Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #11 – Big Science and a Skinny Budget

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

Whether it’s discovering gravity waves, curing cancer or building a space station, the biggest science challenges increasingly require investments that are beyond what private industry can afford and collaborations that include many nations. Casey, Jason and Mat look at the history of big science and the outlook for future efforts. The team also reviews the 2018 budget proposed for NASA by the Trump Administration, and shares other space policy news from Washington.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, space policy fans, to the April 2017 edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined once again by our two space policy and science experts, as I think they're going to prove to you today. Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society. Welcome, Jason. Hey, Matt. Hey, Casey. How are you guys doing? And Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Guys, welcome back. I've been looking forward to getting together again and talking about,

yeah, of course, we're going to talk about the budget because we have to, right? But it's the second topic that's going to come up today as we talk about big science. That is just something that has been important to me my whole life, and I know that it is to you guys just from the preliminary conversation that we've already had. Before we get into that, we want to remind everybody that if they go to planetary.org, first of all, they should take a look at our gorgeous new website, which is brand new. The design is up this week, and it is such an improvement. I'm not embarrassed anymore to send people to planetary.org. But if they go there, they can see how they can directly support the work that Jason and Casey, and a new edition that Casey is going to tell us about are doing on behalf of the society, on behalf of our members and everybody out there.

All of you who believe in space exploration and space science, you can do that at planetary.org. Make your donation. Casey? dot org. Make your donation. Casey? Oh, well, Matt, I just want another minute to just reinforce what my co-host Matt is talking about here. The advocacy and space policy program at the Society, just to give a little context, this year will be my fifth year at the Planetary Society, which is kind of amazing. That's a long career now for me. And when I came to the Planetary Society, there was no full-time person focused on advocacy. I was the first full-time person in history of the entire organization.

In 2012, we were seeing the budget starting to plummet for planetary science at NASA. We had seen the cancellation of the ExoMars joint rover with the European Space Agency from NASA. We had no follow up to Curiosity. It was a very bad time. We had no mission to Europa. And it was a rough time for planetary science and NASA's budget in general. What a difference five years makes. And here I am talking not just with you, Matt, but with my colleague, Jason Callahan, the second full-time space policy expert that the Planetary Society has ever hired. And we are looking at a planetary science budget well past our goal of 1.5. It's at 1.6 and growing. We had a proposal, obviously, that we'll talk about for a $1.9 billion budget in 2018 for planetary science. NASA is back up

to $19 billion, and it has been steadily growing for three years. We have a whole new slew of missions on the books, a mission to Europa, Mars 2020, and we're looking at Mars sample return. It's amazing. Why this happens has been because of planetary society members have enabled this to happen. I can't put it even any more bluntly than that. You listening, if you're a member or a donor, you pay my salary, you pay Jason's salary, you pay Matt's, you pay for the production time, the effort, you pay for us to go to DC

and to really push the envelope of exploration, building support for Congress, building support and the ideas within the White House. Anyone who's working there, we work with to promote space science and exploration. Again, literally that happens because we have donors that enable us to do it. That gives us that flexibility, the independence, and the credibility, honestly, to really represent you. No other organization does this on this scale. We try to limit how much we ask you to fund this program to once a year. Every spring, we ask you to help us offset the cost of this to the organization.

The more you donate, the more we are able to do. And a good example of that, because we've had such strong donations in the last three years, we have hired a third full-time future colleague of the Planetary Society's Space Policy Program. His name is Matt Renninger. He will be our, basically, not just congressional, but governmental liaison, basically going out to Congress, doing a lot of the pounding that pavement literally every day, building coalitions in Congress and the White House to support space science and exploration. Jason compliments him with his expertise on policy and history and original research that we're working on now. And then I run the thing where we work all together. And I do a lot of the talking and manage in the strategic direction of the program and come out and help the Planetary Society really

focus its effort. That is a powerful team. We have a deep bench. And that's because of the members of the Planetary Society. So I mean, it's just been incredible support. So this is the one year, one time out of the year, we really ask you to donate to help us really get that funding going. It helps support things like this show. The more money we raise, we want to do more online training tools, more outreach to you, more education and empowerment. It helps folks like Matt do their job and Jason do their job with more resources to be able to convene workshops, all this kind of great stuff. This happens because of you. It conversely will not happen without you. So please go, as Matt said, to planetary.org slash advocacy is the,

if you want to go right to it, but it's on our homepage now. You can chip in a few bucks. You can become a member. You can sign a couple petitions. But fundamentally, it's helping us have the resources to grow to be an unprecedented powerhouse of space policy and advocacy for you. That's my pitch. Casey, you belong in public radio, man. I wish we had tote bags to send to people, but it's actually much better than tote bags because you are making it happen in Washington,

D.C. You are helping the Planetary Society to expand this amazingly successful effort. I think we've talked in the past about, I mean, I've been in congressional offices and heard the staff, heard Congress people say, you are, the Planetary Society is the most effective voice for space exploration that they ever hear from. Jason, you have extensive experience in this area. Is this unique in your experience, seeing a non-profit the size of the Planetary Society now with a staff of three to advocate on behalf of issues like this? Yeah, it is absolutely unique. And not only have I never seen anything like this in D.C. before, I've never heard of anything historically like this before. It really is a unique capability that we have. And I agree with you, Matt. I've had the same feedback throughout DC

that it's been a really strong and positive feedback to the effectiveness of this program. So I just want to say thank you so much to all our members. You make my dream job possible, and I really enjoy going out there and supporting space exploration to the best of my abilities. So thank you. Same from me. Yeah, I guess we can my abilities. So thank you. Same from me.

Yeah, I guess we can move on. So I just, but again, it's just one time a year. I'm going to lay it on a little thick this time. So again, just planetary.org slash advocacy. It's also on our homepage. Consider chipping in a few bucks. Literally anything helps. It makes it, and one more thing I want to,

I talk about this in terms of return on investment. You know, the return on investment, on investment, I've calculated it out with the amount of money we've raised over the last few years versus the amount of money that goes to the planetary program now at NASA that change. And it's something like 100,000% return on investment. It's obviously kind of a silly metric, but it gives you a sense of this is an area that has never been really strategically and had a really modern area in terms of not just lobbying, but in terms of educating. Literally, a big part of our job is making Congress people aware about the stuff that NASA's science does, right? You know, NASA tends to get lumped with exclusively human spaceflight. Just awareness is one of the big things that we do. The amount of in-person visits we're able to do, the amount of workshops we're able to do, reports, that is one of the biggest and most important in terms of our strength.

That's what we do. And this is the kind of input that we can provide because we have this investment. And the return is, for for us is going to be seeing those incredible pictures of europa's surface in 10 years when we see the clipper fly by it'll be the incredible discoveries we'll have from mars sample return in 15 years or or hopefully sooner you know it's the images of curiosity it. It's this incredible amount of scientific discovery that we will have. We will pay off for us, for our kids, for our grandkids, because we did this work now. Consider it.

