Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - NASA's Budget: Good News and Bad News

Episode Date: February 21, 2005

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Good news and bad news about NASA's budget, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome once again to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. In a time of budget cuts for most federal agencies, NASA may receive a slight increase. But what will the money be spent on? We'll talk about dollars and directions with Senior Washington Advisor and Consultant Lori Garver and the Planetary Society's Lou Friedman.

We'll also hear how the budget will affect NASA's exciting Prometheus effort from the project's director, John Cassani. And later, though I hate to say it, you'll hear how Bruce Betts has really gone to the dogs on What's Up. Here's the latest news from around the Milky Way. There are reports that Deputy NASA Administrator and former shuttle astronaut Frederick Gregory may be named acting administrator. If it becomes official, Gregory will be the first African American to run the agency. Cassini has recaptured the headlines emerging from Saturn's moon Titan. The orbiter's radar has sent back stunning images of the surface.

You can see and read about them at planetary.org. see and read about them at Planetary.org. Spirit has now spent well over 400 Martian days, or souls, exploring the surface of that fascinating neighbor of ours. The Mars Exploration Rover is still carefully climbing the Columbia Hills toward the Cumberland Ridge. Along the way, she is finding more possible evidence of water. Opportunity has turned its microscopic imager on its own shattered heat shield, with scientists now beginning to analyze the data. And how about the brightest flash of

light in all history? It happened less than two months ago. During just a tenth of a second, it released more energy than the sun puts out in 150,000 years. The source was a very rare type of neutron star called a soft gamma repeater magnetar. Be very glad that it is 50,000 light years from Earth. Even at that distance, the flare was brighter than the full moon and emitted lots of nasty gamma and X-rays. And nobody knows how or why. Ain't the universe grand?

I'll be back with Lori Garver and Lou Friedman right after Emily takes us back to the Huygens probe on Titan. Stick around. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Is it possible to reconstruct Huygens' lost data from the radio signals that were picked up on Earth? The Huygens probe had two redundant communication channels, so that if one failed, data could still be received on Cassini through the other channel.

Because of an error made in the instructions sent to Cassini, one of the two receivers on Cassini wasn't turned on, so data from one of the two channels, channel A, was lost. Most of Huygens' instruments broadcast the same data through both channels, but the camera instrument tried to make the most of the Huygens descent by taking so many pictures that they had to be split between the two channels. Consequently, when Channel A was lost, so were half of the images that Huygens took while it descended, about 350 pictures in total. But there was nothing wrong with Huygens' Channel A signal, which was actually picked up and tracked by more than 17 radio telescopes across the Earth.

Can researchers comb through the radio telescope data to get those 350 pictures back? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Here's what outgoing NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe had to say about the space agency's new request for congressional funding. The fiscal 2006 NASA budget reaffirms the President's commitment to the vision for space exploration and provides us the next step in implementing it.

But there's much more to the story. We turn to a couple of experts for analysis. Lori Garver ran the National Space Society before she became NASA's Associate Administrator for Policy and Plans. Now she is a Senior Advisor at DFI International, a strategic consulting firm, and works as a D.C. representative

for the Planetary Society. Lou Friedman is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Planetary Society. Lori and Lou, I'm looking at the NASA press release that was issued after the budget was announced, the proposed budget. It says NASA's budget enables new age of exploration. Now, I know that both of you have been NASA watchers and NASA budget watchers for a long, long time. And I wonder what's your impression at this stage, and we're speaking about two weeks after this budget came out from NASA.

Lori, what are your thoughts? I think NASA is right to be optimistic during a time when a lot of agencies, especially these domestic discretionary agencies, are seeing rather large budget decreases. NASA continued to see an increase, although not as large as proposed a year ago, yet it is still an increase, and NASA is starting to shift funds into some of these new exploration programs in response to the President's announcement last year.

