Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - President Trump Sets Course for the Moon

Episode Date: December 13, 2017

On December 11th President Donald Trump signed a memorandum that firmly points the US space effort toward the Moon, but without providing many details. Planetary Society Director of Space Policy Casey Dreier fills in some of the gaps left by this executive directive.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, space fans. I want to thank all of you who responded to my special appeal last week by going to planetary.org slash give today and donating in support of this show. And if you haven't quite gotten around to it, or if you've just come back from the time dilation zone around a black hole, you can still show your support with a gift of any amount. Again, it's planetary.org slash give today, and if you scroll down, you'll get to where you can direct your gift to Planetary Radio. Your generosity as we end this

year means so much to me, Emily, Bruce, Bill, and the rest of us at the Society. Thanks, and happy holidays. President Trump sets course for the moon this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. The announcement came out of nowhere. With only about 24 hours notice, the White House made known that there would be a signing ceremony on Monday, December 11th. Sure enough, there was U.S. President Donald Trump, surrounded by Vice President Mike Pence, other administration officials, members of Congress, and distinguished astronauts, including Peggy Whitson and Buzz Aldrin. We'll learn what the hubbub was about when we welcome back the Planetary Society's

Director of Space Policy, Casey Dreyer. The moon hadn't quite risen when I joined Bruce Betts on a stretch of California beach for this week's What's Up conversation. Oh, and President Trump also mentioned Mars during that ceremony, not Venus though, and I doubt that anyone was surprised. Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis has just written about that furnace world that hides so many secrets and why it has been so long since the U.S. has visited. Jason, welcome back to the show. Why is it that Venus keeps ending up such a wallflower? ending up such a wallflower. Poor Venus. Yeah, well, almost everyone universally that I interviewed for this story responded with some version of, because it's hard. Landers go there and the temperatures and pressures on the surface just kill them in a matter of a few hours. The Soviet landers, the Venera landers, were only able to get a few pictures from the surface. It's cloudy and it's difficult to see the surface. But looking into it a little more,

and we talk about this in the article, a more accurate explanation might be that Venus hides its secrets better than other destinations. Because when you think about it, landing a rover on Mars, that's also hard. Sending a probe out to visit Pluto at the edge of the solar system and work for many years, that's also hard. So it's not that these things are harder than any place else. It's that they tend to require more effort to get the same science results. A camera that might work in orbit around Mars, a relatively cheap camera that can just see the surface and image the surface, won't work on Venus because it has those clouds in the CO2 atmosphere. So you have to do everything differently. And that's where the hard part comes in. Well, Second Rock has a shot coming up in this new round of proposals for

a New Frontiers mission. New Frontiers, which is sort of that middle of the road, middle of the pack in terms of cost for missions from NASA? Yeah, yeah. So NASA missions go flagship, and that's the big bank, the huge expensive missions like Mars Curiosity rover. Then you got the New Horizons. It's about a billion dollars cost capped. And then the Discovery missions, which are cheaper at about 500 million. So this is a selection for the new frontiers in the middle. And there are three missions that you describe, a couple of landers and an orbiter. What kind of a shot do they have? I guess, how can we really say? Yeah, it really is hard to tell because ultimately the NASA management that looks at this will have to decide which missions out of all of them to any destination ultimately meet, have the best chance of working and the best chance of getting good science for the money that NASA is spending on these. So they don't

particularly put one destination ahead of the other. In theory, all are equal. So Venus has the same chance that the Enceladus probe has or the Titan mission. It's hard to speculate on its chances, but it is interesting that the three Venus missions do have very different approaches. Like you said, one's an orbiter, one deploys a single lander, and another one deploys two landers. So it's a big diversity of different mission types. If you want to learn more about these three missions, one of which could just be the next New Frontiers mission taken on by NASA, it's all described in Jason's post from December 8th of this year, planetary.org, to read more about these.