We will keep people posted. You will be receiving, if you remember, some will be receiving a piece in the mail about this. Emails will be going out soon. You'll be hearing more about it. But if you listen to the show show this is the kind of thing this show we're almost by the way to a year of this show happens because our members have allowed us to to be able to to create this to give us the time to give us the resources it's very very important and we love sharing this knowledge with you too so it really goes back to you ultimately at the end of it. All right, that's

the end of my pitch for this time. We will go on to the usual policy stuff. Thank you for those who've already done it. Thank you so much. And if you're considering it, please do it. It is an investment in science. And in many cases, it means an investment in big science. And that return on investment is undeniable. Let's talk about what the president has proposed to invest in NASA in this budget, which I've heard you guys and others call a skinny budget. Meaning what? Where are we going? You know, we have some videos on our website that talk about this, but this was kicking off the 2018 fiscal year appropriations budget cycle, the 2018 budget cycle. Usually this budget kicks off with the president putting out a budget request. Congress takes the request, puts it out to all of its appropriations committees, and they churn it through and then put out their own budget for the upcoming year.

And it's supposed to pass before October 1st, the beginning of the 2018 fiscal year. For most of you who've been following politics or have followed the news, you know that this has never really happened any time in recent memory. It looks unlikely to continue to do so. But roughly what happened was the president, the White House, put out their first pass at it, kind of their budget outline. Now, this is not unusual to have the actual budget request delayed at the beginning of a brand new administration. So they are withholding a lot of details so far for their 2018 request.

We expect to see those sometime in May. But they released their skinny budget, their budget outline a few weeks ago in March. It's a rough budget very broadly, and it is going to be politically very tumultuous, let's say, to get it through Congress. It basically, it's the very broadest level. It allows sequestration to return, which originally was a law that passed in 2013, was supposed to lower defense and non-defense spending by about five or so percent every year. It never really fully went into effect outside of 2013 because Congress kept undoing it a little bit. They made these agreements and allowed the government to spend a little more money every year. Those limits would

come back in under this budget. And on top of that, what they would do was that they would take about $54 billion from what's called the non-defense side of the discretionary budget. Basically everything we tend to think of when it comes to government, right? Transportation, healthcare, veterans affairs, housing education, yeah, pretty much everything, and shift that to defense. And that would blow through the defense spending cap. It wouldn't spend above sequestration in aggregate. It would just shift about 10% from non-defense to defense. This budget would still run a deficit of about half a trillion dollars, which was about predicted,

because it's not cutting overall spending that much. It's basically shifting it around. It doesn't increase defense ultimately by that much because it undoes the defense sequestration and adds maybe 18 billion on top of it. So the defense side of folks are very unhappy with that. It really guts a lot of non-defense agencies that just didn't have much meat on the bone, right? Non-defense discretionary spending has been shrinking overall for the last 15 years. It really hacks at the bone in that area of things. And it doesn't really save us any money. So no one's very happy with this.

So within that, let's just say, where does NASA come out? And I did write a big, long explainer on our website at planetary.org. NASA really didn't do that bad, considering. In the scheme of things. In the scheme of things. Yeah, relatively speaking, it seems like NASA did really pretty well. It did. So overall, the average cut, what would you say the average cut? 10, 15% across all agencies? Average, yeah, it's probably close to 10. And NASA ended up with, what, about a 1% cut? NASA, yeah, just under, a 0.8% cut. And we're talking about the State Department would lose a third of its budget. The EPA. NOAA. The National Institutes of Health, which Congress has worked to double its budget over the last, you know, couple of decades, they proposed a $6

billion 20% cut for the National Institutes of Health. This is, by the way, for the president who said that they wanted to cure disease, all disease, in his inaugural address. NASA, by that comparison, did extraordinarily well. I was not expecting it to do as well as it did. It basically keeps it flat. I agree with that assessment. I was just saying in the scheme of things, because it sort of indicates where we stand as a nation when you can say a 1% cut is actually doing really well, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. To me, it said a couple of things. Well, we can go into the details of where that cut goes and a few other things that they said. But Jason and I talk about this a lot, and we've written about this a lot.

This is a statement of priority more than anything else. In the scheme of things, it's very good for NASA to be considered a high enough priority program within the government that among everything that was slashed in this budget proposal, NASA basically escaped the knife, you know, escaped the axe, I suppose, and just had maybe this little surgical cut

of about 0.8%, which is about $200 million out of a $19-ish billion budget. That's pretty good. And that's actually, I mean, you think about it, this is a cut from the 2016 level that was appropriated by Congress. The 2017 proposed budget for NASA that Obama put out would actually be less than this.

It'd be 19.0 versus 19.1. It shows you, A, how much Congress has been adding to NASA's budget. And then it's all this relative stuff. It's basically a parity budget. Let's just put it that. And it shows that the Trump administration will actually, at the moment, keep its money where its mouth is. And that's parity with an IT, not an OB. Right. So, OK, so let's talk about where the cuts are or some of the highlights. So, again,

we don't have a full budget. NASA's in the scope of the presidential budget requests, a full budget. NASA's, in the scope of the presidential budget requests, the full one, NASA's part tends to be around 700 pages or so. And I recommend reading. It's really interesting. This was two pages, one and a half pages. It was fewer than 500 words. And they just highlight stuff. So there's lots we do not know, right? We have no way to properly evaluate what kind of budget this is for nasa because we just do not know what they are proposing for 2018 but here's a few of the things sls and orion they're fine they get their money it's unclear exactly how much they get whether it's exactly in parity with congress or slightly less parity but they do fine uh asteroid redirect mission gone surprising maybe one person i don't know very few people

pretty much expected that planetary science they propose a 1.9 billion dollar budget for planetary science and tastic as i wrote in my article this is the bright spot to me in this budget this is a very important increase it doesn't say exactly what it funds, but my guess is that it basically mainly goes to a Europa Clipper mission in 2022. Mars 2020 was called out as being supported. It did say that they will not support a Europa lander for 2024, and they pointed out for programmatic balance. So we need to understand exactly what they're talking about there. If I can interject here, Casey, I was at the Committee for Astrophysics and Planetary Science meeting of the Space Studies Board last week during their National Space Science Week. Kevin

Hand from the Europa Lander team gave a presentation about the current state of that Europa Lander project. And one of the things that they noted was the earliest we could launch that mission for technical reasons was 2025. So the fact that this is not supporting a launch in 2024 is actually, that may just have to do with the project itself. It may not even be an administration priority. We'll talk maybe about what Congress will respond to this, but I would be surprised if no money was there for Lander by this time this is all said and done,

thanks to our friend John Culberson, who's the biggest Europa supporter in Congress. Right. The cuts, where do the cuts come from? So the cuts come from two parts of NASA, Earth Science and the Education Directorate. Now, Earth Science, the cuts target four missions. One is an instrument on the Discover spacecraft, which is orbiting currently.

It's the camera that takes pictures of the Earth. That would be gone, and it would save NASA a whopping $1.2 million a year. Whoopee. Out of $19 billion. The other three are various Earth observation climate-related missions in various stages of development. Two were about to be basically sent up to the space station. The third was going to be a big strategic investment mission for launch in the early 2020s. I think an $800 to $1 billion mission and a decadal survey recommendation.

