Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #1: How We Got Here: Human Spaceflight at the End of the Obama Era

Episode Date: June 3, 2016

In the premiere of this new monthly series we briefly examine the latest move by the House of Representatives in the game of NASA's budget and then discuss what Lockheed Martin's new "Mars Base Camp" proposal takes from The Society's Humans Orbiting Mars workshop. Our featured discussion takes a deep dive into the story of President Obama's impact on human spaceflight--how NASA ended up with a mixed program of commercial systems and big government programs.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 this first official edition of Planetary Radio Extra Space Policy Edition. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Very proud, very pleased to be bringing you this, well, it's really still kind of a pilot. In fact, we don't even have a real music yet, because that music is still being composed and performed by one of our partners in this effort. We'll get to that in a moment. But we are so pleased to be starting this new monthly series. The plan is that we will be posting a new episode for you every first Friday of the month,

at least through the end of this election year 2016. And, you know, depending on how you folks respond, maybe well beyond. This is something we've done, of course, two or three times in the past on sort of an ad hoc basis and had a great time and gotten a great reaction. So it came from my colleague Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. Hey, why don't we make this a regular thing? And so I have now on Skype, both speaking to us from Washington, though different Washingtons. First, Casey, hi there. Hey, Matt, and my colleague who is yet to be named.

And that would be Jason Callahan, the space policy advisor who's based within the Beltway in Washington, D.C., space policy advisor for the Planetary Society. Right, Jason? Yes, sir. How are you guys doing today? Terrific. Yeah, good to see you both. And it is nice to see you even though it's still just an audio podcast because it's great. I'm not used to having the video up here.

Okay, Jason. I have to say, the audience is missing out. I know. We'll work on this. I usually just say a face for is missing out on our work on this. I usually just say a face for radio, but three faces for radio? I don't know, it might be too much. Jason, you were the mystery composer I was talking about. How's our new theme coming?

The theme is written and mostly recorded. I just need to finish mixing it and mastering it, and hopefully I will have it ready to debut for the next podcast. All right, well, stay tuned, folks. That's another reason to tune in when we do this again, first Friday in July. We're going to get into the genuine content here, get into The Weeds, which was, Casey, I think that was one of your inspirations for us doing this, right? That other podcast. Absolutely, yeah, one of my favorite podcasts. inspirations for us doing this, right? That other podcast. Absolutely, yeah, one of my favorite podcasts. But I wanted to start, first of all, by talking a little bit with you guys about

your jobs and why, because I know you love what you do, why you want to do this. I mean, it's hard work dealing with DC and often awfully frustrating. Casey, what got you into this? Yeah, I like how you present that, Matt. Why would you put yourself through this? Really? What the hell? You know, one day at a time is how I take it. Well, my history is, you know, I love space, love space as a kid. I've always wanted to be an astronaut. Very quickly learned that I wasn't a superhuman feats of like mental acuity and physical ability. But I always loved knowing how things work, fundamentally, you know, and I love the engineering side of space.

I love the science because it tells you how the world works. And politics and policy, I think, is one of the great hidden areas of space in terms of how space fundamentally works. How do we enable the kind of exploration we want to see, particularly in the United States, politics tells you why we go places and why we don't go other places. Politics tells you why certain programs get lots more money than other programs. It's a very fascinating and relatively obscure part of the space program, and it's something

that just fascinates me at a very deep level. And then being able to work with the Planetary Society to really kind of get our members engaged and maybe even influence that process. Being able to bring people out together to really understand how the system works and make it work better. That is what really gets me going. And that's why I go through all this. But it work better. That is what really gets me going. That's why I go through all this. But it's fun. I mean, fundamentally, it's fun and exciting. And it's at a deep level. It's just

amazing to see how much goes on behind the scenes. And this is some of what one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast with you, and hopefully to build a great listenership with it. This is we want to talk about all these parts of the space program that don't get much focus. And this is how things work from a political, from a policy side of things. And that's what really I think is going to be really fun here. Yeah, I guess we should note space programs are made in Washington, D.C. and other capitals around the world, not above our heads. That is a fact.

Jason, how about you? You had an interesting path into this as well. Yes, I have definitely taken the road less traveled. Coming out of high school, I played in punk rock bands and then bartended for a while. And while I was bartending, a group of friends of mine and I started going to air shows and car races and anything that was high tech. And we happened to live in Florida and we ended up going down to the Kennedy Space Center and watching space shuttles launch. And after one of those launches, I came home and was sitting around one evening and thinking to myself, you know, bartending seems like perhaps not the best pathway forward for me.

I think I'd like to be involved in something a little more uplifting, as it were. And I went back to college. And my original intent was actually to build a robotic spacecraft to go to other planets. And much like Casey, I discovered that while I could do the math, I wasn't very good at it. And my natural proclivity really was towards politics and policy. And at a certain point, you just have to realize that you don't want to fight against your natural talents. And I find that I get as much satisfaction trying to find money for people who are really good at the science as I would have found being mediocre at the science. So I ended up at the Planetary Society because I think this is a really unique organization.

The power that it has to actually influence policy as a group is really tremendous and is unduplicated anywhere else in the United States and I think probably in the world. You don't have any other member-driven organization of this size and that carries a tremendous amount of weight when you go and you talk to politicians. I'm so proud of this organization, I've got to say. And you guys have had such a great influence there in DC through the work that you do and the other folks that we work with. There's this science guy who has helped out a little bit, I know. Yeah, what's his name? I think a real difference is being made. I suppose, you know, I've asked you guys the question. I had to throw in my two cents.