I think they're right to be optimistic. NASA's budget had been declining over the decade before this, so I think all of us have room to be optimistic. A lot of question about how much of this budget will get eaten up by things such as space shuttle return to flight cost overruns, these congressional earmarks that target things that NASA wouldn't normally be spending their money on. So maybe cautiously optimistic would be a characterization of how I feel about it. I would certainly agree with Laurie that it's remarkable to get a budget increase for a

civil space agency in this economic environment. But I have a little more concern that it's not just money that one should look at. It's really the actions that are going to go behind the vision and the promotion of the new exploration policy. I'm quite concerned that NASA hasn't fully internalized that yet, that they haven't made the commitments to the replacement of the shuttle. They've talked about building the new crew exploration vehicle, but they've only talked about building it. They haven't talked about using it as a replacement for the shuttle. They haven't committed fully

to the retirement of the shuttle by 2010, and they're still talking about perhaps making more than two dozen flights more of the shuttle, which I think is an untenable approach to actually getting on to the new space policy. In the report that was done for the Planetary Society, led by Owen Garriott and Mike Griffin, made a strong point about having to start the crew exploration vehicle earlier, about having to phase out the shuttle quickly, and to getting on to the commitment to the new exploration policy. So those are not only questions of the amount of dollars in the budget.

Those are questions of real policy implementation in the actual way you conduct a program, and that's something that is a little more worrisome. Laurie, we're talking, as we said, about a proposed budget. How much of this do you think is going to make it intact through Congress? Historically, much of NASA's budget makes it through intact. The NASA budget will get attention this year in particular, of course, because it's a very lonely increase. In addition, because of the Hubble Space Telescope, the first hearing that NASA had on a budget has already happened, and a majority of the

questions were quite negative on NASA's budget because they weren't funding the Hubble servicing mission that had been planned prior to last year's cancellation. So any kinds of things like that could cause a huge change to this budget. However, typically, Congress just takes a few things out of the budget in order to make up for these, as I said, earmarks, these pet projects in a congressman's district that they like to fund. But generally, Congress does not affect major shifts in NASA budgets. I would be surprised if Congress changes that history. They're asking

a lot of questions about Hubble. They're asking a lot of questions about Moon, Mars, and shuttle retirement. But ultimately, the NASA legislation tends to go through nearly intact. Lou, I got the idea that you wouldn't mind having some influence over what Congress thinks of this budget. Well, we always want to have influence, of course. We had a very nice congressional event about a week ago in Washington in the House Science Committee's hearing room. Steve Squires, the principal investigator on the MER mission, and Bill Nye, our vice

president, it's fair to say, captivated an audience of some 50 congressional staffers for more than an hour with both the information from the MER mission and some news about the latest discoveries on Mars. It helped set the stage, I think, for a great consideration of why Mars is so important in the President's vision for space exploration and the idea of it being a focal point for the human space exploration program as well as the robotic program. After that meeting, we had a chance to go visit with Representative Bollard, who's the chairman of the House Science Committee, and I asked him if he thought the NASA budget

would make it through intact. And he expressed a great deal of concern. He would think it was a typical congressman's response, citing all the budget pressures that are on the overall budget and thinking that there would have to be cuts. So I can't say we're sanguine about that. I think that it's a good chance that there's going to be fights about the budget. There is some chance that the appropriations committees, in fact, Laurie, you may know more about this than I, there's some chance that the appropriations committees may be restructured

and the NASA budget may be considered by a whole group of new people, and we don't know yet what the pressures will be as a result of that. And, Laurie, before you address that, maybe we can pick that up after we take a quick break. Our guests this week on Planetary Radio are Laurie Garver, who serves as a senior advisor for space at DFI International, a strategic consulting firm, and Lou Friedman, the executive director, one of the founders of the Planetary Society. We'll be back with both of them right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin.