Obviously, what they did was find missions. It was pretty clear that these were targeted and related to climate change. But if you look at the overall amount that they cut earth science, it's $100 million. That leaves earth science with a $1.8 billion budget in 2018 in this proposal. If you had told me the day after the election that Trump would propose $1.8 billion for earth science in their budget this year, I would not have believed you. They proposed in their op-ed before the election to excise earth science completely from NASA and disperse it to other agencies. So overall, it is not the slash of the program that everyone feared.

However, I think that the unsettling aspect of this is not the amount. It is the focus. And that is broadly consistent with the cuts around other parts of the government's budget, particularly at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy's DARPA-E Energy Investment Program, a variety of other climate-related, energy-related investment are seriously cut in this budget. And I believe this is a part of that. Again, good news is that the overall budget does very well. It would be a budget that would be higher than it had in 2016, or no, 2015, a little less than 2016. However, what it goes after to me is a troubling message. And what about the cut of the, at least the National Education Office for NASA, which the Trump administration said there was too much duplication with efforts at the local

levels and mission level. This is the other surprise for me in this budget. NASA is organizing two directorates, one for human operations and exploration, one for science mission directorate that has a science technology, one that also has education, education directorate. And aeronautics. We always forget that. I wasn't being comprehensive. Sorry, aer't being comprehensive sorry it's one of the a's in nasa right yeah the education directorate receives on the order of a hundred or so million dollars a year it's not huge for education it's pretty good but it's you know they're not building spacecraft right these all go into grants for teachers, training, outreach. They pay this thing

called Space Grant, which is the Space Grant offices are in every state in the nation, targeted at small grants towards students and teachers and classrooms and things. The Trump budget would just remove this entire directorate, just gone completely. They didn't really give much of an explanation for it beyond, as you kind of alluded to, Matt, that it would be duplicative of other stuff that NASA already does. The science mission directorate has an outreach and education office that's funded at, what, about 40-some million dollars a year, on the order of 40-some million? Yeah. But it's a very different set of goals, I think. And it's kind of a mix of outreach and education, primarily for its science programs.

It doesn't do anything like Space Grant. And we should say, you know, we're not completely objective observers here on Space Grant. Jason, you and I have benefited from Space Grant supporting interns who have done work for us. My wife has benefited from Space Grant, giving her small investments to invest in educational software for her classrooms. Congress loves this program. I've seen a series of terrific projects at California universities that, you know, I have personal experience with, which I'm sure would not have existed without Space Grant funds. Yeah. And Education Office, too, just gives lots of grants all over the country, right?

They support small astronomy observatories, educational observatories around the nation. They support classroom trips, again, teacher education. And it's not like there's a perfect department here. It's a permanent directorate and the NASA's national office of the inspector general has called it out multiple times for, you know, not being most efficient, for being unclear, blah, blah, blah. Just kind of standard bureaucratic issues.

We should note that this isn't the first time an administration has suggested zeroing out the education budget. This actually happened under the Obama administration as well. But the reasoning there was very different. They were looking at education writ large throughout all of the federal agencies, and they were suggesting taking the money out of NASA's education directorate and moving it into a central location for all education grants in the federal government. It wasn't eliminating these programs. It was moving them into a different bureaucracy. Folks within NASA fought back and were able to reverse that decision for NASA's education department. That said, there have been a number of attempts to lessen their budget over the years that have really, as Casey mentioned, have been predicated

on this idea that they're not managed as efficiently as they might be. So these tend to be sort of warnings in the budget request. And then Congress comes back and refunds the directorate. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this one. Yeah, I'm almost certain this will not go through as proposed. As Jason was just saying, the Obama administration has been, I'm trying to, I had these numbers maybe for the last four years, were proposing every year they'd propose about a $20 million or $25 million cut to that directorate. Every single year, it's just like clockwork. Congress would come back, add the money back. And it was averaged, you know, kind of flattened out around $115 million a year.

So proposing to utterly excise and remove completely a program that Congress has made an effort to purposefully fund above a request for the last five years suggests to me that they're not going to go with this. I'm not worried about it. But again, you worry about the motivation behind it. I'd love to know more of the reasoning that they had for this proposal. And maybe we will see that in their full budget request, which comes out in May. But again, at the moment, they are definitely not making a good case for it. And I don't think politically there's going to be any real support for that in Congress. So one of the things that you'll see with the budget process going forward, if a White House just releases its request without having done any legwork on the Hill,

it's unlikely that Congress will just go along with that budget. Here in DC, I haven't seen a whole lot of that outreach from the White House. So I think that the FY18 budget process is largely, I think Congress is largely going to ignore these requests and sort of put together the budget that they feel is best for the country. So as Casey said, I'm not really all that worried about these numbers, but I am really worried about the motivation because, you know, the White House runs these agencies and has a lot of leeway on how to spend the money that's not directed explicitly in congressional appropriations bills. So it's worth keeping an eye on. Yeah. Oh, and that's so important what Jason just said. I

really want to reemphasize that. I see this all the time on the internet. It may surprise you, Matt, that some people on the internet are wrong sometimes. I'm shocked. And whenever I post about this stuff, when I get feedback shocked. And this is, whenever I post about this stuff, when I get feedback from people, this is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of this, which people will say, oh, it doesn't matter what the president

says because the president proposes the Congress disposes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, Congress will do its own thing no matter what. Well, that's kind of true. But as I said, the budget for NASA, the proposal from the White House is usually around 700 pages. The budget that NASA gets from Congress is usually around 10 pages. In the absence of, as Jason said, specifically directed spending in the actual legislation or the associated what

they call congressional committee report, the president basically defaults to whatever the White House wants to do, unless they're told otherwise. It's much harder to get 535 people to agree in Congress to agree in a specific line in the legislation of the budget that says NASA must spend money this way, particularly if it's a small program. This is where the issue is. Unless Congress specifically says the White House cannot do whatever, you know, in terms of its budget, the White House will do it. If they just don't say anything, it's an implicit acceptance of the proposal of the president. I think we will see specific legislation appropriations saying,

I think we will see specific legislation appropriations saying do not end the education program. I would be surprised if we actually canceled these earth science missions because, A, it's a small, tiny amount of money. And two of them are almost ready to launch. And the third one is a directed mission by the National Academies. And the other one is like a rounding error amount of money. It just like makes no sense. Congress has a lot of work to do for 2018. And as Jason pointed out, they have not done a lot of legwork building this consensus beforehand.