I thought I was going to be an astronomer until I found out about the math. And I'm a much better talker than I am a mathematician. So that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing. And I get to do space and radio slash podcast now, my two favorite things in the world outside of family. So let's get into it. I think our audience, if they've made it this far with us, they want to hear some real content because they are wonks like you guys, and I hope I approach that level. We talked about beginning with sort of a look at where we stand with the budget, and we're not talking about the federal budget for the current year, but the one that's being

planned that actually starts in October, right, for 2017? Yeah, of course, right, just your natural October 1st start of the fiscal year. The Onion, right, used to have headlines of economists celebrate fiscal new year in October 1st with all of them celebrating out in Times Square. 2017 fiscal new year starts October 1st. The Congress is lurching towards trying to pass bills in time for that. Notably, I don't know if you've heard, there is a presidential election this year. What? Which, surprise, I know. That election happens November 5th, notably five weeks after the start of the fiscal year. The closer the country gets to a big presidential election, by the way, the entire House of Representatives is up for re-election and a third of the Senate. The closer

you get to elections, the less stomach Congress tends to have for voting on things because they want to be campaigning. They don't want to be tied to votes. There will be a lot of issues going back and forth. Very likely what we'll see is the budget issue pushed off the table for a few months until after the election. But in the meantime, we have progress in the two committees on the House side and on the Senate side that are developing their kind of paralleled NASA bills based on the initial kind of conditions proposed by the president. And we should highlight there, Casey, that these are the appropriations committees, not to be mistaken with the authorization committees. And that's a

distinction we should talk about, too. Let's go full subcommittee on this. This is not just the appropriations committee. This is the just the Appropriations Committee. This is the Commerce, Justice, and Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee. That is correct. Of the Appropriations Committee. CJS, for short. We'll try to explain all these acronyms as we go through. So the House, they have these two subcommittees that appropriate money year to year.

And the Senate has made their opening bid back in April. They proposed a couple hundred million extra for NASA, up to $19.3 billion. I think we talked about that. The House just made their move forward. And so this is kind of in response. The way that I talked about this on Planetary.org was that the Senate made their initial negotiating offer, and the House has made their counteroffer. And this is can read these two bills because ultimately the House and Senate need to reconcile their differences, pass a bill that the President hopefully ultimately signs. We have some breakdowns, some very, very, very good news for planetary science.

The House would give it $1.846 billion. Our goal for the last few years has been $1.5 billion. So this is a pretty solid, this would be maybe, Jason, you can tell me here, this may be the best planetary science budget in history, adjusted for inflation even? 1.85? Adjusted for inflation, it's probably close. In just numbers, I'm sure that it is. Yeah, it's a huge increase. And it comes at the expense, unfortunately, of Earth science, which would drop to $1.69 billion off of $1.97, which it got last year. The Senate had flipped this around. They'd given Earth science a boost to $1.98 billion, and they had cut planetary science by about the same amount as the House cut Earth science, about 270 million. So you're seeing the relative priorities of the House and Senate expressed here. In recent years, this is what gives me hope, we've ultimately seen both planetary science and Earth science come out pretty well

when all is said and done. But the planetary budget would be fantastic. It would give a ton of extra money to Europa. It would start a Europa lander to launch in 2024. You would have money to select two small class discovery missions. You would have a big boost to scientific research funding for the science community. I mean, honestly, it's a fantastic budget, right? Because there's so much extra money. It matches the Senate's version in that it gives huge increases to the Space Launch system and Orion, which we will be talking about later in the show on how we got to here.

Overall, I'd say this is a pretty solid budget. It's $19.5 billion, which is a healthy budget, $500 million above what the president asked for, $200 million above what the Senate proposed. It's a good starting point. And again, we have some, obviously, some kinks to iron out, but there's some really promising things in there too. Yeah, I think the only thing I would add to that is this being an election year, the chances of us going through regular order where the two committees will then compromise on their bill and send this to the president for a signature that would then be voted on by the entire Congress and then be sent to the president for a – or that would then be voted on by the entire Congress and then be sent to the president for his signature, the chances of that happening are very, very low.

I think it's much, much more likely that we'll see something along the lines of a continuing resolution until after the election, at which time possibly regular order or possibly an omnibus budget bill. My money is on an omnibus. That's where they just lump all these different spending bills together. It makes it much harder to vote against it. It also depends who wins. If we have a President Trump, the Senate, then the Republicans in Congress may just float it out

until the Trump administration and start over. If you have a President Clinton, the Republicans may be very eager to pass what they can during the lame duck session, assuming that they've lost seats. I think something will happen. That's a bold prediction. I know. But as Jason pointed out, very likely that we won't see any of this resolved until after the presidential elections. Democracies are so damn messy. But they sure beat the alternative. Yes. True enough. True enough.

Except for all the other ones. All right. Jason, I don't know if you had anything else to add about the outlook, but it certainly sounds like good news. It's fantastic news. At the moment, we are enjoying tremendous support for planetary science in the House of Representatives, and we're not seeing a whole lot of resistance to that in the Senate. These are great places to be. The White House has, for the most part, sort of stayed out of the way on this issue in the past year or so, which is a welcome change from earlier budgets. The stars are sort of aligning in our favor at the moment. This too shall pass, but at the moment we should enjoy this.

I want to make one final point before we move on, which is just to remark that both the Senate and the House, they're controlled by Republicans, and overall the Republican Party is not big on spending, on discretionary spending. That's kind of a core part of their political ideology. Yet what we're seeing here in both the Senate and the House, that they're both

adding money to NASA above what the president is requesting. We don't know how long this will last, but this is something to just appreciate that when we talk about NASA not getting the funding it needs, it's a step that Congress is actually making a step to give money to NASA. Even if you don't agree with how they're distributing the money, there is more money going into it, and they're prioritizing it in a very otherwise relatively tight situation. You guys know, and I've met some of them, you've met probably all of them, we've got a lot of Congress people on both sides of the aisle who are true believers. I mean, I'm not going to, okay, I won't call them evangelists because some of them would probably not appreciate that. But they are solid for space, whether it's, you know, big rockets carrying humans or space science and getting out to the so-called ocean worlds.

I mean, is this a new era in Congress having these individuals who are kind of leading the fight for whatever their space agenda is? It is somewhat unprecedented. Yeah. You've often had champions for space science and occasionally planetary science in the past, but it's usually been a parochial interest, right? It's in someone's district, you know, somebody representing JPL or, you know, perhaps even Goddard doing a particular mission. You're seeing now a lot of support in Congress from Congress people who have no NASA facilities in their districts. And that's sort of unheard of. It's really been interesting to watch. And you're absolutely right. A lot of these are people you wouldn't even expect to be huge NASA supporters. And they just they've grown up with the program

and grown up with the interest. And it's fantastic to see. And let's not discount, there are still some pretty strong parochial interests expressed in these budgets. I think Eric Berger at Ars Technica had some really good articles about some basically not quite earmarks, but earmarkish language in Alabama and lots of support. It's just places that that's still there. But it also just really is what keeps me awake at night maybe is that so much of this does depend on a few individuals who are just personally really invested. And, you know, we are working to build this coalition. But again, if you get someone who's truly committed at a high level, they can make a huge difference for the space program.

