Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #10 - Special Guest Laura Delgado Lopez, SpaceX to the Moon, looming budget cuts

Episode Date: March 3, 2017

Laura Delgado Lopez from the Harris Corporation joins us to talk about the growing number of countries getting into the space business, particularly in Latin America. Casey, Jason, and Mat also take stock of SpaceX's plans to send humans around the Moon in 2018, and how the newly-announced Trump budget cuts could hurt NASA.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So that distinctive theme music means it's once again time for the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back, everybody, to this once-a-month, first Friday edition of the show. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, rejoined again by our two guests for this extended discussion, unique across the internet, about space policy. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Hi, Casey. Hi, Matt. Jason, pleasure to be here as always.

Jason, the Space Policy Advisor for the Society there within the Beltway in D.C. Hello, Jason. Hey, guys. Good to be talking to you again. We have something brand new for us this time. Hopefully not the last time we'll be doing this. In a few minutes, we will be meeting our first guest on the Space Policy Edition, Laura Delgado-Lopez with the Harris Corporation.

A terrific history as a consultant and researcher regarding space policy, especially on the international stage. Jason will have more to tell us about her when he and I join a conversation with her in a few minutes. But first, we're going to go through the kind of stuff that the three of us generally talk about on this show. Let's begin with, guys, the very busy week that you guys are just completing. Well, Matt, I just flew back from Washington, D.C. and oh, wait, we're not finishing the joke on this one. Leave me hanging here, folks. No, I just got back from Washington, D.C. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're working on it. The timing is still a work in progress. No, I was in D.C. this week. The Planetary Society had a very busy week. Bill Nye joined me down in D.C.

Obviously, Jason Callahan is there. We met with our volunteer group, our great volunteer coordinator. We had a workshop at NASA that we helped co-sponsor, or at least were a sponsor of, looking at the future of planetary science. We had a legislative blitz with members of the Planetary Society going all around Congress talking about space, as did I. It was a productive week. And then, of course, we had the president's address to Congress mixed in there just for fun, because who likes to walk around in straight lines when you could divert around security perimeters in DC. So we'll go through some of that. It was, things are really about to ramp up here in terms of some of our primary policy concerns. We have still waiting for the legislation for this new NASA

Authorization Act. We have some new information on the budget that does not look good. We will talk about that. And of course, the general budgeting process here will be really ramping up in the next few months. So it was a, say, an interesting week with lots more work to be done. Who did you guys get to talk to? What offices were you in? Well, we saw a variety of senators and congresspeople. We met with both Republicans and Democrats. Chris Van Hollen, the new senator from Maryland, who's on the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee in the Senate. NASA Goddard is in Maryland, of course, as is APL, which is helping to make the Europa mission. Jim Bridenstine, who is on the Space Subcommittee

of the House Science Committee. He is one of those names that is being thrown around for potential NASA administrator. Just a rumor, but good to meet with him anyway. You know, he serves on the Space Subcommittee. He's a very important person. We met with the ranking Democrat on the Space Subcommittee, Ami Berra, and also, I believe, Don Beyer, who also is on the Science Committee and ranking member on Oversight. So we had a lot of very productive meetings. Bill was with us every time.

Really fun experience talking about space, science, NASA,, and of course, planetary exploration, search for life. That is our MO. And well, maybe I should also mention keeping Mars as the future of human spaceflight exploration at NASA. So very receptive audience. I think all of the conversations were very good. Like us, a lot of people in Congress are also not sure about where we're going with this budget situation, but this is why we're talking to them, to make sure that our priorities are represented and they are aware of these potential issues. You shared with me, guys, this document,

2017 Legislative Priorities, and this is something the Planetary Society has come up with as kind of the backbone of behind your conversations? Certainly. It's one of those things where we walk into an office, we give them or we send an advance or we have it with us. What are our top three immediate issues that we're working towards? So right now it's getting planetary science budget to match the House proposal for 2017. That's a $1.85 billion budget, a very good one. We are trying to support the authorization bill moving through the House at this point. And we're trying to make sure Mars is the goal for human spaceflight. Those are our top three legislative

priorities. Those are immediate kind of within the next few months. And then we have obviously broader issues like finding life somewhere, but we can't really designate that within the next few months as much as I'd like to do that. So what kind of reception did you get from these representatives and senators that you spoke to? I'd say overall, it's very positive. Really, there isn't a huge amount of spread in a lot of these issues, right? Very few people are against NASA or are against planetary exploration or going to Mars. I think the biggest differences are what do we do with the human

spaceflight program, as we've talked about here before. The endless cycle of debate about where to send people continues on unabated. There's a lot of discussion now of refocusing back to the moon and the Trump administration. You have a significant number of GOP members of Congress in the House who really support the moon. I would say Jim Bridenstine has spoken many times publicly about moon as being an important area for NASA to invest in with its human spaceflight program. So that remains, I think, a topic of debate, and we're going to keep the focus on Mars for human spaceflight program. So that remains, I think, a topic of debate, and we're going to keep the focus on Mars for human spaceflight. It's important to note that in our humans orbiting Mars report, we don't discount the moon, right?

Like it's part of our architecture. So again, this debate tends to get turned into a binary, a moon or Mars. I don't think that's actually the case. I think the moon is involved in any mission that you take to go to Mars. The question is really just how long you stay there. That's absolutely true. And I think that's a really important distinction. And that's something why we go and talk to these members of Congress to say, look, Mars can be the goal and you can do strategic investments at the moon as long as you keep the primary focus of the program, developing the hardware capabilities, communication, so forth, that you need to get humans further and deeper into space. I think the opportunities here to really go away from, Jason, as you said, this kind of binary paradigm of moon or Mars

is really important. And in fact, the Humans Orbiting Mars report even has a lunar landing kind of tucked away in there in the 2030s as a way to test an end-to-end systems of landing on Mars. Maybe the only kind of idea that I've seen for going direct to Mars would be either SpaceX's colonization concept, which is much more of a concept as well than any sort of reality yet, or Mars Direct. And neither of those are really, I would say, what NASA is considering. Remember, NASA still has all these existing programs. And by every, I would say, sign that we've seen so far, and this includes NASA, potential NASA administrators or names who've been thrown around, all embracing the Space Launch System, embracing Orion. You have the NASA authorization transition bill that we've talked about, embracing SLS and Orion. You have the NASA authorization transition bill that we've talked about, embracing SLS and Orion. These programs are not going away. How do you use them is going to be the question for the

next few years. Tell me more about Jim Bridenstine. Of course, as you said, we don't know who's going to be the next NASA administrator, but if he got the offer, what would he bring to the job? Well, and again, let's really emphasize this. No offer has been made that we know of. No admission has been put forward by anyone. So it's purely speculative. He is a young guy. He is from a non-space state. He's from Oklahoma. I want to say baggage, but that's a little more negative than I really intended to. But he doesn't bring a lot of pre-existing ideas and approaches to NASA that's based on a center presence in his district. He's not an astronaut. We've had a lot of astronauts running NASA in the past, so he would bring a much more exterior kind of outside perspective. He's clearly a fan of commercial space and the opportunities that brings.

