion concepts.
(b) High-energy and nuclear systems require independent safety, security, and environmental review.
(a) Programs may support orbital servicing, assembly, manufacturing, repair, propellant transfer, recycling, construction, and scientific production.
(b) Government demonstrations shall use interoperable interfaces where feasible and avoid unnecessary single-vendor dependence.
(a) NASA shall maintain a long-horizon research program for probes to the outer heliosphere and interstellar medium and for enabling communications, power, propulsion, autonomy, navigation, materials, and instruments.
(b) The program may pursue demonstrators and precursor missions without implying a commitment to a crewed interstellar mission.
(a) Agencies may fund rigorous experiments on novel propulsion or energy concepts when hypotheses are physically specified, measurable, and falsifiable.
(b) Extraordinary performance claims require independent replication before major scale-up.
(a) Research may support electronics, materials, autonomy, power, archives, repair, and communication systems intended to function for decades or centuries.
(b) Programs shall explicitly study degradation, maintenance, error accumulation, and long-duration knowledge transfer.
(a) NASA may research extraction, processing, storage, and use of extraterrestrial materials for scientific and logistical purposes consistent with applicable international obligations.
(b) Demonstrations shall include contamination, debris, property, safety, and planetary-protection review.
(a) NASA may study long-lived communications, power, navigation, scientific, logistics, and emergency systems beyond cislunar space, including relay networks and autonomous depots.
(a) Missions expected to operate longer than 25 years shall include governance for scientific succession, hardware obsolescence, software preservation, public communication, and intergenerational mission stewardship.
(a) OPM shall establish a governmentwide personnel system for covered frontier institutions with direct hire, term appointments, distinguished expert appointments, market-sensitive pay, retention incentives, accelerated classification, and cross-agency mobility.
(b) The system shall include scientists, engineers, software professionals, technicians, machinists, fabricators, operators, mission controllers, acquisition professionals, safety experts, data stewards, and scientific administrators.
(a) OPM may authorize compensation above ordinary General Schedule limits for scarce technical roles, subject to aggregate public reporting, internal equity review, and conflict controls.
(b) Compensation authority shall not be limited to employees holding doctoral degrees.
(a) Agencies shall not require academic degrees when validated skills, apprenticeship, licensure, portfolio evidence, examination, or experience can establish competency.
(b) Job qualification systems shall identify the actual competencies needed rather than using degrees as administrative proxies.
(a) Career scientific and technical personnel may receive paid or partially paid sabbaticals for research, training, laboratory exchange, or field work when the agency determines a long-term mission benefit.
(a) Employees may undertake temporary assignments in universities, nonprofit laboratories, allied institutions, standards organizations, and private firms under ethics safeguards.
(b) Term-limited program leaders may receive streamlined reentry consideration for ten years after separation.
(a) Agencies shall maintain promotion and pay tracks that permit exceptional technical experts to advance without becoming people managers.
(b) Technical leaders may hold authority over architecture, standards, peer review, or safety appropriate to expertise.
(a) Agencies may provide childcare, dependent-care assistance, relocation, emergency housing, remote-site incentives, family travel for extended assignments, mental-health services, and transportation where justified by recruitment or mission need.
(a) Covered institutions shall maintain skill inventories and identify single-person or near-single-person dependencies in critical technical functions.
(b) Succession plans shall address retirement, attrition, clearance delays, and contractor concentration.
(a) OPM and covered institutions shall establish time-to-hire targets for priority technical roles and publicly report median hiring time.
(b) Security or suitability requirements may extend the target when necessary, but avoidable administrative delay shall be separately identified.
(a) Workforce plans shall account for contracting, budget, legal, safety, logistics, facilities, IT, records, communications, and administrative professionals needed to keep scientific staff productive.
(a) Agencies may use remote and hybrid work where compatible with laboratory, classified, operational, security, and team requirements.
(b) Policy shall be based on mission needs and measured performance rather than universal assumptions for all scientific roles.
(a) Covered institutions shall manage fatigue, excessive overtime, shift work, hazardous exposure, isolation, and other work conditions that can degrade safety or scientific quality.
(a) NSF, NASA, DOE, and DoD shall establish scholarships and fellowships for undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, technical, and professional education in critical scientific fields.
(b) A service track may exchange tuition and stipend support for Federal service, with hardship waivers and proportional repayment rules.
(c) A non-service track shall remain available where broad ecosystem capacity is itself the public benefit.
(a) Paid apprenticeships shall support precision machining, electronics, avionics, welding, clean-room operations, instrumentation, launch operations, laboratory safety, scientific computing, facility operations, and other critical trades.
(b) Credentials shall be competency-based and portable across participating institutions and contractors.
(a) Priority shall be given to community colleges and technical schools near Federal research centers, manufacturing clusters, launch sites, observatories, test ranges, and laboratories.
(b) Equipment and instructor grants may be paired with paid work placements.
(a) K-12 teachers may receive summer and sabbatical fellowships in Federal laboratories and scientific facilities.
(b) Federally developed classroom materials under this program shall be openly licensed.
(a) Competitive grants may support safe laboratories, instrumentation, fabrication tools, computing, teacher training, and remote facility access.
(a) Federal laboratories may support public lectures, citizen science, museum partnerships, open days, educational media, and remote instrument access where compatible with security and mission.
(a) Scholarship and fellowship programs shall track completion, placement, attrition, mentoring quality, and barriers to entry.
(b) Evaluation shall not substitute demographic targets for scientific or technical qualifications.
(a) Participating agencies shall expand paid research experiences, including placements at Federal laboratories, field stations, launch centers, user facilities, and partner universities.
(a) Workers with relevant mathematics, engineering, software, manufacturing, military, aviation, operations, or trade backgrounds may receive intensive training for frontier-science careers.
(a) Agencies may fund nonpartisan public materials explaining scientific methods, uncertainty, probability, peer review, evidence quality, and the distinction between scientific findings and policy choices.
(a) A new nonimmigrant Frontier Science Visa category is established for scientists, engineers, technical specialists, and advanced trainees sponsored by designated research institutions.
(b) Processing shall be expedited while retaining identity, security, sanctions, and export-control review.
(a) An employment-based immigrant pathway is established for individuals with extraordinary, critical, or demonstrably scarce scientific and engineering capability who will work in eligible public-interest research.
(b) Annual numerical allocations shall be additional to existing employment-based categories.
(a) Spouses and dependent children shall receive coordinated status and work authorization to the extent provided by this title.
(b) Researchers may change among eligible sponsoring institutions without restarting the full adjudication process, subject to notice and continued eligibility.
(a) Nationality, ethnicity, or country of birth alone shall not establish research-security risk.
(b) Risk determinations shall rely on access needs, conduct, affiliation, sanctions, legal obligations, undisclosed conflicts, specific threat information, and individualized evidence.
(a) Programs shall facilitate temporary and circular scientific exchange as well as permanent recruitment.
(b) International fellows may remain affiliated with home institutions where conflicts and export controls are managed.
(a) The Secretary of State may negotiate reciprocal arrangements with trusted partner states for expedited researcher travel, visiting appointments, family status, and recognition of scientific credentials.