Even the issue of breaking the sequester rules and funding the Department of Defense at around 600 and some billion dollars, which is what it would be, moving that money, that takes a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to approve, just to agree to spend more money. And that means you need some Democrats supporting this. And that means you cannot slash discretionary spending as much as they want to, because they would just never approve it through that process. And so what will emerge from this will likely be very different. However, in the absence of specific direction,

the White House's proposals will come through, and this is what we just need to follow. Yeah, it's slightly more complex than that, in that Congress approves budget levels within certain silos of the budget, and the White House can't move money indiscriminately between those silos. But within those programmatic silos, or as the military refers to them, cylinders of excellence, the president has a tremendous amount of leeway if things aren't designated within the legislation. Yeah, that's right. Yep. Yep. How does this then, this so-called skinny budget, fit into a framework that also contains this authorization for NASA, which was just signed off by the president? we're halfway, almost halfway through that. Authorization doesn't actually spend the money, that's appropriation. So authorization just puts out their policy prescriptions, their recommended levels of funding, and then they're supposed to appropriate within those recommended levels. But

again, appropriations for 2017, well, actually hasn't yet to happen, has to finish. That's the other budget that we'll be maybe talking about next month. But the authorization bill, as we've talked on the show a couple times before, wasn't a huge piece of controversial legislation. But the president did sign it. It's the first legislation that we've seen from authorizers in seven years, which is pretty incredible if you think about it. And they did a whole signing ceremony at the White House. You had the week after that signing ceremony, the president used his weekly address to talk about NASA, which was always a good thing. And kind of a fascinating video of primarily Republican. There was one Democrat there, Bill Nelson from Florida, a group of space senators and House members who came to that signing ceremony.

It was a fascinating signing ceremony to watch. You can tell we could do a whole episode on this video and the facial expressions and the, you know, the implied order of hierarchy between the Senate and the House and the subcommittee chairs and the committee chair and so forth. Anyway, he signed the bill, the bill's law. The bill, again, notably says nasa has to define a strategic framework to go to mars great we're happy for that it it calls out specifically mars 2020 in europa as important science missions it was overall it wasn't bad it was good that they went through this process it passed unanimously in the senate and basically unanimously in the

house so when does that happen anymore um that nice to see people coming together for that. So and he signed it. So it's law. And that's one piece of space legislation that's moved through Congress. Before we move on to our other major topic for today, I just wonder if you guys either of you have heard anything more about who may be running NASA before long? Is there progress toward naming an administrator? Nothing that we've seen. There was a kind of an interesting aside. I saw a report. I'm trying to remember which newspaper reported this. It may have been the Washington Examiner. But a lot of you may have noticed the process during the failed health care reform bill that was moving through the House a few weeks ago. Jim Bridenstine, who is often spoken of as the next best candidate for NASA administrator, he's part of the House Freedom Caucus, a very conservative group in the

House of Representatives who almost voted him in block to stop that bill because it wasn't conservative enough for them. It was reported that he was reminded that as the leader potential pick for a NASA administrator, it would be very wise for him to support this bill, which the White House wanted. That was one of the – it was used as an example of one of the carrots that the White House was using. But they never took a vote. I believe he said that he would have voted for it. He did say that, yeah. Yeah. But again, we still don't have a NASA administrator.

Fascinating. NASA and space exploration in the United States don't exist in a vacuum. We would be out of our jobs. Speaking of taking time off from your job, Casey, was that a vacation that you made to Europe? I am intensely envious of where you got to go. I did take a break. Last week I was in Europe. I had some friends there.

They live in Switzerland. And I thought it would be a wonderful time to see one of my most favorite things I love to read about, which is CERN, where they have a giant particle accelerator in Geneva. We just did a tour, nothing special. Next time I'll have to pull some strings or something and get down in there and wear the hard hat helmet. We went and toured CERN. And, you know, there's what was a 27 mile long particle accelerator underground in France and Switzerland. Definitely the premier particle accelerator physics labs in the world. 22 member nations as part of this.

Tens of billions of dollars spent developing it. Obviously, the big news was they found the Higgs boson back in 2012. People got Nobel Prizes. It was designed to find that, basically. It got us thinking about that process. This kind of thing does not just happen, right? 22 member nations don't just walk up together and bump up, you know, against each other in a room and say, hey, let's build a particle accelerator. Sure, you know, and that's it. It's a pretty long process. This is an idea, basically, it's been kind of given this

phrase called big science. This multi-nation, multi-decade, multi-billion dollar process that it takes to really push the frontiers of physics or human health or biology, genetics, space. And it's a really interesting topic, really, to get into with a really interesting history. Maybe you heard it in my voice, but we've been talking a lot about budget and legislation the last few months. And we thought it'd be interesting to maybe talk about something, a bigger picture of how we've gotten to this point. How do things like CERN come together? And why are we able or why do we even need to do these types of things compared to, you know, maybe your more Enlightenment era view of your gentlemen scholars, you know, sitting around and doing physics experiments, you know, in their societies together? My education background is in the history of science, history and sociology of science and technology.

I've got another degree in international science and technology policy, but most of my education has actually been in history of basically this exact topic. How have we conducted scientific and technical projects throughout our history? My education is focused primarily on the Cold War era leading up to today. today. And I'm sure that there are going to be some of my colleagues in the history field who are going to cringe as I run through the history of technology in the United States at a very, very fast pace. But basically, Casey is right. If you look at how basic science and basic technology projects were funded, say in the 1800s in the United States, it was primarily by very wealthy people or perhaps through a university with an endowment. It was funded through these private funding streams.

As you got into the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century, you started to see industry really take up the mantle of conducting this type of research. And you saw the advent of the industry laboratory. You had things like the Bell Labs out in California or the Edison Labs. You could look at some of the industry research done by like Henry Ford's organization, that kind of stuff. Most fundamental research actually took place in these types of settings. Lincoln Labs is another one, though that's associated with MIT, but it had a lot of funding through industry, through the military, but that was sort of an anomaly in the

pre-World War II period. Leading up to World War II, following the Great Depression, companies are sort of looking at what their return on investment has been for all of this support of basic research. What they were finding was it was really difficult to find a linear pathway between this research and product. As they were making this assessment, the federal government was ramping up its investment in research leading into World War II. And the scientific research budget increased dramatically during the war, primarily for things like radar and the nuclear bomb, right? The Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons. These were the first truly big science projects, right? The Manhattan Project in today's dollars works out to somewhere between $100 and $130 billion and involved 150,000

people nationwide. That's so far beyond anything that any corporation could have invested in. It's basically an order of magnitude larger than any previous project. Is there a clear definition of what we mean by big science? I think people are, it's intuitive and you're basically, you're highlighting them. The term is relatively new too. I think it only dates back to the early sixties or something like that, but is it purely something with a lot of money, or is there any other aspects of it that we should just keep in mind as we discuss this? Sure. So it tends to mostly focus on money, but as we'll find as we're discussing this topic a

little further, when you start talking about sums of money this large, what you're also talking about is large coalitions of people. So it's not individuals, it's groups, and it's not just a single scientific group. It's a group of teams of scientists from lots of institutions with also greater stakeholders, right? So you're talking about the political coalitions that you need to make. You're talking about industry coalitions that you need to make. So the larger the project, the more people have to be invested in the project in order for it to succeed. Now, coming out of World War II and for the early years of the Cold War, the mentality within the United States was, well, we need to invest a whole lot of money in this

