Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Extra: Casey Dreier on the 2016 NASA Budget

Episode Date: December 22, 2015

Mat Kaplan sits down with our Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreier, for a discussion of NASA's 2016 budget.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio Extra, one of those opportunities that we periodically take for an extended conversation with someone special, and that someone special this week has a special topic. It's Casey Dreyer, our Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. 21st, 2015 episode with a quick summary of what has turned into very good news for NASA and space fans. It precedes our extended conversation with Representative John Culberson, a Texas congressman who led the fight to increase NASA's budget. But we have time now to go into a bit more detail with Casey. And Casey, welcome back. Hey, Matt.

Happy solstice, by the way. Happy solstice to you. Lots to celebrate. I think we may get to talking when we get to commercial crew. I think we ought to bring up a certain success by SpaceX just a couple of hours, actually, before we are speaking this evening. Just a couple of hours, actually, before we are speaking this evening.

But first, give us an overview. Just how great is this news? It's really good. But let's just talk about SpaceX for a second, because this literally just happened a few hours ago. And it was very cool. So I just need to get it off my chest. We just saw the return of the first stage of the Falcon 9 and Falcon 9's return to flight after the disaster that lost the spacecraft and the rocket earlier this year. Very exciting.

Really great step towards ultimate reusability of the rocket. Fantastic. It just looked great, I thought, Matt. Were you just blown away by this? Oh, man, yeah, I was. And I was looking for people watching the webcast, people I know at SpaceX who are just so thrilled. I think I saw a couple jumping up and down. I tweeted that the best place for anyone alive to be tonight was at an old aircraft assembly building in Hawthorne, California, where all those people were celebrating. And boy, did they have good reason to. It was incredibly exciting.

Yeah, and you know, I love that you bring that up. Capturing that energy of a successful event in space, that's something that NASA TV never does very well, particularly when the show launches. You know, the first time I went to a launch, I was blown away by the energy in the crowd, the screaming and the excitement and just the nail-biting tension. And they really captured that tonight and helped share that, I think, with everybody watching. And I thought that was just a really nice move on their part to have that energy and excitement with everybody out there. Well, I hope NASA was watching and takes note next time they have an exciting

launch because they certainly will have some exciting ones coming up. In a few years, they will have some that were made possible by the budget that just passed. What is the current status? Has it been signed by the president? It got signed by the president. We're done. I'm just in time to start worrying about next year's budget, but I'll take a couple of weeks. You know, so yes, we have a budget. Let's talk about the budget now, because this is honestly, to me and other policy people, maybe more exciting, as exciting as the SpaceX launch that we just saw. It's really good news.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it was that we had a budget for NASA this year and that we got not just a good budget, we got an extraordinary budget for NASA this year. This is NASA's, just by numbers, their best budget,

their total funding, best funding in five years. That's really solid. That's a really important step. $19.3 billion roughly is what NASA is going to get from Congress. That's $730 million more than the president requested this year, which in turn was itself a request of an increase of $500 million. That's a total of $1.3 billion more in 2016 than NASA had to work with in 2015. And that's great. And that money gets divvied around to everybody.

I call this the everybody wins budget. And pretty much everybody gets something out of this. Very few losers in this budget. But, you know, this is something that we've been pushing for a long time. You know, NASA is underfunded for what we as a nation ask it to do. And that means a lot of programs kind of limp along. It means delays. You know, one small delay can catastrophically delay the entire program because there's not overhead, there's not

the money to kind of handle the cutting edge of spacecraft space, you know, rocket development. This helps, this is a very good step forward. And hopefully it will be assigned to the White House when they're putting together their request for next year, that they will take this as their baseline starting point and increase it even from here. You know, we're part of a coalition that says we need, you know, NASA minimum needs to grow with inflation. We talked about that last time when we talked about our humans to Mars concept. Minimum, we need increases with inflation to maintain a viable human spaceflight program that goes somewhere. All of the NASA needs something to kind of grow to be able to do the missions we want it to do.

