Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Planetary Radio Special Feature: NASA Unveils Its Proposed FY2015 Budget

Episode Date: March 5, 2014

NASA unveiled its 2015 budget plans in a March 4 media briefing. Minutes later, Planetary Radio host Mat Kaplan got an enlightening and engaging analysis from Planetary Society Director of Advocacy Casey Dreier. You’ll hear about the winners, the losers, and the uncertain futures of many NASA initiatives and missions.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a special conversation affiliated with Planetary Radio, but really there was so much to talk about regarding the NASA budget plans for fiscal year 2015 that we decided to have a special conversation with Casey Dreyer. Casey, who is the Director of Advocacy, a very effective one, I might say, for the Planetary Society. And we are speaking, Casey, not long after a press briefing and the revelation of a lot of documents about this budget by NASA. And that press briefing starred who else? The NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden. First of all, welcome. Thanks, Matt. It's good to be on a special episode of Planetary Radio. Yeah, we haven't really done this kind of thing before.

So folks out there, listeners, please do let us know what you think of a special report like this. It was so interesting that it started with the administrator, Charlie Bolden, sort of addressing the geopolitical situation. And he was saying, yes, we're funding these things that are going to help us stop depending on Russia. And nobody mentioned the Ukraine, but I think it was implied. Yeah, well, it certainly becomes suddenly much more clarified and important that we are depending on Russia to launch all American astronauts into space at the moment. And so far, it's been working great. But no one really planned on Russia going into Crimea and kind of causing all this trouble with the Ukraine.

And it does, again, really crystallize that when you have other countries launching your astronauts, you depend on good relations with those other countries. Bolden did make sure to clarify, and I should note that we're recording this on Tuesday, March 4th, so this could be entirely out of date in a couple of days. It's moving faster. We're recording this on Tuesday, March 4th, so this could be entirely out of date in a couple of days. It's moving fast. But NASA Administrator Bolden did clarify, and he stated that nothing in their relationship has changed.

And that actually, you know, it reminded me is that this is one of the great advantages of the space program, is that even when you have larger geopolitical standoffs, and this goes back to the Soviet Union, space unites people and unites nations. And this goes back to the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous in the 1970s. It's one of the reasons that the International Space Station was as successful as it was. That was the first time we had a major operational initiative with the Russians after the Cold War ended. And what that does, and this goes back even to the scientific community, it allows some sort of back channel and cooperation to occur

separate from the larger kind of military posturing. So I see this as a great example of how even while parts of our governments can be standing off, we can still be united into launching each other into space for a far grander adventure. Very interesting that Bolden even mentioned talk of nominating the International Space Station for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah. I don't know. Can an inanimate object win? I'd love to see it. I don't think it's happened yet.

I suppose maybe in 20 years it'll be a robot. Yeah. It needs to become self-aware, I think. All right, let's get to the actual budget. Start us sort of at the bottom line. What does this mean overall for the agency? So let's just step back real quick and say what we're talking about when we're talking about NASA's budget today. So the White House, so this is kicking off the budget cycle, you know, this yearly adventure we all go on, where the White House releases its request. And this is the request for the upcoming

fiscal year, the upcoming year, essentially. And the way it works, the White House makes the request, Congress is supposed to take that request, look at it, and then kind of give their response to it and appropriate the money for it and sign that into law at some point. That's usually how it works. Obviously, it hasn't been working that great lately. We're hoping it'll be much smoother this year because Congress has worked out a deal in advance for how much they're going to spend. So that'll smooth a lot of things over.

So when we're talking about the numbers today, just keep in mind that these are the initial proposal. This is kind of the first volley of the bargain that's going to be happening between the administration and the Congress. And so a lot can change, and this is where the people get to weigh in on their representatives and to try to give their opinion about what will be happening in space and other parts of the budget. So these are all notional, but these are important because it sets the initial conditions of the discussion. So we should very much pay attention to these. But again, I just want to make sure everyone remembers, this is the first part of the conversation. This will continue.

This is square one. Yes, this is square one. But again, it's very important because it does represent NASA policy. This now has become official NASA policy, everything reflecting this budget. So what is NASA's budget? The White House is proposing $17.46 billion. This represents a cut, actually, from last year's request by the White House and a cut from what Congress actually gave NASA last year.

So it's about $200 million less that NASA's proposed to get. So programs have been squeezed in a few places, particularly the science program sees a drop of a little over $100 million, all science and NASA. Technology is down a little bit, and other programs are okay. So it's kind of a mix. But that's the top-level line. It's down a little bit, and other programs are okay. So it's kind of a mix. But that's the top-level line. It's down a couple hundred million dollars.