kind of research for national defense. And that term, national defense, encapsulated a whole lot of different efforts. It wasn't just about building weapons, right? They were funding basic science having to do with anything from heliophysics to material science that may or may not have an eventual role in directly impacting national security, which is also sort of a loaded term because there's not really a good definition for what national security means, right? Most people think in terms of military, but infrastructure, protecting infrastructure counts as national security. Protecting the economy counts as national security. So it's a very broad reaching term, but this was the basis for federal investment

in a lot of basic R&D for about 20 or 30 years following World War II. What happens is roughly in the 1970s, the rest of the world starts catching up. The United States, following World War II, was in a sort of unique position, right? We hadn't been bombed. Our infrastructure had not been destroyed as it had been in Europe and in Japan. And most of the world had been bombed into ruins. And we still had all of our buildings and our manufacturing capability. So we spent a lot of years after World War II selling to and training the nation to grow a global economy. And we were benefiting tremendously from that because we were basically the only ones selling. The only ones left standing. I think that's

really interesting you bring that up because when I was at CERN, one of the, we're going through the history of the organization, and it began in 49, specifically as a way to build unity within Europe again in the rebuilding process. 20 years of this post-World War II period, the U.S. not only benefited from being somewhat isolated geographically, obviously by not being bombed, but I think we also benefited by being united geographically, right, and politically, that we weren't a bunch of warring small states that had just destroyed each other, right? And this was the other kind of aspect, I wonder, other yeah right and this was the other kind of aspect i wonder of big science and why it may have risen so dramatically in the last 50 60 years was actually as you talked about it national security is also trying to prevent wars from happening in the first place right and finding what what are ways that we can actually get a bunch of nations together for a common purpose that is inherently peaceful. And science is one of the few avenues that is a really clear, non-politically charged, obvious kind of area to

invest in. And so CERN was 1949. And one of the specific things they said was that this would help build political unity within Europe after this devastating series of wars have been going on. rebuild not only to turn them into markets for U.S. outreach, but also for this exact period, or this exact purpose, rather, to promote a better understanding internationally, a better communication internationally, hopefully to promote peace internationally. We want to note as well that Sputnik came along during this period and provided its own incentive for the West, and particularly the United States to demonstrate that it had not lost its lead in science and technology, which was the immediate assumption. If you read the newspapers back then, it's pretty amazing. And it certainly paid off for this country, didn't it?

It did. But I would posit that the typical interpretation of Sputnik and the creation of NASA is only part of the story. I was just having this conversation earlier today. The other side of that to remember is that prior to Sputnik, the United States had been engaged in an international scientific effort known as the International Geophysical Year. The IGY. The IGY. During this time period, scientists across the globe combined efforts to study the geophysics of Earth. And this was the early days of space science. So they were using initially V2 rockets captured from Germany in World War II and placing scientific instruments on top of this rocket. And these were the early days of trying to figure out what the upper atmosphere was all about. This was the beginning of space science from the concept of actually getting into space and studying it as

opposed to observing it from the earth's surface, right? These researchers, for the most part, were housed in military research projects coming out of World War II. And what they were finding was that the actual basic research that they were able to do was really in the margins of these projects because military projects were really aimed at application. So they began sort of pushing the bureaucracy, pushing government to find a way to continue the IGY activities on a permanent and sustainable basis. And this was really what the beginning of NASA looked like. It wasn't until Sputnik that you had, you know, Sputnik was the impetus that set the decision makers off on the process of trying to figure out how to catch up or to demonstrate that the US had not fallen behind technologically. But what they latched onto from a space science perspective

was this community of scientists that had existed for 20, 30 years previously. And without both of those components, you don't end up with a NASA. The part about the community is often overlooked, that decision makers were selecting from a panoply of choices that were determined by this NASA scientific community. And I think that's really important. by this NASA scientific community. And I think that's really important. As a result, when you have NASA formed, you will note NASA was basically formed in 57,

starts really coming online in 1958. The NASA Space Act, the original document creating the agency, lists science, I think is its number two goal or its number two mandate. I think number two was science. If you look through there, it does not mention human spaceflight. At the time, human spaceflight was not considered within all of the hearings leading up to the formation of NASA. There was a lot of discussion of human spaceflight, but everybody assumed it was 10, 15, 20 years down the road. It was not the impetus for the formation of NASA. That didn't come until Gagarin and Kennedy's speech in 61.

There was an early development program, but it was at a much lower level than we associate with things like Apollo. Fascinating. And that's really kind of a function of Eisenhower's attitude, though, too, right? He didn't want a crash program and was kind of just like, well, yeah, because he was basically this like bulwark of resistance to that relationship to this what he would call that what he did call the the military industrial complex how much do you think big science benefited from the growth of the military industrial complex of this post-war era like that i mean as a function of do you think that's related in any sense? Because it seems like basically you had this huge explosion of the role of giant bureaucratic institutions that develop, in a sense, an inertia and a life of their own from original meaningful points. But it seems like there could be good things spun off of them, like as you were just saying, of putting science instruments at the top of rockets.

Was there a relationship between the growth of these two things, do you think? I absolutely do. So it's important to unwind a couple of these terms. Federal investment in basic science was increasing tremendously at this point, and a lot of that was coming through the military. But it's important to disaggregate that from the rest of the research and development effort in the nation. If you look at the statistics, while government's input to R&D was increasing during this time, it was nowhere nearly the majority of research and development efforts, right? That still primarily lay in the private sector, in industry and academia. But when you start talking about sort of fundamental research, the stuff that is not based on a predicted application

immediately, that became almost entirely the purview of the federal government during this period. There are bits and pockets here and there. And as we move forward through this story, you'll see things like the technology industry and the pharmaceutical industry start to claw back some of that basic research money or the ability to conduct this stuff. But yeah, absolutely, in the early days after World War II, I think basic research, you could argue, was largely funded through military apparatus. I remember reading people talking about the era,

scientists in that era, and saying how if you could just tie whatever research you had to some layer or related something to any sort of national security military issue like that is like the growth of oceanography is one of those huge huge aspects of it right you could just like oh submarines great here's your money you know you just had to write you know these like classic you know some people may be familiar with this what a grant application was like in the 1950s. You like type on a typewriter to the program office in Washington, D.C. saying, hey, I need a few extra $10,000. And they would

say, sure, you know, take it. Right. And just because it was so new, but also maybe you had this political willingness that said this is not only important, but critical to the nation. And I think you can't separate this from the psychological impact of the Manhattan Project, right? That pretty clearly said, here is the value you need to put into this type of investment for the basic continuation of your political independence as a nation, right? And then, of course, your whole growth of the Cold War and your post-war era. Yes, I think that that's very true, but there are other factors at play in there as well. It wasn't just that you could attach your project to national security and the money would flow.