(a) Existing emergency and humanitarian authorities may be coordinated to facilitate temporary entry of displaced scientists whose work, safety, or scientific records are endangered, subject to applicable screening.
(a) Agencies shall report processing time, retention, field distribution, security outcomes, and barriers to scientific mobility without publicly disclosing sensitive personal information.
(a) Agencies may use procurement contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, prizes, challenges, other transactions, consortia, Space Act agreements, cooperative research agreements, and other lawful instruments suited to the relationship.
(b) Instrument choice may not be used primarily to evade competition, labor, ethics, audit, safety, or data-rights requirements.
(a) Agencies shall target median award times of 45 days for small exploratory awards, 90 days for standard frontier awards, and 180 days for major complex awards.
(b) Applicants shall receive status information and an explanation when materially delayed.
(a) Covered institutions may issue simplified exploratory awards up to $2,000,000 using short technical proposals, milestone payments, and proportionate financial review.
(b) Agencies shall not impose full major-contract accounting systems on a small exploratory recipient unless risk justifies them.
(a) NASA and civilian covered institutions are authorized to use research and prototype other transactions under governmentwide safeguards comparable to mature Federal models.
(b) Agreements shall address competition, audit access proportionate to risk, cost sharing where appropriate, intellectual property, security, and transition.
(a) Agencies may fund multiple competing technical approaches and continue, merge, or terminate performers based on technical milestones.
(b) Milestones may be updated when new evidence changes the underlying technical path, with documented rationale.
(a) Where public demand can accelerate socially valuable technology, agencies may commit to future purchases conditioned on independently verified performance, price ceilings, and appropriations.
(b) No commitment may obligate funds beyond lawful budget authority.
(a) Contracting officers, agreement officers, counsel, cost analysts, and program staff supporting frontier research shall receive specialized training in uncertainty, intellectual property, prototype contracting, and technical milestone design.
(a) Unsuccessful applicants shall receive useful debriefing proportionate to award size and competition sensitivity.
(b) Agencies shall analyze recurring application friction and remove requirements that do not materially protect the public interest.
(a) Covered institutions may establish higher simplified-acquisition thresholds for specialized research components, software, scientific services, and time-sensitive test needs within limits established by statute and regulation.
(b) Competition, price reasonableness, conflicts, and anti-splitting rules remain applicable.
(a) During a declared emergency or mission-threatening equipment failure, agencies may use expedited procurement with contemporaneous documentation and after-the-fact audit.
(a) A meaningful share of frontier funding shall remain available through broad solicitations that permit unsolicited or cross-disciplinary ideas and do not require prior Federal contracting history.
(a) Covered institutions shall use structured award and milestone data sufficient to compare time-to-award, competition, cost growth, performer diversity, and transition outcomes.
(a) Covered institutions shall maintain technically staffed transition offices capable of moving successful work into Government operations, standards, licensing, manufacturing, open-source ecosystems, or commercial markets.
(a) Agencies may act as first customers for technically successful technologies that serve a lawful mission where private demand is not yet sufficient.
(b) Awards require price reasonableness, performance criteria, appropriate competition, and avoidance of unnecessary lock-in.
(a) The Infrastructure Authority and Commerce may support shared pilot facilities for manufacturing processes that are technically proven but not yet financeable at commercial scale.
(b) Shared facilities shall use transparent access, conflict, IP, security, and cost-recovery rules.
(a) Subject to separate credit-program scoring, Commerce may provide loans, guarantees, or repayable milestone finance for scale-up of SPACE-funded technologies with significant public benefit.
(b) Credit assistance shall include risk-based pricing, collateral or alternative protections, and taxpayer upside where appropriate.
(a) Agreements shall preserve commercialization incentives while ensuring Government-use rights and remedies sufficient to protect mission access.
(b) Publicly financed foundational tools should use nonexclusive or open licensing where exclusive control is unnecessary for development.
(a) Agencies shall publish model terms for research software, data, patents, hardware designs, biological materials, and standards-essential technologies.
(a) NIST shall provide rapid metrology and standards support to successful programs approaching deployment.
(b) Standards work shall begin early enough that measurement and interoperability do not become late-stage barriers.
(a) Where the Government provides exceptional scale-up support, agreements may include royalties, warrants, repayment, price protections for Government use, or other lawful public-return mechanisms proportionate to risk.
(a) When technically successful programs fail to transition, agencies shall identify whether the cause was cost, standards, procurement, manufacturing, regulation, user incentives, security, IP, market structure, or technical immaturity.
(b) Transition failure shall inform future program design rather than be treated as a purely commercial matter.
(a) Agencies may use open-source software, hardware, models, standards, or reference designs as a transition path when broad adoption and interoperability provide greater public value than exclusive licensing.
(a) Unclassified fundamental research shall carry a presumption of publication and broad scientific dissemination.
(b) Temporary review may identify classified, export-controlled, proprietary, privacy-protected, or specifically security-sensitive material.
(c) Embarrassment, controversy, criticism of a program, or inconsistency with policy is not a lawful publication restriction.
(a) Ordinary prepublication review shall conclude within 30 days.
(b) Extensions require a written legal basis, a responsible senior official, and a specific end date.
(c) Researchers may appeal an extended restriction through an official outside the original program chain.
(a) Peer-reviewed manuscripts and supporting civilian research data shall be publicly accessible without unnecessary delay, subject to lawful exceptions.
(b) Fees charged to the public for access to Federally funded research outputs should be minimized where lawful alternatives exist.
(a) Major datasets shall use documented metadata, persistent identifiers, machine-readable formats, provenance, access controls, retention schedules, and archival plans.
(b) Agencies shall distinguish data that should be open, controlled, time-embargoed, secure, or destroyed.
(a) Agencies shall preserve source code, dependencies, model weights where releasable, computational environments, and documentation needed to reproduce material results.
(b) Long-lived scientific software may receive maintenance funding independent of novelty criteria.
(a) Agencies may maintain repositories for well-designed negative or null results to reduce duplication and publication bias.
(b) Submission may be required for major failed public programs when the information can prevent repeated waste.
(a) The Archivist, Library of Congress, NIST, and covered institutions shall preserve historically and technically significant records using geographically redundant and format-migrated systems.
(b) Critical archives shall maintain offline or otherwise resilient copies.
(a) Scientific and technical records shall be reviewed for declassification on a rolling basis under existing law, with priority for material of substantial historical or scientific value.
(a) For major privately performed projects, agencies may require secure escrow of critical software, design records, calibration data, and documentation needed to preserve Government mission continuity.
(a) Federal research systems shall use persistent identifiers for grants, researchers, datasets, software, instruments, and publications where practical to improve traceability and reduce administrative duplication.
(a) Nothing in this Act narrows constitutional rights, civil-rights law, privacy law, labor law, environmental law, whistleblower protections, judicial review, or human-subject protections except where an express provision lawfully states otherwise.
(a) This Act provides no independent authority to intercept communications, track persons, conduct biometric identification, search private data, or perform domestic intelligence collection.
(b) Law-enforcement access to research data requires existing lawful authority.