Among other things that you include here is a little montage of photos from those amazing Venera landers. Are you as impressed with that accomplishment by the old Soviet Union as I am? Yeah, I definitely am. It really is amazing when you look at these and think what the, you know, the surface temperature and pressure was where these pictures were taken. Very cool. And still the only images we have from the surface. Yeah. Thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure to talk to you and look forward to the next opportunity. Thanks, Matt. That's Jason Davis, the digital editor for the Planetary Society, who follows all things space for us and is our embedded reporter with LightSail,

which I'm sure we will be talking about again in the near term. The directive I'm signing today will refocus America's space program on human exploration and discovery. It marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond. This directive will ensure America's space program once again leads and inspires all of humanity. The pioneer spirit has always defined America. After braving the vast unknown and discovering the new world, our forefathers did not only merely sail home and in some cases never to return. They stayed, they explored, they built, they guided,

and through that pioneering spirit, they imagined all of the possibilities that few dared to dream. Today, the same spirit beckons us to begin new journeys of exploration and discovery, to lift our eyes all the way up to the heavens and once again imagine the possibilities waiting in those big, beautiful stars if we dare to dream big. And that's what our country is doing again. We're dreaming big. This is a giant step toward that inspiring future and toward reclaiming America's proud destiny in space. And space has so much to do with so many other applications, including a military application. So we are the leader and we're going to stay the leader and we're going to increase it many fold. That was President Donald

J. Trump signing a presidential memorandum regarding the future of space plans here in the United States. With us here to talk about that event, which took place on Monday, December 11th, is the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome back. Hey, Matt. Happy to be here. Tell us what's your assessment of what took place in the White House yesterday as we speak? Honestly, I was a little underwhelmed, I suppose, is the answer to this. It's really nothing more than an official implementation of policy that was announced all the way back in early October by Vice President Pence at the very first council

meeting of the National Space Council. by Vice President Pence at the very first council meeting of the National Space Council. It really doesn't add any meat to the idea that the United States is going to focus its exploration efforts on the moon. And every question that we had before this announcement still stands. We don't know what budget expectations we need for the moon. We don't know what timeline we're working with. We don't know what timeline we're working with. We don't know how exactly we're going to get there. It's just basically was the equivalent of crossing your T's and dotting your I's. And now this is official US space policy. Were you as surprised as me? I mean, when I actually found the document this morning and saw

that the actual meat of this document, other than legalese and who it's directed to, is one paragraph. Yeah, exactly. That was a little bit of a surprise. And, you know, in some ways, it makes sense, given the fact that the Space Council has not been at work that long. They really only got going in the late summer. So they've only had a few months. So I suppose this is a reasonable expectation. They can't be rewriting all of U.S. space policy that quickly. But yeah, it was only one paragraph. And what it does, if you look at it, it takes President Obama's national space policy, which was released in 2010, which is a multi-page document.

10, which is a multi-page document. And it had previously called for sending humans near the moon by 2025, specifically to an asteroid, and then going on to Mars by the mid 2030s, specifically to orbit. That's what the previous US space policy said was the goal of NASA's human spaceflight program. This memorandum that President Trump signed yesterday basically says, strike out that one paragraph. So all of the U.S. space policy is still in effect, except for that one paragraph on human space exploration. And would you like me to read what it says? It's short enough. I can go through this word for word. I would love for you to.

Go ahead. I'll put on my narrator voice. So here's what they replaced U.S. space policy with for human spaceflight. That NASA will lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations. I wish they had added to boldly go where no one has gone. It kind of has that ring to it, doesn't it? It really does. And it's hard to find anything particularly wrong with that, at least in my hearing. What about you? Yeah, I mean, there's really nothing wrong in it. What's interesting is that it removes

any semblance of timeline. Even before, even though it was somewhat of an unrealistic timeline before, it did say humans to the moon by 2025, humans to Mars by mid 2030s. This notably has no dates. So we don't know exactly what they're thinking of in terms of a timeline. It's more flexible. Notably, there's the word commercial in there, which is nice to see. And honestly, there's the commercial industry in space has grown so much in its capability in this period since Obama signed this last national US space policy. Good to see human missions to Mars in there. But again, I stand by our basic question, which is I've yet to see any detailed answer to show how going to the surface

of the moon will get us to Mars any faster than if we just went with an orbit first policy like we were talking about in our previous humans orbiting Mars concept. So lots of unanswered questions still. It's vague enough that there's very little to dislike about this, which we can count as a win. You mentioned the National Space Council, which, of course, Vice President Pence heads, and he also got to speak at that ceremony at the White House. The secretary of the council is this fellow that we've talked about before, Scott Pace, who runs the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University

and is kind of, as I think you and Jason Callahan have explained it, is sort of the day-to-day guy running the business of the National Space Council. And NASA provided this soundbite from Scott Pace. And the moon is the next feasible step. Mars remains an inspiring horizon goal that we need to be working toward, but we first need to walk out of the neighborhood before we can run out of the neighborhood. And we need to do it in a way that reflects the world today, which is many more countries and companies that are involved in space and interested in space. And the moon remains the logical next step in order for us to bring that whole community along with us and not just go by ourselves. That's Scott Pace, the secretary to the National