And this goes back a long time, you know, and we'll talk about this later in terms of how we're at where we are with human spaceflight. We've had a series of individuals who tended to be presidents of the United States, but they're still the relative decisions made by a very few number of people have very long lasting implications to where the space program goes in this country. We got one other topic that we were going to pick up briefly before we get into our main subject of the day, which, as you said, Casey, we're going to talk about human spaceflight and kind of looking back at how we got to where we are now. But first, I was in your hometown,

Jason, a couple of weeks ago, Humans to Mars conference, and Lockheed Martin people got on stage, and they talked about this summer camp that they want to build on Mars, except that they don't want to build it on Mars. They want to do it in orbit, which is something that we talk about a lot at the Planetary Society. All this stuff seems so ambitious. They're talking about 2028. Jason, can you tell us about this? And are those birds you have that sound like they're also enthusiastic about orbiting Mars? Yes, I have to apologize. Our pet birds are home and in cages closer to the microphone than they normally would be. We have guests in town. So I do apologize if that's bothering anyone.

That's all right. At least now we know what it is. I do apologize if that's bothering anyone. That's all right. At least now we know what it is. The Lockheed Martin plan that they announced at the Humans to Mars conference is really, really interesting. It's sort of the first public step to something that Casey and I have been seeing in some of the workshops and individual meetings that we've been going to for the past couple of

months. And you're seeing a convergence within the human spaceflight community towards this idea of orbiting Mars first as a pathway to a sustainable program that leads to long-term human exploration of Mars. Casey, do you want to talk at all about the details of this plan? Yeah, I mean, humans, so we don't know a ton of details yet because they just announced this, but the basic idea shares a lot of, again, a lot of the core values is our humans orbiting Mars workshop, where you use existing programs to the maximal extent that you can. That means using the SLS. That means using Orion.

You use technology development to create a deep space habitat, test it at the moon, and then use that to send it to Mars orbit. And then you have humans go and visit basically this big orbiting science station. And you have a couple of Orions there you can use to do sorties down to, you know, the moons of Mars, you go to Phobos and Deimos. You can control assets, the engineering term for cool Martian robots on the surface of Mars. And you can just really start to advance the presence

of humans beyond the Earth-Moon system in a way that you don't have to rely on figuring out how to land and developing very expensive and technically challenging landing systems. It was really neat to see that Lockheed Martin basically took a lot of these ideas from our workshop and also from the JPL concept from from that study team that they made, to really say, what can we do to amp this up? And how they amped it up was saying, let's do this in 2028 instead of 2033. And I'm like, great, let's see if you can do it. I'm all for it.

So, I mean, obviously the one big missing thing that we'd love to see is an independent cost estimate. And that's what the JPL study team had from the Aerospace Corporation, where they said, look, you can do this by 2033, you can orbit Mars and do it within a NASA budget that grows just with inflation. That's a very powerful argument. And that's one of the core things that the entire space community has to realize and work towards in order to achieve this. And so we look forward to Lockheed Martin putting out additional details, hopefully getting it independently costed.

But again, the idea, one of the core things was we need to make a community and define a spaceflight community and a coalition that will carry this program through for multiple presidents, multiple congresses over decades. This is a good step to that. So that was fun to see. And we have some details on our website. And we also have an op-ed coming out in Space News where we discuss this a lot further.

That's great. Is that an op-ed that you're preparing? We prepared and sent it a couple weeks or so. It should be out. But with John Logsdon and Scott Hubbard, we all wrote a nice op-ed discussing this further. Wow, nice company. Okay then, Lockheed Martin, good on you.

We're all behind you. Go for that 12 years. Out from now, humans orbiting Mars. We think that's a good idea. Guys, let's go ahead on to the discussion that will take up the bulk of our time today. We certainly could have taken this on without the inspiration that we may be getting from our colleague Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society, who is preparing this great series on the vision for space exploration and kind of how it got us to where we are now

with NASA's plans for human spaceflight. I think that's fair to say. Now, that series from Jason is not going to start, it's not going to be posted at planetary.org until, as it happens, and it's not an accident, the fifth anniversary of the launch of the last space shuttle. So that'll be July 8th of this year, and then they're going to come out with them periodically after that. But we've had this great opportunity to get a preview of what Jason's writing. It is a terrific piece. I've already complimented him. Can we use that as the jumping off point and talk about how we got to

where we are with human spaceflight? I think we should. And I want to even just add to that, too, because human spaceflight, let's just talk about this from even a bigger level, where it's actually kind of funny. One of the reasons i wanted to start this podcast with all you was to discuss all the policy that human space flight tends to take all the attention away from and then here we are in the very first episode talking about human space flight right but there's a reason for that hey we're we're only human. Yes, exactly. It's very relevant to me. But there is value to it. And there is a reason why human spaceflight tends to take up so much attention from policy.

Because it's much more of an open question, just in general, about what do we do with a human spaceflight program? And this has been the core question since Apollo was successful, right? It was what do we do? This new series that Jason Davis is working on is taking this really, really great deep dive into where are we right now? Here we are at the end of one presidency, right? We have the end of the Obama administration's winding down this year. It went through a very major shift to the human spaceflight program at NASA when they first came in, which itself was already shifting pretty dramatically from decades of relative stasis

in terms of the space shuttle being the main human spaceflight vehicle. This is, I would even jump back and say, you know, before we even go down, the real core of this, which is, you know, I don't know, Jason, if this is a real saying in the space policy community, but when in doubt, blame Nixon for things. And so, I mean, this goes all the way back to 1970 with Nixon's space doctrine, I mean, this goes all the way back to 1970 with Nixon's space doctrine, which fundamentally changed how the nation views the spaceflight program, particularly the human spaceflight program. We could call it the anti-spaceflight doctrine. Right. And this is Nixon.

And I have to warn our sensitive listeners, this is going to contain a bad language. But this is Nixon. But it's a podcast, right? So I'll just go ahead and say it. And he said, I don't give a damn about space. I know, right? But this is what he said. This is during, this is while men were landing on the moon.

Nixon has this famous, that John Logsdon wrote about this in this great book after Apollo. Nixon was, I don't give a damn about space. I'm not one of those space cadets. That was his general attitude for what do we do with NASA after the moon program. Logsdon also likes, he has those two photos of the Oval Office with Nixon. And one has the picture of, was it astronauts on the moon? And then a few months later or a year later, they're gone. And it's just a nice country scene or something. Exactly. It shows this nice shifting of attitudes.

