Goodbye, Richard Shelby, and thanks for all the pork

Every other year, celebrities from the aerospace community gather in France for the famous Paris Air Show, the largest aerospace exhibition in the world. The show offers visitors the chance to see new technology and the opportunity to mix and mingle.

For the leaders of the largest and most powerful aerospace companies in the world, there is also a chance to kiss the ring. This was to take place on the one night of the Paris Air Show, at which the Alabama Legislative Delegation leased the top floor of the Eiffel Tower for a reception to receive aerospace dignitaries.

The main attraction atop the historic tower was a US Senator, Richard Shelby. The CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Dynetics, and other industrial companies came to meet Shelby, to see and be seen, and to show love to the state of Alabama. As chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee in the US Senate, Shelby’s voice was God’s when it came to funding US defense and civilian space contracts.

Now that era has come to an end, as Tuesday was Shelby’s last day as a U.S. Senator. His departure will shake up space policy in ways that are hard to predict.

Seniority and space policy

Shelby was an Alabama senator for nearly four decades. He started out as a Democrat and then changed parties to become a Republican in 1994. But his jam was never partisan. Shelby favored dealmaking and working with legislators in both parties to fund the government in general and its priorities in particular. And over the years, Shelby brought the bacon to Alabama, landing big contracts to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, and big companies that agreed to do business in Alabama.

For the past decade, Shelby has been arguably the most influential U.S. government official when it came to space policy, dictating NASA’s continued development of the Space Launch System and focusing on an Apollo-like plan to return to the Moon. He did this over the past decade by spending more money on the SLS missile program, which was based at Marshall, than NASA requested each year. He also held the lead in 2019 when NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggested that due to delays in the rocket’s development, it might be better to launch the Orion spacecraft on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

After this hearing, Shelby was furious. He privately dressed Bridenstine after the administrator’s public remarks. Shelby was upset at both the potential sideline of the SLS vehicle and the fact that no one at NASA had bothered to tell him about Bridenstine’s comments beforehand. A few weeks later, at a hearing before Shelby’s committee, Bridenstine was brought back into line. The video is worth watching to fully understand the power dynamics at play.