Space Council. Again, Casey, certainly nothing offensive there. And Scott is one of the most knowledgeable people around about what the American space program has done and maybe can do, right? Oh, yeah, he absolutely is. And his mark on this council, I think we're already beginning to feel. He worked on the constellation program back in the George W. Bush administration. He has very strong opinions and very well thought out opinions about the role and utility of going to the moon with humans first. I always like to point out, you cannot make a wrong argument there. There's no objective place that is the right place to send humans to explore space, right?

You can go to the moon. You can say you want to go to Mars. Both of them are good options. The question is, why are you doing it? And Scott has very good answers to that question for why you go to the moon first, which is international engagement, soft power projection across the world. You have this new unproven but seductive idea of resource utilization.

That's a much more broader impact. use existing hardware like the Space Launch System Block 1A and the first version of Orion to send humans near the moon without having to add even more years of investment and hardware development to be able to push people further into space. That's Casey Dreyer. After the break, he'll tell us more about that new directive from President Donald Trump and what it means for men and women who want to leave footprints on Mars. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society.

And I wanted to let you know that right now Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now. We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition2017. Thank you. You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the Planetary Society this holiday season or any time of year.

Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. Because, come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. President Donald J. Trump just put his signature on a simple memorandum that speaks volumes about the space exploration goals of the United States. It's Casey Dreyer's job to understand where that directive will take us and to help the rest of us understand it as well.

Casey is the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy, so it's also his job to represent the wishes of the Society's members and everyone else who cares deeply about our exploration of the solar system. In a perhaps related announcement, Casey, we just heard that Japan has committed itself, at least at this early stage, to participating in the so-called Lunar Gateway proposed by NASA and the United States, which the president alluded to, international cooperation. We also heard about that from Scott Pace. You saw that announcement too? Yeah. And NASA has an

agreement with Roscosmos to explore ways to do something like that together. And other international partners are becoming more interested in this idea of the deep space gateway. It's really interesting to me because, again, if you read the president's memorandum closely, it doesn't actually say anything about the surface of the moon, right? It just says the humans to the moon for long-term exploration. Now, NASA was already planning to send humans near the moon in the context, in the guise of the previous Obama space policy. Now, the question is, is NASA going to, in addition to these plans for this deep space gateway, send humans to the surface, lead people to the surface? By what means are they going to, in addition to these plans for this deep space gateway, send humans to the surface,

lead people to the surface. By what means are they going to do that? But it sounds to me that NASA is continuing to plan on its existing program. And it's just incorporating this new directive to say, of course, we're going to address your program. So it's interesting that this pre-existing program from the previous president is being used to justify or at least follow initially this new memorandum by the new president. So it's a way to try to keep programmatic consistency. And notably, it uses all the same things that NASA has already been developing. Unlike the cancellation of Constellation, this is a much less disruptive policy change to shift to this lunar focus because we were already going to the moon. As you know, we've got a lot of would-be Martians in the audience for this program.

What should they take away from this? Is this good or bad or neutral news for reaching Mars? It is not good news if you want to reach Mars in our lifetimes. If you want to go to the moon, there's no incorrect argument. It's not fundamentally wrong. However, I don't think you can make the argument that to enable Mars, you have to go to the moon. I just don't see how that works out, particularly if nothing else in terms of resource allocation. There's no mention of budget. The big step coming forward, we'll see in NASA's 2019 budget request that the White House is putting together right now, whether additional money will be requested to enable NASA to pursue this moon goal. Even if they do add extra money, it can't, very unlikely, I will say, will be that much. All of your listeners know that NASA is being asked to do too much with too little.