What it basically did is the Nixon Doctrine set this nation's attitude towards space ever since. It has not changed in the intervening 45 years. And what it basically says is space will no longer be made of great leaps. We will be a regular part of what we do as a nation and as such it will compete with everything else that the nation attempts to do in its discretionary, what it chooses to spend money on. Most people listening probably know that NASA has not competed that well over the intervening 40 years.

So Nixon was one of the critical presidents in space history. He did not have a grand view of space. That set the doctrine. But again, notably, no president has really changed it either. Every president afterwards has implicitly or explicitly embraced that doctrine. And that's kind of where we found ourselves in 2003 when you had the Columbia disaster. And the shuttle had been flying for, what, 21 years by that point, 22 years by that point. You had a second major disaster of an orbiter.

The nation, you know, we had a pretty serious, and Jason, you jump in here because this is where your experience starts to get a lot better than mine. But you had the nation say, what are we doing with the space program? Why did these astronauts lose their lives? That is what led into George W. Bush's proposal for the next phase of NASA's human space flight program. Yeah, so there were a number of things that happened right around this time. I think even prior to the Columbia disaster, there was a blue ribbon panel led by Pete Aldridge that was putting together a report that came to be known as the Aldridge Report. And they were making significant recommendations on how to change the human spaceflight program because there was already sort of a sense that it was adrift. It didn't have a lot of focus.

didn't have a lot of focus. And interestingly, a number of the recommendations in that report, I think, were sort of the preceding concepts that led to things like the commercial orbital transport system and now commercial crew. But this stuff actually predates what people usually think of when they think of the COTS program or CCDEV, sorry, Commercial Orbit to Transport and Commercial Crew Development. Good catch. That report came out shortly after the Challenger, or excuse me, the Columbia accident, and it sort of got buried. NASA formed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, or the CAIB, the C-A-I-B.

The CAIB went and looked not just at what happened to Columbia, but looked larger at NASA, looked at the culture of NASA, the direction of NASA. They looked at the entire agency top to bottom and made a number of recommendations. Among those recommendations, you find a lot of the things that have led to the program that we're now looking at. So this really dates back to this very crucial moment that Casey's talking about, this accident. And you saw similar things happen with the Challenger. But what the CABE found is that many of the causes of the Columbia accident were the same causes as the Challenger. And so this was not acceptable a second time, right? That serious changes really had to be implemented this time. We weren't just going to build another shuttle and move on.

changes really had to be implemented this time. We weren't just going to build another shuttle and move on. That led to the White House talking to Congress, talking to people in the community, talking to people in industry, and trying to figure out what to do with NASA. How do we take this tragedy and turn it into something productive? How do we use this to turn NASA around and find it a direction? And notably, I think here too is how we default into calling it NASA. It's the human spaceflight program. This is what this is all wrapped up in, right? And this is where just even casually we forget that there's this whole science program that is kind of chugging along throughout this period.

And aeronautics. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do deal with, there are a few congressmen who try to remind them of that now and then. Totally busted. Sorry. Yes, and aeronautics. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do deal with – there are a few congressmen who try to remind them of that now and then. Totally busted. Sorry. Yes, and aeronautics. The first day at NASA, yes. Yeah.

But it's this really focused thing. What do we do with the human spaceflight program? When we look at now and, you know, we have this situation, right, where we are building these kind of massive new systems, you can look on any, for all of those who love to read the bottom half of the internet and see a lot of comments on things, the varying quality of comments. But a lot of them you'll see is like, oh, why is NASA building space launch system? Why is it building Orion? Why is it building X when SpaceX will just do it? Or why are we doing this when clearly it's too expensive and we can't handle it? Well, again, this is, I think, the beauty of policy. And I think also critically

here, history is understanding how these things came to be. And again, so we look at the history of where Nixon defined spaceflight as a regular thing and started the space shuttle. The space shuttle was ultimately a 30-year, almost a 40-year program, really, when it began in 1972, flew first in 1981, and then the last flight was eight years after the Columbia disaster.

I mean, you read through a lot of this history, and it was really hard to stop flying the shuttle because of these very large shuttle workforce issues. Basically, we had thousands of people who depended on the shuttle for their jobs in states like Texas, in states like Florida, states like Alabama and Mississippi. And suddenly, what were we going to do with those workforces? Congress, even those who generally like space, they love getting reelected more. And they do not want to have thousands of people put out of work in their districts. Congress, even those who generally like space, they love getting reelected more. And they do not want to have thousands of people put out of work in their districts.

And so you had the Bush, you know, all of this discussion about what to do with the human spaceflight program now and back in 2003 and 2004, where the vision for space exploration came together, it assumes a somewhat constricted problem space of that you are not going to walk away from these long-term workforce and infrastructure investments because they are politically impossible to do so. And that is kind of this interesting background to every discussion that we have here, for the most part, I mean, at least at very high levels, at very serious levels. What do we do with this? Well, Congress is going to have a pretty significant interest in maintaining a certain status quo, particularly with jobs. And this is partly, at least, why we're still looking at vehicles, and they were then with the Constellation system and the Ares rockets, right, with shuttle components, solid rocket boosters, space shuttle main engines, liquid-fueled engines.

We're still doing a lot of that kind of stuff. And, of course, there is also the advantage that they were pretty well proven. I'll let Jason go on a tirade about this, but there's always the argument too that they'll save money using heritage, right? The stuff that they've used before. So Jason, go. Why is heritage hardware always a great idea? Well, it depends on the heritage that you're using and it depends on why you're using it, what the purpose is. Generally speaking, if you're using heritage technology for a completely different purpose, you never ever save money. You spend far more trying to adapt it to the new purpose than you would have spent developing an entirely new system

to do what you wanted to do. In this case, you have a lot of hardware that was meant to launch a reusable launch vehicle with wings on the side of a large fuel tank with solid rocket boosters. And now you're talking about taking those components, taking them all apart and stacking them on top of each other, which is not at all what they were designed to do. Well, let's actually step back and let's actually walk through what the vision for space exploration and constellation was. Let's lay that groundwork real quick. Yeah, which came out of this era following Columbia and out of the Bush administration,

right? The GW Bush administration. Correct. Yeah, Jason, why don't you walk us through what Constellation was and what the vision was? Sure. In January of 2004, the president announced the Vision for Space Exploration, which was basically a strategic plan for NASA that outlined its future for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. And the purpose of the vision for space exploration was to send astronauts back to the surface of the moon to establish lunar bases, all of which would eventually lead to Mars. Mars was the destination goal. The stepping stone to Mars. That's correct.

