Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Extra: Our Space Policy Experts Analyze NASA's Proposed 2017 Budget

Episode Date: February 23, 2016

Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy, and Jason Callahan, the Society's Space Policy Advisor, talk with Mat Kaplan about the just-released "President's Budget Request" for the fiscal year starting in October of 2016.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 another edition of Planetary Radio Extra, this time talking with Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and the Society's Space Policy Advisor, Jason Callahan, who is based in Washington, D.C. Actually, we're talking to them via Skype. They're both in Washington. It's just that Casey's in Washington State, and Jason is in Washington, D.C. Hello, guys. Welcome back. Hey, Matt. Good to talk to you again. We are talking, of course, because the 2017 budget process is now officially underway.

Casey, this is something that you and I talked about on the Planetary Radio episode for the week of February 15th, which anybody can find at planetary.org slash radio. But that was just one of our little introductory teaser segments. And we mentioned during that segment that we would be expanding on that in a longer conversation. And that's this conversation, of course. But let's go back to the basics. What has kicked off this process? What has gotten things started, Casey? The core of budget season begins with the president's budget request, or as hipsters call it, PBR. And it feels like we just talked about this, right?

We had an extended interview just a couple months ago because we were talking about the 2016 budget, which just wrapped up in December. Usually it doesn't go that long, though in recent years it has. And so we're supposed to have a little bit more of a break than we do here at the Planetary Society between budgets. But fundamentally, the president kicks off the annual cycle of appropriations in Congress by releasing a budget request.

And that basically sets the terms of the argument for the coming year. The request is just that. It doesn't have force of law. However, it does show what the administration's priorities are, what they intend to do in the future. And for all the things that Congress doesn't specify, ultimately, in their appropriations process, you generally can look at what the president's detailed budget proposal looks at, and that's what it'll get. So big ticket items like the space launch system and planetary science in Europa, those will probably change from the

president's budget request. But smaller things like the deep space network or rocket testing or joint robotics investments, those will pretty much get what the president requested, absent any particular directive. So it's a very important document. It's also a very fascinating document. I kind of recommend anybody who wants to kind of level up on their space advocateness to go to nasa.gov slash budget and look through the 2017 budget estimates. And it's kind of an amazing overview of everything that NASA does as the space program. It's a 700-page document. You don't have to read it all at once. There's a lot of tables. There's some pictures. But it really goes through in a detailed way like pretty much no

other single document does the scope and breadth of our space program in this country. It's a fascinating document. So that came out on February 9th. Congress will be picking up in the next month or so here and start holding hearings. But that's the start of the process, the PBR. Now, of course, this is a pretty complex process. And there is more going on here than may even meet the eye. Jason, there is something that you've brought up and said we ought to talk about. It has to do with the difference between the discretionary and the mandatory portions or views of this budget. What do you mean by that? The federal budget is broken into two categories of spending.

You have mandatory spending and you have discretionary spending. spending. You have mandatory spending and you have discretionary spending. Now, mandatory spending traditionally has covered things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the interest on the debt that the country owes. These are expenditures that Congress doesn't vote on year to year. They just sort of cost money each year out of the budget due to prior legislation. Discretionary spending is voted on, is appropriated by Congress on an annual basis, and it covers everything from the military to education to housing and commerce and the State Department and also NASA. Traditionally, NASA has always been funded out of the discretionary budget. This year, the president's budget request

includes a significant amount of money, just under $800 million of spending that they suggest should come from the mandatory account rather than the discretionary account. Now, the reason that they've done this is that Congress and the White House last year came to an agreement, a two-year agreement on budget levels for discretionary spending. The White House is proposing that those levels actually be exceeded for specific amounts of research and development spending in the United States, including at NASA, but that that money come from the mandatory side of the ledger rather than the discretionary side in an effort to break these caps. This has never been done before in Congress. It's not even clear how

it would occur in Congress. The legislation required, nobody really knows what that would look like. So it's a very unusual statement made by the White House. It also makes this budget a bit difficult to read because the budget request includes this mandatory account, which is unlikely to happen. So the request also includes where that mandatory expenditure would come from. If you go back and you look through this budget document, basically what you end up seeing is that a lot of the president's priorities are not actually paid for through the discretionary process. So it's a question as to whether or not they're actually priorities of the administration. Wow. Curiouser and curiouser. Can I add something to that too, Matt? Of course. It's actually kind of fascinating. I want to

just emphasize this. When the United States, and politically when people talk about the budget, they'll say the president released a $4 trillion budget for the United States in 2017. And that's true. But $3 trillion of that, roughly, is mandatory spending. Congress is not arguing about that $3 trillion. That's set in law. Social Security, there's a law. It raises money. It pays for itself. Congress is not authorizing that or appropriating that every year. And so when people talk about cutting the budget this year, they're only talking about one quarter of what we're actually spending. And you lower that by 10%, you've effectively done nothing to address overall spending in this country. Mandatory spending is the majority of spending in the United States.

And it mainly goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a lot of big social programs and servicing the debt. social programs and servicing the debt. And that kind of goes to this interesting thing of when people talk about NASA and whether we can afford it or not. NASA is not the problem. You know, it's just that happens to be the part of politics that churns on this area of spending every year. The mandatory spending is the vast majority of spending of the country. And as you can probably tell, no one really wants to deal with that if it's really a problem, because it tends to be very politically popular and also politically very difficult to change. So I just wanted to just emphasize this breakdown between mandatory and discretionary. Almost always when people talk about spending, they're talking about

discretionary spending. They lop off half of that that goes to defense. And so really, the rest of what we can consider the government is funded out of half of a quarter of the entire amount of money that the government spends every year. Yeah, I know this comes as a great surprise to many people who don't know much about the inner workings. When you start talking about these, the so called entitlements and the other other things that Congress has very little say over or at least doesn't choose to have any say over. Oh, yeah. They could change the whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.