We have two human spaceflight programs, one in low Earth orbit, one struggling to get beyond. Both of those are running about $4 billion a year. And that's just stasis, right? So in order to land on the moon, you're going to need billions of more dollars, even if you use commercial partners. And then just like the space station, you've got to provision it, you've got to accrue it, you've got to operate it. That's billions of dollars per year to run that lunar presence. That's all that money that has not been getting spent on going to Mars. And so, you know, if you really want to see humans get to Mars in your lifetime, eat your vegetables, you know, make sure you work out 35 minutes a day, keep your blood pressure

down and watch your salt intake. We've got to keep the long-term focus. Now, I'm being a little flippant about this. There is a lot of opportunity here. There are ways that you can develop this program and plan it to have a very clear end goal of Mars. Now, that needs to be done very carefully because it becomes so easy to focus on moon-centric issues that you just end up making a moon program. But if you want to go to Mars, you've got to make every decision in your moon program with Mars in your sight. And we need to make sure that that will happen. We'll keep an eye out, especially you and your colleagues on the

space policy and advocacy staff at the Planetary Society for that 2019 budget. Of course, we're still waiting for the 2018 budget, aren't we? We are, but at least we have. They were telegraphed. They made the request back in May, so we knew what they were proposing, at least. Congress is the one kind of at this point dragging its feet to finish, to get that one across the finish line. The president's budget request, we expect to come out sometime in the spring. Again, we hope it will contain positive news for NASA. The bad outcome that we have to be very careful of, we're reading a lot in between the lines. It's hard to know exactly what the priorities are going to be,

but they're talking about redirecting NASA to focus on human exploration and discovery. Now, there's a lot of ways to interpret that statement, but the most negative way that we tend to worry about sometimes is that that means they will take money away from NASA science programs to fund the human work, and then you don't need as big of an increase in funding. There's only so many pots of money within NASA that is not being spent on human exploration that that can draw from. And so we need to be careful, and we're going to be continually making

this case that whatever we do with the human efforts to the moon, to the deep space gateway, to whatever they decide on, that we preserve the part of NASA that is actively projecting human presence from anywhere from the sun all the way out beyond Pluto to the Kuiper belt. That is a precious investment that we've made and we need to preserve that even if the humans are going to be going to the moon. Ever vigilant, Casey. I can't let you go without mentioning one other thing I just noticed in the news this morning, and that is this announcement that in support of the National Space Council, there will be soon an advisory group. Did you see that announcement? I did.

We've been expecting it. The user advisory group is going to be run by NASA. It will contain anywhere from 15 to 30 people, apparently. The details just came out today. It's something that I've mentioned for a while. It was part of the charter of the National Space Council when it was created by President Trump earlier this year. We will nominate good people to serve on it. And then ultimately, that choice will be up to the Vice President and the President of the United States of who serves on this council. that choice will be up to the Vice President and the President of the United States of who serves on this Council. I'm sure there will be more that we can say about this when we hit the next

Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio on the first Friday of January. Till then, unless something else comes out of the blue, as this signing ceremony did yesterday, keep looking out for us, the interest of all of us who love space exploration and have a great holiday. Oh, you too, Matt. We'll keep up our compulsive work even when things are slow here. It's a lot of interesting things happening this year. Casey Dreyer is the director of space policy for the Planetary Society, watching out for us there in Washington, D.C., where these big decisions are being made. We'll be back in a moment with this week's edition of What's Up, and it's a special Surf's Up edition.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Where are we? I have my feet in the sand on Coronado Beach in the San Diego area. It's beautiful. And the sun just set in front of us. It did indeed. And I predicted that it would, and then it did. And a few hundred feet down this way, people are ice skating in front of the Del Coronado Hotel. Is that because the weather is so much colder, kind of a microclimate?

Yeah, if anybody could arrange it, it would be the Hotel Del. But no, it's just, it was like 80 degrees today, and they're ice skating on the beach. Eat your heart out, eastern United States and much of the rest of the world. Yeah, no, it was a little overly warm here today, don't you think? It was a bit, a bit, a trifle too temperate. But it's lovely right now at sunset. By the way, we're talking to Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. In a moment or two, we're going to have the night sky here. Tell us

what we should look for. In the evening sky, you've got a bunch of cool looking stars and that sun up before it sets. But in the pre-dawn, you've got low in the east in the pre-dawn, you've got Jupiter really bright, and above it, reddish Mars, and above that, bluish Spica. But we've got some cool stuff. We've got the Geminid meteor shower, peaks on the 13th and 14th, but also continues for several days after that with increased meteor counts and it's going to be really good because the moon is not coming out until roughly the pre-dawn around the peak so there should be some dark skies if you're in a really dark side up to 100 120 meteors per hour most of us will get far fewer but still a good thing to see and it derives from the rock comet rock comet which is uh was just thought to