On top of this, though, is this very interesting sort of add-on. I referred to it in another conversation as the icing on the cake. It's this almost $900 million. Where does that come from? What is NASA trying to pull off here? Yeah, so this is what's called the Opportunity Growth and Security Initiative, which I'm just going to call shorthand the wish list. It just is easier to say.

And so this goes back to the thing that I alluded to earlier, which is that Congress has already worked out a very top-level number of what it's going to spend on the U.S. government this year. So the White House budget, their request honors that number. It's about $1.016 trillion for all discretionary and military spending in the United States. Because of that, that's relatively low in recent years. That's been dropping. It's not as bad as the sequester, but it's not great either.

And so the White House basically said, okay, here's the budget that fits your spending cap. By the way, here's what we would love to do. Here's what we're not going to be able to do because of the spending cap. So they tried to put a face to their cuts. And this is happening in many other areas of the federal budget, right? Yes. Because I've heard reports about this. Yeah, and I should clarify that.

So the whole initiative, the wish list, is a $56 billion wish list that covers defense and all sorts of other discretionary accounts. $900 million of that would apply to NASA. A lot of it else would apply everywhere else. And that would be paid for, according to the White House, by raising some taxes on some high-earning income folks and also closing some tax loopholes. No one who's been following government in the last 10 years really honestly believes either of those two things will happen.

So this remains a wish list. It remains kind of a priority of what the agencies would do. It's very hard to say at this point whether or not any of those will become true, or some of them probably will and some of them probably won't. Yeah. So were there any major surprises, anything shocking in what was revealed? I mean, since they really try to avoid sounding like anything really serious is being done to hurt any program. Yeah, NASA overall did okay. There's one big issue, and the shocker I think that I would define would be basically canceling SOFIA, which is an infrared observatory that actually flies in a modified 747.

Yeah. Bill and I climbed around it and had a great time. I'm sorry to hear this. Yeah. And so it's, it's important. What it does for astronomy is that it looks in the infrared range. And the problem is on earth, uh, water absorbs infrared. And so it flies at like 44,000, 41,000 feet above most of the water, so it can see these infrared rays coming in from the cosmos, observes them on a mirror that's bigger than the Hubble,

and then lands, and it can be serviced. And this is the big idea. Now, this has seen I think a very troubled development over its life cycle. It's cost over a billion dollars to make it but this year was the first year it was really hitting its stride in full science operations. The problem is

it's also expensive to maintain and it's second only to the Hubble Space Telescope in the annual cost to fly this telescope around. So it became a victim to the declining budget and but the there's hope so we should say this is the first step in the conversation so germany their space program dlr

is a big investor in this nasa saying look if germany or other nations want to kick in and make this run we'll keep running it we can't contribute much beyond that. If Germany doesn't kick in, they're not going to dismantle it. They're going to put it in, they're going to mothball it. In storage. Right, yeah. So it's... You think of some huge footlocker someplace. Yeah, it very well may be. And so it could theoretically come back if it got that far. But so, but we're a long way from that happening yet. We'll see what the Germans are going to come back with. We'll see if ESA is, you know, there's a lot of opportunities here to come in. But fundamentally, this is the big shocker. This was the big cut for 2015. Yeah, and I'll tell you some

of my additional regrets about this. It is a good international program, but it is also one that has a very strong educational element. And maybe we'll get a chance to talk about a little bit of the education portion of NASA's budget well into this conversation. But they were already taking students up on these flights that were conducting astronomy up there at 44,000 feet or so, high above the Pacific Ocean. And I think that was worth remembering about this program as well. Also, some really, really excellent instruments that they put at the back end of that telescope. So we'll see what happens with SOFIA.

There are so many other areas of the budget to talk about, but let's start with the one that is maybe the dearest and nearest to Planetary Society, folks, and that is planetary science. Where do we end up? Yeah, so planetary science, I'm sure a lot of people listening are familiar with us talking about this. It's kind of the core. For us here at the Planetary Society, planetary science is kind of the core of NASA science and what's been on fire. We've been trying to put this fire out for the last three years. Back in 2012, the White House proposed very large cuts,

over 20% of the program. Most of those were realized. We've been slowly, every year, getting Congress to put some money back into planetary science so we can really go out to some of these incredible destinations. We want to return a sample from the surface of Mars. We want to go to Europa. We want to go to places beyond Europa. Titan. We want to go back to Titan. We want to go to Enceladus, Uranus, Neptune, Mercury.