(a) Agencies shall establish capability-based risk tiers for biological, cyber, AI, autonomous, nuclear, directed-energy, and other high-consequence technologies designated by rule.
(b) Controls shall be proportionate, specific, reviewable, and designed to burden ordinary open research as little as practicable.
(a) Researchers and institutions materially affected by a research-security designation may seek reconsideration before an official not responsible for the initial determination.
(b) Classified evidence may be protected while providing an unclassified statement of reasons to the maximum extent possible.
(a) No authority in this Act permits nonconsensual human experimentation.
(b) Research involving vulnerable populations, irreversible interventions, or highly sensitive neural, genetic, or biometric data shall receive enhanced independent review.
(a) High-capability AI or autonomous systems deployed in safety-critical or rights-affecting settings shall undergo evaluation, red teaming, incident reporting, and appropriate human oversight.
(b) An agency may not waive a material safety control solely to accelerate a public demonstration.
(a) Cybersecurity research may include offensive techniques in controlled environments, but this Act provides no authority for unlawful intrusion into nonconsenting systems.
(a) Nuclear propulsion, reactors, fusion systems, high-energy lasers, accelerators, and comparable hazardous systems require independent safety analysis proportionate to potential consequences.
(a) Employees and contractors may make protected disclosures concerning safety, legality, fraud, scientific integrity, censorship, or falsified technical records through lawful channels.
(b) Security classifications may not be used to conceal illegality or retaliation.
(a) For projects that may create irreversible environmental, biological, autonomous, or planetary effects, agencies shall evaluate reversibility, consent, distributional effects, failure modes, and intergenerational consequences before deployment.
(a) NIST, OSTP, and covered institutions shall maintain a governmentwide research-security framework that is risk-balanced, evidence-based, and compatible with legitimate international collaboration.
(b) Compliance requirements shall scale with sensitivity, access, and threat rather than institution size alone.
(a) Covered institutions shall maintain confidential reporting for safety, security, research-integrity, and technical incidents.
(b) Deidentified lessons shall be shared across the Network when recurrence prevention outweighs sensitivity.
(a) A designated safety or security official may temporarily stop research presenting a credible risk of imminent serious harm.
(b) A stop-work order shall receive prompt senior review and may not be used as an indefinite substitute for ordinary adjudication.
(a) Commerce, NSF, NASA, DOE, and DoD may designate regional corridors linking laboratories, universities, community colleges, manufacturers, test sites, launch sites, and local governments.
(b) Selection shall be based on capability, workforce, infrastructure, housing, partnership, geographic resilience, and technical opportunity rather than partisan allocation.
(a) Competitive grants may establish shared laboratories, clean rooms, fabrication, compute, test, and training capacity in regions lacking access to major scientific infrastructure.
(a) Agencies shall maintain simplified application, payment, IP, and reporting pathways for small businesses, startups, nonprofit laboratories, individual researchers, and first-time Federal performers.
(a) Payment terms shall not require small performers to finance unreasonable Federal working-capital needs.
(b) Advance or milestone payments may be used when risk controls are adequate.
(a) Major research-campus expansions shall assess foreseeable housing pressure and may finance workforce housing, transit, utilities, or local infrastructure needed to prevent mission-threatening displacement.
(b) Local support shall not be conditioned on exclusionary housing or discriminatory land-use practices.
(a) Programs shall support observatories, ranges, field stations, launch sites, environmental monitoring, geology, agriculture, and other science that depends on rural or remote geography.
(a) Territories and tribal governments may participate in research infrastructure, education, environmental science, astronomy, ocean science, and workforce programs on terms respecting sovereignty and local law.
(a) The Network shall avoid excessive concentration of irreplaceable scientific capability in a single geographic hazard zone, power grid, supply chain, or communications system.
(a) Major facilities may support training, quality systems, metrology, and supplier development that enable local firms to compete on technical merit for scientific work.
(a) For projects above $1,000,000,000, agencies shall publish expected local infrastructure, employment, environmental, housing, and service impacts and the Federal mitigation plan.
(a) The United States should promote peaceful, open, rights-respecting international scientific institutions capable of financing and operating major research across generations.
(b) No international body created or supported under this Act receives U.S. legislative, taxing, military, police, or judicial power absent treaty and implementing law.
(a) The President is authorized to negotiate an International SPACE Convention substantially consistent with Annex A.
(b) Any agreement requiring Senate advice and consent or implementing legislation shall follow the Constitution and applicable law.
(a) The proposed Convention should use mandatory contributions for common scientific infrastructure and governance, based primarily on gross national income or a comparable capacity measure.
(b) Optional programs should permit states to subscribe to additional missions and facilities without forcing universal participation.
(a) The Convention should include an Assembly of States, independent Scientific Council, Finance and Audit Committee, Executive Directorate, ethics and safety body, and independent external auditor.
(b) Scientific members should be selected for expertise without geographic quotas as the controlling criterion.
(a) The United States shall seek reciprocal scientific visas, credential recognition, visiting-scientist status, and family mobility for participating states.
(a) Every international megaproject shall have a charter specifying mission, contributions, host obligations, procurement, cost and schedule control, data, IP, security, safety, environmental duties, decommissioning, dispute resolution, and withdrawal.
(a) Peaceful fundamental research should be presumptively publishable while classified, export-controlled, sanctions-restricted, personal, and legitimately proprietary information remains protected.
(a) The United States position shall be that technical merit, resilience, competition, total lifecycle cost, and capacity building should ordinarily take priority over guaranteed industrial return by nationality.
(a) The Convention may establish training, facility access, instrumentation, data, and regional-center programs enabling lower-resource member states to build durable scientific capacity.
(a) International civilian facilities funded under the Convention shall be used for peaceful purposes and shall not become a mechanism for transferring classified weapons technology.
(a) The Convention may operate shared scientific data, reference materials, standards, archives, Earth and space observations, hazard warning, and open research tools as global commons.
(a) International facilities shall have host agreements addressing land, privileges, taxation, labor, emergency services, environmental duties, liability, security, and local infrastructure.
(a) A state withdrawing from a common facility shall remain responsible for already committed obligations, decommissioning shares, worker protections, and data-preservation duties defined by agreement.
(a) International disputes should proceed through negotiation, mediation, and agreed arbitration before project termination, without overriding any mandatory jurisdiction accepted by a party.
(a) The proposed Convention should convene a comprehensive review conference at least every ten years and a long-horizon stewardship review every 25 years.
(a) Portfolios shall be evaluated using scientific learning, technical capability, transition, reliability, cost, schedule, workforce, publication, reproducibility, data quality, mission impact, and safety.
(b) Publication count, patent count, or near-term revenue shall not be the dominant performance metric for frontier research.
(a) Major projects shall pass independent concept, preliminary design, critical design, integration, operational-readiness, and lifecycle reviews appropriate to project type.
(b) A review may recommend continuation, restructuring, competition, descope, pause, or termination.
(a) Major-project cost estimates shall include independent estimates and quantified schedule and technical risk.
(b) Agencies shall report confidence levels rather than presenting a single deterministic number as certainty.
(a) Nothing in this Act limits Inspector General authority.
(b) NASA OIG and DoD OIG may establish technical audit cadres in engineering, software, data, cost, and scientific integrity.