However, the last time I think they tried that was George W. Bush's beginning of second term and they tried to redo parts of Social Security. It did not work out too well. People tend to like Social Security. And maybe before we even go further, we should say what we're talking about too. NASA's total budget proposed by the president this year was $19 billion. As Jason said, about $800 million of that is so-called mandatory new spending that I believe is coming from a variety of new taxes and loopholes and closing tax loopholes and so forth.

I think for the purposes of this discussion, besides acknowledging this kind of weird budgetary gimmick that the administration did to bring in more money to spend while still adhering overall, mathematically, it still adds up, right? They're still spending the same amount because they raise new funds. It's so meaningless in the sense because Congress is so unlikely to raise any new funds via taxes this year in particular, but in general, that I think for the rest of our discussion, we'll just talk as if this is a straightforward request and proposal. Because I don't think, maybe Jason, you can disagree with me here, but I don't think there's that much insight beyond the fact that this is a budgetary way to fund a lot of different things and still

adhere to the budget caps. The only thing that I would add to that is that if you look at how the mandatory funding is distributed throughout the NASA budget request, it's interesting that they don't spread it evenly. It accounts for more spending on some items than it does on other items, which I think is sort of an indication of how those items that are paid for through the mandatory line stack up from a priority perspective in the eyes of the White House. Just to add to that real quick, as an example, if you read it closely, the extended missions of Opportunity, Mars Express, and Odyssey are paid for with mandatory funding, which makes no sense because it's not new research or development.

It's just adding numbers up. They tried to cancel opportunity last year to save money. So I think Jason makes an excellent point. Casey, when you look at that top line that you were just talking about, the overall NASA budget proposed by the president, how does that compare overall with previous years like last year? And we'll dive down into the weeds here in just a moment or two. So NASA's top line budget that the president is proposing, and again, we're just going

to just lump in all this mandatory mess and just assume it's a straightforward request, is $19 billion. That is, for the president, a solid number. That is about $260 or so million less than Congress provided last year. So it represents a cut. Now, to be fair to the administration, Congress did not pass its budget for NASA until mid-December. The NASA budget that the president puts together, they start working on that a year in advance. And so they had mainly finished their

work by the time Congress finally appropriated their number. Very unlikely that much was able to change in the last month or so before the release after Congress's budget came out. So I don't necessarily believe it means anything big whether, you know, whether or not the president agrees with it. 19 billion, solid number above what they requested last year, which is good, but still below as a functional thing. So we'll have to work with Congress to get that number back up. Let's go ahead and start drilling down now. And we'll begin with planetary science. After all, we're the Planetary Society. Damn right. So where should we start here? Because there's lots to talk about just in this category. Yeah, well, let's start with the request, because the request is a special number. I think

for me personally, I was very satisfied to see this. And I think a lot of our members will be satisfied to see this. All of us, we're all very satisfied. The president requested $1.52 billion, which granted is a cut from last year. However, 1.52 billion would be the highest amount ever requested by this president for planetary science. That's a very good sign. And it's above the 1.5 billion we've been arguing for, for the last four years. Just to see that finally, you know, we're seeing a better alignment of what planetary science needs, the number it needs to have the actual balanced program that the entire scientific community has endorsed. Congress has been pushing for that number for years. The White House finally requested

a solid number. The big difference, the cut, is almost exclusively to the Europa mission. And we can delve down into that. But the rest of the program overall, I would say, is in pretty good shape in this request, which is I'm not used to saying those words in that order. You know, this is a solid request for planetary science, except for Europa. We have had lots of people talk to us about their interest in seeing this Europa mission happen as soon as possible. In fact, we had a rather prominent congressperson state that on this program that he had written into, he and others had written into legislation, that they wanted to see Europa not just an orbiter, but a lander in the early 2020s. And since you've mentioned it, how does this reduction in funding affect this? Massively. It's impossible. They're requesting about $50

million for Europa next year. That's a step up from what they had asked last year. But you need a lot more than that if you want to launch by the early 2020s. This is a $2 billion mission plus some unknown amount for a lander, which remember, is law. You know, that is, it's not a request. This is written into US legislation. NASA must have a Europa mission and a lander, and it has to launch from the Space Launch System. Now, Jason has actually run some really interesting numbers for us about what it would actually take for the United States to launch this mission to Europa by 2022, which is the goal of John Culberson. It adds a significant amount. Jason, do you want to talk about some of those numbers? And actually, I think NASA ran their own numbers this year. They did. It was part of that same legislation that you were just referring to, Casey,

required NASA to publish estimates year by year for the next five years of what it would cost to launch a Europa mission by 2022. Their cost curve is pretty significant. I think in 2020, the total just for Europa was going to be something like $630 million, which is a little more than a third of the entire planetary science budget, right? which is a little more than a third of the entire planetary science budget, right? So that's a significant expenditure in a year that we would also be launching the Mars 2020. I mean, that's like a James Webb Space Telescope level funding that year, that one year. Yeah, that's really a significant expenditure. I think that NASA's math differed somewhat from mine. Their five-year projection included something on the neighborhood of $2 billion of the $2.3 billion that they're estimating for the entire mission, which would account for significantly more money for development than most flagships use.

That said, the timing is still very, very difficult. I don't think that Planetary has really tried to run two flagship missions concurrently in development previously. That's a huge expenditure. And it's very, very difficult to imagine how that happens without impacting other parts of the budget within Planetary Science. And I suspect even within other divisions in the Science Mission Directorate. We took a crack at this separately, just using Jason's experience and how NASA's internal budgeting works and how spacecraft development works. And if we push the launch date back a year or two, it becomes much easier. It's still, I wouldn't even say it's easy, but it

becomes much more doable, I think, because we have this issue where because planetary science has been underfunded for four years now, a lot of missions that should have been in development this entire time basically haven't been there. We have this backlog of new missions that need to go through development. Development is the most expensive time of a mission, and so we need to start recovering this program, and that means we need to build a bunch of a mission. And so we need to start recovering this program. And that means we need to build a bunch of new spacecraft. That's hard to squeeze through all at the same time. And so we're trying to rebuild the Discovery program, which is supposed to launch every two years.