Here we jumped above. We had a 7% jump. That's 5% above inflation. We need to keep this going next year. Very exciting. But also just a great sign. And from what you're hearing from people like John Culberson, people in Congress want to fund NASA. That's another really important takeaway.

They did a great job funding NASA. It's very exciting. Yeah, what the congressman said, that once he had a chance to explain what he was hoping to accomplish, everybody got on board. And this cut across aisles. It was, I think you said it, not just bipartisan, but maybe nonpartisan. Exactly. I think you said it, not just bipartisan, but maybe nonpartisan. Exactly. And I make this point in an upcoming issue of the Planetary Report, our magazine at the Planetary Society, that NASA, one of the benefits, I think, that the space program, at least in this country, has is this idea of you can find a nonpartisan place to build relationships across the aisle, right?

Politics in this country is very polarized, and that polarization drives mistrust between the individuals, between the parties. What if we have something like space, which everybody gets behind, that we can get together, start making deals and finding ways to mutually support it maybe that can be a base for building that trust back to have a more functioning government so things like this i think is a great example of how people can come together and maybe we'll see space service one of those not just an international way to engage our partners across the world but a national way international way to engage our partners across the world,

but a national way in politics to engage our partners across the aisle. And that's something I think that space really brings to the table. Let's get into some of the specifics. We won't go into all of them. If you want to see them, they are in Casey's blog post that he put up at planetary.org on December 18th. It's easy to find at planetary.org. There is a table here. It's a little hard to read.

You can't expand it. Just, you know, zoom out within your browser, I suppose. But that has all the major lines in the NASA budget. But let's start with the one that you care the most. Most of us care the most about, I suppose, Casey. And that's planetary science, the one that you and others have been working so hard on, along with tens of thousands of people who made their wishes known by writing to their congressional representatives. Tell us what the status is.

Sure. So, okay, Matt, as you said, maybe my favorite topic at NASA is planetary science, right? I joined the Planetary Society four years ago, roughly. And when I came in, planetary science at NASA was in a free fall. We had just had a big 20% cut proposed by the president. People were panicking. We were looking at we had just lost the ExoMars mission in 2018. You know, we didn't have a path forward for any mission to follow up

on Curiosity. We didn't have any missions even to talk about to the outer planets. Don't even talk about that. It's so unrealistic. And that was the situation every year we have been arguing at the Planetary Society since 2012 that we need to get

the budget for this division within the science division minimum back up to, we gave out the number 1.5 billion. You know, that's the historical average over the first part of the century, the 21st century. You know, it seemed that you can do a lot with that. We were down to like 1.2, you know, we had lost $300 million in a blink of an eye. So that was the background, right? We were trying to build back up to 1.2, you know, we had lost $300 million in a blink of an eye. So that was the background, right? We were trying to build back up to 1.5. And every year, we got a little closer to that, right? We got, you know, over the last few years, we've added hundreds of millions to this budget. Last year, we got to 1.44, right? Very close, 60 million, just shy of our goal.

Yeah, we felt pretty good. And we felt great, actually. I was very happy with that. This year, we shy of our goal. Yeah, we felt pretty good. And we felt great, actually. I was very happy with that. This year, we blew through our goal of 1.5. We're at $1.631 billion for planetary science. That's an increase of over $200 million from the president's request. That's an increase of nearly $200 million from what we had last year. It's an incredible number, the best number for planetary science since 2005. Decade.

That's how good this number is. And that's a huge, huge statement of support. Very much, I think, John Culberson is behind that. We thank him very much for that work that he did and others within Congress. But that was, you know, also we had a record number of people writing Congress this year. We sent over 100,000 messages to Congress in the White House this year. Planetary Society members came out in record numbers. We had non-members, supporters of space advocates from all over the world write in support of Europa, write in support of planetary

exploration. And, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing the best number in 10 years at the same year that we saw the best response in planetary society history for advancing these programs. It's a great number. All right, Casey. So what is this extra $1.631 billion actually going to do for us, maybe starting with older missions, missions that were somewhat in jeopardy. Yeah, let's start there. Those were two important but somewhat neglected in the news story issues. We're talking about the MER Opportunity Rover and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, two missions that are way past their design lifetime, still returning fantastic science. And it's not just me saying that. This is an independent review panel last year, ranked them, I believe, number two and three