He's very focused on pragmatic issues, particularly space orbital debris and other issues, particularly with launch regulations and regulatory systems to make it easier for things to launch. He's also very interested in NASA having a lunar surface presence. And he has talked about that publicly multiple times as well. So, you know, I think he would be a very interesting choice. He would certainly bring a lot of outside ideas and energy to the space program. But again, it's very hard to know exactly what a NASA administrator would do, because fundamentally, they answer to the White House, they answer to the president. And it's that relationship of the administrator to the White House, the answer to the president. And it's that relationship of the administrator to the White House that will really ultimately define US space policy at NASA.

One of the things that I find very interesting about the way that Jim Bridenstine discusses space issues, he tends to tie them to infrastructure issues, which I think is a very canny way of placing his view of what he would like to see NASA do in terms of what the White House is looking at as a larger national priority. He wants to see NASA's agenda tie into the Trump administration's focus on infrastructure. I think that's a very effective way to take an agency that doesn't necessarily fit into a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the White House and placing the discussion in terms of something that the White House is paying a lot of attention to. Yeah.

And Jason, you've written multiple articles about this very idea of when NASA aligns to national priorities, NASA tends to do better budgetarily. Just everything fires a little more smoothly, obviously, right? Because it's seen more as a useful tool to enacting a presidential agenda. And again, that's why it's very thoughtful to present this information this way. And I think just for the broader space community in general can take a lesson from that. I clearly couldn't agree more. Since you also were part of this workshop that it sounds like the Planetary Society helped to facilitate, tell us about that.

What was this? NASA, the Planetary Science Division within the Space Mission Directorate at NASA, held a workshop this past week called the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop. this past week called the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop. The purpose of this workshop was to get the space science community thinking in terms of what they could do in the next 35 years, right? Between now and the year 2050, what are the kinds of things that we have the opportunity to engage in, in planetary exploration and science? It was sort of an outside of the box thinking meeting. But the main reason for doing this, Jim Green, the director of planetary science at NASA, is really trying to get the community to think in terms of the upcoming decadal survey. this survey, not in terms of a 10-year time frame, but a much longer time frame. Like, what can we do in the next 10 years that will have an effect 20, 30, 40 years down the road? He wants people to think in these kinds of time frames. I think it was a really useful conference in that context. You really saw the space science community thinking differently than you tend to

see them think. Most people are really focused on what the next mission is or what the next question is for their particular discipline. And this was an opportunity to think much more strategically. It was really fascinating to see. This is a good example of the type of low level, I would say, planning that is really critical for long term success in these missions. And just a reminder of the types of timescales that you deal with in space that most other parts of the federal government tend to not have to think about quite as closely or as in such long-term timescales. We're looking at, you know, some of these missions for to ice giants, right, in the outer solar system, decades to make a spacecraft, a decade maybe to get it out there, 20 years.

There's two-thirds way through your planetary visions at 2050. Learning about what types of technology you need to start investing in now in order to mature them in time to be used for something in a few decades, that's the kind of stuff NASA needs to think about. All of these things, these happen in a variety of ways throughout years and over decades that really start to coalesce around big picture plans 10, 15, 20 years from now. Participating in these, the exercise itself, I'm saying, is just very important and just an aspect of how the machinery of these mission planning processes work. It's an interesting one and also kind of fun. Jason, I'm kind of curious on your thoughts

on this. I saw some people criticizing this by, oh, scientists aren't taking advantage or being realistic about budgets and funding. But that strikes me as kind of not the point of this type of workshop, right? It seems like this type of workshop is to say, what does the science tell us we should be thinking about and what kinds of capabilities should we be aware of? And then people like Jim Green or the actual people in Congress who fund it, they can then think about what kinds of money can go into it to support what they can out of that. No, I think that's absolutely true. This conference was about what we're capable of, not how much it's going to cost, right. We're halfway through the fiscal year 2017, and we still don't have a full budget for this year. The idea of trying to predict what the budget will be in 2050 is complete fantasy. Just because you don't know how much money you're going to have in 35 years doesn't mean that you shouldn't be thinking about what you can do in 35 years. I find that argument a bit disingenuous. I think that these

exercises have a lot of value. It gets people thinking in terms of how to prioritize the science, and we'll figure out how to pay for it as we go along, which has been the case in the federal government in every agency. Basically everything that we do follows that same pattern. Right. I guess if you were 35 years ago, 1982, trying to think about what the budget would be like, there's a lot of things you probably would not have predicted would have happened. The internet coming along would have been a good thing. Major events, terrorism, the rise of terrorism, surpluses, the end of surpluses, ups and downs. I mean, back in 1982, you barely had a planetary science program. Absolutely true. and downs. I mean, back in 1982, you barely had a planetary science program. That's absolutely true. Which is why, just about the time the Planetary Society got started for that very reason.

Exactly. But programmatically, back in the early 80s, you'd probably be thinking about missions to Pluto, rovers on, they were definitely talking about rovers on Mars, and that wasn't realized until the mid 90s. You know, some of these big picture things ultimately can happen. Because again, you have no idea what the annual budget cycle is going to be, hell, even this year, as you pointed out, right? Much less 10, 20, 30 years from now. Let's turn to the budget. Since you've brought it up looking way down the line, there are some ominous indications for not only the NASA budget, but other agencies and programs like this. Even though we heard the president in that message he gave the other night to a joint session of Congress, space came up. I don't know. It was brief, but it was a nice prominent mention, wasn't it?

It was a mention. I'll take it. Footprints on distant worlds is not too big of a dream. It was interesting. Space Twitter, of which I follow, went a flutter or a Twitter. I don't know the exact terminology here. Right before, because someone leaked that there would be a prominent mention of human spaceflight in the speech. I would say that that's not a prominent mention. It was a mention, which is, again, great. But we've heard that it would was supposed to have been more detailed and more ambitious and ultimately was cut for reasons that are unclear, perhaps just for time, perhaps that they weren't ready to commit to anything. world, if you're going to slash 10, 15% from non-defense discretionary part of the U.S. budget, the part that funds NASA, it may in fact be too big of a dream to do that within the next 10 years. So the budget, troubled signs ahead, troubled waters ahead. Let's just recap really quick what we're dealing with. What's the lay of the land? Right now, we're in the fiscal year 2017.

Fiscal year 2017 had, multiple years ago a budget deal between John Boehner, who was then leading the House of Representatives, and then President Barack Obama. They raised spending caps for both military and non-military spending. And that gave everyone a little bit more breathing room to work with to actually fund the government. However, they were about to finish off the 2017 funding at the end of last year. Trump transition team asked them to wait. So they passed what they call a continuing resolution,

which is a temporary stopgap funding measure extending last year's funding for a few months, basically through the end of April. So we have yet to finish 2017. 2017 has more spending flexibility than next year does. And we're hoping that we will have a good number for NASA. We're hoping that we'll have a very good number for planetary science. Signs for that are good. However, the question is, can they pass that in time before the government would otherwise shut down on April 28th?

