Mark Whittington has a useful set of recommendations on space policy for the next president. I could nitpick some of it, but there's actually little with which I disagree. But I think he missed one: reform ITAR.

Link?

Picky, picky, picky...

Fixed now.

Question, one of the points/prizes in the article was about spacesuit gloves. The way I understand the problem is that it is very tiring using your hands when the gloves are (a) inflated (b) semi-armored. Why can't you have a second set of gloves, say connected below the wrist joint, zipped up so they are normally internal, that are unarmored and very tight to provide the required external pressure without an air bubble?

That way when you really need to manipulate something you pull your hand out of the standard glove (I'm assuming it's a lose fit with the air and all) and slide it into the second pair. Unzip and push the second pair out through the sleave. Repeat for the second glove. Now you've got close on manipulation abilities. If the tight-fiting gloves pop you pull them back into the sleave, zip them up tight, and return to the standard gloves.

Is the idea of really tight gloves helping with the pressure an unproven science fiction concept? Is the wrist connector simply two tight to pull your arm through?

ITAR modification and the Outer Space Treaty look like low lying fruit to me. In addition to ITAR's well-known harmful effects on numerous industries, it's the largest Federal restriction on academic speech. We need to come up with a sane policy, one that doesn't sacrifice the US's future for some vague security goals.

The Outer Space Treaty sounds like a lengthy bit of negotiation. The only sticking points would probably be militarization of space (which is allowed to some extent by the treaty, but the US military would probably want to loosen those restrictions) and how to divvy up the spoils. If some form of private ownership is allowed, then who gets paid when someone buys or acquires a property right? I think it'd be better to negotiate now while the US doesn't have a large stake (so as to minimize the extortion that other parties might try).

IMHO neither of these require a substantial expenditure of capital either political or economic IMHO.

I'm involved in aerospace research, and ITAR has made our work much more difficult. We’re not free to submit paper to conferences anymore; all of our written work has to go through a ridiculous review process—usually reviewer who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of our research. Personally, I would be ecstatic if ITAR were to go away.