It's been launching every five years. We need to build a new medium class, new frontiers mission after Juno ends and Jupiter. And we need to build the next Mars mission. And so Europa is trying to get slotted in there. We're running into, as one of our guest bloggers, Van Cain said, a Europa budget bulge. And can we get through it? Now, I think we have really strong support from Congress to increase the budget of planetary science over the next few years.

But the numbers for 2022 are very tough. I think that we'd be talking about 2.2, 2.3 billion a year, which would kind of, I think Jason would be record high in history, right? For planetary science to get to that level. Yeah. I think even adjusted for inflation, it would be record high. Yeah. Maybe a lot of this is like clever phasing, you know, when they're going to launch the mission. So maybe a Europa mission in 2023 or 2024 would make it a lot easier and maintain a healthier overall program than trying to front load it to 2022. So Jason, have your congressional sources, have they reacted at all to the specific funding proposed by the president for a Europa mission? And have they started to react to other things in the PBR? The general mood in Congress is that this budget is sort of a non-starter. Congress views this presidential administration as basically a lame duck.

They're waiting for the next administration to come in to work with. And I think that the general mood on the Hill is that Congress intends to put forth their own budget numbers, regardless of what the president's request is. But as Casey said, whatever those numbers turn out to be, what you're going to find is the language within the law will affect some of the larger programs. But when you get down to the smaller programs, that's where this budget document, I think, is actually really interesting, is it sort of explains where the rest of the money will end up. How interesting that to learn that the Supreme Court has something in common with a moon of Jupiter. I saw a very funny, I believe it was Eric Berger. Eric Berger is a journalist for Ars Technica, who reached out to John Culberson,

asked for his opinion on this president's budget, particularly with regard to Europa. And I believe Chairman Culberson's response was irrelevant. Oh my goodness. So I believe we'll see stronger numbers for Europa. However, so this is a really good point to bring up that we haven't quite touched on yet. This is an election year. Oh, man, if it was political before, right, if it was tough to get budgets through before, this year is just amped up to insanity. There's going to be so much at play. And then, of course, now we've just had this bombshell of Scalia's death and coming

replacement. To poison that well further. What we have is this issue where most of the time, particularly in recent decades, Congress is loathe to take votes when they are up for reelection. You know, as crazy as that sounds, it's like, let's not get on the record about too many things. And so particularly for conservatives who are running on anti-debt and worried about the deficit, any kind of vote in support of any budget could theoretically be hard for them to stomach back in their home districts. So we've already

had this mix of already a lot of resistance to passing a budget. You're seeing a resurgence of a Tea Party group in the House saying that they want to pull back on the previous deal that they had made last year with the White House in agreeing to the top line spending for the year and cut it back down to sequestration levels, which is just disastrous. And then at the same time you have a presidential election and a lot of people in Congress, in the Senate, running for president. And they don't want to take these votes necessarily either. So it's very likely that we won't see a budget by the end

of the fiscal year, which is October 1st. That's nothing new. We haven't had a budget for a while. They tend to do these what they call continuing resolutions. They'll extend the current year's budget to cover this time. Now, it's possible based on who wins the election or who doesn't that Congress may not even pass a budget until next year when they have a new president in office. Or maybe they just won't pass a budget at all and do what's called a full year continuing resolution just to avoid any votes on spending this year in effect. It's so much at play here. There's a much at play here. There's a lot of political forces stacking up

against any kind of advancing of the budget. That said, sometimes they can pull these things out of the hat at the middle of the night on December 24th and they'll pass something very quickly and go home for Christmas. This is why having the request be better. So in a continuing resolution, actually, a lot of, as Jason was saying, the smaller bits of the budget that aren't specified, or a lot of pieces of it actually fall

back onto the administration to determine how to spend that money during a continuing resolution. Even though they can't cancel programs, they can lower the amount of money they spend on it just in case the lowest level of all possible budget scenarios happens going forward. And so having a better budget request from the president is always a good thing to have in your pocket, particularly during very unstable political times where we don't know what the final budget is going to be at the end of the year. So planetary science is well positioned, I think, this year to weather out some of these unknowns. But at the same time, there is just, don't even, it's impossible to predict exactly how the Congress is going to

react to passing a budget this year. Let's go into some of these other areas. And there is one that is very much related to the Europa mission. And we heard Congressman Culberson of Texas talk about this as well, how he wanted to make sure that NASA continued its exploration of ocean worlds like Europa. And that's addressed in this budget as well, isn't it? It is. And there's this nascent idea of creating an ocean worlds program. It's interesting. This is where I love understanding how things work. And, you know, bureaucracies can sometimes be really useful. Right now in the planetary science division of NASA that runs all the planetary missions, of course, you have a sub program called the Mars Exploration Program. That means there is a director of Mars exploration. There is staff to support

that director. There's a Mars exploration center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at NASA headquarters. All of these people are committed to maintaining a steady cadence of missions exploring Mars. And that means that they will fight internally to promote and support these missions. Outer worlds, outer planets, ocean worlds, not really anything comparable. And so there's this idea, what if we create an ocean worlds program that's devoted to sending regular missions out to ocean worlds in the outer solar system, Titan, Europa, Enceladus, they all have oceans now, right? The idea there is that you have this internal support promoting

these missions, and you have the Space Launch System that, on paper, could theoretically help you get a mission out there every couple of years. And you can feed this back. You can develop your knowledge and capability just like the Mars Exploration Program. So this is being batted around, and this was actually written into, not law, but a supplementary document called the Committee Report on last year's budget that encouraged NASA, basically basically to create a program. They didn't quite, however