Or are they going to just pass a full year continuing resolution? You know, there's a lot of politics here not to be worked out. So that's for this fiscal year we are currently in right now. All the news that just came out last week about very large cuts coming down the line, that is going to apply to next year, to fiscal year 2018. Now, that usually comes through in a president's budget request that has not been released yet. That is not unusual for the first term of a new presidential administration. They just got through their new budget director, lots of new policies coming in, a little understaffed, but they did say they're going to be releasing top level

kind of intentions here soon. And the first that we learned about this was that there is going to be a 10% reduction in all of non-defense discretionary spending. Again, the part that funds NASA and most everything you think of as the government. That's not just going to be a cut, that's basically going to be shifted towards defense. Of the entire month that U.S. government, the Congress approves every year, they're taking a big chunk out of non-defense and sticking it to defense. They're doing this in the context of the sequester, which snaps back into place. Remember, I said they had had a budget agreement a few years ago. That ends this year. So already we were looking at, I think, something like a 5% cut to the discretionary spending levels for next year.

What this does is basically undoes that for the military side of things and doubles down on those cuts on the non-military side of things. So basically the entire pool of money from which NASA draws its budget is about to shrink by about 13 or so percent when all of those things are added together. That is a bad situation to begin your budget planning from. Right. And Casey, you and I have discussed this before on the show that this is the real threat to NASA. NASA has a lot of bipartisan support in the Congress, but these larger issues can have such an impact that no one who is a supporter of

NASA really has a lot of control over. So you and I can be up on the Hill and lobby as hard as we want or discuss our issues as hard as we want to inform people of what the penalties of these cuts would be to the space agency. But the fact of the matter is, if the pool of money that these people are drawing from is much smaller than it was previously, it doesn't matter what a priority NASA is. There's going to be an effect. So the real question is, does that 13% of non-defense discretionary spending, does that come across the top of all the agencies? Or are there some agencies that will see a 30% or 40% cut while others see a much lesser cut. And that's still totally unclear. We don't know how that's going to pan out yet.

Yeah. And we've already heard that the EPA may be cut 25 percent. So there's one. And the State Department, 37 percent. A few other places. So it may not be even. But again, EPA is $8 billion. You save 13 to 20 percent.

That's not a huge amount of savings for other agencies. And don't forget, yeah, as Jason said, is this going to just come off the top of everything? Things are divided in Congress. They're kind of chunked up different parts of the budget. Different subcommittees of appropriations have different, they receive an allocation of how much money they have to fund all of their responsibilities. If the part, so NASA lives in Commerce, Justice and Science, it's the Commerce Department, Justice Department, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and then a variety of other things are kind of included in there.

You know, FBI is part of the Justice Department. You have federal prisons. You have NOAA. You have a variety of important agencies. And if they want to increase, which they have said, funding for the Justice Department, that's then a direct competition with the pot of money that funds NASA. Also in that same pot of money, unfortunately for us, is the census, which is one of the few constitutionally mandated expenditures of the federal government. That is growing because we need to have a census here in 2020.

And that's going to cost what? What was that, Jason? Maybe about $10 billion? It's about $12.5. $12.5 billion. So that's going to cost what? What was that, Jason? Maybe about $10 billion? It's about $12.5 billion. $12.5 billion. So that's ramping up here. So that's also then competing with NASA's budget. So even for NASA to maintain its current level of 1903, 1905, whatever it's going to get in 2017, even just to maintain that in 2018 is a functional, significant increase in NASA's percentage of the overall money available for non-defense discretionary. So that's a functional, in a sense, increase in terms of

every other agency. So this is going to be a tough one. And Congress has not reacted too well overall to this proposal. Everyone likes to save money until it actually comes down to making the decisions about what to cut, then everyone's piece is important. So it's going to be a fight. This is actually a very big unknown whether the GOP right now has a faction of itself, the Tea Party wing, the Freedom Caucus, which has enough votes in the House to stymie basically any legislation they want. They may go full ahead, cut all these things. You have more moderate Republicans who don't want to cut things like the State Department. You have people like John McCain who are actually upset that the Defense Department is not getting enough money and think that this is a not enough

increase in spending to defense. And even to increase the Defense Department funding, you would need to change the law. The sequester law passed years ago, and you would need a 60 vote majority in the Senate to change that law to break a filibuster. That seems very unlikely that Democrats are going to allow that to happen if they then gut all of the non-defense funding as well. So this will be an interesting political season coming up. Lots of unknowns coming through. Oh, and yeah, don't forget then in August, we also have to raise the debt limit ceiling.

There's the debt limit. There's that. By the way, all of this is completely, it's not completely speculative, but we're extrapolating right now, right? We do not have anything specific on right? We do not have anything specific on NASA. We do not have anything specific on what's going to happen to the allocations to the Commerce, Justice and Science part of Congress, to the subcommittees and appropriations.

What we have is that there's an intent to slash 10% on top of the sequester levels for non-defense discretionary and move it to defense. We have a few pieces of information about the EPA, state, and a few other things, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities. Those are rounding errors. I mean, if you just look to the nearest billion, those things get zero dollars. We have some sense of where it's going, but no clarity. But the math is bad. And on top of that, we have the personnel that have been placed in charge of a number of these agencies, including Mick Mulvaney, who is now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who has a long history of saying that his goal for government is to cut non-defense discretionary

spending. We don't know what's going to happen, but the tea leaves are not pretty at this point. To anticipate questions from people, and I get this on my Twitter account all the time, anytime I talk about the budget, and I will paraphrase it by saying roughly the question will be, hey, we're $20 trillion in debt. We need cuts. We can't afford stuff anyway. Tough decisions have to be made. Oh, that's an exaggeration. It's only like $14 trillion. I think it's close to 20 now, actually. Trillion here, a trillion there. You're talking real money. Oh, real money.

I think it depends on how you account for it exactly. But let's just say 20 for just rounding because, you know, what's the difference, right? Between friends, right. Yeah. So going after non-defense discretionary, if you're worried about a $20 trillion debt, it's so meaningless. And this is why. All the money the government spends, the vast majority is in Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare service on the debt. That's approximately $2.5 trillion per year. Now, the government every year runs a deficit. And right now, the deficit is about $500 to $600 billion. For an annual expenditure.

For an annual, that's the annual deficit. That total deficit is larger than the entire amount of money that we spend every year on non-defense discretionary spending, the part that they want to cut by 10%. So you could cut 10% of that. And let's say you save, even though they're spending in the military, let's just say you save 10%, you save $50 billion. Well, you still now are running a deficit of $550 billion instead of $600 billion. It's a meaningless rounding number in your total amount of debt. That's the problem, right? So anytime you hear someone going after

non-defense discretionary as the single reason, you could cut out the entire rest of government besides defense and Social Security, Medicaid, service on the debt, and you would basically barely be breaking even. And you would have no roads. You would have, Congress would have no money to fund itself, no science research, no transportation, no justice department, no FBI, no federal prisons,

no nothing. That's how big of a deficit we run. And so really the only two choices are you have some serious reforms to these entitlement programs, or you have tax increases. And you can see why neither of those is a palatable thing to discuss for politicians. Right. And it's important to note that the math that you just did, if you eliminated all of the non-defense discretionary budget, it just means that we wouldn't continue adding to the deficit, but we wouldn't actually be paying down what we already owe, which is that 14 to $20 trillion number. And of course, the massive seismic collapse of internal investment within the country would cause destabilizing economic forces. Right.