And it was going to do this by establishing an architecture of heavy launch vehicles, heavy lift vehicles. It was going to start with test vehicles that would not be able to get to the moon and then evolve to larger vehicles. Those smaller vehicles were actually going to be used to get to the International Space Station. The larger vehicles then would get us to the moon. You would develop a crew vehicle that would carry astronauts, and you would develop a lunar lander vehicle that would get you to and from the surface of the moon. And then you would build technology from there that would eventually enable us to get to Mars. Now, that was about the level

of detail. Actually, that's probably more detail than was announced at the unveiling of the vision. Well, and one critical thing there, the space shuttle would be retired. Sure, yes. That was actually one of the most important statements of the vision, that we need to stop using the space shuttle, which I think everyone had kind of understood, but that finalized it, right? And before you go on, Jason, with this background, I was so surprised to see in reading this draft from Jason Davis that when President Bush made this announcement, he knew that there would be this gap, the ISS accessibility gap, where we would have to depend on Russia for something like four years, at least four years, right? Because the shuttle would be gone and these new rockets wouldn't be in place.

Right. We've seen this with Apollo when they retired the Saturn rockets. We've seen it now with the shuttle program as we've retired the shuttle. We're going to see the same transition happening happening with the International Space Station when it finally is too old to continue to maintain with lots of entrenched interests to an end while also developing the next program. It basically calls for a bump in the budget, and that's really difficult to actually achieve. What NASA was planning, what the White House was planning, was to use this budget wedge that they'd been spending on the space shuttle, that when the shuttle retired, that wedge would just go into the development of these new Constellation systems. Now, fundamentally, the issues surrounding the retirement of the shuttle and the issues surrounding our international obligations at the International Space Station are really problematic for Constellation. And we'll see as that moves forward.

really problematic for Constellation. And we'll see as that moves forward. And Constellation became the name of the system that would try to execute the vision for space exploration. And so Constellation was this, it was two new rockets, right? So the Ares I and the Ares V. Ares I was like the candlestick, right? It was basically a shuttle solid rocket booster with a second stage on top of it

that would lift Orion up to the space station. And then you had the Ares V, which would carry huge amounts of cargo, or I think just cargo, right, into orbit or out towards the moon. And that would be your heavy lift launch vehicle. Yeah, the later versions of the Ares V would actually carry the Orion to the moon. That was the plan. Okay. And so that's ultimately what came out of the vision for space exploration. And I actually went back yesterday and read the original VSE document. And it's actually kind of, there's very little to dislike, really, in terms of what, in the broad aspect, probably because there weren't a ton of details, but, you know, there was a significant part of it that said, oh, and the other guiding force for NASA will be searching for life on Mars and on the moons of Jupiter.

So actually Europa had a huge part, and they wanted to develop Project Prometheus. These, like, big nuclear technology demonstration missions to go out to the moons of Jupiter to search for life. Tons of missions to Mars to search for life. They had Mars sample return slated for 2011, something like that. That's something we're still working for. And so it was a really broad, kind of nice, ambitious system. And then it just ultimately, it became none of that. Just as a quick side note, it's interesting that you mentioned Project Prometheus,

which was basically a nuclear rocket program. It was championed by Administrator Sean O'Keefe, which I think is part of the reason that it lasted as long as it did. It was a very, very ambitious program. The first test was supposed to be the, the GMO project, the Jupiter and icy moons orbiting project, which was eventually canceled, uh, due to the overruns on the constellation architecture. This didn't happen until after Sean O'Keefe had left that he kept it alive until he had moved on. So this vision gets laid out. Was it immediately embraced by Congress? Did it get the money that it needed? Kind of. Yes. So first of all, the interesting question there is not was the vision embraced by Congress because the White House had actually done a lot of legwork prior to unveiling it.

So all of the key players in Congress were already aware of this. And so they had embraced it prior to its announcement. were already aware of this. And so they had embraced it prior to its announcement. So you had a lot of support for it on the Hill. And that only becomes important in later discussions. But it is a very key fact to understand that if the White House is going to roll out a policy announcement, you just don't stand on a front lawn and announce it. If you want it to be effective, you really have to make sure that you have a coalition in support of your policy. That's like the trial lawyer's principle. Don't ask any questions you don't already know the answer to. Right, right.

Yeah. I want to add just a little bit of complexity to that because I've written about this recently too in terms of how presidents polarize topics merely by talking about them. And where was the big polarization on this? And well, I think you had two interesting factors that helped diminish that. One was that this was after the Columbia disaster. There was a significant bipartisan desire to be united as a nation and address these problems in the space program. I think the other part was George W. Bush really did not ask for that much more money to do Constellation.

And that's the other kind of key thing here. When they came out, I think they requested, they promised to add about a billion dollars a year for three years. It was five years initially. Five years. And then kind of grow with inflation after that. And I believe the first request came and they got an extra 600-ish million, and then they redirected a lot of internal NASA money. So what Constellation started, they started to do from the beginning was pull internal money away from other projects

at NASA, put it towards Constellation, which probably didn't do them too many favors in terms of all the other interests internally to NASA, but that's where the priority was. And then you had a small growth the next year, but then you started to have a lot of just, again, deeper budget issues and money being spent less overall. Yeah. You have to keep in mind, you know, nationally what was happening at this time, by 2005, we were involved in two wars and Hurricane Katrina had just struck. So you had a lot of pressures outside of NASA that were really demanding that budgets elsewhere not grow. And also the space shuttle was trying to return to flight at the same time, which became hugely expensive. I think the normal operating costs for the shuttle were about four4.5 billion a year by the end.