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Planetary Radio is back with our two distinguished guests this week. Lori Garver, who is a senior advisor for space at DFI International. But she was the associate administrator for policy and plans at NASA and is a longtime worker in space advocacy. And that is very much the full-time job for Lou Friedman, the executive director of the Planetary Society, also on the line with us today. Laurie, when we left it there, Lou had posed the question about changes to who in Congress,

on the Appropriations Committee and elsewhere, might actually be considering the NASA budget this year. Yes, Congress is doing something, or attempting to do something, that people who support NASA budget increases have wanted to do for a long time, and that is try and remove the space agency from the subcommittee where it has been for at least 30 years now. The appropriators are divided into 13 different subcommittee bills, and we have been with the Veterans Administration, housing,

and other independent agencies. with the Veterans Administration, housing, and other independent agencies. This has been a difficult thing for NASA since it's always very hard to go up against agencies that have really strong constituencies such as those. They're planning to move NASA now in the House to an appropriation bill that includes the Department of Commerce and Department of State. Most people think that it will be a good move for NASA, and in fact, Congressman DeLay is somewhat behind this moving of NASA because he wants to see our continued funding increases. Ultimately, in my view, a lot of this is just the bureaucratic

movement of Washington. What really matters is whether this space agency, NASA, is willing to embrace this vision of going beyond Earth orbit back to the moon and onto Mars. And there is a huge question about within these even slightly growing budgets, we're not going to be able to do that unless we let go of some of the things we have been doing for decades. And the main thing of that is the space shuttle. We've talked about NASA announcing its retirement in 2010. However, they've also talked, and in the hearings already this year,

continue to say they need 28 flights to get to the space station. If the shuttle is going to fly 28 times, we undoubtedly are not going to be ready to retire it by 2010, and therefore not going to be ready to go beyond low-Earth orbit on schedule either. Lou Friedman, we've still got a couple of minutes left. Do you want to pick up from there? Yes, I think I would like to mention that there is strong support in the budget for continued Mars exploration.

Next year we'll see the launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then there's the Phoenix mission. There's the large Mars science laboratory mission of 2009, and there's commitment to sample return. So Mars exploration continues to get strongly supported, as does now the introduction of a new lunar mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, that is being proposed as part of the new Moon-Mars thrust of the new policy, and there's the continuation of other programs as well, including Discovery missions and the New Frontiers missions. One problem that NASA's going to have is what to do about Europa.

We want to see a commitment, and we're urging now, a commitment to a Europa mission. You know it has been removed from the Prometheus program as the first mission. It was a plan to do a Jupiter icy moon orbiter. It would have been a juicy mission. It would have been a juicy mission, and it still will be, but it's probably several decades into the future. And before that, we want to see a mission to Europa. So we're urging a mission to Europa be done much more quickly.

What will happen with the Prometheus program for testing a nuclear reactor for deep space propulsion and for testing nuclear power for planetary landers, I don't know. They're going to have to consider some other form of mission. But clearly, we don't want to be in the critical path of having to wait for a science mission on that development. And I'll mention that we're going to hear just a little snippet of a conversation we've had with John Cassani, the project director for Prometheus and the Jupiter Icy Moons orbiter mission, and spend a little bit more time with him in one of our upcoming shows.

Laurie, we'll come back to you for a final comment. The thing that scares me, of course, is something that you said in the first part of our conversation. What about those ever-present cost overruns and other unforeseen things that might wreak some havoc here? Well, NASA's, I think, gotten three-quarters of the way there in that we now have an articulated vision, and that is something we did not have just over a year ago. People have been calling for it at least for as long as I've been involved in the space program, 20 years. And even just with one year beyond that announcement, the budgets are aligning. There are coalitions of industry focused on going beyond the space shuttle and space station, and we're realigning the space station science.

So I do feel that just having that vision, even if budget increases don't come as quickly as we had hoped, and even if there are cost overruns, inevitably there will be, that we're marching in the right direction. And I'm optimistic about that. Lou, are we generally on the right track? Oh, we are. I think it's something I have to say that no discussion of the budget and NASA's situation would be complete without mentioning Hubble.

NASA's made a terrible mistake of prematurely trying to make decisions about Hubble when they don't have the information. They don't know when the shuttle is going to return to flight. They don't know how easy that return to flight will be. They don't know how many launches of the shuttle will be successful over the next several years and where they will be in the schedule by the time the Hubble servicing is needed. Yet they rushed prematurely, first to decide they weren't going to do a servicing mission, and then to decide they'd do it a different way, and now to decide they'll deorbit one. None of those decisions need to be made now.