If you just remove $600 billion from the economy overnight, that's a bad situation to be in. We'd be looking just from civil servants alone. We'd be looking at probably a 30 to 40 percent unemployment rate in the nation. unemployment rate in the nation. I'll just throw in in passing, though, if you want to deconstruct the federal government, cutting non-defense discretionary spending and then getting into entitlements is not a bad way to start. But that's maybe for a different sort of podcast. This isn't new to the Trump administration. The degree of it, I would say, is new. This has been part of politics forever. Sure, sure. We're fiscal conservatives,

and we're going to go after the smallest part of the government to make a symbolic point. This isn't saving money, really. It's not doing anything to the overall debt, but it does have the ability to seriously damage the continued healthy functioning of many, many, many parts of government, including NASA. And I mean, really here, the things like NASA, National Science Foundation,

NOAA, those are fundamental scientific research that is not covered by anything else. That's why you have public services for these things. Private companies do not invest in basic R&D because there's no clear path to money making in that effectively. By gutting the part of the government that funds these things, there's no replacement for it. You're just under-investing, not in just our future, but even our present. And it's going to throw a lot of things into disarray should that happen.

So we are seeing that there's a lot of const into disarray should that happen. So we are seeing that there is a lot of consternation about this. And we haven't even seen, I don't think, a budget resolution passed the House or Senate. And so we don't even know how much they intend to spend. This is far from over. But again, this is a bad initial set of starting conditions. And as you said, it's really still a matter of stay tuned because we really don't know yet. And even if you have both arms of the legislature and the executive and the judicial, you still have to govern with all those different competing interests that you talked about. In the midst of all of this, Elon Musk tells us SpaceX is going to the moon with human beings who've paid for tickets or at least around the moon in a long loop, a free return journey. Guys, this has got to be a big topic for you as well. I'm sure there's been a lot of buzz. No? There's been a lot of buzz. I mean, there's very little information

here. So let's look at where we are. So people have set this up that there is a public-private moon race right now, right? Because you have SLS and Orion. Their first mission was going to launch humans in 2021 in a lunar orbit and lunar return. That was going to be their first launch with crew, 2021. 2018, they were going to do a test launch with no crew in the same type of mission. And suddenly NASA announced that it's doing a study to see if they can put crew on that first launch. Roughly around the same time, maybe not coincidentally, Elon Musk announces this. Private citizens have put down a sizable deposit to take a dragon, to basically buy a dragon and a Falcon Heavy and swing around the

moon and come back in 2018. I have two minds about this. One is that the schedule to me is almost certainly not realistic. There's no almost about it. It's not. Yeah. And this is something that Bill Nye talks about in his segment on the weekly edition of Planetary Radio. Yeah, we're not alone in this. Pretty much everybody says ain't going to happen in 2018. Even the odds makers are saying, we don't think so. On the other hand, as John Logsdon said, SpaceX, yeah, they usually miss their target dates, but they generally achieve what they're going for. Again, there's no usually about that. They miss their target dates. Yeah. And that's the thing. So that's why I'm saying there's two things about that. They missed their target dates. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And that's the thing.

So that's why I'm saying there's two things about this. Twenty eighteen. That's roughly 18 months. You know, they have to launch this thing. They have yet to fly Falcon Heavy once, much less demonstrate it safe for humans. They've yet to fly the commercial dragon, much less demonstrate that, you know, if any of those things happen, goes wrong during any of those initial tests. There goes your schedule.

Not to mention deep space operations, communications, life support, lots of unknowns. 18 months is very aggressive. How much money are these private individuals willing to pay SpaceX to invest to make sure all of these technologies are ready in time? Now, if you don't worry about the schedule as much, things are a little different. You can launch the moon every month, right? Lots of launch opportunities to the moon. What is really interesting and something that we've talked about in the past is that when you have a company that owns its intellectual property for its rockets and can do effectively whatever they want with that intellectual property and capability, you can get opportunities like this where you have someone say, hey, I want to buy a rocket. And they're like, great, you're not, you're illegal to buy a rocket. You can, we can do whatever is, you know, within realm of legality with this rocket and capsule.

If you want to try to go for the moon and take that risk, we're happy to enable it. Now, it's not even clear, actually, if the FAA will allow the launch to happen. This will be an interesting problem for them to determine safety and so forth on. But they have to grant the launch license for a crewed launch, for any launch. So I'm of two minds, obviously. It's classic SpaceX, classic Elon, a very ambitious schedule that they will almost certainly miss. But at the same time, there's enough demonstrable technical capability, expertise, and ambition that it's still really fun to watch and see them say that this is going to be something that they intend to do. I can't wait to see them try.

And at the same time, we just need to keep a grain of salt in our in our hand or salt lick or whatever you want to do and just like make sure you keep that in mind that this is insanely ambitious. And we have to just make sure that it's put in that proper context, right? There's a lot that has to go right in the next few years. And the problem is, I think what we're seeing here, really, in a way, I almost see this more of a proxy battle for the hearts and minds of the Trump administration, right? Between now, it's not even almost who does it first, it's who is able to capture the interest of this new administration to help direct what their nascent and yet undeveloped space policy is going to be.

Can NASA retain its big programs and say that we're going to do something in its first term? Or is things like SpaceX going to say, no, we're going to, you know, if you want stuff to happen fast, if you want to happen in your first term, you got to go with us. I think these are proxy battles in that ongoing war between these two styles of space. Right. And that's the real disadvantage for SpaceX. I've been talking a lot of trash about the company here in the past few minutes. The fact of the matter is they're really, really good at accomplishing the things that they say that they are going to accomplish. They have a tremendous track record. The problem is that they don't have a tremendous track record of doing it on the schedule that they claim they're going

to do it on. So I have zero doubt that at some point they will be able to launch people to the moon from a technical standpoint. They're totally capable of doing that. It's just completely impossible that they're going to do it in the next 12 months. But as Casey says, they're putting these schedules out there, not because they believe that they're going to make it in the next 12 months. They're putting it out there because they're trying to find a way to change the dynamic in Washington to try and get more federal investment in their company as opposed to, say, Lockheed or Boeing or some other project, some other company that NASA would contract with. I don't blame them for that. It's a great strategy. They should be doing these

kinds of things. But from a policy standpoint, we need to be cognizant of the fact that the reality is they're not going to be launching humans to the moon in the next 12 months. We've seen Virgin Galactic, they've sold hundreds of tickets just to get to low Earth orbit, and they haven't done it in the past 10 years. Space is very, very difficult. So the idea that two people spending far more than a ticket for Virgin Galactic, that that would have an impact on getting SpaceX craft to the moon and back, it's just not realistic in this time frame. Two more things about this. One is the relationship that SpaceX has with NASA. NASA is its patron, right? Let's not forget that.

We saw from Wall Street Journal, half of SpaceX's revenue comes from NASA contracts. Half. And SpaceX had been running a slim profit margin until last year when they ran in the red because of blowing up a rocket. SpaceX has immediate business concerns that it needs to address. And I think there's developing tension between NASA, who again, is paying a significant amount of SpaceX's budget right now, of saying, look, we're contracting with you for billions of dollars to develop Dragon for commercial crew service to the space station, which right now, the government accountability office predicts won't happen until 2019.

SpaceX disputes that and says that they'll still be ready for 2018. But as Jason has pointed out, SpaceX always has had a hard time, has ever reached its initial projections for commercial crew or for any of its projects. So NASA sees itself like, look, we're paying you a lot of money to make crew access to the station. That better be your top priority right now than these moonshots that are kind of, you know, in a way embarrassing us with our bigger project of SLS and Orion.