be an asteroid but now we see gas coming out and so it's this combination like kind of comedy rock or rockety comet 3200 phaethon it is actually making its closest past on December 16th since 1974. Still 10 million kilometers, 6 million miles away. Not visible with your eye, but if you have a small telescope or a big telescope, check out online sites that will give you directions for where to look for 3200 Phaethon. I like cometoroid. I like it, cometoroid. Hey, you've coined a new term. We'll take that to the IAU. All right, we move on to random space fact. You just needed the other beach boys to do the

harmony for that. I know I really did, or my sons, but they're not here right now. Continuing my, the saga of what's happened in the last 15 years since you started Planetary Radio, we look at Mars this time. Since starting in 2002, there have been five new orbiters and additional ones that were there, three rovers, and one fixed lander of the successful spacecraft at Mars. That is very impressive. Nice to have been around long enough to see some history. It is. There's been a lot of great stuff in planetary exploration that's been going on.

Speaking of great stuff, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, oh, lifeguard. That's a lifeguard yelling at us. It's okay, mister. Hey, mister. I asked you who was the first guest on Planetary Radio, and how'd we do, man? People had to work for this. You do make them work now and then. I guess it's not in the Wikipedia. That's maybe not mentioned. There were people like Ilya Schwartz who went page after page back through the archives because every show from the start is on our website at planetary.org. Ilya, like our winner today, discovered that it was... Louis Friedman.

Lou Friedman, the former executive director and still executive director emeritus of the Planetary Society, co-founder. Random.org's choice was, this week, Brian Hewlett. Brian Hewlett of Charlottesville, Virginia. Go Cavaliers. Who said, sure enough, Lou Friedman, congratulations, Brian. You are going to be getting a Planetary Society t-shirt from Chop Shop Store. You can check out our store at chopshopstore.com. There's a Planetary Society store.

Just saw a guy wipe out out there. Wipe out. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account worth a couple hundred dollars, actually, to use that international nonprofit network of telescopes. And the iTelescope guy said absolutely. Tell people that they can donate that account to a local school, an astronomy club, or whomever they like. We got so many lovely messages from people because you asked them to say nice things. I said, please say nice things, send us

nice messages. And thank you to those who did. The first of those, we're going to read a few. And thank you to those who did. The first of those, we're going to read a few. David Fisher in Craigmore, Australia. Matt, your experiment of a radio show seems to be a great success. You've fired up a great interest in space and astronomy for me personally. It will certainly keep me up late at night and out with the telescope for many years. Aw.

From Torsten Zimmer in Germany. Congrats on the 15th anniversary of Planetary Radio. I haven't missed a single episode since I discovered it 11 or so years ago. So glad a show like this exists in the solar system. Here's to the next 15. Oh, that's wonderful. Yay. Martin Hajoski in Houston. This is a comment about Lou, Lou Friedman. You might even say he was there when Planetary Radio set the solar sails for its 15-year journey

to seek out new life and new civilizations and go boldly but split no infinitives where no podcast has gone before. I've got one from Josh Lyon, Lyon, from Howell, Michigan. My favorite part in that first show was the hysterically outdated random space fact, which referred to Pluto as a planet and emphasized that no probe has ever visited it. You know, I emphasized it so that a probe would visit it. And look, it worked. There we are, providing the incentive for the New Horizons mission, right from the beginning of this program. You want to do another one?

Sure. From Evan Daw of Derry, Pennsylvania, your podcast helped inspire me to return to school to pursue my dream of becoming an aerospace engineer. Thank you so much for what you do and keep the space science coming. Nice, huh? That's very nice. Last one, because we've got to end with something funny.

And this one from Bob in Chandler, Arizona. Congratulations on entertaining and informing us for 15 years. That's longer than any of my marriages. Yikes. Bob, I'm glad we have a relationship that could stand the test of time. Are you ready to give us another question? I do. I mean, I am. I'm ready. We talked about Phaethon. What is it? The cometroid. The cometroid Phaethon. And so it was named after a mythological character,

Phaethon or Phaethon. Who was Phaethon's father in mythology? Phaethon's father in mythology. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have this time until the 20th. That'll be Wednesday, December 20th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And we will have for you a Planetary Radio, excuse me, a Planetary Society t-shirt, that Venn diagram of Mars and the Earth, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about a beautiful sunset over a glorious ocean. Thank you, and good night. I'm going to grab my board.

How about you, Cowabunga? Dude, surf's up! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its moon-bound members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.