(c) Audits shall distinguish acceptable technical failure from fraud, negligence, unsafe practice, or poor controls.
(a) GAO shall conduct biennial reviews of funding integrity, workforce, infrastructure, acquisition, autonomy, project performance, fiscal sustainability, and international obligations.
(a) OMB shall maintain a machine-readable public dashboard of appropriations, obligations, outlays, awards, major facilities, workforce, project status, schedule, lifecycle cost, research outputs, and transition metrics, subject to lawful exceptions.
(a) Senior Fund, acquisition, program, and investment officials shall disclose relevant financial interests and comply with recusal and cooling-off requirements.
(b) No award, investment, or facility decision may be made to provide personal financial benefit to a participating official.
(a) Every five years an independent panel shall assess whether programs are overly dependent on particular contractors, institutions, regions, theories, or technical architectures.
(b) The review shall recommend competition, modularity, alternative suppliers, or internal capacity where concentration creates mission risk.
(a) Programs that repeatedly fail milestones without a credible revised hypothesis shall be terminated or restructured.
(b) Termination shall preserve useful data, hardware, software, samples, and technical lessons.
(a) Every five years OSTP and an independent evaluator shall assess scientific knowledge, capabilities, workforce, productivity, standards, companies, public services, and mission outcomes associated with SPACE investments.
(b) The evaluation shall distinguish measured outcomes from modeled or speculative spillovers.
(a) Every five years GAO shall identify duplicative or low-value statutory reports and recommend consolidation without reducing substantive oversight.
(a) A temporary SPACE Implementation Office is established in the Executive Office of the President for ten years.
(b) The Office shall coordinate fiscal certification, personnel, infrastructure, data systems, procurement modernization, and international implementation.
(c) The Office shall not control individual scientific award decisions.
(a) Agencies shall initiate baseline certification, workforce inventories, infrastructure triage, Fund rulemaking, interim acquisition guidance, and establishment of the Implementation Office.
(a) Within one year agencies shall issue personnel rules, launch scholarship and apprenticeship programs, publish infrastructure capacity plans, establish the public dashboard, and begin rapid-award pilots.
(a) Funding shall reach 2.5x protected floors in FY2028 and 3x floors in FY2029, subject to statutory finance rules.
(b) The Infrastructure Authority shall begin major facility projects and the Frontier Compute Reserve shall reach initial operating capability.
(a) Agencies shall mature shared user facilities, international projects, scale-up systems, grand instruments, long-duration archives, and reserve capitalization.
(a) Every five years the President shall transmit a SPACE Capacity Review covering scientific opportunity, threats, infrastructure, workforce, fiscal sustainability, institutional health, technology trends, and international conditions.
(b) Independent assessments from GAO, the Fund Board, and the Frontier Science Council shall accompany the review.
(a) Covered institutions shall maintain detailed 25-year capability and infrastructure plans.
(b) The United States shall maintain a higher-level 50-year science, exploration, and resilience plan updated every ten years.
(a) Every 20 years an independent body shall conduct 100-year scenarios addressing scientific possibility, institutional continuity, catastrophic risk, ethics, workforce, archives, and capital needs.
(a) Every 25 years Congress shall receive a nonbinding 500-year stewardship statement assessing whether current fiscal, archival, educational, environmental, infrastructure, and governance choices preserve options for distant generations.
(b) The statement shall include multiple scenarios and shall not claim predictive certainty.
(a) At least every five years covered institutions shall test continuity under scenarios including cyberattack, pandemic, natural disaster, supply disruption, power loss, war, launch-site closure, financial-market disruption, and workforce interruption.
(b) Exercises shall address experiments, biological repositories, scientific data, spacecraft command, observatories, and long-duration assets.
(a) Programs expected to last longer than ten years shall maintain succession plans for key technical knowledge and decision rationale.
(a) The SPACE Implementation Office shall terminate ten years after enactment unless reauthorized.
(b) Permanent functions shall transfer to existing agencies, the Fund Board, or the Network Council under a plan submitted to Congress not later than year nine.
(a) Congress enacts this Act pursuant to its powers to tax and spend for the general welfare; regulate interstate and foreign commerce; provide for the common defense; make rules respecting Federal property; promote the progress of science and useful arts where applicable; make laws necessary and proper to execute Federal powers; and exercise other powers granted by the Constitution.
(a) No officer may obligate or expend Federal funds under this Act except pursuant to lawful budget authority.
(b) The permanent appropriation in Title IV is intended to make deposited Fund amounts legally available for authorized purposes, subject to all limitations in this Act.
(a) Automatic contribution-rate adjustments are governed by objective statutory thresholds and do not confer open-ended taxing discretion on the Executive.
(b) Treasury may issue implementing definitions and anti-avoidance rules within the statutory tax base but may not exceed the rate corridor.
(a) Except where expressly modified, rulemaking and final agency action remain subject to the Administrative Procedure Act and other applicable review statutes.
(a) Material adverse determinations concerning debarment, program eligibility, security designation, publication restriction, or recovery of funds shall include notice and review appropriate to the interest affected and applicable law.
(a) This Act does not broadly preempt State, tribal, territorial, or local consumer, labor, environmental, privacy, safety, or professional law.
(b) Existing constitutional rules concerning Federal property and functions remain unchanged.
(a) No private right of action is created solely by this Act unless expressly stated.
(a) If any provision or application is held invalid, the remainder shall not be affected.
(b) If a dedicated revenue provision is invalidated, program authorities remain in effect but obligations are limited to other lawfully available resources until Congress supplies replacement financing.
(a) A later general appropriations provision shall not be construed to repeal or suspend a protected SPACE funding rule unless it expressly identifies the affected section.
(b) Nothing in this subsection prevents Congress from amending or repealing this Act by law.
(a) General provisions take effect 180 days after enactment.
(b) Baseline certification, implementation, rulemaking, and transition authorities take effect on enactment.
(c) Tax provisions take effect as stated in Title IV.
This model convention is provided for negotiation and adaptation. It is not self-executing United States law.
The Parties establish the International Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration Organization, known as the International SPACE Organization, as an intergovernmental organization possessing the legal personality necessary to perform its functions.
The Organization shall finance and operate peaceful frontier-science programs, shared facilities, long-horizon research, scientific mobility, and scientific-capacity development that materially benefit from multinational scale.
Membership does not transfer legislative, taxation, military, police, or judicial sovereignty to the Organization. Powers are limited to those expressly conferred by the Convention.
Membership is open to states that accept the Convention, meet financial and legal obligations, provide reciprocal scientific access consistent with security, and accept independent audit.
All members contribute to governance, common scientific infrastructure, basic data systems, training, and agreed common facilities.
Members may subscribe voluntarily to additional missions, instruments, exploration systems, regional centers, or technology programs.
Common-budget contributions shall be calculated primarily using gross national income, adjusted by minimum and maximum shares adopted by the Assembly. Optional contributions shall follow program subscriptions.
Each member has one seat. Ordinary governance decisions require a majority of members voting; extraordinary capital commitments require both a majority of members and a qualified majority of assessed contributions.
