Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #12 – Is Space Policy Stagnant? With Special Guest Marcia Smith

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

Moon or Mars? Should NASA depend on private companies? What’s the goal of human spaceflight? These questions were debated three decades ago, yet are just as relevant today. Does that mean space policy is stagnant?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome once again. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, the weekly regular show. Looking forward to another conversation with my colleagues Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan. Hi, guys. Hey, guys. I want to say happy anniversary. Happy anniversary.

That's so sweet of you guys. Thank you. I didn't get you flowers or presents, but this is a one-year anniversary of the show. Proud of the work that we've done. They said it would never last. And it's done rather well. And we can thank the folks out there, all of the policy wonks and people still in the process of reaching your level of wonkiness who are enjoying these conversations. We've heard from so many of you. We hope we'll continue to hear from you about how much you enjoy this show. We love doing it, this monthly show, last Friday of every month.

So we have lots to talk about and a very special segment this time as well. But I do want to suggest that if anybody would like to send us an anniversary present, hint, hint, Casey, there's a great reason to do that and a great way to do that right now, right? Yeah, Matt. So everyone, Matt's favorite flower is the white rose. And so, no, we are fundraising for the Space Policy and Advocacy Program for the program that is providing this show to you right now. And we are doing very well. We are at the time we're recording this, I think 77 percent of the way to our hundred thousand dollar fundraising goal. We are trying to obviously push beyond that. We've really expanded the program this year. I think 77% of the way to our $100,000 fundraising goal. We are trying to obviously push beyond that.

We've really expanded the program this year. We've brought on a third full-time staff member in addition to Jason and myself. Really excited about him, Matt Renninger. He's going to be our senior relationship guy on Congress, the manager of government relations. And he's out there right now probably in some meeting on Capitol Hill representing you, promoting manager of government relations. And he's out there right now, probably in some meeting on Capitol Hill, representing you, promoting space science and exploration. Jason and I have been working on original research that we will be publishing here soon. You'd see the work that we do in the magazine,

online, and all the workshops. That is the kind of stuff you underwrite when you invest in this program. And we are very excited with the fundraising so far. So if you want to help us out, planetary.org slash advocacy, and you can drop us a couple bucks. You can even sign a petition, you know, just get more involved with us. But again, we depend on you. We are, I should say, independent. So we are allowed to really pursue the kind of stuff to represent you.

So please consider giving us a donation, investing in the program. Well said. Thank you, Casey. We hope that you'll want to get in on this and support the great work that Jason, Casey, and now Matt are doing in D.C. And also this show, bringing it to you guys, telling you about their activities and about what's happening in D.C. And there's a lot happening. There's quite a bit for us to talk about. Let's do that for a couple of minutes before we get to that very special conversation, Casey, that you had with one of our nation's, one of the world's great space policy experts, Marcia Smith. But first, bring us up to date. What's the latest news? The title of the show is, Is Space Policy Stagnant?

That's basically what Marcia Smith and I are going to talk about. She founded the Space Policy Online website, which I recommend everyone go to. We're going to check in on our first topic of our very first episode, which is the status of the human spaceflight program. And we have two new reports that shed some light on that, where we are with that. And then also, as you just mentioned, we had a budget. This is now, just to be clear, and I've seen this mistake made so many times in so many otherwise reputable outlets. What year are we talking about? What this budget that just passed the Congress probably will be signed by the White House.

This is for the fiscal year 2017, the year that we are in right now, which has five months left. Yeah. And just to make it more complicated, it's the fiscal year that we're in right now that started in October of 2016. Yes, exactly. Just to make that a little more complicated. So we've been operating, the U.S. government has been operating under what's called a continuing resolution. That means that we basically just extended the budget from 2016 until Congress could get it back together. Mainly, they put it off to wait for the presidential transition. We should be clear again that there are multiple budgets floating around right now. There was the one that you've probably heard about, which was pretty bad for

science. This is the proposal coming out of the Trump administration, but that is for 2018. That proposal is the one that proposes a $6 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health, a billion dollar cut to the Department of Energy's Office of Science, in addition to massive cuts to the State Department and so forth and so on. That has yet to be worked out. This budget that just passed Congress does not apply to that proposal. That is next year. That is the next fiscal year, I should say. So Congress now starts to work on that.

This is for the year that we're in. And while there were some cuts proposed by the Trump administration, they were nowhere near as draconian as the ones that you've been hearing about. So most of the work for 2017 had already been done. And you can really see, I think, a pretty good set of deals that were made to get this through. It passed by the House by quite a large margin. Let's get to the brass tacks of it. It was pretty good for NASA. It was better than I think anybody had expected for NASA. It really turned out to be one of the better budgets we've seen in a number of years. I want to say that I'm raising my hand here. I actually expected pretty good things out of this

budget. It's been a weird, it's been, I mean, what happened is this is another, this budget for NASA for 2017, for the next five months, gives NASA $19.65 billion. That's NASA's best budget in a long, long time, at least a decade. Is that, I guess, adjusted for inflation probably seven years or so? It might even be in the past decade. I'd have to go back and run the numbers, but it might be the best in the decade. It's an increase of over $300 million from last year. It's $600 million and change above what President Obama requested for NASA in 2017. And it's a good example of what I like to call the everybody wins budget. They basically had the priorities in the Senate and the priorities in the House. And the deal was that everybody gets their priorities and they just spend more money.