I think that's about right. That's about right. Yeah, it averaged out roughly a little over $1 billion a shuttle launch. And so this is what Jason was making this point, where it's really hard to spin up a new program when $5 billion of your operating budget of $16 billion is going towards the space shuttle, the old technology. And you can't move that to anything else. And then at the same time, there's a big kind of

brouhaha about should we service the Hubble and save the Hubble Space Telescope? And ultimately, they did. And that money had to come from somewhere too. And there's just so many pressures for funding that it didn't really get a ton of support. And then I believe once the Democrats took back control of Congress, you saw a pretty significant cut to Constellation merely by the fact that they just didn't want to deal with, you know, they kind of came in, they just passed, they kind of whiffed on the first year budget. They just let that slide. They just let it continue from 2006, which functionally gave a major cut to Constellation. And so right out of the gate,

you had the pressures of the shuttle and, you know, the lack of general interest in providing the money that was promised never actually showed up. And that kind of hampered it from the beginning. Yeah, it was a it was a confluence of events. To be sure, Congress never appropriated the money that had been promised the constellation. The White House really, they fought for it to an extent. There were a couple of veto threats, but it was unclear as to whether or not the White House would actually follow through on those. While NASA wasn't getting all the money that they wanted, there were also massive cost overruns on the constellation program itself, but the shuttle returned to flight. Literally,

the vision for space exploration was announced in January. And in February, it was announced that the return to flight costs were significantly over what the original estimates had been. So as Casey says, literally right out of the gate, this program was in trouble. So this was a lose-lose. I mean, NASA being impoverished overall, money going to Constellation, but not nearly enough because that program also was proved to be so much more expensive than was originally estimated. Yeah. And there were just technical problems too. And I think just we can skip through towards the next few years and just, you know, things weren't going that well, actually.

So by the time Obama comes into office at the beginning of 2009... With the economy in shambles. The economy is not doing too hot. They start looking at, where are we? What's the state of this program? And they had this big blue ribbon panel. What's the full name of it? It's normally known as the Augustine Commission or the Second Augustine Commission. But what's the full name of it, Jason?

The Committee on the United States Human Spaceflight Program? Goals? I'd have to look it up for sure. Okay, so there's a long thing, but it's basically a blue ribbon panel to state of the program. Where are we with constellation and human spaceflight? At the same time, I dug this out the other night, the Government Accountability Office came out in early 2009 and basically said Constellation program is in not very good shape, is the very short

way of saying it. They identified over 200 high risk technical problems that NASA had not solved yet with the rockets, with the Orion crew capsule, with all of these major things and it was not a healthy program. And it just, it was not a healthy program. It just seemed like just from a fundamental level. And I know people will disagree with that. And I know Mike Griffin, the previous administrator of NASA, would probably disagree with that. But you had a lot of independent analysis saying this is an unsustainable program. And that's what the Augustine Commission said as well. The Committee on the United States Human Spaceflight Plans. Or excuse me, it was the, yeah, yeah.

Committee on the United States Human Spaceflight Plans. Yes. So one of the many blue ribbon panel committees over the years. And so you basically had a system where you had a new NASA administrator, a new deputy administrator. You had a new NASA administrator, a new deputy administrator, you had a new president. They were inheriting a program that by all accounts seemed to be unsustainable or in danger of growing over budget by very large amounts and threatening other parts of the agency. This is kind of where we bring up to full speed. This is at the beginning of the Obama administration. So how did we end up with the Space Launch System and Orion? And this is where the infamous 2011 NASA budget request kind of comes into the picture, which is released

in 2010. And this budget request, this is the initial president's proposal to Congress for the year, and it basically said we zero out Constellation. Constellation is over. And here is what was, I think, very scary to a lot of people. We are not going to build another rocket. We may in the future, but we're not going to now. We are going to invest in lots of technology development. They actually had a budget line for game-changing technologies, which is kind of a hilarious budgetary goal.

Let's change the game. which is kind of a hilarious budgetary goal. Let's change the game. And they're a serious investment in commercial crew. We're talking $1.5, $1.4 billion right off the gate to do what they ultimately did, but to really have an aggressive commercial program to fill in that ISS access gap. I think it's critical to remind ourselves how big an issue that was. I think at this point, it's really important to remember what a huge topic of conversation this concept of a gap in American capabilities to launch humans

into space really was. I mean, it was in every conversation and it was used for every political agenda you could think of, you know, the the companies that wanted to get lots and lots of money for the government would use this as a scare tactic and say, oh, we'll be completely reliant on the Russians, we need more money to lower this gap. And other people would say, well, you know, is four years really that long, you know, maybe we should spend five years or six years and not spend all of this money. So we could spend it on education or whatever their priority was. It was this this was the, this was sort of the crux of the political football for a number of years. Yeah. People yelling all over the place, including Apollo astronauts who just

hated many of them hated this. Yes. Yes. But by that point, the gap was there. I mean, that was the interesting thing. You had to, you had to stop flying the shuttle. I mean, that was the interesting thing. You had to stop flying the shuttle. I mean, the shuttle was basically deemed unsafe. I mean, it wasn't doing the job anymore, in a sense. It was so expensive to do the job that you couldn't just continue to do it indefinitely. And that was an option, too. Oh, why don't we just keep flying the shuttle until we have this new capability on? And Boeing certainly pushed for that. Yes. Yeah. And but again, by the time you you just can't spin up a new human rated rocket without dumping the money. And that was again, this is the kind of the underlies this whole discussion is like, oh,

how can we sustain this gap? Well, clearly they could because they couldn't spend that. No one wanted to spend the money to mitigate the gap that much. I mean, you could have done a crash program, spent $50 billion in a couple of years, you could probably have had something. Again, this is all I think to remind us. The money is still the limiting factor and also the existing political structure that supports NASA is still assumed as your working starting conditions here. Right. And there had been a number of programs to replace the shuttle that had been enacted 10 years before anybody thought the shuttle was actually going to be retired. But they all got canceled.

So when people were thinking ahead in strategic terms, they kept getting shut down. They kept losing their funding. There were technical issues as well because everybody wanted to rebuild something way better than the shuttle. Yeah. And so here we are in 2010, right? government-built rockets, basically, to put all of their chips into the private sector to build a new low-Earth capability, to turn a lot of the old rocket development centers into technology exploration and development NASA centers. I don't even know what the plan for Kennedy Space Center was, but everyone got something.

But it was such a fundamental shift in the philosophy and their role within NASA. You can argue that it was definitely not rolled out well. Unlike Vision for Space Exploration, this proposal came out relatively suddenly. Matt, do you actually remember, did you do a show on this back when this was happening? What was it from your perspective? What were you seeing here as a, not a policy person, but as a space, a very deep fan of space? You know, it was more, less specific shows that took up this topic than just sort of the general feeling, milieu of the time, which was nobody was happy.

Nobody seemed to be satisfied with the way things were going. Not the science people, not the human spaceflight people, not the people who were worried about the gap. It was not a vision, it seemed. I'm not clear about how we got from that point to where we seem to be now, where there seems to be new optimism about where we're going. Of course, not everybody's happy. Not everybody ever will be. But, you know, Orion somehow managed to come through this. But we're talking about a big new rocket again.