An independent Scientific Council shall evaluate scientific merit, portfolio balance, long-range opportunity, and major-facility proposals. Members are appointed for scientific eminence without nationality quotas as the controlling criterion.
A Finance and Audit Committee representing member governments shall review contributions, budget, procurement systems, reserves, risk, and lifecycle obligations.
A Director-General shall administer the Organization under a fixed term, execute the approved program, and remain accountable to the Assembly.
An independent board shall review major biological, nuclear, AI, cyber, autonomous, planetary-protection, human-subject, and irreversible environmental risks.
The Convention protects technical peer review, scientific interpretation, safety findings, lawful publication, and internal technical dissent from improper political or financial interference.
Peaceful unclassified fundamental research shall be presumptively published. Data shall be open where lawful and compatible with privacy, legitimate security, and intellectual-property constraints.
Security controls shall be capability- and conduct-based, proportionate, reviewable, and compatible with legitimate international collaboration.
Procurement shall prioritize technical merit, competition, resilience, total lifecycle cost, integrity, and capacity building. Geographic return shall not be mandatory unless specifically adopted for a program.
Every megaproject requires a charter defining purpose, cost share, host duties, schedule, technical governance, procurement, data, IP, security, safety, decommissioning, dispute resolution, and withdrawal.
Members shall seek expedited visas, credential recognition, researcher portability, and family mobility for approved scientific work.
Shared facilities shall use transparent access rules based on merit, capacity, safety, security, and cost recovery.
The Organization may finance regional centers, instrumentation, training, compute, data access, and technical education in lower-resource member states.
Project rules shall preserve commercialization incentives while ensuring member access necessary for public missions and preventing unjustified lock-in.
Organization activities shall not authorize nonconsensual human experimentation, unlawful surveillance, discrimination, forced labor, suppression of lawful scientific criticism, or evasion of host-state rights protections.
Civilian Organization facilities shall be used for peaceful scientific purposes and shall not function as a mechanism for transferring classified weapons technology.
The Organization shall preserve scientific records, data, software, and instrument documentation using redundant long-term archives.
An independent external auditor shall report annually to all members and publish unclassified findings.
Procurement fraud, bribery, undisclosed conflicts, self-dealing, and misuse of funds shall be subject to investigation, sanctions, recovery, and referral to competent national authorities.
States shall first seek negotiation, then mediation or arbitration under procedures adopted by the Assembly, without prejudice to mandatory jurisdiction otherwise accepted by the parties.
Host states and the Organization shall negotiate privileges, immunities, taxation, labor, safety, environmental, emergency, infrastructure, and local-service arrangements necessary for each facility.
A member may withdraw on not less than two years notice while remaining responsible for already committed obligations, decommissioning shares, and worker or safety duties defined by project agreements.
Amendments require the voting threshold specified by the Convention and national ratification where required by member law.
A review conference shall occur every ten years to assess scientific opportunity, governance, membership, finance, safety, and institutional effectiveness.
Every 25 years the Organization shall publish a 100-year capability assessment and 500-year stewardship scenario for infrastructure, archives, human capital, and financial continuity.
This annex is a compact model for sovereign states that wish to adopt the institutional principles of the SPACE Act without copying United States-specific constitutional or fiscal mechanisms.
The adopting state should establish a transparent, indexed minimum for public frontier-science spending measured as a real baseline, share of general expenditure, or share of national income.
The state should maintain distinct pathways for basic research, mission research, high-risk programs, standards and metrology, major facilities, and technology transition.
Scientific interpretation, peer review, safety findings, technical dissent, and publication of peaceful fundamental research should be protected from improper interference while elected institutions retain lawful policy and budget authority.
Long-duration research and capital programs should receive multi-year or no-year funding where constitutional budget law permits.
The state may create an independently audited science endowment with conservative payouts, public asset-allocation rules, fiduciary duties, and conflict safeguards.
A professional capital-delivery body may build and maintain laboratories, observatories, test sites, compute, scientific vessels, field stations, and shared manufacturing assets.
The framework should include scientists, engineers, technicians, trades, operators, acquisition specialists, educators, safety staff, software professionals, and research administrators.
Scholarships, apprenticeships, teacher fellowships, community colleges, universities, and public laboratories should be connected through paid training and facility access.
Visa and credential policy should enable legitimate scientific exchange while using risk-based security review.
Controls should be based on capability, access, conduct, affiliation, sanctions, and specific threat information rather than nationality proxies.
Peaceful fundamental research should be presumptively publishable and supported by interoperable data, reproducible methods, and durable software.
The state should provide prizes, prototype contracts, test access, standards, first-customer procurement, licensing, scale-up facilities, and public-return mechanisms.
Scientific authorities should not create independent surveillance, censorship, coercive experimentation, or rights-avoidance powers.
Scientific failure should be distinguished from fraud, corruption, unsafe practice, and mismanagement.
Every five years the state should review capacity; every 20-25 years it should conduct century-scale scenarios and long-horizon stewardship analysis.
This fiscal note is a legislative-design estimate, not an official CBO or Joint Committee on Taxation score. Amounts are constant FY2025 dollars unless otherwise specified.
| Window | Illustrative gross authority | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | $154.9B | Simple constant-dollar authority before growth and capitalization timing |
| 5 years | $774.4B | Simple constant-dollar authority before growth and capitalization timing |
| 10 years | $1.55T | Simple constant-dollar authority before growth and capitalization timing |
| 30 years | $4.65T | Simple constant-dollar authority before growth and capitalization timing |
| 500 years | $77.44T | Illustrative arithmetic only |
Illustrative annual authority at full implementation is $154.874 billion. A 50x endowment target would be about $7.744 trillion. A 2 percent ordinary real payout is deliberately conservative, but no statute can guarantee future real returns.
• Primary dedicated receipt: a 0.04 percent Frontier Transactions Contribution on a broad secondary-market base, with an automatic statutory corridor of 0.01-0.10 percent.
• Secondary dedicated receipt: an additional one-percentage-point excise contribution on covered corporate stock repurchases.
• Supplemental receipts: Federal royalties designated by law, authorized user fees, recoveries, international reimbursements, gifts, and investment earnings.
• Stabilizer: a 30-month reserve for protected NASA and DARPA obligations.
• Long-run capital: a 50x Endowment target, capitalized only after current obligations and reserve requirements.
CBO's December 2024 financial-transactions option estimated that a 0.01 percent tax would reduce deficits by about $296.8 billion over 2025-2034 after related revenue effects. CBO's August 2026 excise-tax report states that the existing 1 percent corporate stock-repurchase excise tax is one of the largest current Federal excise taxes, with CBO projecting roughly $9 billion per year on average over the next decade. These are benchmarks only; the combined SPACE package requires formal scoring because revenue is not linearly scalable.
| Scenario | Statutory response |
|---|---|
| Base | Three-year ramp reaches full protected floors by FY2029; infrastructure and workforce accounts grow as execution capacity is certified. |
| High construction inflation | Delay lower-priority facilities, use shared user facilities, phase projects, preserve maintenance, and increase independent cost review. |
| Skilled labor shortage | Increase apprenticeship, scientific pay, mobility, university partnerships, and automation before increasing project count. |
| Revenue underperformance | Automatic contribution-rate step, reserve use, pause new endowment transfers, then reduce nonprotected program growth. |
| Market disruption | Reserve finances protected obligations while transaction receipts fall; rate changes occur only under the statutory schedule. |
| Strong receipts and returns | Build reserve and Endowment before expanding recurring commitments beyond the statutory base. |
• Transaction-tax effects on trading volume, liquidity, spreads, asset values, derivatives substitution, location of trading, and income-tax receipts.