there's an interesting name change for eagle-eyed readers of NASA budgets in last year's budget for fiscal year 16. It was just outer planets was the section that held Cassini, that's where they book keep Europa and so forth. This year it's outer planets and ocean worlds. That's an interesting name change. That's a step. And then they also did for the next competition for the medium class mission, New Frontiers. They added two new opportunities for destinations. New Frontiers is kind of interesting. The scientific community within the decadal survey process, they select a series of destinations and or mission types that should be pursued, and then people can propose ways to achieve those missions. Anyway, they added two new destinations

to this list, Titan and Enceladus. So that was an interesting step forward too. And Jason, I know you have some opinions on this. I want you to talk about the pluses and minuses of this addition of Ocean Worlds to the New Frontiers program. Sure. So the benefit is that outer planet scientists for nearly a generation now have had very little data to work with, right? Basically, we've had the Cassini mission back when I was in high school. I think you had the mission to Jupiter, but this is the data that the scientists have had to work with since. So it's been a very long time since anyone has had anything new to work with, and that's very

damaging to a scientific community over a period of time. So I think it's fantastic that we're talking about starting to get missions back out past Jupiter, or out to Jupiter or further again. I think that's a really positive development. The downside of this, Casey alluded earlier to the Decadal Survey, which is a study conducted every 10 years by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. But these surveys are community-based documents. They go out and they talk to the scientific community and figure out what all of the space scientists' priorities are in science. And from there, NASA determines what missions will fly aligned with those scientific priorities. Now, in the last Planetary Science Decadal Survey, Europa was mentioned as a second priority flagship mission behind the first stage of a Mars sample return.

There were a number of other mentions in the New Frontiers and the Discovery program lines, but they were not top tier selections in that survey. So the idea that NASA is now placing these destinations above, or at least on a parallel with destinations that were chosen in the decadal, is very problematic and it's very disruptive to that process. I hope what is happening is that NASA would like to see proposals in this next announcement of opportunity for the New Frontiers missions that they will probably not select, but it gives those teams the incentive. It gives them a little bit of money and gives them some incentive to start making plans for the next decadal survey, at which time I think it's very likely that ocean worlds will start to take more of a priority in the science. members of the science community become kind of restless, a little disturbed when they see NASA and the government stray from the recommendations of the decadal survey. So this is very relevant to the space community in the United States and around the world.

Yeah, well, it's a really interesting example of the importance of policy in terms of stability and also just kind of community agreement, right? So the decadal survey, these are relatively new. I think they've only been doing them for planetary science. We've only had one before this one. Is that correct, Jason? That's correct. They've been used in every other science that NASA uses them now. And they're really great because they basically say, okay, the scientific community, you get to spend, you know, about two years hashing out internally what the community thinks is the most important direction for space science in their particular space science. And that provides, I think, really invaluable direction to Congress and the administration to say, how do we prioritize our limited dollars going forward? And the reason it works is that everyone, for the most

part, I think everyone trusts and has faith in the system that puts the decadal survey together. And without that shared sense of reliability, in a sense, the process begins to break down. Now, Europa works because it was the number two is essentially tied at the number two spot, number one spot for a big flagship mission. Ocean Worlds gets a little more complex. Now, you can argue that we didn't know a lot about Titan or Enceladus at the time as much as we did now, thanks to Cassini. But at the same time, I think we really need to take a careful approach to the decadal process. And as Jason pointed out, I think the real value here is,

you know, NASA also gets to see, can we send a $1 billion mission to Titan? And what would it do? And what would it look like? Just knowing what your opportunities are, do we need to spend a flagship two, three, $4 billion to go to Titan again? Or can we do it for a billion? And so there's some value to that. But I think it's, it's just that we have to be careful in terms of how we, you know, if we say that the decadal survey is the gold standard, we need to appreciate that and really think about how we stray from it. Let's reluctantly leave these distant worlds and their hidden oceans behind and move on to some other stuff, including an asteroid mission, which is in preparation right now, OSIRIS-REx.

Why are we talking about OSIRIS-REx in the budget? It's going to launch this fall in 2016. It's going to be a great mission. It's a New Frontiers mission. It was one of those pre-selected opportunities. NASA went with this one, sample return from an asteroid. Why is it special in this budget? Jason, I'll let you take this one because you're the one who really noted this to me when you saw this. The development of this mission has proceeded remarkably well. They've basically met every single milestone that they needed to meet. And in a very unusual circumstance at NASA, this mission has actually come in significantly under budget. That's a rarity and a welcome rarity at NASA. They are currently about $78 million below their expected development cost. And that's money that NASA can then apportion

to other uses within the Planetary Science Division. It's an extraordinary opportunity to actually bolster the research and analysis program or perhaps the technology program. But really, it's just it's a testament to the extraordinary skill and talent of the development team on OSIRIS-REx. They've done a really nice job on this. You know, that's something we just do not talk about enough. And particularly the larger media just doesn't acknowledge, right? It's always news when something blows its budget. And NASA has like, oh, you know, egg on its face and look, they can't do anything. But you have a mission like OSIRIS-REx where $78 million under budget.

That's a lot of money. And they've already done, to what Jason was talking about, they're doing technology development for the next series of New Frontiers missions. They're doing tests and, you know, they're moving those things along in hopes that those will save money in the future, that they're buying down risk in NASA parlance. Congratulations to them for running such a tight ship. And MAVEN did it before them as well. MAVEN came in significantly under budget. Haven came in significantly under budget, and that allowed, during the really bad crunch years of the Planetary Science Budget, that allowed other Mars missions to continue operating in absence of other funds. So, great job, and something that we should all talk about more when it happens.