NASA also has contracts with SpaceX to supply the station. They had their first station resupply in a while because, again, they blew up a rocket. Falcon is going to be undergoing at least two more upgrades to its Block 5 version that is going to be launching those humans into space. So NASA doesn't like to see multiple rocket failures that it's going to be putting its astronauts on. And also SpaceX has a backlog of commercial launches for satellite communications and a variety of other sources that it needs to really be ramping up its launch cadence. So I believe it frustrates people who are trying to get SpaceX to focus on its immediate here and now obligations

to see them talk about moonshots that otherwise appear to be unrealistic. There's a lot that SpaceX needs to do to develop its core business and reliability, but it's definitely not a sexy thing when you talk about that, right? It's far more interesting to say you're going to do a moonshot in 18 months. But at the same time, places like NASA, at the same time, they want SpaceX to succeed, right? There's that tension. You don't want to tamp down on the ambitions, but you want them to be successful ultimately. This is another great difference, I think, between NASA, which is a government agency with lots of oversight, forced transparency, political systems that fund it and so forth, versus a entrepreneur with a private business whose job it is to drum up

business and keep himself and his company out in the spotlight. There's a tension there, I think, which is developing and kind of fascinating to watch. Back in what you've just said, I'm sure you guys saw the statement from NASA about this announcement from SpaceX, which was so interesting to read. It said, you know, we commend SpaceX on these ambitious plans, and we will be working with them to make sure that they meet all of their other commitments, that they have made important commitments to NASA and to the nation. Really fascinating. Where in all of this do you think, it seems to be a very similar effort, fits this announcement we've just gotten from Jeff Bezos, who of course has Blue Origin,

that he's ready to start delivering packages to the moon as soon as we need them for a base at the poles there. Jason, you had a nice way to put this, right? Right. He's offering a service on a rocket that doesn't exist yet to fly to a moon base that doesn't exist yet. It's complete speculation as to what the direction of the national space program will be. He's trying to position his company to benefit from what he believes he's seeing the direction of that, the directions that NASA will be taking. Again, he's an entrepreneur, he's a business owner. He should be doing these things, but from an

outsider's perspective, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. The idea that he'll be launching cargo to a lunar base anytime in the next two or three years, it's hard to imagine the amount of federal investment that would be required to get a lunar base established in a timeframe of three or four years. We just had a long discussion about all of the budget uncertainty and all of the challenges facing non-defense discretionary spending. It's hard to imagine that somebody's going to ramp up NASA spending by 10 or $12 billion a year in order to get a base built in the next couple of years and then contract with Blue Origin to supply that base. There are just so many dominoes that have to fall in order for that to happen. It's really difficult to imagine.

And so many questions. Are Amazon Prime members going to have to wait three days to get their stuff delivered to the moon? These are important considerations. Casey? I was going to say, there was one statement in that news story you're referring to about Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post, which was, I did like to see this. He said that I'm willing to invest my own money in addition to NASA investment to make this

happen. You know, I thought that was a nice acknowledgement of that this is not, it wouldn't just be a NASA contract to make it happen. It would be a public-private partnership. And that's ultimately the ideal of where this is going, that there is private capital willing to match government public investment. But that's the big question, right? Does it actually match? What we've seen with SpaceX is that NASA paid 90% of the development costs, and yet we refer to that as a commercial space program. That's not really commercial to me. As a taxpayer, we're going to spend $90 for every $10 that Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are going to spend. I want a return on that investment.

If they're going to spend 50-50, that's a very different dynamic to discuss. That's a much different conversation to have. So that's still an open question, I think. And you're referring to commercial crew on this. Yes. Yeah. And there was a one-to-one, at least for Falcon 9, there was a 50-50 split. I think NASA and SpaceX both put in about half a billion dollars. Yes. But if you look at the development cost of the Falcon

family dating back, I think the numbers are much higher. Guys, I think we are nearly at the point where we're going to be introducing that special guest. Is there anything else that you want to bring to the attention of our audience? Let's actually just talk about maybe contextually introduce what Laura is going to be discussing in far greater detail, which is international, the role of international space here. One of the fun things that I get to do when I come to D.C. is meet with our Planetary Society D.C. volunteer group. And we had a gathering and got to meet a bunch of our members. It's always fun to talk to members who already have a higher level of awareness of space than general public. But in the D.C. area, everyone's amped up even a little more basic general knowledge of space policy.

So we get to have these kind of wonky meetings and discussions and so forth, which are very, very fun. And this time we got together and I thought it would be really interesting to talk about what's the role of NASA in the world in its international engagements in this context of this new administration that is openly promoting an America first engagement with the world, at some ways in a very, very, very different foreign policy than has been seen by the United States since any time after World War Two. NASA in its originating charter, and it's one of its greatest, I would say ongoing practical consequences has been it's an expression of United States soft power across the world.

It's a way to engage with technology development, engineering throughout many, many different countries in a peaceful manner. Jason can talk and has talked a much deeper breadth on this. International policy, international engagement is one of NASA's kind of bonus things that it pays off to the United States. How would that change in this new context of maybe a more transactional or bilateral set of opportunistic decisions that this U.S. foreign policy will now take on in this new administration? And again, a lot is we still don't know exactly what the U.S. foreign policy is going to be, but it could change. It seems like it may change. NASA's role in the world may change with it. So there's this whole world, you know, what's NASA's role internationally and how that's going to change us?

A topic of discussion. I don't have the answers. No one, I don't think, does. But Jason, I think you want to add a few thoughts on this as well. I think that NASA has been an invaluable tool for international relations for the United States for decades. Bill Nye likes to point out that it's one of the greatest brands in the world. From an American standpoint, if you go and you talk to people in other countries, it's basically Coca-Cola, Superman, Mickey Mouse, and NASA. These are

the brands that everybody knows and associates with the U.S. That's really powerful. That's a tremendous capability that you have to influence people around the world. And it would be a real shame to see that get closed off in an effort to focus only on our internal issues. It's a really powerful aspect of NASA to engage the rest of the world. Yeah. It was great to have you come to DC and meet with a lot of people who really understood these issues and ask some fantastic questions. It was a lot of fun having that discussion. Yeah. And we should emphasize here that this is, this is really a question with this administration. I would say Congress on both sides of Congress, this attitude of the usefulness,

the utility of NASA and the world stage, to me remains unchanged. That has been consistent. So that's kind of the big question and maybe a developing tension. And there are people out there who really focus, I mean, a lot of policy work is on international development, particularly international attempts, the development of space agencies and space programs in other nations, why other nations have space programs, the development of space agencies and space programs in other nations, why other nations have space programs, what kinds of returns does it give to those nations,

how do they fit into this global economy and a global economy of space, what niches or other areas do they define for themselves. I think that's always been a really fascinating fact to me that there is so much interest by not just developed nations, but developing nations to have a space presence, a space program, whether it's just space communications, or you have more ambitious attempts now like the United Arab Emirates going to Mars or India going to Mars with its robotic spacecraft. And there's a huge set of policy out there. And this has actually been one of our most requested topics overall has been a deeper discussion about international space politics and policy. So this is where having Laura come in and really go into

the nuts and bolts of that is really fascinating for me to listen to your discussion that you had with her, Jason. It is the most requested topic we've gotten from our listeners, actually. Besides hearing me talk at great length about budget, right? Yeah. Well, but that's a given. Everyone knows that. You get that one way or another. Sorry.