• Indirect burden on retirement savers, pension funds, mutual funds, market makers, and long-horizon investors.
• Behavioral response to an additional stock-repurchase contribution, including dividends and corporate investment.
• Construction and scientific-labor inflation during rapid capacity growth.
• Private R&D crowd-in from public infrastructure, data, procurement, and human capital, and possible crowd-out in tight technical labor markets.
• Long-run productivity spillovers, which should be reported separately from conventional score unless official methodology incorporates them.
| Period | Lead entities | Required actions |
|---|---|---|
| 0-90 days | OMB; Treasury; NASA; DoD; OPM; OSTP | Baseline certification; Fund implementation; workforce inventory; infrastructure triage; interim acquisition guidance; Implementation Office. |
| 3-6 months | OPM; Treasury; GSA; NSF; DOE; NIST | Scientific personnel rules; tax regulations; Infrastructure Authority setup; risk-tier draft; shared-facility inventory. |
| 6-12 months | NASA; DARPA; NSF; DOE; Commerce | First hiring surge; apprenticeship and scholar programs; compute reserve procurement; first campus designs; public dashboard. |
| Year 2 | All covered institutions | 2.5x protected funding phase; rapid-award standards; shared test and fabrication nodes; initial grand challenges. |
| Year 3 | NASA; DARPA; Fund Board | 3x protected floors; reserve buildout; first independent portfolio and infrastructure reviews. |
| Years 4-5 | Infrastructure Authority; Network Council | Grand instruments; user facilities; scale-up lines; software infrastructure; regional corridors; international megaproject charters. |
| Years 6-10 | All covered institutions | Mature shared infrastructure; endowment capitalization; scientific mobility system; complete first major adaptive review cycle. |
| Every 5 years | President; GAO; independent councils | SPACE Capacity Review and institutional health review. |
| Every 20-25 years | Independent body; Congress | 100-year scenarios and 500-year stewardship statement. |
| Entity | Core responsibility |
|---|---|
| NASA | Civil space science, aeronautics, exploration, planetary defense, deep-space systems, and common space infrastructure. |
| DARPA | High-risk national-security R&D, rapid program management, technical disruption, validation, and transition. |
| NSF | Investigator-led basic research, research infrastructure, education, and cross-disciplinary science. |
| DOE and national laboratories | Large-scale science, energy, nuclear, computing, materials, major facilities, and laboratory networks. |
| NIST | Metrology, standards, benchmarking, measurement science, and research-security guidance. |
| NOAA and USGS | Earth, ocean, atmosphere, hazards, geoscience, and long-duration public observations. |
| OPM | Special scientific personnel system. |
| Treasury and Fund Board | Dedicated receipts, reserves, endowment, fiduciary governance, and fiscal certification. |
| Infrastructure Authority | Capital delivery and lifecycle management. |
| OMB and Implementation Office | Execution, fiscal controls, data systems, public dashboard, and coordination. |
| GAO and Inspectors General | Independent audit, performance review, fraud and control oversight. |
| State and Homeland Security | International convention, scientific mobility, visas, sanctions, and security coordination. |
Taxing and Spending Powers
The central program and dedicated-revenue mechanisms rest on Congress's taxing and spending powers. Permanent Fund language should be treated as an appropriation of deposited amounts, subject to later amendment or repeal.
Appropriations Clause
No agency may spend merely because the Act states a policy goal. The draft distinguishes authorizations, permanently available Fund amounts, and other lawfully available budget authority.
Future Congresses
No ordinary statute can bind Congress for 500 years. The Act expressly recognizes later amendment and treats 500 years as a rolling stewardship horizon.
Nondelegation
The financial-transactions contribution adjusts mechanically within a congressionally defined corridor and according to statutory coverage ratios, reducing open-ended delegation concerns.
Executive supervision
The NASA Administrator receives a term but no for-cause removal protection. Scientific councils advise and review but do not exercise final sovereign power over appropriations or executive missions.
Infrastructure Authority
The government corporation is limited to capital delivery and lifecycle management and does not receive independent taxing or research-award power.
First Amendment
Publication protections are viewpoint-neutral. Restrictions require specific legal interests such as classification, export control, privacy, security, or legitimate proprietary rights.
Due process
Security classifications, debarment, publication restrictions, and adverse eligibility determinations receive notice and review appropriate to existing law.
Equal protection
Research security may rely on individualized risk, affiliation, access, sanctions, and conduct but not ancestry or nationality as the sole proxy for threat.
Privacy
The Act expressly creates no independent surveillance authority and requires minimization for sensitive research data.
Human subjects
No provision displaces informed-consent or research-subject protections. Higher-risk neurotechnology and irreversible interventions receive enhanced review.
Federalism
The draft avoids blanket preemption and uses ordinary Federal property, procurement, grant, and supremacy principles.
International law
The model Convention is negotiating text only. U.S. participation remains subject to the Treaty Clause and any implementing legislation required by domestic law.
Fiscal severability
If a dedicated revenue provision is invalidated, program authorities continue only to the extent other lawful resources exist.
Titles I-II
Convert the Act into a measurable national funding compact. NASA and DARPA remain separately protected while complementary capacity grows around them.
Title III
Creates a fuller autonomy charter protecting scientific judgment, dissent, peer review, integrity, and publication while preserving elected policy authority and nonwaivable law.
Title IV
Separates current operations, stabilization, and intergenerational capital. The automatic contribution rule is more disciplined than broad executive rate discretion.
Title V
Treats research space as a system: land, lifecycle cost, maintenance, local infrastructure, utilities, environmental review, remote-site housing, and user access.
Titles VI-VII
Scale NASA and DARPA according to their different institutional logics. NASA receives mission, project, facility, and workforce architecture; DARPA receives program-manager, rapid experimentation, validation, failure-tolerance, and transition protections.
Titles VIII-IX
Protect basic science, metrology, shared facilities, grand instruments, scientific software, replication, and long-duration observation.
Title X
Creates a legal home for ideas that ordinary annual metrics systematically underfund while retaining testability, milestones, validation, and termination discipline.
Titles XI-XIX
Translate far-reaching human ambitions into lawful research portfolios spanning deep space, life-detection science, advanced flight, AI, quantum, fusion, biotechnology, Earth systems, planetary defense, novel propulsion, and interstellar precursors.
Titles XX-XXII
Treat human capital as infrastructure. The Act covers technicians and trades as seriously as advanced-degree scientists and combines domestic education with lawful international mobility.
Titles XXIII-XXIV
Create an end-to-end path from small experiment to prototype, test, standards, first customer, pilot manufacturing, scale-up finance, licensing, and public return.