Kudos, therefore, to Dante Loretto. Yeah, just a little kudos. Dante Loretto, the PI for the OSIRIS-REx mission and his team. Full disclosure, the Planetary Society has a role in this mission in helping to get the word out, so-called EPO activities, education and public outreach. How about the Red Planet? I know you guys had some thoughts you wanted to share about looking out not just the missions that are currently underway, because those were somewhat in jeopardy,

particularly Opportunity, still roving down on the surface, but also future missions, including the possibility of another orbiter. With Mars, right, again, I was just talking about this. We have a Mars exploration program, which means we need to send regular missions to Mars to develop and sustain not just our scientific knowledge, but to sustain our ability to keep exploring Mars. And this is an interesting infrastructure problem where you have a rover on the ground. Yeah, that rover can talk to Earth directly, but very slowly in terms of the data rate. We're talking about tens of kilobits a second. So what they usually do is they have the orbiters, like the Mars

Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has its own suite of scientific instruments, but it has a really big antenna. We actually have the functional Mars telecommunication system. It's our interplanetary telecommunication system. The orbiter relays that data back to Earth at a much higher megabits per second. Yeah. Same with the MAVEN orbiter, which NASA required that it have that same relay package. That's how we got it through the government shutdown. It became a critical infrastructure requirement to sustain the rovers. Now, the problem is Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2005, I believe, or got to Mars in 2005.

Odyssey has been there since 2002, 2003. These are getting old. They're going to die. MAVEN is great, but it's a polar orbit, so it's not as helpful. We've actually put, we, NASA, has actually put a telecommunications relay on the trace gas orbiter. But really, we need to be thinking about, if we're going to sustain a ground operation on Mars, we need a new orbiter. It was actually a surprise to me that we didn't actually see a new orbiter show up in this budget. What they did, which is a step, they put in about 10 to 12 million dollars a year to really start studying what the next Mars mission after Mars 2020 is going to be. And that's a crucial thing to start happening, but

needs to start happening soon. I think by 2022, 2023, it's very unlikely that Odyssey will still exist in Mars orbit in a functional state. The only thing I would add to what Casey just said is having an orbital asset in the 2030s is going to be critical because we have Mars 2020 going to the surface. And if there's nothing there for it to communicate with, that makes it very, very difficult to enjoy the benefits of the scientific return. Besides, think how disappointed it'll be if we lose an orbiter with the capabilities of that high-rise camera, that telescope, basically, spy satellite above Mars that we currently have on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. above Mars that we currently have on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I mean, I, for one, and I don't think I'd be alone, would be pretty upset to lose those close-ups of things going on on the surface. And again, it just reminds you these interesting problems that spacecraft designers and NASA have to face. You know, it's not just designing a rover to work on the surface of Mars. You've got to get that data back. And so things like data volume, they actually deal with this every day. They have a certain amount of data that they can send back

even through the orbiters. They have to be careful about how much data their scientific instruments gather or else they'll never be able to send back data. And this is particularly difficult in far out missions like New Frontiers, where it's going to take literally a year to send all of its data back. But for missions on Mars, where you have to make decisions every day and send commands back up based on what you saw the day before, you really have to make sure you can get the data back. And this is the ongoing problems, you know, these like minor irritations. And that actually minor is a pretty major irritation. But you need an infrastructure to support exploration. And don't even get us started.

If you want to send humans to Mars, you're going to need not just one or two science orbiters. You're going to need a significant number of telecommunications satellites at Mars to relay lots of data back. I don't know if you remember from The Martian. I think they referenced there was like 12 or 18. I forget the exact number. Some crazy number it sounded like. Some crazy number of satellites. Let's try for it. But we need to start thinking about this now in order to support

our continued exploration of Mars. And this is what they have to do. So Jason, how about some of those other old timers that we've mentioned? There was good news in this year's budget, 2016, for those extended missions. How does it look in the year's budget, 2016, for those extended missions. How does it look in the president's 2017 request? It looks like everything is fully funded. All of the operating missions in extended operations now are actually fully funded through the year, which is great. And Cassini ostensibly will be funded until the end of its mission in 2017. It will basically, Casey, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe that it runs out of fuel in 2017.

Yeah, I can confirm that. That's why we're going to crash it into Saturn. Exactly, exactly. So I think that Cassini's funding is pretty safe. I think everybody else at the moment looks to be funded with the caveat that all of the Mars extended missions are currently funded under that mandatory funding gimmick. So it's an indication of the priorities that the White House is putting on the extended missions that they apparently seem to see the other extended missions as being somewhat more important than the Mars missions, theoretically. Of course, it could have just been a bookkeeping thing.

Just one more here under planetary science that you guys thought of bringing up. And I should have mentioned this when we were talking about the outer planets, because those are really what make these so important, although it comes in handy at night and in the winter on Mars, too. And that is the creation of plutonium-238, which I'd understood is underway. Department of Energy is cooking along there. Is that addressed in this new budget? It is, and it's there.

I mean, the nice thing is plutonium-238 hasn't been a contentious issue. Even the White House, in the worst parts of the planetary science cuts, supported plutonium-238. It's just at a lower level than was really needed to move it along fast, but it's there. The interesting thing that happened a couple years ago, interesting in a bad way, is that NASA is pretty much responsible for the Department of Energy's entire overhead for maintaining plutonium-238, not just production, which is new, but the existing infrastructure to press them into the plutonium pellets to create the radioisotope power systems. All of that now is paid through by NASA.