in terms of best potential science return out of all planetary missions. Both of those missions had been proposed to receive zero dollars in 2016 by the president's budget. Kind of shocked everybody because they're great. They're still functioning. Obviously, the science's budget. Kind of shocked everybody because they're great. They're still functioning. Obviously, the science is great. So it was clearly kind of a dare to Congress to not fund them. Congress funded them as any rational person would. I think we're talking about an extra $34 million to keep both of these in operation for another year. So thank goodness those got their money.

Those will continue. We also saw a lot of really just big top level stuff. Of course, let's start with the most important, flashy, exciting one, which is Europa. Europa has extra money. I think the big deal this year, earlier, when the President's budget came out, was that it finally accepted a Europa orbiter as part of NASA's future mission portfolio. It put it into its future budget projections. It kicked off a bunch of bureaucratic levers were being able to be pulled where they can form a mission team. They have a science team that can select the instruments. This mission is in formulation now. It's being

created. It's very exciting. They asked for very little money to start it. They were pushing this way off into the late 2020s to launch it. I think they asked for $30 million this year. Congress gave them $175 million. So a very big increase. And very crucially, or maybe not even crucially very uh surprisingly to some in the law in the text of the law that is now the law of the land uh it's not just the europa orbiter anymore

right this is the europa orbiter and lander we are having two missions now uh so i mean it's very interesting to see what's going to play out here. But a couple things. And also, they also decreed that the mission must launch on a Space Launch System rocket. Yeah, that big new rocket. We'll get to that in a couple of minutes here. So a lander and an orbiter on their way to Europa. Are we starting to get an idea? I mean, it's got everyone by surprise of what this might look like, this mission. Well, it's very early stage. I mean, obviously, so we had this multiple flyby concept, right?

The Europa Clipper, it's not called that anymore, but it'll fly by Europa a bunch of times, kind of like Cassini is flown by Titan. You know, you can actually map, using very clever trajectory calculations, map out the entire surface of Europa, do almost all your top-level science, and it's a lot cheaper since, A, you don't need to slow down and bring all that extra fuel with you, and, B, you can dip in and out of the worst radiation around Jupiter

and not have as much heavy shielding with you as well. So it makes everything a lot cheaper. The lander is kind of anyone's guess. They looked at a few concepts. You know, this just came out a few days ago. I know that JPL has a team thinking about landing. It remains to be seen. It says law, but it remains to be seen how NASA is going to handle this.

The 2017 budget request, which is what sets out the presidential priorities for the coming year, and actually coming five years, it actually has a direction in the law. This is law that they have to include a five-year budget plan to how they're going to fund

Europa and a Europa lander. So they can go a couple of ways with that. Maybe they'll say fine, you want to do that? Goodbye to your Mars program. That's a very extreme way they could do it. They can say fine, here's the extra money that we know you'll give us. That's what

I hope they'll do because Congress has clearly demonstrated their intent to support planetary science, growth in that science. But we just don't know. It's going to be a very interesting budget to see from the president next February. But for now, law of the land, we're going to have a Europa orbiter, probably. And I'm sure that there are those listening to this program who are smart people and will say this is not how science should work.

You shouldn't be legislating specific missions like this. But that's a topic for another day. We won't get into that here. It certainly, though, makes a lot of us happy to think that we may be going to Europa and actually setting down on that ice. This is something that we heard John Culberson on this week's Planetary Radio get very excited about. He is clearly quite passionate about this topic, and he seems to know what he's talking about.

He talks to the scientists, he says, and he says that JPL and Ames tell him that they can absolutely pull this off. Yeah, and to your point very quickly, this is always something we have to be careful with, right? As you said, we should not ideally be legislating at such a fine degree. But at the same time, this is very much, this is completely in line with the scientific community's, you know, National Academy's report about the top priorities for planetary science.