Right. Well, here I have the answer for you. And, again, these names just roll off the tongue. And it's called Public Law 111-267, also known as the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. And this is the piece of, I actually have this here. There it is. He's holding it up in front of the microphone so that you can read it out there. I would argue this is one of the most important pieces of legislation for the space program in decades.

I don't know if Jason, you would agree with me on this, but it's a very, very big deal piece of legislation. So we talked about appropriations earlier in the show, about the annual, you know, appropriating of money to space. This is authorization. This is setting policy. This doesn't always have to happen. It's better when it does, but when it does happen, it can have some serious consequences. And so, public law. This is the law of the United States. And I have

even highlighted a few things here, but they basically said that NASA will build a follow-on launch vehicle to the space shuttle. This is section 302. It is the policy of the United States. And, Casey, this came from Congress, right? This is Congress.

This is particularly from the Senate. This is the Senate's science committee, which has a space subcommittee. And their committee staff, and representing the interests on that committee, clearly working with the industrial representatives and I'm sure NASA representatives as well, put this together. And it's effectively a hybrid. This is the compromise that came out of the initial proposal to end Constellation and

to go all commercial. This comes out and says we should do commercial. It should get a fraction of the money that the White House requested and it should also be the policy of the United States that NASA to develop a space launch system as a follow on to the space shuttle. I'm reading this verbatim. This is even the more interesting thing. This is what we're talking about earlier today.

This system can access cislunar space and the regions of space beyond low earth orbit in order to enable the United States to participate in global efforts to access and develop this increasingly strategic region." So written into law was that this system should access the moon. That is the goal of this system. And then I have here, there's another part, this is a really fascinating document to read that in order to limit NASA's cost to end all the constellation stuff, the administrator shall extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts necessary to achieve this goal.

So the Congress is telling NASA, by law, you have to make a giant rocket. You have to continue making the Orion capsule. You have to make a giant rocket. You have to continue making the Orion capsule. And anything you do for this rocket, you shall use your existing contracts that you've been working on with Ares and with Shuttle and maintain. There's additional language that you maintain this workforce. In order to provide an mission capability, you needed to conduct cislunar missions. The 2010 AUTH Act, was that also where they specified the weight capability to low Earth orbit?

Yep. Total payload of 130 tons or more into low Earth orbit. Wow. I'm reading this right here. Engineering by legislation. Exactly. So it's an interesting point. So this is what led to the current space launch system at NASA, the SLS. And it's interesting, in Washington, D.C., in some circles, the SLS is often called the Senate Launch System.

And again, but this is where I become defensive of NASA sometimes and NASA deserves its fair share of criticism all the time because it's a big government organization. It's our role to criticize them. But this is U.S. law, right? And so you see a lot of people saying, oh, well, SpaceX and Blue Origin, these companies are working on reusability.

Why isn't NASA working on reusability? Well, because U.S. law says that they shall use the existing systems to the maximum extent that they can. Which are not reusable. Well, they were reusable in a vague sense. Yeah, well, that was the intent. The orbiter was.

Right, yeah, true enough. They should use these existing systems and to minimize the modification of all of these other things, right? This wasn't NASA going out and saying, we want to spend billions of dollars on Araga. This was Congress literally telling them to. In a sense, this is why a government program can never be quite as nimble

as a purely private program, because you have how many authors, you know, how many people could get to tell NASA what to do, right? NASA is a part of the executive branch, so the president sets national space policy, but then Congress could pass a law when it wants to, telling NASA to do something completely different, and they have to do that now. It has all these extra bits in here that they have to follow in terms of public law. It really is part of the deal that you make, basically, as being a recipient of public funding in a democracy for money that they don't have to give you. Maybe you have to do all these things in order to get this money. And so it was really the core of where we are now.

How we got to here was that the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, the reaction to the president's budget that canceled Constellation, gave us this heavy lift rocket, gave us the crew capsule to go to the moon. And it's basically written in there. And at the same time, they gave the White House the ability to pursue commercial crew, but at a greatly reduced level of importance. But fundamentally, this is what compromise looks like. I mean, this is this is democracy in action. And for people who love the engineering of the space program, it's very, very frustrating. But democracy is inherently inefficient. So yes, that's the very nature of democracy. As I said earlier, it's very messy. But at the same time, look where we are. Nearly six years later, this was passed in October of

2010. We have commercial entities supplying the space station. We have two companies competing to launch humans that will happen hopefully in 2017, probably more likely 2018. And we have seen the largest transition in NASA's old framework of human space flight, I would say the shuttle centers that we've seen since the 1970s. I mean, in here, there's also a significant amount, a lot of stuff that's been happening has been happening kind of behind the scenes. And they've been restructuring and rebuilding Kennedy Space Center, you know, all these new things to create the SLS. And it's a pretty

impressive change. As Jason said, it's not pretty. Something went right. I mean, SLS on the way, Orion well on the way, and a plan to get us to Mars. An ambition, maybe? An ambition? A dream.

A vision. Yeah, and I'm being a little harsh. Let me rephrase that. They haven't had Mars as their organizing principle ever. And that's something important. That's a big deal. And notably, again, what they're building, they're building to go to the moon as basically written in this law. But you can use that to go beyond the moon.

That's the interesting part here. I want to clarify, because you use that phrase that we hear a lot, cislunar, which simply means near the moon, right? Right. Orbiting the moon or following the moon or something like that. Yeah, just not landing on it, not on the surface. Jason, do you see the thread, I mean, that got us from this legislation that Casey's been talking about to where we are now, and is it where we ought to be? Interestingly, I think if you look at where we are now, and you look at what was originally proposed for the Vision for Space Exploration, you don't see a tremendous amount of difference. And I think what happened is the program went way over budget for many, many reasons. A new administration came in, suggested a very, very different path forward. There was tremendous resistance from all of the parties who had vested interests in keeping the old program together. And between those two, you ended up with a compromise. So it's not, it doesn't look exactly like the vision for space exploration, but it rhymes, right? And you also have this commercial capability that you didn't

have before. And, you know, the White House had suggested that the commercial crew and commercial cargo programs would free up money for NASA to pursue exploration. That hasn't necessarily materialized, but you could see how it could happen now. You couldn't see that in 2011. It made, the risks were much higher then. But as things have come along, you're starting to see these things gel into actual physical manifestations of these programs as the term bending metal. They're past bending metal. They're now testing, right? So it's suddenly a viable program in a way that I don't think many people had anticipated before, and that's really exciting.