What they needed to do was wait and see what the reality is, the reality with the shuttle and the reality with the Hubble. I think they've gotten themselves in a terrible bind with the public about this because the public very much owns Hubble and wants to know that all options are being considered. So I think that has to be taken into account. And I guess the final comment I want to make, which I think Laurie will agree with, is that a lot of concerns or questions that we've had about how things are going to be considered are going to be largely influenced, at least we hope they're largely influenced, by the next NASA administrator. And, of course, we don't know who that will be,

and that will be an important consideration for he or she whenever he or she comes into office. So we'll all be watching that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're out of time, folks. Thanks so much for joining us. Lou, I know we'll be hearing from you again on Planetary Radio before long. And, Laurie, I hope this is just the first of many visits. It's nice to know that we have somebody knowledgeable there in Washington.

Maybe we'll make you our Washington correspondent. Thanks, Matt. Laurie Garver serves as Senior Advisor for Space at DFI International. Long, long history in space advocacy and was at one time NASA Associate Administrator for Policy and Plans. And Lou Friedman, of course, is Executive Director of the Planetary Society, an organization he helped to found. Planetary Radio will follow this story through congressional approval of NASA's 2006 budget. Someone else who will also be paying close attention is John Cassani. He is manager of the Prometheus project, an ambitious effort to develop nuclear electric propulsion and power

systems for a new generation of robotic and perhaps human-crewed space vehicles. The so-called Jimmo mission was the centerpiece of the project, but now the Jupiter-IC Moons orbiter has been pushed somewhat off-center. Well, as you've seen from the budget, the President's request is suggesting or proposing that we include a demonstration mission in front of the Jupiter-IC Moons orbiter mission. The Jupiter-IC Moons orbiter mission is a very challenging mission. It's a long duration. It's been 10 or 12 years to complete the mission. Very expensive in terms of the investment that would have to be made in the instruments for that mission, the Europa orbiter and its instruments and the possibility of a lander, and the scan platform and all of the equipment that is required to support the mission itself.

that is required to support the mission itself. And so the question came up, well, maybe before we make the or commit to the investment of all that instrumentation and everything that's required for the GMO mission, that maybe we ought to fly a simpler, less complex demonstration mission, if you like, to demonstrate the nuclear electric capability, nuclear electric propulsion capability. And so that's what's been introduced into the budget. The Jimmo launch was baseline for 2015, and we're now being asked to consider a demo mission

to be launched in 2014. John Cassani, manager of NASA's Prometheus project. We'll bring you an extended interview with John about Prometheus and Jimmo next week. Bruce Batts arrives in just a minute with a real howler of a What's Up segment. That's right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Many people hope that Huygens Channel A broadcasts, picked up by Earth's radio telescopes, will be usable to reconstruct lost images.

But that is probably not going to happen. According to the Huygens imaging team, while the radio telescopes did an excellent job of detecting the carrier wave of Channel A, it is much more difficult to extract the data. It would be like receiving a digital music file across a telephone line, but you didn't have your computer handy, so you recorded it on a dictation machine across the room from the telephone instead, and then tried to play back the dictation machine into your 56k modem. The dictation machine was never intended to record the high frequencies needed by a modem, nor to make the recording very faithfully, and by the time the signal has gone from the phone

across the room and into the microphone, it is too weak and obscured by room noises to do more than tell how long the file was. So, it's not likely that the mission will recover more than a few random bits of Channel A from the radio telescopes. Still, the Huygens team has 350 pictures from Titan to study,

and all of the other instruments on board receive the full complement of data that they expected, making Huygens a full scientific success. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Hey, it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, so we are joined by Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Bruce, welcome back. Thank you very much. And what

is up? Well, up there in the sky right now, we've got rain, but you may not where you are. So let me tell you what else you can look for in the sky if you don't have clouds up there. Planets, as always, a lovely thing to look at. We've got Saturn in the evening sky, great for viewing. Coming up, it'll already be partway up in the sky at sunset, good to view in the early evening off in the east-southeast, moving towards the south and pretty much overhead by the middle of the night. It is near Castor and Pollux, the bright stars of Gemini, forms sort of an L shape with them,