Title XXV
Treats data, software, archives, negative results, persistent identifiers, and reproducibility as infrastructure.
Title XXVI
Builds explicit safety and rights boundaries around powerful research and denies any implied surveillance or coercive-experimentation authority.
Title XXVII
Adds regional capacity and small-performer access without turning scientific allocation into geographic patronage.
Title XXVIII and Annexes A-B
Make global adoption concrete by supplying both a model intergovernmental convention and a model national implementation law.
Title XXIX
Strengthens project control, independent cost estimation, anti-capture review, benefit measurement, and termination discipline while preserving research failure tolerance.
Titles XXX-XXXI
Create the implementation clock, adaptive governance, continuity regime, constitutional basis, judicial-review rules, severability, and express non-entrenchment.
NASA FY2025 baseline
NASA, FY 2025 Agency Financial Report, reporting $24.838 billion of discretionary FY2025 appropriations. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/fy25-afr-final-tagged.pdf
NASA major projects and workforce
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-108556, NASA: Assessments of Major Projects, July 23, 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108556
NASA launch infrastructure
NASA Office of Inspector General, June 22, 2026, launch-infrastructure assessment. https://oig.nasa.gov/news/nasas-aging-launch-infrastructure-faces-capacity-limits-amid-growing-mission-demands/
NASA infrastructure resilience
NASA Office of Inspector General, IG-25-008, NASA's Approach to Infrastructure and Operational Resilience. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/final-report-ig-25-008-nasas-approach-to-infrastructure-and-operational-resilience.pdf
DARPA operating model
DARPA, Program Managers and careers materials. https://www.darpa.mil/about/program-managers ; https://www.darpa.mil/careers/program-manager
DARPA rapid experimentation
DARPA, Disruptioneering: Streamlining the Process of Scientific Discovery. https://www.darpa.mil/news/2017/disruptioneering
U.S. science and engineering system
National Science Board / NCSES, The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2026. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsbsep20261
Research security
NIST, Safeguarding International Science: Research Security Framework, 2025. https://www.nist.gov/publications/safeguarding-international-science-research-security-framework-0
Financial-transactions benchmark
Congressional Budget Office, Impose a Tax on Financial Transactions, December 12, 2024. https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/60966
Federal excise-tax benchmark
Congressional Budget Office, Federal Excise Tax Revenues, August 2026. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61945
ESA contribution model
European Space Agency, Funding / ESA Facts. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Funding
CERN governance model
CERN, Our Governance. https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/
Federal appropriations principles
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Principles of Federal Appropriations Law. https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/red-book
Constitutional materials
Congress.gov Constitution Annotated. https://constitution.congress.gov/
| Quality area | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Consistency | NASA and DARPA floors, network accounts, fiscal note, Fund structure, reserve, and 50x endowment target use a common FY2025 real-dollar framework. |
| Authority | Program authorities identify responsible agencies and constitutional bases. International provisions remain subject to treaty and implementing-law requirements. |
| Constitutional risk | Primary risks are permanent finance, tax-base design, government-corporation appointments, autonomy boundaries, immigration changes, and any effort to insulate funds from future Congresses. The draft narrows rather than denies those risks. |
| Enforceability | Major duties use mandatory language, named entities, time limits, review, reporting, and judicial-review savings. |
| Fiscal credibility | The Act uses dedicated receipts, reserves, and automatic adjustment instead of an unsupported general-fund promise. Exact sufficiency requires CBO/JCT scoring. |
| Implementation risk | The central risk is absorptive capacity: people, contracting, facilities, and supply chains may scale more slowly than money. The three-year ramp and execution-capacity review are safeguards. |
| Scientific risk | Failure is legitimate where the science is competent and learning is preserved; fraud, falsification, unsafe practice, and indefinite continuation after negative evidence are not protected. |
| Civil liberties | The draft withholds independent surveillance authority, protects publication and dissent, rejects nationality as a sole security proxy, and preserves applicable rights law. |
| Global transferability | The international model is separate from U.S.-specific fiscal and constitutional mechanisms and can be adapted to different forms of government. |
• Official CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation score of the combined transaction and stock-repurchase revenue package.
• Final FY2025 DARPA enacted baseline using Department of Defense execution tables.
• Whether the Infrastructure Authority should remain a government corporation, become an agency component, or operate as a multi-agency revolving fund.
• Whether Congress wants additional institution-specific floors for NSF, DOE Office of Science, NIST, NOAA, ARPA-E, ARPA-H, or selected national laboratories.
• Whether the Frontier Science Visa should be numerically unlimited for Federal-sponsored researchers or subject to a statutory annual cap.
• Whether the 35 percent NASA single-architecture cap should be a fixed cap, waiverable threshold, or reporting trigger.
• Whether public-return mechanisms should be mandatory above a defined scale of Federal commercialization support.
• How the model International SPACE Convention should treat sanctioned states, armed conflict, severe corruption findings, or repeated violations of scientific-access commitments.
The SPACE Act deliberately distributes benefits, obligations, and oversight across a large ecosystem rather than treating science policy as a transfer to two agencies. This annex identifies the principal stakeholders, their likely interests, and the statutory mechanisms intended to manage those incentives.