Sorry, audience. That's why we saved Laura to the end, right? Yeah. Yes. Let me give you this little bio statement based on what Laura gave us. Laura Delgado-Lopez is her name. She's been with the Harris Corporation's Space and Intelligence Systems segment, or SIS, since last July. She is that group's commercial partnerships and international strategic account manager. So she works with U.S. and especially apparently international partners,

primarily in support of SIS's geospatial, environmental, and energy solutions teams. She spent five years as a project manager just before joining Harris at the Secure World Foundation nonprofit. She led the SWF Human and Environmental Security Initiative, engaging with the Latin American space community. She's also worked with the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and is a correspondent for SpacePolicyOnline.com with research that she authored, published in Space Policy, Astropolitics, and Space News. Other media appearances, including Spanish-speaking outlets like CNN on Español.

She's got a Master of Arts in International Science and Technology with a focus on space policy from the George Washington University. Your alma mater, Jason. That's where we met, yeah. 2009 Truman Scholar, 2009-2010 Northrop Grumman Fellow at GWU's Space Policy Institute. Her studies started at the University of Puerto Rico, where she grew up, and earned her B.A. in political science. And Jason, unless you've got anything to add, we can go to that conversation that we recorded with Laura just yesterday as we speak. Let's do that. It's a far more interesting conversation. Good morning, Laura.

Good morning. Full disclosure, Laura and I met in grad school and have remained friends for several years after, so this is not somebody that we are unfamiliar with here on the show. That's really nice for our first guest on the Space Policy Edition. Laura, you have that distinction. Well, and I would say we have remained friends, even though we have had a lot of space policy-related discussions. So there is hope. There's hope in Washington. That's a good way to start this conversation. Jason, take it away.

Sure. Laura, I think to start with, maybe you could tell us a little bit about where you are working these days and how your career has evolved, what your areas of interest are professionally. Sure. So I've spent about, wow, seven months already at Harris Corporation. I think for a lot of the space folks in the audience, you will recognize the name. But if you don't, we're a technology and communications company. And I work for the space segment, the space and intelligence system segment. We do a whole host of space related activities all the way from technology and communications company. And I work for the space segment, space and intelligence system segment. We do a whole host of space related activities all the way from small sets, ground stations to telescopes and optics and really cool stuff, weather and climate sensors.

It's really, really exciting. I'm called a commercial partnerships and international strategic account manager, which is a long title, but it boils down to I do international and commercial advocacy. And so it's a really interesting role that Harris and Excellus, when it used to be Excellus before I joined Harris, created where, and if you're in DC, this makes a lot of sense. Basically, you sit in the middle of traditional business development and government relations and that sort of advocacy, and you help build relationships with the rest of the stakeholders that have a say and an impact in all of these issues. So,

for example, in the weather and climate sphere, we're trying to get into more of the sustainable development market. So, I get to go to all of these international development related meetings, meetings at the international development banks, for example, and really follow the discussions that they're having on, you know, how to meet the, for example, sustainable development goals. And then I get to step in and talk about, well, what are your specific data needs? Because we have all these cool technology. For example, Greenlight, it's a ground-based carbon monitoring capability. So I get to talk about that and really kind of understand where they're coming from and what their needs are. And then, you know, bring it back to the company and say, you know, this is what this community needs. And really challenge the brilliant folks, our engineers and all the technical folks to

really come up with a solution. So it's been really interesting. And I like that I get to do still a lot of the international work that I'm really passionate about. My last job, I was at the Secure World Foundation. You may know them from doing a lot of policy related work internationally promoting particularly space sustainability. So in that role, I was very active, for example, in working with the Latin American space nations and engaging with them on the space sustainability-related issues. So I think for the people that follow these subjects closely, you wouldn't think necessarily, oh, Chile would have an interest in space debris. Well, they do because they have satellite.

So they are very concerned about something like that. I want to make sure they're following best practices and rules. Let's see, before that, I was at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies doing mostly work for NASA on the Earth education and space science realm. For example, I'm very proud I hosted NASA's first Google Plus Hangout in Spanish. That was really cool. We highlighted researchers from JPL and had people, quote unquote, calling in, right? If you know how Hangout works, it's not exactly live. We didn't open the line for everybody to call in, but we were using social media. So we did get questions from all over the world. And that was really exciting.

And then also on the Earth Observations front, IGES runs something called the Alliance for Earth Observations. So I did a lot of the engagement that I still do now that's kind of diverse. And you're looking at really unique users of Earth Observations data like the insurance sector. So got to learn a lot about that. And I'll end on kind of what drew me to this field. I studied political science and was really good at writing and kind of public communications and somehow landed in this really interesting field where all of that makes sense and where

the politics are very important for the policy, as you know. Yes. But the fact that it kind of brings together so many different communities and stakeholders, I really found really interesting. Fantastic. Yeah, it was like 10 years and three minutes. That was excellent. The condensed elevator speech that we all have to practice here in DC. That's right. That's right.

We have a tremendous number of members that live outside of the United States. And Matt, I think you can testify to the fact that we get a whole lot of questions about space programs in other countries. In conversations that you and I have had over the years, one of the things that we often talk about is the fact that the motivations to go into space in the United States are often very different than motivations in other countries. And I was wondering if you might be able to reflect a bit on that and describe why that might be. Sure. And I'll focus more on the Latin American space programs, just because that was the focus of the work I've been doing. It's really interesting to notice the overlaps for

countries that are very distinct and that have completely different histories, as you know. But you will see a lot of emphasis on, say, the role that space can play in economic development. You see constant references to that. I think that has to do a lot with the fact that with countries that are in the developing stage in the economic sense or have to balance investments across a lot of different areas, technology-wise, economic, to address societal needs, they really want to make that connection really strong so that they can justify these investments and the fact that the fruits of that labor won't be seen for several years as something that the government is really

taking a serious look at and that is worthwhile. It's really interesting, the dynamic, because sometimes in the media or in interviews, you will see people actually couch somewhat negatively what here in the U.S. can be a very persuasive argument. So, for example, they will say, oh, we're not just doing this to be the first, or we're not just doing this to achieve something and then stop, or even not just to, say, inspire the next generation. I think that's always a part of it, but front and center will be, we're doing this to meet the needs of our citizens. For example, if we're investing in a telecommunications satellite that we've

purchased from a European company or from a US company, we're doing this because we know that the communities that are in the most remote part of our country, think country, the sites of Colombia or Brazil, that's the main goal. And then maybe the other sort of political or soft power goals are in there as well, but they're secondary to bring them in to make sure that they have their needs covered by the government. So all these different, very complex issues, when you see how they translate into space investments, there's a real big focus on making sure that space is connected with meeting these other goals. space is connected with meeting these other goals. Sure. No, that makes perfect sense. And it aligns with something that I've noticed in international space activities. They don't all follow the paradigm that the United States or the Soviet Union took, where you start off working on launch vehicles and you build all of this internal capability to do space soup to nuts, to build

every single aspect of your space program. I noticed that a lot of countries opt for a different model where they tend to specialize in one or two things and then collaborate with other nations to meet those other needs. Do you see this as a completely different paradigm or is this just borne out by necessity or how do these countries sort of make these types of choices? I think it's a little bit of both. And it also comes from which institution this idea of having a space program first took root, right? And I'll give you two examples. So one is Mexico. Mexico has been active in space for decades, but its space agency only got established in 2008. So, if you're coming new to the space history and how this effort developed, you would assume, oh, you start with a space agency and then you do.