The Decadal Survey. Right, which Representative Culberson did address as well. Yes. So it's not completely out of nowhere. There is very strong scientific support for this. And critically, what Representative, I should say, Chairman Culberson is doing is that he is not taking money away from anything to do this. We talked about NASA's budget grew. The pie got bigger. This

is new money. This is not taking money away from Earth science. This is not taking money away from Mars. This is money coming in to support Europa. That is the way to do this. He sees that. I believe he understands that. I'm very supportive of this as long as the money is coming in to support this and not taking it away from other scientific priorities as well. So it's a very good move on their part. So just very briefly, let's add to this something else that got a little bit of a boost, and that may very well be the power source for these, plural, Europa missions, production of plutonium. That was specifically called out in the budget.

Great to see that, too, of course. The fact that, you know, plutonium-238, the heat source that powers the radioisotope thermoelectric generators that power these deep spacecraft. We haven't made any since 1989 at the Savannah River reactor down in South Carolina, I believe. We are making it again. It's a long-term project. I think 2022 is when they're looking to be in full production, but we got $15 million for it. That is exactly what they needed to keep this on track and moving it along. That's very, very good to see that kind of support and vision because if we want to go anywhere out beyond Jupiter now,

we need plutonium-238. We even need plutonium-238 to land on shadowy parts of the moon. If you want to be on the moon for more than two weeks, you can't use solar panels. You want to land on, let's say, the ice in Mercury's poles, or you want to land on dusty parts of Mars, you need plutonium-238. It's critical infrastructure investment. Very glad to see that in the budget. We've talked now, therefore, about new flagship missions. How about at the other end of the planetary science mission spectrum, the so-called discovery missions? How do they do?

Yeah, discovery. So discovery is the small class missions capped and competed. They tend to be very specific, very successful. They tend to be on budget more often than not. The latest Discovery mission is going to be InSight, which is going to land on Mars in 2016, next year. That got a boost as well. It got a boost encouraging to kind of increase the cadence, how often they compete these missions. So this year NASA selected five proposals for further study.

There's a chance they might select two of those to move forward instead of one. That could be very great, very helpful in increasing the speed of this. So the small missions are getting money too. Mars exploration is getting extra money for the Mars 2020 rover. Basically every part of planetary science Division is seeing some extra money to help it pursue the goals that, again, we as a nation ask it to do. Let's jump to some other areas of funding for NASA that have benefited from this brand new budget. Beginning, and I'm just really kind of using your blog entry from the 16th of December as an outline for this.

Commercial crew, we kind of put the cart before the horse here. We talked already about a tremendous success by SpaceX, not necessarily directly related to commercial crew, but certainly won't hurt to be able to reuse the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket or eventually a Falcon Heavy rocket. How does Commercial Crew fare in this new budget? Commercial Crew, just to kind of give a little history on this, Commercial Crew has just been perennially underfunded by Congress. Remember, the original goal for Commercial Crew was that we would have commercial launches to the space station starting this year, 2015.

Congress has never been that excited to fund the request at the level that the White House wanted. It's been a constant battle. They've gotten a lot less than the requests have been. The timeline, as a consequence consequence has stretched out to 2017. And NASA wanted this request, their amount of requests, $1.24 billion. That's what they asked for. They wanted this very, very badly. I cannot emphasize this.

I don't know exactly, but this probably was the top priority for NASA this year to get this money. They selected two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to supply rides to the space station. Everyone in NASA was on this line, from Charles Bolden, the administrator, to astronauts on the space station. All were talking about how they need to have commercial crew funded at $1.24 billion to keep the goal in 2017, to keep the program moving along. They got the money.

That was a very big win for NASA, a very big win for commercial crew. This is the first time that they actually got as much money as they requested. You can believe that. So this will help keep both of those programs moving along. And hopefully we'll see commercial launches. They're actually contracting. I don't know if this is just a probably was a coincidence in timing, but NASA contracted a second launch from Boeing the day that this budget passed. So, you know, for 2017. So we're seeing some great progress and hopefully we'll be seeing

commercial launches of humans to the space station in two years. It's very, very important. I cannot emphasize enough. We talk mainly at the Planetary Society about science. That's our core. That's what we started with. Our people, members

are here for the exploration of the solar system. But commercial stuff, just from a programmatic part of NASA, very important, completely new, but very divisive part in terms of funding, very happy to see this move forward. Very important win for NASA this year. So SLS, the Space Launch System, that gigantic rocket, eventually bigger than the Saturn V. It's already come up in our conversation because, as you said, by law, the mission to Europa will have to fly on the tip of one of these. How is that big rocket doing in this new budget? So this is fun.