First of all, there was more money to play with. Tax rates were higher, so the revenue generated by the government per capita was higher. At the same time, there was less global competition from an economic standpoint. Rates of return on investment in industry, I think, were generally higher, which led to higher, you know, because of the higher tax rates, led to more money as well. I think there was less competition. Casey, you and I were discussing this earlier, this concept of low-hanging fruit, right? And I think in those days of science, I'm sure that those scientists didn't see it this way. But some of the basic fundamental discoveries that you were trying to suss out were much easier. They didn't require something on the order of CERN to determine fundamental principles of some scientific question.

So I think that generally speaking, you could still do really powerful science with less money to begin with. I think that the era of big science outside of the military really didn't start until probably the mid to late 50s. And I think that some of that was military work on things like electronics. Some of it was work in aerospace, as you saw with the formation of NASA. What you see coming out of the 1960s, however, is this increase in global competition. At the same time, you see productivity in the United States decreasing, and the economy was slowing down comparatively. money to go around at the same time that there was a greater need for more money for larger science projects as the science became more complex. And then in addition to that, beginning in the early 1980s, you see deficit spending increased tremendously. Up to that point, the United States basically took in as much as it spent every year. Beginning in the 1980s, that trajectory changes pretty significantly.

And the debt grows and grows and grows. The entire debt of the United States at the moment is over 100% of gross domestic product. That happened last year for the first time in this nation's history. And it's a little terrifying. is that we're paying something on the order of $250, $280 billion a year just in interest on that debt, which is more than 10 times NASA's budget. And that's not to say that all that money would go to NASA, but it's yet another indication of the pressures that are being put on federal resources writ large. And federal R&D, it's a long-term investment.

The things that you invest in today, you probably, from a basic research standpoint, you may not see the benefits of for 20 to 50 years, if ever. So it's a tough sell in a short-term Congress, right? Well, this is why industry doesn't do a lot of R&D, except for very specific areas that may help it. When you see big tech companies who are rich are rich, you know, spend money in R&D, but you know, in computing, and you have Google doing kind of these moonshot ish programs for self driving cars and energy stuff. But even then they cancel them if they're not don't look promising in somewhat of a near term. But this is why we have governments, right? This is why we have public investment in these things, because

ultimately, you need to be able to take these long term risks. Maybe they will pay up and maybe they won't. But fundamentally, you've still trained and educated a bunch of scientists and engineers and, you know, so forth to benefit the country in a broader sense. I think it's really interesting, the sense of I want to go back to something you said, what we were just talking about, which is the growth of this in the post-war era and the resources needed. It was enabled to grow because we had the resources. We didn't have as much kind of structural debt and other problems that we're facing with, being faced with today. And if you look at the amount of budgetary growth for this stuff, the AAAS has some really nice plots from the 1950s and onwards. And you just see this incredible,

you know, just like huge jumps in spending on R&D. And then it flatlines and you have growth. And it's kind of interesting to see what changes where all that money goes. At the beginning, it was very focused on aerospace was the biggest part of that growth was NASA, physics, fundamental physics and things. But what's been really growing over the last few decades in the US has been health research. And that is actually, as NASA is basically shrunk, you've seen this huge explosion in research and health, maybe reflecting kind of our expectations of the healthcare system, and also just our approach to accepting disease. Yeah, so you said something really interesting earlier, the idea that if you could just nod your head

towards the concept of national security, that that would likely result in funding. I think that that's actually a symptom of a larger issue with funding for federally funded R&D, and that is attaching your project to any form of a national priority. And the difference is that national security has shifted since the end of the Cold War. And we're now looking at different kinds of national

priorities, not just national security. So it's harder for particularly big science projects to attach themselves to economic benefits or international relations or education or health, organizations or education or, you know, or health, these other sort of larger national priorities, because we don't, as a nation, tend to blindly throw money at those in the same way that we will if somebody says, oh, well, we need this for military purposes. It's very easy to build a coalition in a government sense for those things. But for the other things, it's a little harder. It takes more time. It takes really looking for the specific

coalition to build. And there is a change there over several decades. And we should remember that it was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who declared war on cancer and funneled lots of money to the National Institutes of Health. I remember, because I'm old, being very excited about this big hole that was being dug in Texas, which was to become the superconducting supercollider, which if it had been finished, if it had worked and been finished and actually functioned the way it was supposed to with the then much more primitive technology, it would have been bigger than CERN's large hadron collider. A lot of physicists have told me that, yep, we'd have discovered the Higgs boson a lot sooner, and we'd have done it in the United States in a big ring under the ground in Texas.

But by the mid-1990s, Congress said, nope, we don't want to do this. It's a boondoggle. We don't see the value. A lot of people point to this as symptomatic, as a big example of the challenges faced by big science projects today. Is that fair? Bringing this up is a good reminder, in a sense, of what it means to do big science, that you can become targets, right? I mean, when you depend that much on federal resources, and this is what Jason fundamentally does a lot of research for us for, is how do you have a coalition to sustain you? Should politics change or whatever?

I mean, the superconducting supercollider really, I think, was something around $6 billion, which is not that ton of money, really, on the scale of things for for federal money i should say i would like six but it was also i think an example of not of being like too focused it was too texas focused ultimately is what killed it right it was at the texas senators state of texas loved it but outside of texas who was the governor of texas actually didn't support it which was which was problematic right but the uh not many other centers, many other states were willing to go to bat for this Texas project. CERN is a 22-member nation. You try to cancel CERN or whatever,

the Large Hadron Collider, let's say, project, you're pissing off 20 other nations back to you saying, why are you pulling out of this project? By growing bigger and being more diffuse, and in a sense of actually having more bureaucratic overhead, that kind of protects you in some ways, because you have more people in your coalition who are invested in you to succeed. I think a good example of this happening right now is the, the name is escaping me, but it's the fusion reactor they're trying to build in France. Yeah, the first one that will is supposed to demonstrate commercial viability, or at least

that they can get a lot more, that they can get more energy out a good deal more than they have to put in to make it work. Moving forward on the border of France. Yeah, it's called ITER, I-T-E-R. And the U.S. has flirted with pulling out of that for years, and we keep going back to it, but because of the huge international commitment we've made. And that's, in a sense, one of the benefits of big science is that, in a sense, that bureaucracy and the inefficiency that comes with the bureaucracy, bureaucracies tend to have inertia. And those will keep these going through ups and downs in politics. And so I think the SSC, Superconducting Supercollector, is a good example of this. We saw this very recently with the James Webb Space Telescope, right? An $8 billion project. Revisit ITER and the SSC real quick, and then I'll come back to James Webb. ITER is interesting. You were talking about US involvement in this project. Part of the issue

that the US has with staying in this project is we've also invested a tremendous amount of money in the National Ignition Facility through the Department of Energy's Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Stewardship Program. But one of the offshoots of that facility was supposed to be proof of concept of the ability to create a fusion reactor using laser compression. But that project went massively over budget. It's run off the rails several times and has almost been shut down a number of times, which was sort of the same story that you saw with the SSC. So Casey, you were talking about it being about a $6 billion project. I actually ran some numbers on this. It was proposed in 87 as a $4.4 billion project, which works out to about $9.5 billion in today's money. By the time it was shut down,

we had spent in 2016 dollars about $3.5 billion and had drilled about 14 or 15 miles worth of tunnels with a bunch of shafts going down. But at that point, the magnets that they were proposing to use were at a very low technology readiness level, which meant that there was no real telling what the final cost would be. It had already ballooned in 2016 dollars to basically 20 billion dollars in cost. So by their numbers, it was four times over budget from the original cost. In today's dollars, it's a little over twice as much. That was the scream level. That's the point at which the political coalition sort of fell apart, and that's when it was canceled. Now, we saw something similar with JWST happen recently, right? And just full disclosure,