And this is actually, this is a good opportunity, this can answer a question that we received on my blog post, which was talking about this thing called the ASRGs, the Advanced Sterling Radioisotope Generator, which was supposed to be this new way to use plutonium, use a lot less plutonium, using a little piston, closed-loop piston to generate power on these spacecraft. NASA had spent about $50 million a year on this program for the last 12 years and canceled it two years ago. Well,

they canceled the flight readiness part of it. And the reason they did that was because they had to assume roughly $55 million a year of infrastructure costs for the Department of Energy. And so there is no way that I see, unless you have a significant change in technology funding at Planetary Science, for NASA to restart a flight ready ASRG program. They have far smaller ambitions to improve the efficiency of the existing MMRTGs just to kind of help squeeze a few extra percent, but nothing in the scope of a brand new piece of flight hardware. And so that's an unfortunate thing. But at the same time, hardware. And so that's an unfortunate thing. But at the same time, the plutonium program is marching along. It's getting about 15 million a year right now. And they say it's going to be

production ready. They keep pushing it back, but it's 2021, 2023. Even then, it's going to be kind of tricky. They're only going to generate 1.5 kilograms of fuel, plutonium oxide, a year. I believe there's about 4 kilograms of plutonium oxide in a Mars Curiosity, Mars 2020 MMRTG. And if you need three of those for an outer planets mission, you're talking about a decade of production just to fuel one mission. So it'll be there, but it'll be still a highly limited resource. And it's very difficult to use. But, you know, one step at a time. It took years to get this back off the ground to start creating this again.

So it's very good that that's there. And it's happening. I think they're doing their first actual production run to test the production this year. Just one more I'll throw out to you before we turn to talking about humans in space for a few minutes. What's the status of the James Webb Space Telescope in this budget? Is it kept on track? Thank goodness, yes, it has. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief for that.

Absolutely. They seem to have solved all of their major development problems. It seems like, barring any unforeseen disasters, it's sort of on a glide path to launch in 2018 to the great relief of everyone in the science community. All right, then let's hope that we have the same relief when that monster telescope unfolds properly up there in space. Everybody's keeping their fingers crossed, I hope. That's going to be the most stressful. I think it unfolds over the course of months before it's like fully operational. It's going to be even a launch.

Actually, thank goodness. It's launching on an Ariane 5, which is about as reliable of a rocket as you get. But it's still, you know, it's still sitting on a giant bomb, you know, to go up into space. It's going to be an exciting year, 2018. Knocking on my wooden desk here. Speaking of rockets, SLS, it's already come up. That's the Space Launch System, this eventually bigger than Saturn V rocket, and the capsule that's going to sit on top of it, Orion.

How do those fare in this budget? These are big deals for Congress. Oh, man, this is the—so Congress and the White House have been fighting over what the proper level of funding for the Space Launch System and Orion has been since the whole thing began in 2011. This is no different this year. White House is sticking to its lower funding level projections. They pretty much ignored the $650 million increase to the SLS that Congress provided last year. So it's a functional cut of about a third of the budget down to a mere $1.3 billion. Orion gets a small cut. I very much doubt that should Congress pass a budget, you will see

this money restored back to the SLS. They have shown pretty impressive willingness to give a lot of money to this program. Last year, they gave it $2 billion, 50% increase over the request. It's interesting. It's a hard program to understand exactly where that money is being spent or what they do with the extra $600 million in a year. At a fundamental level, and Jason, i'm sure you can talk more about this this is just not a way to run an efficient program you have to have such a disagreement in spending congress can appropriate an extra 600 million dollars you have about two years to spend

that money before it goes back to the treasury maybe there are ways that they can do that well but if you're just like seesong back and forth between planning for 1.3, getting 2 billion, and then having to spend it in a shorter time span, because you know that the request will come down low again, it's just not the best way to do it. And really what we need is a better alignment of this program between Congress and most likely the next White House. Jason? When Casey was talking about that, I was reminded of an old movie called Brewster's Millions. Suddenly you have far more money than you really know what to do with. I don't think SLS is at that point. I think by now, after years and years and years

of getting more money than the president requests, the program probably has a pretty good idea. They probably have two different development plans, one for if the president's request comes true and one if they get more from Congress. So I think that their expenditures are probably on some kind of a track at this point, although it is still very disruptive to not know what your money is going to be from year to year. It's very difficult to plan for eventual outcomes when the numbers are sort of coming out of thin air. Yeah, it was fascinating.

When we were listening to the budget rollout announcement, the NASA CFO, David Radzanowski, was talking about the big decrease to the SLS program. He was saying, well, this will support the first crewed launch of the SLS and Orion in 2023. However, we hope it stays on track for 2021, which was just a really strange way of saying, we assume Congress will actually provide the funding to get it to 2021, but we don't want to request that as the administration. That kind of sums up the weird disconnect between how they're running this program. And then he also went

through and said a lot of that extra money went to last year was this thing called the exploration upper stage, which is the block 1B variant of the SLS. And that's kind of your critical upper stage that you need to actually throw stuff out to the outer planets really fast. You need that to really get humans beyond lunar space. And, you know, the current plan was to use this ICPS, this interim cryogenic propulsion stage, human rated for one time use, which would cost tens of millions of dollars, and then develop your exploration upper stage in your 2020s and then use that. Congress is saying, skip this human rating of this pointless in between thing, go right into developing exploration upper stage. here's your money.

And the CFO during the budget release said, no, you know, we're not going to do that. We can't do it. We're going to use the ICPS. A week later, we have a story saying that NASA's put a stop work order out on human rating the ICPS. I don't even know who's running what over there, but it's an interesting show of what is actually happening and kind of this conflict between administration and Congress. Wow. Yeah. Fundamentally, it's gamesmanship on trying to determine, you know that Congress will

give money to SLS. The question is, will they add that to the NASA priorities laid out in the budget or will that money come from some of those priorities in the NASA budget? Right? So will Congress up NASA's top end budget? Or is this a zero sum game that if they put another $600 million into SLS, will that come out of commercial crew or science or aeronautics or somewhere else? And so far, it's actually kind of been, well, the last couple years, I should say, past performance does not imply future returns, I think is the standard thing with the stock market. But fortunately, I think last year was a really good example. They just added $1.3 billion to NASA's top line, came out of wherever they pull money from in Congress. We're hoping that will continue

again this year. Obviously, there is a much tougher field to be working in politically than there was last year. But the desire is there. And I think we have a lot of strong supporters in the Senate and the House who are committed to adding money to NASA's budget. But Jason makes a very good point. You can't necessarily depend on that to always be the case. And when it comes down to brass tacks, likely Congress is going to prioritize SLS over pretty much anything. Guys, we are headed into nearly an hour of this discussion, and even the wonkiest of our listeners today are probably looking to take a break soon. So we'll wrap this up with just two or three more topics. And one of those is kind of related to SLS Orion.