There's like a whole solar system out there, Matt. And right now, we're not really able to go to much of those because of the declining budget. So we've been fighting NASA on this a lot. NASA and the White House have really been shortchanging planetary science. For the first time in three years, that began to change a little. So it's kind of mixed. They requested $1.28 billion for planetary science. That is below what Congress gave them last year. It's below what Congress gave them the year before. But for the White House, this is the largest increase they have proposed for planetary science in three years. So we're now, we've gotten the White House and NASA to go in the right direction.

And we think that's a real piece of progress. And I know that Adam Schiff, who is the JPL's congressional representative, released a statement just a few minutes ago saying really glad that NASA's kind of seeing the value of planetary science. We're not where we need to be. We need to be at 1.5. That's the historical average for the program if we want to go to Europa.

But it's a step. So it's kind of a mixed thing for us. We're happy to see the step in the right direction. We also heard that Curiosity and Cassini will continue this year. That was good because Cassini's continued operations were in a little bit of doubt there. We know that InSight is going to continue on its course for launch in 2016. OSIRIS-REx is going to launch in 2016. InSight, which is a lander on Mars. Yes. And so, you know, it's okay. You know, so what it means is that, and this is, I think, the important part, NASA now acknowledges and it admits that it's been underfunding planetary science for the last two years. And it's trying to do something.

It's getting there. But fundamentally, they've acknowledged it. It's getting there, but fundamentally they've acknowledged it, and that's what I think is a real win for the society and a real win for our larger society as a whole, since we'll start seeing hopefully more and more resources come back to us. You mentioned Europa, and the administrator was asked about it, I heard, three times. The first two, now it was mentioned, and you said there are a few million dollars that have been assigned for, what's it called, pre-formulation?

So that was the other big thing. This is the other thing that we need to, you know, that we're simultaneously really happy about and, you know, need to do more work on. Europa. So, of course, we learned last year that Europa probably has these giant plumes of water spewing out of its south pole, so Europa did us a favor in throwing its habitable environment out into space for us, so we can fly through that. However, NASA's been strangely reticent to do a mission to Europa for the past 20 years, probably. It's been a high, high priority for the scientific community. It's been a huge generator of public interest.

But getting a mission there has been very difficult. So the other nice piece of news in the planetary science budget was that NASA also acknowledged that Europa is important and put in a line item. Now, this doesn't sound exciting, but to us budget guys, seeing a line item in the budget represents something pretty big because that means there's some institutional support for it. So they put a small amount of money, $15 million, for pre-formulation studies. What does that mean? You know, not that much. It means that NASA is going to continue studying different ideas for mission concepts to Europa. studying different ideas for mission concepts to Europa.

What we didn't get in today's briefing was any commitment from the administration about a flagship mission to Europa, which are missions above a billion dollars usually. We didn't get any information about what kind of mission they're looking at, honestly. And so there's a lot of unknowns here. But again, they've been studying Europa for 15 years. They've been studying this mission concept. I don't know why they need to keep studying a mission concept unless they want to throw out everything they've done before. So this is a big kind of question about where they're going with this. They kept saying some vague ideas about launching to Europa in the mid-2020s,

which is really far away. So, you know, it's a mix. It's one of those things where we're really happy that they've finally acknowledged that Europa seems like a good place to explore. But the other part is we don't have anything concrete, and we're very far away from an actual mission. And so we'll need to do a lot more work to make sure that mission happens and doesn't just peter out in two years. I want to hear you say a little bit more about some of these existing missions, because I think you and I were talking about a couple of surprises there. Yes, there's funding through this year. The question is beyond that.

Now, Cassini at Saturn doing still the most amazing work, supposed to go till 2017. But what? Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter? Mars Exploration Rovers? Poor little Opportunity being left in jeopardy up there on Mars? Yeah, so this is where things get a little weird. This is where we have to go back to our Opportunity Growth and Security wish list. In that wish list, I've been told that both MER and LRO, their extended mission funding exists in that

wish list. That's not a good place to be if you want them to keep going. We don't know enough information right now about Cassini Beyond 2015. All we've heard is that right now it's okay. So, you know, we have the problem with NASA, and it's an interesting problem to have, is that they make such great hardware that it lasts for way longer than anyone anticipated. And so, you know, MER just had its 10th opportunity, 10th birthday, happy birthday opportunity. Sorry to see you go, but here's the door. Here's your gold watch. And that kind of seems to be where they're coming from.