I was out at Goddard Space Flight Center on Saturday for Friends and Family Day. It was one of the last days that JWST will be at Goddard before they pack it up and ship it to Texas. So I got a selfie right in front of the mirrors. It was really cool. It's a really great project to see. That project was originally budgeted or proposed, I think something like $2 billion. By the time it was confirmed, it was at $5.5 billion, $5.2, I think. And then it overran and had to be re-baselined. They had to go back to Congress and make a new deal, basically, with Congress about what they were going to do. about what they were going to do. When they re-baselined the project, it was at, I think, 8.7 billion? 8.8. 8.8 billion. And that was in 2011 that they overran. So they have since remained on cost and on schedule, which is fantastic. And hopefully we'll see it launch next year. But that kind of money and astronomy program at NASA has a huge impact on the rest of the

astronomy community. When you go over budget by three and a half or four billion dollars, that pushes out every other project that was proposed by years. That means that entire people's careers are put on hold for a very, very long time. This brings up a really good point. And this is something I wanted to ask you was, we've talked about this before. These types of big science projects, they are so big and complex. And a lot of times they are using technology that they have to invent as they go along, creating insanely complex systems to tackle these incredibly difficult problems that they almost always go over budget, don't they?

What is the cost? It's hard to quantify, but is that worth it to go for big science? Or would it be a smarter investment for these nations to just say, we're just going to give a lot of grant money to individuals to pursue science or much smaller scale projects? I mean, if you think about $3 billion lost to other astronomy missions that will no longer be looking for things or pushing them off by decades. Is that the right decision? It's a hard thing to answer, I feel like. It is. And there's been a lot of work done on that exact question. And generally what the conclusions have been over time are that these big projects are worth it,

but they're only worth it if you go about it in certain ways. The idea of starting off with a proposal with very low developed technology that's going to be very difficult to develop, that's a high risk program. Ideally, what you want to do is technology development over a long period of time to bring these technologies closer to reality before you start spending money on the big project. We've also gotten much better about doing cost assessments, cost analysis. And the reason for that is the way that you do a cost analysis is by looking back at historical costs. Well, when you're looking at something like space science, there haven't been that many missions. So statistically speaking, even though it looks like we've done a couple hundred space missions over 50 years, a couple hundred data points on various different

kinds of missions is not actually that much data to work with. But as we do more, we're getting more data so we can make better assessments about what risks actually cost. I think you're seeing this borne out in the planetary science program. Size of emission or complexity of emission is usually a really good indication of the cost of emission and vice versa. So the more complex emission, the more it's going to cost. Can you also see evidence of what you've just described in the approach that NASA has taken so far to getting humans to Mars, developing the basic technologies that are going to be needed to do that without actually, so far anyway, laying out the framework that

now is being pushed for? That is one of the arguments that they make. So again, that's another dimension to this much larger question. So as you get more and more complex projects, you're incurring more and more risk. But the benefits of the return on that project are higher than they would be for smaller projects. You have a larger constituency. You're getting data back for a science mission that affects more people. people. What you're seeing with the human spaceflight program is that they're dragging out the technology development over a long period of time, not only to reduce the risks, but also because they don't have enough budget to develop all of this in an ongoing project, right? It's a more linear project than we've seen in the past. Something like Apollo,

which was a crash project where money is essentially no object. You develop all of these things in parallel rather than in sequence. And I think with the current human spaceflight program, you're seeing a sequential development instead of in parallel as much as they can do. before we wrap up, which is, is it even possible to avoid big science projects if you want to actually advance human knowledge of the world around us at this point? William Herschel discovered infrared radiation with a prism and a thermometer, and he just put it outside the red part of the prism and discovered that it was warmer than the red part. Did he get a government grant to buy that prism? Yeah. He was just like, oh, I'm in my attic.

Look at that. I just discovered a new property of, he didn't know what it was at the moment, electromagnetic radiation. But think of that compared to discovering gravity waves, right, which took these two incredibly precise precise, multi billion dollar facilities in multiple parts of the country, 1015 years to build. I mean, you can't just sit and measure gravity waves with your with a plumb bob in your attic while in taking a break after drinking your coffee. So is it even possible? I guess it's just a consequence of being really good at science or an exponential growth of scientific knowledge. You mentioned earlier that, you know, that happened in the age of gentleman scholars.

Well, that term actually refers to rich white people who could afford to be in his attic during the day and not at work, right? The Thomas Jeffersons of the world, the natural philosophers. Yeah, good point. Would you call the International Space Station big science? That's how it was pitched, right? Jason, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I remember reading that basically people in Congress saw the choice for the superconducting supercollider and the International Space Station as an either or. We couldn't do both.

And they said we would go for the science value of the ISS over the SSC. And that was that. Is that roughly true? Certainly was a little more complex than that. But that was the gist of the argument. That's basically how it played out. And what you found is that the International Space Station, as it was being constructed and started to go massively over its budget, the first things that were jettisoned were the science modules on the ISS.

So what had been used as the original argument was eventually removed from the justification for continuing building this thing, and yet it still was constructed, which is an interesting lesson in and of itself about building coalitions, right? Yeah, maybe that's more of a lesson of, for lack of a better term, the military-industrial complex, where it meant something else beyond science, which kept that coalition going. I mean, the operational cost of the ISS is a big science project every year, right? It's $3-ish billion a year.

And the entire ISS budget, only about $200-300 million is devoted to science. And of the six astronauts on board, they spend a fraction of their day on science because they've got to keep the thing running. I guess at least the motivation was good. You know, the science was there at the beginning. Right. But if you look back at what the motivation was outside of NASA to build the ISS, I don't think it was ever really science. You have to keep it in context of what was happening globally at this time.

This is right after the end of the Cold War. And, you know, the ISS was almost canceled. I think it survived in Congress by a single vote at one point. But when the Clinton administration comes in, I think people roundly expected ISS to be canceled. But you had the collapse of the Soviet Union and you had this giant unknown of the aerospace industry in Russia. You know, the aerospace industry in Russia had been completely opaque to us for decades. We had no idea how this country functioned, what they were capable of, how many people were there, who was in charge of anything. This was a very capable nation that had launched

many rockets into space and had built many, many nuclear missiles. And we were afraid of that capability wandering globally and ending up in Pakistan or North Korea or any of a number of other places. So from a national security and international relations standpoint, it made a lot of sense to bring the Russians in as partners on the ISS because the agreements involved in doing so allowed us to see what was happening in that country and also allowed us to provide that industry in Russia with enough money to keep those people secure, the individuals who had those capabilities secure and not have them bleed out to places that we might not want them to go.