And one of those is kind of related to SLS Orion. It's the so-called Habitat module. Now, I know all of us would love to see NASA start development of the Ares spacecraft that gets people to Mars in the Martian. In fact, gets them there several times, apparently. You need your VASMIR engine, I think. Yes, we need those VASMIR engines. Would you please tell those guys at AdAstra to get on it? Barring that, one essential element, along with, oh, solar electric propulsion, is going to be this big place for people to live, because nobody's going to want to hang out in the Orion capsule over the months it's going to take to get to Mars.

Does the habitat module come up in the budget? There is a mention of it, which is interesting. It's kind of buried in there. It doesn't stand out with its own budget line. But according to NASA's CFO, NASA is proposing to spend $90 million developing a, in this case, a cislunar, lunar area habitat for the 2020s. Congress included a line item directing $50 million to be spent on this in 2016. Thankfully, NASA's picking up with that and I think officially starting development on this and would start developing this in 2017 fiscal year. And that's, I think, a critical step, not just for our humans orbiting Mars concept, but for any realistic plan going forward, you're going to need to learn how to have

completely closed-loop life support in deep space taking you to Mars or operating far vicinity of the moon. And so it's a very important step. I really wish they had started this many years ago, but glad to see them starting it now. And we should note that even the International Space Station, that's not a closed loop system.

We still haven't achieved that. And if you're going to keep people alive, just as you've said, Casey, we better figure that out. Jason, let's go on to commercial crew. You guys have noted that this has been kicked around a little bit in this 2017 budget. How does it do and has it moved somewhere new? As Casey alluded to earlier, I don't know that the goalposts have actually moved that much. I think that this is still the fundamental battle between Congress and the White House is, do you want to fund SLS or do you want to fund Commercial Crew? In the end, it's never a zero

sum game. It's somewhere in between. I think that Commercial Crew is doing better now. I think that there is more acceptance of this program within Congress. Congress still tends to fund it at lower levels than the president's request. But at this point, Commercial Crew has really moved along to the point where they're talking about launches next year, next calendar year, so 2017 and 2018. It seems as though this battle is finally starting to diminish. And I think a lot of that is just the fact that you're starting to see actual hardware. And, you know, the commercial cargo resupply has had its ups and downs, but that's to be expected with any new rocket development program. I suspect we'll see,

hopefully not such dramatic ups and downs with commercial crew, but I still think that they've got a long road to go before you have safe human-rated vehicles to go to the International Space Station. That said, I think that they're on the trajectory to actually accomplish that. Yeah, they request, I think, $1.15 billion this year, which is less than last year, but that was projected. That was expected. They're following a development curve model where you have a year that you need peak funding as you're building most of the new stuff and you have most of the people working on it that you'll ever have on the project. And so the administration is completely following its request, its plan so far. So it'll be a little less money that Congress would have to pony up.

And again, it's really going to depend, I think, on the overall fiscal picture, whether or not they have this extra money to work with. I think Congress will fund SLS over Commercial Crew. That has been demonstrated year and year again. And if there's enough money left over, basically Commercial Crew will get the money NASA says it needs.

And hopefully it does, because I think, as Jason pointed out, they're getting very close. I'm really excited to see these first launches next year. They'll be doing quite a few tests this year, too, that we'll be following. And it's just one of those things that you can actually start seeing it shift

in the budget projections, moving from development money, which will be tailing down, to services purchases, basically, just like they do with cargo. They're starting to purchase rides, paying for those in advance. So it's exciting. This is what a priority looks like. For an administration, they have supported this program as hard as they could, given some pretty stiff opposition from Congress. And they've basically pulled out every legal trick that they could to keep as much funding

going towards commercial crew as possible. And we'll see the payoff here in a few years. Just one more mission that I want to mention, and it is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is moving an asteroid where someday some humans in an Orion capsule and maybe a habitat module can head out there, rendezvous with it, and chip off a few pieces. Is there still development underway on a redirect mission? Yeah, it's in there. It's the first time we've seen, I think this is correct, Jason, jump in if I'm wrong here. This is the first time we've seen an actual line item for the asteroid redirect mission in the budget previously it had been hidden in exploration

advanced exploration studies accounts and space technology accounts and that's there still to some degree but there's actually a line item that says arm it's the pirate version the asteroid robotic read treeble mission or something it's called you version, the Asteroid Robotic Retrieval Mission, or something it's called, to actually fund the boulder-grabbing concept now. They request $66 million in 2017, which is honestly, for the supposed flagship human mission of NASA and this administration, is a paltry amount.

And you can see in their projections, all of the major funding needed to build this spacecraft would occur in the next presidential administration. So this does not strike me as having that high of a priority anymore, that they are not fighting for this program the way that they fought for commercial crew that I was just talking about. It's going to very much depend on what the next administration wants to do, whether or not this continues. Yeah, Casey, to that I would add, if money is an indication of priorities, which I believe it generally is

in a federal budget, this administration is proposing to spend $90 million in the first year on a habitat that is not necessary for the ARM mission. And they're proposing to spend $66 million on the retrieval mission. And that proposal also pushes the launch date for the robotic aspect of that mission from 2020 to 2023. Yeah, that is a hidden story in this that very few people are talking about. If you look at a typical robotic science mission, the development curve is such that you've got anywhere from five to 15 years worth of pre-formulation of the mission. Then there are anywhere from two to five years of development before you launch the mission. Well, if we're