Part of me doesn't feel like they would actually let Opportunity die on the surface of Mars. Stranger things have happened. So that's one of the things. We just don't have that much information. We need to first go through the senior review process. That's coming up at NASA in the spring where they have to formally review the potential science for all active missions, and they'll rate them in terms of importance.

So once we have a hard document saying, like, look, Opportunity can do more science, which I fully expect them to come out with, then we can say, look, why are we turning this thing off on the surface of Mars? So it's one of those things where we don't know enough details about the budget to know what exactly is going on. But Opportunity and LRO certainly seem to be on the endangered species list. Yeah, well, stay tuned. There was a lot of talk, and the administrator really enjoyed coming back to this,

I think, several times, about the eventual goal of a human mission to an asteroid, asteroid retrieval. And this came up a lot, but there weren't a whole lot of details, and they got some pressure regarding this from some of the other major media reps, and I guess they said, well, no, we're getting there. There will be details. But one of the interesting points that was made by the NASA CFO is that this kind of stuff cuts across a lot of NASA's directorates.

It's not just science. It really is spread out. Yeah, so ARM, that's a great one to talk about. That was announced first time at the budget last year. It has proved to be relatively divisive within the community. I know the House of Representatives in the United States is not a big fan of this mission. The Senate seems to be lukewarm on it. They've expressed some support for it, but they're not really yelling in the halls of Congress to support it.

So that kind of leaves NASA in this place where no one's told them no, but they're not getting a ton of support. So it's a little strange to me, and this is just me talking here, that NASA is still in such an early development phase with this program. We still don't know what exactly they're planning to do. They say they're looking at mission concepts for what type of asteroid, how big, how to capture it, and where to bring it. And I would think that they should know that by now, after a year. But they don't seem to. They're still working on it. So that leaves the program, to me, in a weak position

to continue arguing its existence to a skeptical Congress. But they can continue in what they did last year and what they're continuing to do this year is that they're investing in the technologies they think they're going to need. That's solar electric propulsion is a major one, increased observations for near-Earth objects that the societies and most thinking human beings are entirely behind. Yeah, we want to find those rocks.

Yeah, so that's actually, they continue increased funding. They doubled it last year. They're going to continue that level this year, $40 million. They're continuing some other technology development and a few other mission directorates, but there's no future kind of line item for making the asteroid capture spacecraft. There's no future line item for starting to train astronauts

to deal with a captured spacecraft. So these may be happening behind the scenes somewhere, but it's not a big portion of their budget, and they still haven't talked about where that money is going to come from. And again, so it's not that, you know, the society is, like most people, kind of on the fence about this. We're excited about the idea. We want to know more information,

but NASA still hasn't provided that much information about the program. There's some nice artist renderings. They seem to like to show those up. Yeah, and they're very pretty. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's a cool concept. I think it's a very cool concept. I just want to know more about it, and so we'll continue to wait. But again, I think it's a strange position to find themselves where they have a program that they very much seem to be behind from a high level, and they just haven't gotten the information together about what kind of mission they want to do. That's not a good sign to me, but again, I'm hoping that they'll provide us more information. Now, there are two key elements that NASA identifies as essential to

an asteroid retrieval mission or any kind of activity by people in deep space, SLS, the Space Launch System, and Orion. And it looks like those continue to be pretty big line items. Yes, and those continue unabated. They are going through with those projects. The funding is stable for both of them. They seem to be moving ahead just fine, and they have very strong congressional support. And so I see no big changes in either of those. I was surprised to hear that the first

human mission, people inside an Orion capsule on top of an SLS rocket, is eight years away. I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. This is a very ambitious project. It is, and that's always been the fundamental challenge with Orion and SLS, that it's the time horizons we're talking about are large, and that puts any program at risk without any major events coming up. So you do see a few things penciled in. End of this year, end of 2014, we should see the first uncrewed test of Orion going up on a Delta IV and landing back to test its heat shield. That should be exciting to watch. And then I believe 2017, 2018 for SLS, first uncrewed mission on SLS.

Getting humans on there and getting that all ready to go is, as you said, a long time in the future. And we're going to have to make sure that the program is healthy and that it's stable and that its budget is strong but it's not eating up the rest of NASA's budget. I think we all want a balanced program and we all want a strong human program at NASA. Does it look like we're going to see humans riding a commercial spacecraft up to the International Space Station well before anybody takes a ride on Orion? Well, that's the hope, and that was NASA's grand vision. And the problem is commercial crew has been consistently underfunded by Congress.