and Saturn is the brightest of the three and a little bit yellowish. You can also find Jupiter starting to rise in the evening sky or near evening, rising around four or five hours after sunset in the east, and then it will be very high up before dawn as the brightest object in the sky, brightest star-like object. Speaking of the brightest object in the night sky, it will be near the moon on February 26th. You can look for it there. And Mars, you can also see in the pre-dawn sky,

it'll be very high in the sky before dawn, looking reddish the way it does. Also, get ready, and depending on when you listen for this, get ready for Mercury coming up, great apparition of Mercury in the evening sky, looking very bright, not as bright as Jupiter, but as bright as Saturn. If you pick it up at the very end of February or early March, you're looking in the west, you're looking low on the horizon, and you're looking shortly after sunset. It will then dim over the couple weeks after that,

but get higher in the sky, gets highest on the 12th of March. And if you just can't find this puppy, look for it near the crescent moon on March 11th. Mercury, don't miss it. Be there. On to this week in space history. February 23rd, 1987, supernova 1987A was detected exploding, getting big and explosive and ferocious. We learned a lot from that, right? We did. Because we got to really point a lot of scientific instruments at one for the first time. Yes, yes, yes. Supernovas, the first

supernova really well studied as it happened. Groovy stuff. On to random space fact! Our solar system all formed about 4.6 billion years ago. I remember it well. Yes, so happy birthday, solar system. So consistently everything forming pretty much at the same time, at least the initial formation process. All right, let's go on to our trivia contest.

I asked you, what is the largest moon of Uranus, the Uranian system? How'd we do, Matt? Interesting answers to this. A lot of people, one person actually got it wrong because they may have checked a source that was too old. Because I guess at one time, another moon of Uranus was thought to be bigger than the actual Lancer that we know is correct today. And the wrong one is Oberon. The correct one is Titania. Titania, I guess, is Uranus' largest moon. Can you confirm that, Dr. Betts?

I can confirm that. Oberon used to be the largest moon but went on a diet. And we actually had one person point out that both of these moons take their names from characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is near and dear to my heart because last summer my daughters were in a wonderful performance of that very play. You know, we saw some of that. It was quite impressive. That's right. You were there.

I forgot that you came down. It was an outdoor performance by the Long Beach Shakespeare Company. A little plug here on a space show. I want you all to rush on over. You too, Patrick Marks. Patrick Marks from the Netherlands. Patrick, not only did you get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but I'll tell you what, if you show up in Southern California,

we'll get you into a Long Beach Shakespeare Company performance. Probably won't be Midsummer Night's Dream, but he did have the right answer, Titania. Titania, and indeed, all of the moons named after things out of Shakespearean plays, I believe, or randomly an Alexander Pope play. Yeah, right. Just one that they threw in for some reason.

A little bit of mix and match going on there. Let's give you the trivia question for this time around to win your Fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt in honor of last week's show covering the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the planet Pluto. When was the dog Pluto from Disney cartoons discovered? When did Pluto first appear?

Now I realize, those of you who are Disney-ophiles, that Pluto appeared without a name originally, appeared with a different name the next time around, then got named Pluto. But I'm asking for when did he first appear? What year did the dog Pluto appear? Send your answers to planetary.org slash radio and bark heavily as you do. This one is Googlicious, boy. They're going to have fun with this one. And you sure do learn a lot about space when you listen to Planetary Radio. Get it into us by the 28th, 28th of February at noon Pacific time.

Make sure you're not barking up the wrong tree. Hey, everybody out there, look on the night sky and think about what dogs think about space. Especially the dog Star. And he is one, by the way. That's Bruce Betts. Good boy, Pluto. Betts. Good boy, Pluto. That's Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who not only can be heard here on the radio, but can be heard panting and making other silly sounds on television, or at least on the web. If you check out his class offered by Cal State Dominguez,

look for it on our website, won't you? Oh, please do. Planetary.org slash Betts Class. We'll continue our explorations next week as we visit with John Cassani of JPL, manager of the Prometheus Nuclear Electric Propulsion Project. In the meantime, we wish you a shockingly great week. Remember, you can write to us at PlanetaryRadio at Planetary.org. Take care, all.