talking about launching it in 2020, that means that we should basically be done with the pre-formulation and be moving to development this year. There is no indication that that has happened at all. In fact, I've seen very little indication that between here and 2023. So I really think that that's an indication that NASA is sort of waiting this mission out to see what the outcome of the election is and what the next administration's priorities are. Well, I just want to emphasize too, 2023 means that this would, Boulder would not be in lunar, cislunar orbit by 2025 when they are still planning to say, they're still claiming that you would have astronauts launching to the moon

to rendezvous with this. Previous estimates had been five years for the retrieval part. Now, I don't even know what the implication of a three-year delay has on what their target asteroid is, if they can still get there and back

at the same amount of time. Like orbital mechanics are kind of tough, right? They don't, you know, celestial bodies wait for no man or woman. You know, and NASA is still claiming. I try not to be negative as much because I think there's too much negativity in space policy,

but it is a little bit of nonsense to claim that the human part of the mission is not delayed and is still going to happen in 2025. I just don't see physically how they can get the boulder back in that amount of time. And so you're talking about the signature mission of the human spaceflight program on paper pushed back to at least 2028, which is becoming less and less likely to me. And as Jason pointed out, all those reasons Jason pointed out, there is not a significant, just in terms of funding, in terms of the speed at which this program has moved through,

this has been somewhat disappointing to see NASA approach this project. And again, why are they doing this? It's because the president's national space policy is for humans to visit an asteroid in the 2020s. Well, this allows them to say that they're working towards that. But I would be surprised at this point to see this mission picked up vigorously by the next administration, whether or not that's a Democrat or Republican. There are a few asteroids out there then that may be breathing a sigh of relief as they listen to this. So we're not going to be filching any of their boulders anytime soon, it sounds like. We're going to wrap this up. But Casey, I want to give you a chance to crow a little bit about

the success that we see in the planetary science budget and the role that the planetary society has had in this? Jeez, Matt, if you insist, I just drag it out of me. No, it's planetary science. When I first took this job was in a budgetary freefall. It wasn't just the initial cut. We were looking at projections of cuts for continuing five years to really, there was no follow-on mission to Mars after Curiosity, no missions to anywhere in the ocean worlds. We were basically looking at a few maybe small missions to asteroids, and that was it.

In the period that we've been doing this, and really focusing this at the Planetary Society, we have seen the fortunes of planetary science change dramatically. And now we're arguing whether or not Europa should happen in 2022 or the late 2020s. That's a wonderful argument to have compared to where we first started. And that has been because the society, which is funded, remember, by individuals, right, by members, have supported an aggressive expansion of our space policy, now space policy program, right? We have not just me as the first full-time person working on space policy. We have Jason, the second full-time person working on space policy. And we are able to do so

much more now than ever before. And we have been developing a really strong base of supporters of our members who are willing to year after year, right, they're members of Congress, right, the White House, from wherever they are, to support these programs, you know, that take decades to pay off. And it's been very satisfying to see that support. And also, you know, for non-partisan, non-politicized parts of government to see government respond to that, to the voices of the people, really. You know, it's very hopeful in a sense. And we've been seeing such good support, and it's been slower on the NASA side, but every request that NASA has made since the big cut in 2013 has been a better request than the year before,

that NASA has made since the big cut in 2013 has been a better request than the year before, even though they were still cutting. So it's been very, very satisfying. And it's exciting to see where we can take this. As I keep telling people now, we've kind of done our triage, right? We've stopped, we've stemmed the bleeding, we are in a recovery mode,

and we've gotten our foot in the door of cracking open the funding to support a truly exciting and unprecedented program of solar system exploration that could happen in our lifetimes. To me, the sky is the limit, you know, or the solar system is the limit here. And it's going to be, you know, can we keep this, if we keep this momentum up, we're going to have an extraordinary decade into the 2020s. Gentlemen, we will no doubt be talking again about this on Planetary Radio and in other

Planetary Radio extras, since as you've noted, this is only the bare beginnings of the development of a budget for the United States in 2017, the 2017 federal fiscal year, which might start on October 1st. It still starts on October 21st, whether or not there's a budget. That's always the interesting question. So it's going to be a weird ride. Oh, and we should also just, can we just quickly mention, Matt, that there is this little thing, I don't know if people have heard about it,

that there's a presidential election this year. And I was going to get to this next. You've got some great resources on the website, this election 2016 page. that we can find that's been on the record in recent years of every candidate who is running for president and what they think about NASA. And we have those listed at planetary.org slash election 2016. And we also are asking our members, particularly those in the early primary states, if you find yourself shaking hands with a candidate to tell them that A, you support NASA and B, what are their plans for NASA in their administration? What would they do? Get some data for us, and then tell us about it. We've had a few members already write in with really great experiences about that. And so we encourage

people to do that if they have the opportunity, or otherwise, just look at what your favorite candidate has said about NASA. That's all planetary.org slash election2016. So that's all, planetary.org slash election2016. And you and Jason, I assume, will be seeing much more written by you guys and others at planetary.org as this election year and budget planning year unfolds. Oh, absolutely. Our fingers are already sore. It's too much to do. Jason, any final thoughts? I think the only thing I'd like to add is I really want to extend a great big thank you to all of our members. Casey's and my efforts would not be possible without their support, and that's a really, really important issue for both of us. Special thanks to you folks,

members or not, who have stuck it out through us through this long discussion. Hey, they're upset. We're finishing. I'd bet you anything. I want to hear it. This could go on for hours. Well, I can tell you, I get wonderful mail from people thanking us for these discussions, and hopefully that'll happen again. Let us know what you think of these Planetary Radio Extra discussions, and this one in particular, that we are just bringing to a close with Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy, and his full-time colleague at the Society, Jason Callahan,

our Space Policy Advisor based in Washington, D.C. Gentlemen, again, thank you very much, and keep up the great work. Thanks, Matt. Thanks very much. And this has been another Planetary Radio Extra edition from the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio, hoping that you'll tune in to the show as well, our weekly half hour about space exploration.

And be sure to check out the other resources we provide at planetary.org. Thanks very much for listening.