Those were all considerations for ISS above and beyond science. And even after the science started to disappear from the mission, those reasons still held. Short of something that ends human civilization, is anything going to stop big science? I mean, maybe it'll slack off in some nations, as it, you might posit, did in Spain several hundred years ago, and other people took over the mantle of exploration. It's certainly going full speed ahead in places like China. It is. But if you look at the funding streams in China, you're talking about a very centralized government that at the moment is able to divert funds to whatever it sees fit over their five-year time plan, their 50-year time plan, their 100-year time plan.

know, their five-year time plan, their 50-year time plan, their 100-year time plan, our political apparatus doesn't quite operate the same way. There are benefits and negatives to the differences. I think that the biggest threat to big science in this country is a lack of appreciation of the role of government in funding fundamental research and an understanding of the timelines and the necessity of funding that. Every time you're cutting fundamental research in this country now, the effects won't be felt for 10, 15, 20, 50 years, but they will be felt eventually. And that's hard to sell to a congressperson who runs every two

years or six years, or a president who at the outset is going to serve eight years of an administration. It's hard to sell them on projects of those timeframes. That to me is the biggest danger. And I think that when you hear people talk about things like, well, this isn't a role for government, we should turn this back over to industry, but you're not seeing commensurate industry interest in spending these kinds of funds. And quite frankly, they couldn't spend the kind of funds that we need for space science. That makes me really nervous. It's clear that people are talking about those issues in unsophisticated ways. That's a danger for the nation, in my opinion.

Can big science become too big? There are these studies and research that people claim, you know, that science has been on this exponential growth, almost like a Moore's law of science in terms of number of papers published and people in these in these fields and PhDs granted. But obviously, you can't have exponential growth forever, because it'll consume all natural resources for people or whatever. I think this goes back to this fundamental problem, like as you probe deeper into the natural world, right? I mean, as we've gotten through the low-hanging fruit that we think is there, and you have things like CERN, which is something like 27 miles circumference, but you max out a certain, you need to build a bigger one to find the next

deepest particle. I always think of string theory, which I think to really test string theory, you would need a particle accelerator the size of the Earth's orbit around the sun. That's impossible. And so, I mean, can big science itself just peter out because we just no longer have the physical resources? We hit a limitation of bureaucracies or global stability or even just finances to be able to support it. I mean, we've seemed to have topped out in terms of our R&D investment in this country has been flat for 20 years. How much bigger steins could we even do? No, that's an interesting question. It reminds me of an analogy

that Norm Augustine wrote in his book, Augustine's Laws, many, many years ago, where he plotted the average cost of a fighter jet in the United States over a 20 or 30 year period. And when he did the regression analysis and found the linear plot, he basically showed that by 2050, the United States military budget would be able to buy a single aircraft, right? So your question is sort of along those lines. You're correct that trying to do something to prove string theory, you know, the boundaries required for that kind of a particle accelerator are completely impossible today. But we don't know what kind of materials science will develop, what kind of rocket science will develop, what kind of rocket technologies will develop over the next 20, 30 years, it's entirely possible that putting together some kind of a

magnetic tunnel around the sun in 50 years becomes far more feasible and far more cost efficient. We don't know. I don't like the concept of futurists and trying to predict the trajectories of technology. But I do know that if you look over the history of the past several hundred years of technological advance, it always increases in very unique and surprising ways that are difficult to understand in the moment. I understand your concerns with lack of funding or lack of budgets, lack of political will to keep increasing spending on science, or as the complexity of the science increases, the will isn't there to meet the resource needs.

That said, I don't know that the resource needs are always going to be static. So I'm hopeful. Jason, I am ready to throw my full support behind the coalition that will build the Callahan interplanetary particle accelerator. I'm ready to join up. This has just been fascinating. Casey, any final words? I think also the important thing about big science is that it enables little science, if I can say that without kind of a diminutive aspect of it. You look at NASA, and we spend $1.6 billion on planetary science, right? These missions cost anywhere from half a billion to $2.5 billion. But it's also the only source of these $30,000, $100,000 grants to scientists themselves, which pay their bills. Not like just literally for the labs, but literally

pays their bills for their mortgages and their on their house, their water bills, pays their salaries. These wouldn't happen without the giant anchor of these big science projects to drive that resource allocation. So I think there's this interesting interplay between the small individual in this process of these massive multi-decade science undertakings. And it's actually, again, one of the more, honestly, I think, beautiful aspects of modern human society that we can work together on these esoteric desires peacefully for decades at a time to answer things like, is there, what's the fundamental fabric of the universe? What did the universe look like a few hundred million years after its origination? Like, it's one of my more hopeful things that I

latch on to when I need that little boost for humanity. Beautiful, hopeful, and extremely inspiring, especially to young people. And I think that that is the less tangible benefit that we have not mentioned until now as well. Just to address one thing, because I know we'll get emails about this, the concept that the private sector would be able to take over something like planetary science, I think it's a difficult argument to make at the moment, just because the costs involved in a single mission for planetary science preclude all but the largest of companies being able to invest the required amount of money to undertake one of these things. And the profits of the

largest companies in the world would be able to fund a single mission of the size that the government is capable of funding at the moment. That doesn't mean, you know, I just had a big long tangent about the concept of technology evolving. That may change. But where we are today, it's unrealistic to think that the private sector is going to take over all of the capabilities that the government currently invests in. Gentlemen, another fascinating discussion. This topic, as I said at the outset, has been one that has absolutely enthralled me for as long as I can remember. Obviously, the same for you, and I suspect much of our audience as well. Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I want to harken back to how we started the conversation today, that if you like what you're hearing from Jason, Casey, and myself, the best way to keep this going, to support it, is to go to planetary.org,

take a look at that beautiful new website design, brand new as of today as we speak, in fact, but go to planetary.org slash advocate as as casey said it's a campaign that only happens once a year it is underway right now it is a big part of what the planetary society uh is enabled through your support of what we are able to do as we create we educate and we advocate and it's the last uh segment of that triad that we are most concerned about with today, although we love the other two as well. Casey, anything else to add along those lines? No, Matt, you nailed it.

I believe it's planetary.org slash advocacy. Oh, I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. It is advocacy. But no, Matt, you got it. And everyone else, thank you again for helping us do this show and doing all the great work that we can do for the Planetary Society. It's a lot of fun and a real honor to do this. Jason, farewell to you as well. Thank you very much. I want to concur with what Casey just said and express my appreciation to all the members and all our listeners. And I really have, once again, had a wonderful time. And I can't wait to do this again next month.

really have once again had a wonderful time and I can't wait to do this again next month. You bet. And we will do so on the first Friday in May and we will mark the one year anniversary of the Space Policy Edition. We'll have to come up with a suitable celebration, guys. We look forward to hearing from you, your comments, your questions. Write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. You can do that right after you go to planetary.org slash advocacy. Thanks very much for joining us. And here is that theme from Jason Callahan to take us out of the show. Have a great month.