No, Mexico started doing and then it realized, hey, maybe we need a coordinating body that helps maintain policies and maintain, you know, a strong aerospace industry and an academic community in sync with the political goals of the government. And so that's a way to describe what's going on in Mexico. But the fact that the space agency is so new doesn't mean that it hasn't had an important role in space before that, right? Argentina is another interesting case. They have had a space agency for a long time. But I think they're definitely more of a program that started focusing on those niche capabilities,

developing indigenous satellites and sensor technologies, and collaboration with other countries, not just in the region, but all over the world. They have a strong partnership with France, for example. And then in the last few years, I've also looked at broadening that program. And so now they're developing the Tornador launch vehicle. And I think we'll see them in the next couple of decades having more of that diverse, really across the board program that we've seen, but rooted in, for example, a very strong Earth Observations program in history. Right now, they're working on a really interesting program with Brazil to study water resources, the Savia Mar satellite.

That's the case. I think there's a lot of value for U.S. space experts to look at how other countries are doing, because I think it reminds you that the decisions that we have made in our program are not at all the only ones. There's a lot of, there's reasons why we've made these decisions along the way, but it's not because they're the only path forward. I think these other programs are showing that you can do and you can talk about space in slightly different ways and still hit those points. Now, definitely these programs are much, much smaller, and there's a lot of reasons for that, and one of them being resource constraints.

But I do think there's a lot of lessons learned for how that coordination takes place. Totally agree. And another interesting thing you mentioned a moment ago is sort of the difference in institutions in these different countries that they run their space programs through. We've seen in some nations, you know, in China and India, where these programs sort of begin as military programs. And over time, at least with the Indians, you sort of see the civil side of that sort of extricates itself from the military to some degree or another. But the fact of the matter is that space technologies tend to be dual use, right? If you can launch a rocket, it means you can change the payload on the top and turn it into a missile. If you can image rainforest deforestation, well, you can also look at what your neighbor is up to. So in Latin America, do you see different approaches to military versus civil space at all? Sure. So one of the countries that follows that model that

India followed, as you mentioned, is Brazil. So it started as a holy military, and then I believe it was in the 80s, they made that split. And so you have the Agencia Espacial Brasileira, that is civil. And then you also have under the Air Force, a military space program, right? But in other countries, you don't have that split Springs a couple of years ago, talking about, yes, our program has to be dual use because we don't have sufficient resources to have independent systems, to have one system that fills the Earth observation needs of the civilian sector and one that fills the needs of the military sector. And so in that sense, I think, again, it's really interesting to see because it's dual use, not because you want to hide a particular aspect of the program. No, they're very upfront about it. And they're like, we are using this one program, we're really taking advantage of the resources we spent on this to make sure that these two different sectors

of our government and our society have the information that they need. And I think in Chile's case, it makes for very good coordination when it comes to the interagency process that we know and love. So, yes, I think resource constraints, the particular history of when a program starts, it's a number of different elements that have led to, again, just countries taking different paths. And you do see that in Latin America, where a dual use has a different connotation. It is military, but when you're talking about, say, protecting borders, like you were saying, it's tough to say, oh, this is for purely civilian, and this is for purely military ends.

That's really fascinating. In those terms, sort of dealing with the international collaboration but also occasionally competition aspects of space, what role does the UN play in Latin America? the forum, is considered the forum for talking about cooperation and policy-related issues at the international scale for the countries in the region. That has a lot to do with political history and, you know, the UN being one of the forums where everybody sits at the same table and has to say of all these issues. And so you even see countries, for example, Costa Rica is very active in the UN and in the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where these issues are addressed. They don't have a space program, a space agency, I should say. They do have a space program. They're working on a crowdfunded satellite, microsatellite effort. And so they've

created these different bodies in the government to help coordinate that, but they don't have a space agency. So back to my earlier point about how these countries take different steps, right? They are active in that, even though you could say, well, they're not fighting for funds or they're not looking for close bilateral engagement with another country where they're going to jointly develop something. with another country where they're going to jointly develop something. Maybe not today, but I like the fact that even the smaller countries with not a whole lot invested in space see a role for this international level coordination of policy. And I do think it ends up being very, very helpful for the cooperation

and for finding partners later on. Like I said, Argentina is one of the countries with, I would say, the most diverse, one of the most diverse portfolios when it comes to partners. And I'm pretty sure engagement in these international forums helps a lot with that, because that's where they can share ideas. That's where they, for example, were announcing the Tornado Project, and I'm sure got a lot of response from other countries at different stages of development in space regarding offers of help or, you know, maybe we want to use your launch vehicle in the future. So I do think the fact that these countries have

delegations in Vienna helps a lot. Sometimes they're not able to fly experts from the capitals, but they coordinate a lot of these discussions through the Ministry of Foreign Relations to make sure that they're making the right statements and engaging in the way that they do. One more thing I'll add on the UN that's very interesting. The UN has these regional bodies that help coordinate regional level policies. So they have something called GRULAC, which is a group of Latin American countries. If you're a country that maybe doesn't have a lot of interest in space yet, or doesn't have a lot to say, but you participate in GRULAC, then that regional body will make sure that your interests are heard and that as a region, there are policies that aren't implemented that would harm the region

in a negative way. So I think there's a lot of value that these countries derive from participating in the international forums. I think sort of the last topic I really wanted to broach with you, because this sort of relates to the work that you do with Harris, has to do with innovation in these smaller space programs. We tend to think of NASA as these very large flight programs. They're very expensive, multi tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, occasionally billions of dollars. Are you seeing innovative programs or processes being developed in these countries, or do they tend to just adopt technologies from other countries,

which is also its own form of innovation, I guess? No, I think you're seeing both, and I think you are seeing a lot of emphasis on particularly small satellites. Small satellites have taken off in a big way in the region, and for a company like ours, we are investing a lot in that. We have all this expertise in sensor technologies where we're pretty confident that in miniaturization and then just figuring out how to make these tools work, even in smaller buses, will really give us an edge. And so I think you'll hear a lot from us from that front. And I think it's oriented towards real uses, right? Small sites are not just about testing anymore or just about giving students a hands-on experience,

which is completely valuable and something that I think will continue in parallel. But you're seeing, whether it's the military community or national government saying, I only have a couple hundred million dollars to invest and I have all these needs I want to fit and maybe small satellite is the way to get there, right? Just before this conversation, I was looking up Brazil recently announced they're interested in launching a CubeSat mission to the moon to make observations related to impact. So, astrobiology mission related to how the lunar atmosphere impacts microorganisms. It's, again, interesting because even programs that are very much rooted in meeting economic

development and the needs of the society, they are looking at expanding and taking advantage of these new technologies and innovations so that they can, in a cost-effective manner, still play in these other areas, such as planetary or other kinds of exploration. So I think what is the expression, scarcity is the mother of invention or something like that? I think it's definitely the case for programs that want to do a lot with less. This is, particularly in the US, couched as a problem because we've been so used to having such a wealth of resources. But I think it affords really good interactions with the government here and internationally between government, industry, and academia, because we all have to pool resources. So, I think as a company, we're looking forward to that, and I know others in

industry or partners are doing that as well. So, it's really exciting. I think it's easy to be cynical about a lot of the space policy debates that we participate on here in DC, but there's so much going on, particularly when you look across our borders and you see all this just wealth of activity that it's really, it's exciting, I would say. That's fantastic. No, I totally agree with you. Jason, thank you for bringing Laura into our program. This is just terrific. I got a couple of questions. What should be the best role for this country, the one we're speaking from, the United States, in helping these other nations with emerging space programs, helping them toward their goals in space? And is that a role that we're already playing or is there room for improvement?