If we hadn't seen the support for commercial development, do you think we would today have SpaceX talking about Red Dragon landing on Mars as soon as a couple of years from now? No, I don't think so. I don't think it could, yeah. Yeah, SpaceX has benefited significantly, many billions of dollars from NASA contracts to help grow their company and to help them become hopefully a viable self-supporting company with the commercial launch market. That would have been a much harder pace to keep up without NASA's investments in SpaceX. Yeah, Elon Musk is a very wealthy man, but individuals can't spend nation-size money on programs to develop a rocket. So I suppose we also wouldn't have Lockheed Martin talking about orbiting Mars in 2028. It's possible. I mean, the question here, I mean, this is a good kind of metaphor for the Obama presidency, honestly, in general. Obama presidency, honestly, in general, for many, many areas of policy, where Obama has had to make a significant number of compromises to his initial policy agenda.

And to a lot of Obama supporters, that has become very disenfranchising or very disappointing. To a lot of his opponents, he has been the opposite, where he has relentlessly advanced this agenda through the whole process. In reality, Obama is going to be a very influential president in terms of history. Once people really step back and you see, despite all the compromises, he's made some significant changes. I'd, the role of commercial spaceflight or commercial companies in spaceflight and commercial space marketing in the United States is going to be a very big, long-lasting legacy, probably in ways that we can't quite predict right now. And that's done in the guise of a significant compromise with Congress in order to get that moving forward.

Jason, you've been nodding in agreement. Yeah, that's why I hired him. That seems like a very good point at which for us to start wrapping this first ever conversation up in this new podcast. Where does this leave us as we now look toward the arrival of a new president? It's going to be somebody new taking that office in January. That's going to be so dependent. It's so hard to predict. But I think the next president can look at what the Obama White House went through when they tried to make a drastic change to NASA.

You have to be very prepared to go against some very, very strong interests that are interested in maintaining the status quo. So not that the next president couldn't pull the plug on SLS and Orion, but you see a very, very supportive Congress of both of those programs. And I would say in general, the next president is probably going to continue those. Again, it really depends on if they develop a sudden interest in space that we have not yet identified. But seeing the amount of kind of Congress really put themselves out there, and you're seeing this now, more and more Congress people are writing op-eds and kind of making these public statements of how much they love these big programs.

And I think they're kind of laying this groundwork of saying, you know, let's keep this going. Because again, the next president will be the one who oversees the first launch of all of these commercial crew and the SLS and Orion in 2018. And they will have to fund those for two years after they take office. It's important to remember that NASA is an agency of the executive branch. And fundamentally, it needs to serve the policy desires of a presidential administration

with advice from Congress. So the congressional part means that the president has to compromise to build coalitions to enact their agenda. But that said, whoever comes into the White House is going to have, you know, some overarching themes that they're looking at that NASA needs to figure its place, needs to figure out how it fits in with these policies. If you look at the two likely candidates for president, they have very, very, very different views of the world. NASA is going to have these systems. They're going to have these capabilities. world. NASA is going to have these systems. They're going to have these capabilities.

What they do with them will depend very much on what the White House wants to pursue as an overarching agenda for the nation. Guys, this has been fun. This is exciting stuff to talk about. It's not quite as so inspiring as talking about missions to Jupiter and beyond, or Mars, but this is what underlies it all. And I really look forward to doing more of this with you. Absolutely. And again, this is how you get those missions, right? All of this rests, all the inspiration rests on the pretty practical and pragmatic exchanges of politics. And I think the more that we can, in a sense, embrace that and learn how to participate and make it better, the more of the inspiration we can get. But again, knowledge is power, right? Knowing is half the battle.

This is the fun part to look at of how we have what we have. There are reasons for all of this. They may not be the best reasons, but there are reasons. These all fall out of a historical context here. We will do it again on Friday, July 1st. That'll be the second installment of Planetary Radio Extra, the Space Policy Edition. And just before we go, there's so much more for us to talk about, guys. What are the topics that you hope we'll take up

over these next shows? Jason? Well, I'm really looking forward to getting back to discussions of the science portion of NASA. I love human spaceflight. It's certainly a fascinating topic, but from a policy standpoint, it's a far more difficult thing to talk about.

So I'm looking forward to discussing sort of how planetary science actually works and how the community contributes to policy and what the effects are of policy on that community. And we have fun things, too. We have, of course, planetary protection is going to be a major, major issue for planetary exploration. As Emily likes to call us, dirty meatbags. Are we even compatible with strict planetary protection? What about robots? We're going through some of these growing pains right now. If you want to go to Europa, if you want to go to Mars. We also have, I would love to do an episode on the what if of the 2011 NASA budget. If that had been enacted as is, what was in that budget? Because that is a fascinating counter-historical narrative. That would be very interesting to look at.

We also have tons of things. I mean, again, there's so many fun policy things to look at here. And I would invite, for those still listening, send Matt or send me an idea on Twitter or email. If you want to hear things demystified or analyzed or understood, toss us a note and we will try to talk about it as we go through the show here.

Oh, and there's also this thing called the presidential election again. I think I mentioned that earlier. Yeah. We will try to take a look at what the candidates think about space. I am really looking forward to that. Casey, your Twitter handle? Casey Dreyer. Just search for Casey Planetary Society.

You'll find me also on planetary.org. You can find my email there. And I'm at planrad. And if you prefer email, you can write to the one we always give out on the radio show, planetaryradio at planetary.org. Jason, I don't know if you want to get in with one of these or not? I tend to be a little harder to get a hold of, but I'm pretty sure my email address is on the website. I know I've got a number of blog posts up there. It's just jason.callahan at planetary.org. All right, guys, we'll bring this to a close. And we thank all of you policy wonks and wonkettes out there who've stuck with us through this almost an hour and 15 minutes of fascinating discussion. And I really do look forward to doing this again. We'll do it again, guys, in about four weeks, July 1st, as I said. Thanks again so much. Thanks, Matt. Thank you so much. This was fun. That's Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society, and Casey Dreyer,

the Director of Space Policy for the Society. I am Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Society, and Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Society. I am Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, which, of course, you can hear every week. We have a new episode posted pretty much every Tuesday. In fact, definitely every Tuesday for the last 13 and a half years at planetary.org. But you can also catch us on SoundCloud, iTunes, all over the place online. That's it. We'll be back with you with this series in a month. This is Planetary Radio Extra, the Space Policy Edition. Thanks for listening.