So this is kind of the inverse of planetary science, where here the White House and NASA have been requesting around $800 million a year for this program. And Congress has been giving them around $500 to $600 million. And that's just that that prevented them from really dumping in a lot of money to these programs. You have SpaceX and Boeing are the two main recipients of this funding. And then you have Sierra Nevada as like a kind of a half-funded. That dream chaser, the thing that looks like a mini shuttle or more like the old lifting bodies. Yeah.

And so whether or not those continue on schedule, I know that Bolden has said multiple times in public and to Congress that they need full funding for commercial crude to hit their targets in 2017 and 2018. And they're not getting those. And so it remains to be seen. Maybe this issue with Russia will clarify things and give that program the support it needs. But right now, it's hard to say. Yeah. One of the reporters actually made the point because there were questions about, well, what do we do? What's the contingency planning if the Russians decide they don't want to give us rides into space anymore?

And the administrator was saying, well, there is no contingency plan. He didn't really say that overtly. They're not thinking about a contingency plan. Yeah, we don't need it because everything's peachy with our Russian friends. But there was a reporter who said, well, what contingency plans could you make? There isn't anything else, at least not unless commercial crew or Orion are put on the fast track. Yeah. And you know what? I don't even know. And I don't even think that Orion is capable of docking with the space station as designed. They need to make a dock for it. So that would have to be added. I can't see Orion

being any faster, being ready any faster. Perhaps. There may be engineers who will correct me on this. Either way, even if they fast-tracked both of those programs, we'd be years away from getting humans ready to launch on them. And that's, as you said, the fundamental problem with the Russia question. There is no contingency plan at the moment. So hopefully nothing bad will happen. All right, let's move to another of those big line items for several years now, and that's the James Webb Space Telescope. How does it fare?

James Webb is one of those high-priority missions at NASA and Congress, so it's faring just fine. It's getting exactly what they requested in the previous years from Congress. NASA continues the requests at their projected levels. That program seems to be moving along, and it seems to be much healthier now than it was a few years ago. So they're saying still 2018 for launch. All right.

How about some of the other elements in the NASA budget? We'll ignore aeronautics. We'll leave that to some other discussion, not on this program. But education, I noticed that it looked like there was about a 25% cut, at least in the basic budget, the FY15 budget, for education. And more talk about consolidation. And if you, you know, explain that. Yeah, so this is where we still don't have a ton of information. They do propose cutting education by a significant amount, down to $90-some million from the previous year. Very unlikely to me that that will happen. This seems to be a relatively common occurrence where NASA proposed.

This happened last year and the year before. NASA proposed cuts to education. Congress almost always restores them. And I'm not too worried about education. Now, the other question, it's a separate question, is are they going to restructure and are they going to combine and unify all scientific outreach education? Last year they proposed taking all education and public outreach away from NASA and to the Smithsonian and National

Science Foundation. Yeah, I believe so. And one other organization. And I don't believe that that's happening in quite the same way, though they have stated their intent that they are going to try to unify a lot of their EPO programs. Which is education and public outreach. That's correct. And again, we just don't have a

lot of information on that right now. So they're going to try to unify something, whether or not that stays in NASA or it's taken out to a different agency, we're still not particularly clear on. So we'll have more information about that as more documents are released. So really what we're left with is, unfortunately, a notable lack of clarity in many of the most important issues that we've just talked about, and we'll have to wait and see. But what are you looking for next in the immediate future? Definitely clarification on the asteroid retrieval mission, where they're going with it and how that program plans to go forward.

As I mentioned before, clarification, what are their plans with Europa? So you keep alluding to the press conference that we had with NASA Administrator Bolden and Beth Robinson, the CFO of NASA, and both of them did not answer the question very well, is Europa going to be a flagship, is it going to be a big mission? The fact that they were not answering the question, to me, suggests that the answer is not that it's not going to be a flagship. And so what kind of mission are we looking at with Europa? I personally would love to see a Europa submersible.

I'm realistic to know that may not happen this go around. Yeah, dream on. Yeah. But there's, you know, Europa is an interesting mission because, again, it's highly rated scientifically. And it has a couple very strong supporters in Congress who want to make this a flagship mission to do a lot of science. If we're able to do a lot of science that's cheaper, I'm all for that. But we just need to see where we are, and we need to not dawdle if we can go. So that'll be something I'll be looking forward to. Another big question we don't have information on is Mars 2020. And this is funny because Mars 2020 is a huge mission. This

is a really, really, really important mission. This is the first step in sampling the surface of Mars to bring back to Earth. And this is the built-on, the Curiosity chassis, but probably very different instruments and this system yet to be developed to sort of cache these samples and wait until we figure out how to get them home. Absolutely. And the idea is, so they announced this a little over a year ago, and the idea is that it's about a $1.5 billion mission, so kind of a very small flagship mission.