I think there's always room for improvement. I think one of the things that we're good at and that we should continue absolutely to do is in the area of best practices. And so whether it's process-wise, again, in an agency, you know, I've sat through a lot of conversations, particularly when I was at Secure World, where you had U.S. government officials talking about, this is how we do X. Is it expert controls or is it one of the other thorny issues that we have to deal with when it comes to space policy? And then they would say, this is what we think works. This is where the challenges are that we would want you to avoid. There's a lot of reasons to do that in terms of, again, sharing best practices, whether they be process-wise or technical. One of them, for the U.S., it really helps us because it means

that when we work with a partner internationally, then we know that they're following a process that we understand and that actually makes the collaboration easier. I think that sharing our best practices with an end to promote the safe and sustainable use of space, but also to make this collaboration easier, not just for the government, but also for industry, I think would be very important to maintain. is joint development. That has been in the history of the U.S.-based program has had a particular definition of what joint development means or collaboration and technical programs, right? And I think there's now more growing interest where now that other programs have caught up, in a sense, and that you have so many more partners with niche capabilities

that are able to substantially contribute to programs that the U.S. is interested in, really bring the two together and have a more active collaboration, not just, say, putting payloads together in a satellite and launching them. But that joint development, I think, is something that the other countries are very interested in. And I think here in the US, there's more interest in that direction. It also sounds like you may believe that the growing presence of small sats, microsats is going to accelerate opportunities for these smaller nations. I think so. I think they're looking at it as a way of getting a seat at the table and of accelerated path to space, let's say, rather than

developing a big system that'll take years and then, you know, you got to wait for a launch vehicle, etc. So I think they do see it as something that they're going to be investing in in the future. Now, here in the US, I know there's a lot of discussions about, is the launch vehicle availability there yet? And is there a market for that? So it's kind of like this cycle of, are there really enough small satellites to warrant having all these different dedicated vehicles or not? I think that will trickle down to the other countries, because a lot of them are not investing in developing their own launch vehicles. So they are going to depend on, say, India in hitching rides that way. So I think they will follow those discussions very closely. But I would posit that we'll see

in the next few years where those investments are going to take root and whether we really are looking at small satellites as something that's going to be a standard for the development of these programs. Laura and Jason, I just have one more. And I guess I would ask both of you, because none of us here are engineers or scientists. I wonder, when you talk to young people, young space geeks, maybe especially young women who are space geeks, but know that they're not going to be scientists or engineers, what can you tell them about the kinds of opportunities that the two of you have taken advantage of to become a part of this exciting area? For me, I would say if space is something that you really, that's an industry or a field that you really want to pursue, the best way to do it is to talk to people who are already involved in that area. You're going to give your phone number? My email address is pretty publicly available and I'm happy to answer emails. I know I spend a fair

bit of my time actually meeting with younger people or folks who are interested in the field here in DC. I know Laura has done some of this as well. And I know for a fact that both of us have benefited tremendously in our careers from mentorships from people who came before us, people who are still influencing our careers to this day. So I think that that's really the key. It's important to get the education in whatever area you want to pursue. And it doesn't have to be science or engineering. But getting to know the people in the field is absolutely critical. Laura? I agree. I think that's very, very important because they tell you, you know, this is the path I took. And then you can sort of figure out your

own way. But it's really, really valuable. There's a lot of opportunity for people that maybe hadn't thought about space as a potential, but they have this skill set that would be valuable, right? Maybe they're really good writers, maybe they're really good at understanding a particular culture or a country that is now active in space and could really help other countries that want to partner with them, etc. So I think there's a lot of opportunities, even if you're not an engineer or a scientist. And the truth is that, you know, Jason and I and others that work in this field, we work with those engineers and those scientists, so we'll never replace their expertise or would want to. It's really a matter

of helping them communicate and advocate and really get the messages across to whether it be decision makers or the public or the people that have an impact on these decisions so that they can continue to do the great work that they do. So I do think there's a lot of opportunities and definitely having mentors will help them navigate through that. Jason, Laura, this has been absolutely delightful. Laura, I want to thank you once again for being our very first external guest here on the Space Policy Edition.

And I hope you'll return. Thank you. That would be great. It was my pleasure. Talk to you guys soon. Laura Delgado-Lopez, the Space Policy Edition's first outside guest talking with Jason Callahan and myself just recently, just a day before we recorded the main portion of this month's edition of the Space Policy Edition,

which we are just about to close out. Gentlemen, any final thoughts? I think the most interesting thing coming up will be the president's budget request, which should come out in April or perhaps early May. And that will give us the first real indication of what this administration is planning to do with space. Once that comes out, then we will see the debate take place in Congress. And this will be the direction of the Space Agency for the next few years. That's Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society. Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Society. Casey?

Matt, Jason, I guess, as usual, we will be holding on and for the ride that's ahead of us. As we go forward, part of the process is that the Planetary Society is there following this very closely. We're on the hill. We're working every day to make sure that as this budget goes, process goes through, your priorities are going to be represented very vocally in the halls of Congress, in the administration. And we are not just going to sit and watch anything bad happen. If there are going to be cuts, we're going to fight those cuts.

We're going to fight for our priorities. And maybe we should just make a plug that we do that because we have members like you. And if you're not a member like you yet, you can be a member like you and join the Planetary Society at planetary.org slash membership. It's only four bucks a month. Again, that literally enables us to do the work that we do. We do not take significant amounts of money from corporate or government. We are primarily funded by small donors like yourself. So we depend on that.

So if you like what you're hearing, if you like the work that we're doing, and if you're worried about the future of NASA, consider joining or upping your membership levels if you're already a member. So that'll be my last plug, I think, for the show. Well, I'll give one more because even if you're a member, if you want to do more, if you think that this effort that you've heard us talking about is worth further support, you can do that as well at planetary.org by donating directly in support of the Planetary Society's space policy and advocacy efforts. And it means an awful lot to us. It's how we are able to do this, bringing you the space policy Edition of Planetary

Radio and Planetary Radio itself, which of course you can hear on a weekly basis. I am Matt Kaplan, the host and producer of the show. We'll be back with another Space Policy Edition on the first Friday in April of 2017, perhaps with much more to talk about. Thank you so much for joining us again. And Jason, Casey, thank you. Thanks a lot, Matt. This is a blast as always. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for listening. We will see you all next month.