This is the opposite of commercial crew. The White House perennially asks for too little money for this program. perennially asks for too little money for this program. And then Congress kind of trips over itself to see whether the House or the Senate can give it more than the other. The request was $1.34 billion for 2020, excuse me, for 2016. Congress gave it $2 billion. That's an increase of 50% over the president's request. That's a lot of money. That's a increase of 50% over the president's request. That's a lot of money.

That's a big increase. Just as a comparison, what they added to this SLS budget this year, $640 million, that's roughly what we spend on heliophysics every year. The entire heliophysics division in the science mission directorate that launches all heliophysics missions, that's what they added this year to the SLS. That is a program that tells me that it has a significant number of supporters in Congress. It's a big program. But it's also important, right? It's five years down the line, you know, in terms of its process and the program. It is pretty much on track for launching in early 2018. This extra money will definitely be helpful in keeping that. And then also, very importantly, it kind of earmarks a little bit of this money

to make it the 1B format, the exploration upper stage, right? The second stage that's going to be big enough to launch humans beyond the moon. It's going to be big enough to launch humans beyond the moon. It's going to be big enough to launch things direct to Jupiter. It's going to be big enough, you know, it's the kind of the second part that they really need to make this really useful rocket to go beyond the moon. That's the exploration upper stage. For those of you keeping track at home, this is the variant, the 1B variant. And NASA's original plan was to not, they didn't have the money to develop it. Now they're going to do it later,

which meant that they had the human rate, this kind of like interim stage, the ICPS. I don't even want to try the acronym right now. But the interim cryogenic propulsion stage maybe. There you go. Yeah, they wanted to human rate it so they could launch it once and then build the exploration upper stage. So this is basically saying, don't waste your money,

you know, human rating this other one. Build this now, use some extra money now to start making this second stage right away to have it ready by 2021. So, you know, that's good news for that. It's also very important for launching direct to Europa, or excuse me, direct to Jupiter. So yeah, but that shows you congressional priority. That's, you know, look where the

money is spent. It's the SLS program. And also Orion, the human module, of course, deep space human module capsule is going to get a couple hundred extra million dollars as well this year. So here's an area of NASA funding, which also did pretty well and kind of surprised me, considering that there are a lot of people in Congress who aren't thrilled about NASA studying our home planet. Earth Science does pretty well as well. Earth Science did great. So a lot of people describe this as a small cut. And that's really, I don't think that's really an accurate way to think of this one. The president had requested an increase to earth science this year of about $190-ish million.

They ended up with an increase of $150 million. And so that over last year in terms of actual money. And that's up to $1.93 billion. This is by far the biggest science division. It's important. It's been building back up steadily over the last eight years since it had been cut during the Bush-W administration. This is very good for earth science. And we had seen some very threatening cuts to earth science earlier this year, not from the Appropriations Committee, but from what's called an Authorization Committee, which is a whole other bag of worms,

can of worms, that we won't get into now, but doesn't have direct control over spending, but can set spending limits. They never passed that budget. They never passed that, never got moved in the Senate. It was kind of a statement, you know, political statement in appropriations where they actually are spending the money. This, you know, has some very strong supporters, particularly on the Democrats. Unfortunately, now it's a partisan issue, but the Democrats are very strong for science. Everyone should be strong for science. Right. And here we have a nice boost. And it's one of those things where that

could grow planetary science could grow and actually astrophysics grew this year as well mainly because we had the pie grew the overall pie grew because the we had a deal between congress and the white house that we would spend a little bit more money on national priorities this year this is the direct consequence of that so it's very nice to see that grow as well. Because we often get asked, you know, a lot of times, you know, well, you want planetary science to grow, what are you going to take it out of? And our answer is just, look, look at history. You know, the last few years, every time planetary science has grown, every other science has grown too. We should always be kind of pushing for a little more funding to, again, do what the nation asks us to do.

