Bob Zimmerman listened to it, so you don’t have to. It was pretty uninspiring, at least to anyone who knows what’s going on.

[Update a few minutes later]

Keith Cowing has a word cloud of the speech.

[Update a few more minutes later]

And more from Loren Grush:

it was a speech with very little substance. There were many anecdotes about the US’s past achievements in space, Pence argued that recent administrations had failed to “match the spirit of the American people” when it came to creating space policy. Multiple times he insisted that Trump would open “a new era of American space leadership.” But the most recent presidential budget request calls for cutting NASA’s funding, as well as canceling some of the agency’s offices and programs. Space is expensive. How does Pence plan to match our ambitions with our missions if there isn’t a detailed money plan?

So, six months into the Trump administration, NASA doesn’t have any space policy priorities or definitive leadership. NASA administrators are often instrumental in steering the direction of the space agency, and without one, the agency will lack a strategy for how to move forward. This is now the longest amount of time NASA has been without a new permanent administrator; the record was previously held by President Richard Nixon, who took 164 days after his inauguration to fill the position, according to the Planetary Society. NASA’s current acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, who took over temporarily when Trump was inaugurated, has now served longer than that. And there’s no indication when a new administrator will be named.

“Depending on the details, this backwards speech could signal a backwards space policy, meaning rolling back the progress that’s being made instead of building on the commercial space policies that Reagan started and Obama continued,” says Larson.

I have no particular expectations about civil space from Trump. But I’m happy that at least milspace seems to be undergoing reform.