Save money by using Curiosity spare parts and the same design for Curiosity, but with an entirely different scientific suite, and as you said, with the capability to store samples of Mars. So this mission is huge, and we need this mission because not only is it following these very, very highly rated large mission priorities in the scientific, the so-called decadal survey of planetary science, it also maintains this incredible capability that the United States has built up in terms of landing on Mars. Not very many countries, in fact, zero countries have successfully landed on Mars outside the United States. And that's a wealth of knowledge we've developed, engineering

and scientific and operational knowledge. And we are keeping that alive with this mission. And it's an exciting mission. And they're selecting the first round of instruments in the spring. But the problem is, is that the way that they've been predicted to fund this mission is not very practical. So I can't, this is on audio so I can't show it, but usually it's like a hump mission funding, right? You have what they call peak funding a year or two before the launch. And that's just how programs tend to work in terms of engineering. This is different. This is like an exponential growth curve of funding where you have a really low dip about where you should be having a high

peak in terms of funding for March 2020. This invites overruns and schedule slippage and all these other problems if the money's not there when you need it to be there during these levels of development. Now this gets down into the weeds and this isn't the super exciting stuff, but this is the crucial stuff. If people complain all the time about NASA projects going over budget, we need to give them the proper budget profiles to make sure that they can function properly. We're very concerned about this. In the past two years, Congress has made sure to give the extra bump in funding at the beginning

to make sure this project can go on track. As we move forward, we don't right now don't have the numbers. We don't know what they're planning to give Mars 2020, and we don't know if they're going to continue what Congress has done or they're going to continue their own inverse funding level profile plan for Mars 2020. So that's personally something that we need to, you know, we don't talk about March 2020 as much because it's happening and it's great and it's on track. And so it's not this problem child like Europa tends to be. But we need to make sure that just because it's happening, it's healthy. And that's something

that we're definitely going to be looking into. When are you headed back to D.C. again, Casey? I have plans in April and May to be back in D.C. There'll be the Humans to Mars Summit, which Lou Friedman, the Emeritus Executive Director, will be speaking at, and has a special discount, I should say, for Planetary Society members. We also have in May that the Planetary Society is going to be doing a special congressional outreach event and we will be putting on an event to reach out to staff members and to the public and to representatives in Congress to talk about kind of the incredible opportunity that the solar system presents to us scientifically and also how we can use all these other NASA assets like the JWST,

like the SLS, to get out to all of these places or to observe all these places and to form this really amazing scientific program of exploration. So two trips coming up. I'll be there in the next couple of months. So Casey, so far all we've done is talk at people, this being an online program. We can tell people what they can do, how they can take action. Yeah, Matt, so that's a great thing to bring up because fundamentally, you know, we try to inform, but we want you to act. You know, this is your space program if you're living in the United States. This is the biggest space program if you're living abroad. You have the right to weigh in on this and to contact your representatives, to write the president and the staff at NASA. We make this easy for you to go to planetary.org slash SOS. You know, we've seen a small turnaround on planetary

science budget, but we're so far where we need to be. We need to rise up again. We saw last year, we saw the impact of this, $127 million more than what was requested by the White House. We can do that again. We've got our foot in the door with Europa. Let's make that a big mission. Let's not wait till 2020s. Let's get this started now. We can do this, but everyone needs to contact their representatives and say that they support space exploration and planetary exploration. You can do that at planetary.org slash SOS. Thank you, Casey. Love your enthusiasm and have enjoyed this conversation more than I did the hour-and-a-quarter press briefing.

I have the luxury of not having to represent the entire United States government and not have the President of the United States being my boss. You never know. I hope that. Please stick around. Don't accept that offer from the White House. All right. Thanks, Matt.

Casey Dreyer is the Director of Advocacy for the Planetary Society. He's got a blog entry wrapping up some of the stuff that we just talked about. You'll find it at planetary.org. Just look for his series of blogs. And he will continue to follow this right there on the website and hopefully now and then on the radio show, Planetary Radio. This has been a very special feature presentation by Planetary Radio, made possible by the members of the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan. Hope you'll tune in to the regular show, which comes up every week. Thanks for listening.