And here's a perfect example of that. And I'm sure we have people wondering about yet another big line in this budget. We'll just mention in passing that the James Webb Space Telescope, development continuing toward that, I believe, 2018 launch, got funded at the level that NASA requested. So also doing okay, at least as far as the purse strings go. There is one other line that you addressed in your December 16 blog post, and that is about the Space Technology Mission Directorate, STMD. First of all, tell us what that division of NASA is all about. Sure. So Space Tech, I'll just call it space tech for short space technology mission director it's a new director so you know directorates are these big top level it kind of implies importance if you have a

directorate exploration as a director he uh human exploration and operations as a directorate science as a directorate aeronautics is basically a directorate. Space technology was new as of a few years ago to address this problem of this kind of, they called it this valley of death problem. Which is a very dramatic sounding name for a very real but kind of practical problem, which is a lot of people think think in space that's always pushing the boundaries of technology, right? But it's often not because space hardware tends to be very conservative because space is very unforgiving, right? The space shuttle designed in the early 70s, used hardware from the 70s, not changed that much over its entire 30-year operational lifetime, right? The space launch system is using rockets derived fromyear operational lifetime, right? The Space Launch System is using rockets derived from the space shuttle, right? Why are they doing that? Because

they know those rockets work. You have this problem, therefore, if you want to have new technology to help you, you know, either run things more efficiently, to create scientific instruments that have ways you've never done before, you have to put a lot of money and basically show them, approve to NASA and others that this won't, you know, not work or not destroy the spacecraft or, you know, this thing will actually be successful in space. It takes a lot of money to do that, and it takes, basically, technology development, technology investment.

And so to address this, the Obama administration created the Space Technology Mission Directorate basically to advance technologies to become useful to actual programs, to be ready to use, to get them through what they would call this valley of death. So the idea is that you would get some money for very early technology development. You could prove the concept, but then there was no money to ever shepherd it through this later period to prove that it could work in space before getting it onto a mission. That was the Valley of Death. And so this was a, it's a very important, but not very sexy concept, right? You're basically funding individual promising technologies. So a good example of one of the things that they do is the, uh, well, the thing is the hypersonic decelerator, you know, the, uh, the aerojet breaking stuff that they're

trying for Mars. They're like launching up on a big balloon and puffs up, you know, to try to land something big on Mars. Right. It's the inflatable heat shield, essentially. Yeah. That's a, that's a much more accessible way to describe it. Uh, you know, they fund a ton of things, right? They, lots of things all over. Some of them will pan out, some of them won't. But the idea is that they need, it's perennially underfunded, right? The White House always asks for more money.

Congress tends to give them less because it doesn't have a big, clear project associated with it. So in this case, space tech, I'd say this is the one loser out of the budget. Space tech on paper looks like it gets an increase this year to nearly $700 million. And that's just shy of what the White House had requested. But if you look closely, it actually got an earmark kind of tucked in there, which says that of that roughly $700 million, you actually have to spend $133 of it on this very specific program that is being moved. It's this interesting bookkeeping jujitsu that's

happening here. They're moving a program called Restore L. It's a satellite. The idea is you can do in-space satellite servicing, rejuvenating old satellites. That program used to be bookkept under the International Space Station operations account because part of it was involved with the station. They moved that into space tech and they said, you have to carve out your $700 million and spend $133 on this. And that leaves you with around $560 or so, which is actually a small cut over last year's budget. And so they kind of got stuck with this extra accounting thing that they have to spend this money on.