| Stakeholder | Primary benefit | Principal concern | SPACE Act response |
|---|---|---|---|
| NASA and its workforce | Stable 3x real funding floor; facilities renewal; technical workforce growth; long-horizon mission continuity. | Rapid scaling can create acquisition, workforce, and construction bottlenecks. | Three-year ramp; execution-capacity plans; independent cost review; lifecycle infrastructure funding. |
| DARPA and defense research performers | Larger high-risk portfolio; stronger program-manager support; faster experiments; more transition routes. | Headquarters growth or compliance layers could dilute the DARPA model. | 70% technical-program floor; term-limited PM model; rapid seed funds; failure-tolerant portfolio oversight. |
| NSF, DOE, NIST, NOAA, national laboratories, and other science agencies | Shared facilities, basic-research support, compute, metrology, scientific software, and cross-agency programs. | NASA/DARPA expansion could otherwise pull talent and capital away from basic science. | Frontier Science Network and separate $25B illustrative complementary account. |
| Universities and nonprofit research institutions | Expanded grants, user-facility access, fellowships, shared instruments, and open science. | Administrative burden and security rules can consume research time. | Administrative-waiver authority, proportionate research security, standard agreements, reporting simplification. |
| Scientists and engineers | Greater research opportunity, pay flexibility, technical career paths, dissent protections, mobility. | Political interference, unstable funding, or managerial promotion pressure. | Scientific autonomy charter, technical leadership track, publication protections, market-sensitive pay. |
| Technicians, machinists, fabricators, operators, and skilled trades | Large apprenticeship network, competency-based hiring, portable credentials, technical advancement. | Science policy often underinvests in non-degree technical roles. | No-degree-inflation rule; apprenticeships; technician-inclusive personnel system. |
| Small businesses and first-time performers | Simplified awards, milestone payments, user facilities, test access, first-customer procurement. | Cash-flow burden, complex IP terms, and incumbent lock-in. | Working-capital protection, model licenses, short-form awards, open solicitations, anti-capture review. |
| Large aerospace, defense, technology, and industrial contractors | Larger project pipeline and shared infrastructure. | Concentration may create vendor dependence or political capture. | Competition, modularity, data rights, independent estimates, anti-capture reviews, alternate transition paths. |
| State, tribal, territorial, and local governments | Research campuses, workforce development, infrastructure investment, regional science corridors. | Housing pressure, utility load, displacement, traffic, and service costs. | Impact assessments, local infrastructure agreements, anti-displacement planning, tribal sovereignty provisions. |
| Workers and organized labor | Expanded skilled employment and training demand. | Fast-track procurement or campus construction could be used to erode ordinary labor protections. | Express nonwaiver of labor law; ordinary worker protections remain applicable. |
| Civil-liberties, privacy, and research-ethics communities | Explicit rights safeguards and appeal mechanisms. | Powerful AI, biotech, cyber, neural, and surveillance-adjacent research can produce rights risks. | No independent surveillance authority; human-subject protections; risk-tier review; security appeals; whistleblower protection. |
| National-security and research-security officials | More technical capability, secure facilities, export-control and risk-management resources. | Open science and global mobility may expose sensitive capabilities. | Capability-based risk tiers, sanctions/export-control savings clauses, classified channels, individualized security review. |
| Taxpayers and financial-market participants | Potential long-run spillovers from science, infrastructure, productivity, resilience, and technology. | Dedicated transaction and repurchase contributions impose economic costs and behavioral effects. | Automatic rate corridor, formal JCT/CBO scoring requirement, no-net-deficit certification, reserve rules, public audits. |
| International scientific partners | Access to shared megaprojects, facilities, talent mobility, data, and common standards. | Sovereignty, unequal contributions, procurement access, and security disputes. | Model Convention with limited delegated powers, contribution formula, optional programs, dispute resolution, withdrawal rules. |
| Future generations | Inherited laboratories, archives, institutions, knowledge, and financial capital. | Current generations could overconsume the Fund or create brittle infrastructure. | 50x endowment target, 2% payout ceiling, knowledge preservation, lifecycle reserves, 100-year scenarios, 500-year stewardship statements. |
• The Act does not promise equal geographic spending. Scientific merit, mission need, resilience, and lifecycle value remain primary, while regional-capacity programs reduce structural access barriers.
• The Act is intentionally degree-neutral for many technical jobs. Scientific excellence requires laboratories full of people who can design, build, operate, repair, measure, validate, and document, not only advanced-degree researchers.
• The dedicated revenue system is not treated as distributionally neutral. Treasury, CBO, and JCT analysis is required to examine incidence on households, retirement accounts, liquidity providers, businesses, and asset values before and during implementation.
• International participation is reciprocal rather than unconditional. Open science is preserved where lawful, while classified, export-controlled, sanctions-restricted, proprietary, and sensitive personal information remain protected.
The SPACE Act is a proposal to make frontier science a permanent public capability rather than something rebuilt every budget cycle. It gives NASA and DARPA much more money, but it also finances the laboratories, people, compute, manufacturing, safety systems, basic research, archives, and international institutions required to use that money responsibly.
What does SPACE stand for?
Scientific Progress, Autonomy, Capacity, and Exploration.
Does the bill literally fund NASA and DARPA for 500 years?
No present Congress can make an ordinary law unrepealable for five centuries. The Act instead creates permanent funding machinery, reserves, an intergenerational endowment target, knowledge-preservation duties, and recurring long-range reviews intended to keep the system viable over a rolling 500-year horizon.
How much would NASA receive?
After a three-year ramp, NASA receives at least three times its certified FY2025 discretionary baseline in real dollars. Using the current planning baseline of $24.838 billion, the planning floor is $74.514 billion in FY2025 purchasing power.
How much would DARPA receive?
After the same ramp, DARPA receives at least three times its certified FY2025 enacted RDT&E baseline in real dollars. The draft uses $4.120 billion as a planning baseline until formal certification.
Why fund agencies besides NASA and DARPA?
Because a larger NASA and DARPA cannot operate in a vacuum. Their success depends on universities, basic science, DOE laboratories, standards, scientific software, skilled trades, computing, manufacturing, instruments, and long-term talent pipelines.
Does the bill just create bigger bureaucracies?
It is drafted specifically to avoid that outcome. DARPA receives a technical-program spending floor and program-manager protections. NASA receives execution-capacity rules. Shared facilities and services are used where useful, and the temporary implementation office sunsets after ten years.
What happens to projects that fail?
Technical failure can be a legitimate result in high-risk research. Fraud, falsification, unsafe conduct, conflicts, and persistent mismanagement are not protected. Failed programs must preserve useful data and lessons so later researchers do not blindly repeat them.
Does the Act fund truly speculative science?
Yes, through a Far-Horizon Research Account and rapid concept grants, but speculative work still needs a testable scientific rationale, measurable questions, milestones, safety controls, and independent replication before large-scale expansion.
How is the Act funded?
The draft uses a dedicated financial-transactions contribution, an additional stock-repurchase contribution, royalties and user fees where authorized, investment earnings, and other appropriated resources. Rates and program growth are constrained by coverage, reserve, and no-net-deficit rules. The package still requires formal CBO and JCT scoring.
What is the SPACE Future Fund?
It is the long-term financing structure. It contains operating resources, a stabilization reserve, infrastructure resources, and an intergenerational endowment account.
Why a 50-times annual-spending endowment target?
A 50x target corresponds to a conservative 2 percent ordinary annual real distribution ceiling. It is designed to preserve capital through many economic environments, not to claim that a specific return is guaranteed.
Does this weaken safety rules to move faster?
No. The Act permits agencies to waive unnecessary internal administration, but it expressly makes civil rights, labor protections, environmental law, human-subject rules, biosafety, nuclear safety, export controls, sanctions, classified-information rules, and anti-fraud protections nonwaivable.
Does this give agencies new domestic surveillance powers?
No. The Act expressly creates no independent authority to intercept communications, track people, perform biometric identification, search private data, or conduct domestic intelligence collection.
What about AI, biotechnology, cyber research, or nuclear systems?
Those fields are included because they are central to frontier science, but higher-risk work receives capability-based safety, security, ethics, and legal review. Consequential AI and autonomous systems also receive evaluation, red teaming, and appropriate human oversight.
Does the bill force scientists to reach particular conclusions?
No. The scientific-autonomy provisions prohibit altering scientific results, safety findings, peer-review scores, or technical conclusions for partisan, personal, retaliatory, or financial reasons.
Does this create a world government?
No. The international framework is a model scientific convention. It does not transfer taxation, military, police, legislative, or judicial sovereignty. U.S. participation remains subject to the Constitution, treaties, and implementing legislation.
Can countries with smaller economies participate?
Yes. The model convention combines economic-capacity-based common contributions, optional programs, regional scientific centers, training, facility access, and capacity-building measures.
What would success look like?
Not merely more launches or patents. Success would include stronger basic science, faster experiments, healthier facilities, deeper technical workforces, reproducible research, major new capabilities, successful and unsuccessful moonshots that genuinely teach us something, technologies that transition into useful systems, and institutions durable enough to keep discovering across generations.