Why did they do that? Well, because they actually moved, in more bookkeeping jujitsu, they moved commercial crew from one account into the same account with Space Operations and the International Space Station. one account into the same account with Space Operations and the International Space Station. They didn't increase the total level enough to account for the $1.24 billion in commercial crew. So they basically moved a smaller program into space tech and gave NASA the latitude to move some money internally to make up that difference. It's very funny little kind of internal accounting that happens on these things, but with real consequences, right? We're going to have a little less money for space tech this year. Casey, I'm hoping we can close with the same

way I closed with Representative Culberson. And that was with a question that you most wanted me to ask him. And that is, where do we go from here? Specifically, I want to talk with you about what the public can do to see this go beyond the current federal fiscal year, which of course is now barely nine months away. Well, I think what we, what did we learn from this year? And actually I would even say, what have we learned from the last three and a half, four years since the planetary society has been kind of laser focused on this problem of planetary exploration?

has been kind of laser focused on this problem of planetary exploration. And I think what we're seeing is, you know, just historically, there has never been kind of this level of focused intensity on a single goal for so long. And I think we're seeing real benefit from that. And that means focused intensity not just by our program, but from our members and our supporters who are writing year after year for you know it gets god it gets tiring to to talk about the same problem underfunding the planetary science we need this mission to europa but look

at what we've done by staying eyes on the prize this last four years. We have a mission to Europa on the books. We have the biggest planetary science budget in 10 years. That is what you get by having a focused effort over time. And so I think, you know, just for our members and supporters who listen to this, just staying active, that is the most important thing. It's keeping this long game attitude, right? Again, it's like Pluto. It took us, you know, we saved that mission multiple times in the early 2000s. And 15 years later, we get the results. That's what we have to, you know, we have to take a cosmic perspective on these things. And so I think, you know, for people at home, it's just participating in the process. You know, so many multiple studies, scientific studies have done this, and they look

at this and they say, if your congressperson does not have a strong opinion about a particular issue, and for most of them, the vast majority of them, NASA, they do not have strong opinions one way or another, besides they generally might like it. If they hear from their constituents about NASA or about planetary science, they will tend to reflect those views of the people they hear from, even if they hear from 50 people. Because they don't, why not? You know, they don't have a strong, particular, interested view. I've heard this from staff members who will say, oh, we want to hear about NASA, and they'll bring that to their boss, their congressperson, and they'll say, well, how many constituents have written about it?

That makes such amount of a difference. It feels so trite sometimes and so simple to just sign that petition, to call the office, but I guarantee you that makes a difference. And I cannot emphasize enough how much that level of engagement is going to be critical as we move forward to not just maintain this level, but to grow it, which we must do. Actually, we've got a lander to feed. You know, it's like we got twins as opposed to we were expecting one baby and we got twins. We got a whole family to feed now of new missions coming up for planetary science. We have got to grow the budget more over the next few years

to accommodate what's going to be a backlog of missions to rebuild this program. So it's a lot of exciting stuff, but it's just staying engaged and making this. It's this long game that we're playing, but it's a very effective one. Well, we're in it for the long haul, and it's certainly a good start. Casey, I know you haven't heard it yet, but when you do, you will be very pleased to hear the praise that Congressman Coberson has for your work, the work of the Planetary Society, and the important work of all those tens of thousands of people who took the trouble to join the fight.

work of all those tens of thousands of people who took the trouble to join the fight. So Casey, best of luck as we continue that effort. And thank you for everything you do and for joining us again today for this special extra edition of Planetary Radio. Thanks, Matt. And I'll just propose for next time that we can do a great deep dive into the construction and environmental compliance and restoration part of NASA's budget that we somehow missed today in our discussion. But, you know, there's a lot of detail there, too. Okay. An hour or two, you think? Yeah, why not?

Oh, heck, 90 minutes. All right. Thanks, Matt. Thank you so much. That's Casey Dreyer. He is, of course, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. He leads the effort, the very successful effort this year, to increase funding for NASA and especially for planetary science, but so much more that is benefiting in this brand new budget signed by the President within the last few days that will take us through the rest of the federal fiscal year.

I'm Matt Kaplan of Planetary Radio. Hope you will listen to the December 21st edition with that quick summary from Casey and a conversation with Representative John Culberson, and that you'll join us every week for the radio show. And keep checking back at planetary.org for work by Casey and all of our other colleagues. Thanks for listening.