I think that the House had proposed 19-5 for NASA. The Senate had proposed 19.3. The deal was 19.6.5, 0.65. So they just added more. It was great. I love it when that happens. And because it's an everybody wins budget, there's very little to criticize here and actually quite a bit to celebrate. So let's talk about planetary science. That's really maybe the biggest, well, the biggest winner is Space Launch System and Orion. Right. Space Launch System and Orion got $700 million plus up from the president's request. But it's totally in line with what it got last year. SLS gets $2.15 billion.

That's an increase of $150 million. 2.15 billion. That's an increase of 150 million, but they direct 300 million of that budget to develop in the exploration upper stage to make it the Block 1B variant, which they're trying to get ready for 2021. We will talk about whether they can make that timeline later. No, and that's an interesting point. You said that the main beneficiary was the Space Launch System and Orion. In fact, the term beneficiary, it depends on the view of the beholder, right? I think that this budget basically bailed them out of some problems that they were having, as opposed to the budget increases for planetary science, which actually allow them to do more than they had anticipated. Excellent point. Yeah, that's right. It's always

kind of funny to read the NASA budget proposal because planetary science section division, it's something like 55, 60 pages of details going down to the line items of single digit millions of dollars, how they intend to spend the money. SLS and Orion, it's maybe five pages, mostly boilerplate, and it's just two billion. Right. We'll spend it. You know, and it's just it's much less clear how that money gets shunted around which is probably one of the big complaints of these big programs however let's move on to other highlights of the budget we'll talk about sls in a minute planetary science in this budget which again looks ready to pass as we are recording this will receive 1.846 billion. I just want to soak in that number.

$1.846 billion. Remember, two years ago, our goal was $1.5 billion. I remember sitting in a senator's office. I'm not going to say who this senator was, but this senator had a lot of reason to support planetary science. This senator looked at our request, looked us in the eye, and said, this will never happen. Never happen. That was the response.

And we are now 300 million above 1.5 billion. Like 20% above. I think the past year, if anything, has proven that when it comes to politics, anything is possible. That's the lesson we learned from the NASA budget process, right? That's what you're referring to? That's exactly right. So 1.846, you can tell I'm pretty happy with this number. Everything, basically everything got increased. Every program in planetary science basically sees an increase. The biggest win, I guess, of this is the Europa mission, which would receive $275 million in this budget.

I believe the request was $50 million. So substantial increase. This keeps the mission on track for a 2022 launch date, and lot of money to support that program. That's a Texas, Houston area congressman. Exactly. So not even a parochial interest in JPL. It's just a personal, passionate interest. And as also, I should always emphasize, completely validated by the scientific community. This is the number two priority of the scientific, at least the Clipper mission, not so much the lander. Right. The one remaining question that we have with the Europa Clipper mission is whether or

not it'll fly on an SLS or on a Delta IV Heavy. It was announced at the Space Studies Board meeting last April, or last month rather, they're going to try and make that decision sometime this spring. So we should hear something about that within the next month or so. As far as the Europa lander mission goes, my understanding is it, it cannot fly unless it's on an SLS. So whatever happens with the SLS program will have a major impact on decisions in planetary science, which we'll, we'll be talking about in a couple of minutes here. impact on decisions in planetary science. Which we'll be talking about in a couple of minutes here. Other highlights of planetary science, the Mars program gets 75 million more. Part of that goes into Mars 2020 rover development. It will get a Mars helicopter, which I think is one of the coolest additions to this, as long as, and then they make it clear, as long as it does not

disrupt the schedule. I think they just tack on a little remote-controlled helicopter to just practice flying around on the surface of Mars, which, sure, I will take that. I'm totally happy to see that. That would be very cool. This is a tech demonstration mission. I don't think it has a lot of science there. Yeah, they'll probably put a camera on it. Yeah, sure. Hopefully, right?

That would be great. They better. Every extended mission, planetary science is funded, so every mission continues. We also saw an increase to $20 million for plutonium-238 development. That will help accelerate that program a little bit. Your favorite program. My favorite isotope. My favorite radioactive isotope.

We'll see that move forward, continue to move forward. Discovery got a nice increase to handle the overruns on the InSight program and support the two new missions under selection. Oh, and maybe most important, and this is often overlooked by Congress, so I was very happy to see this in there, Planetary Science Research and Analysis, the pot of money that actually funds scientists to do science with the data brought back by these missions, will receive a $16 million

increase this year. That's a lot of additional support for scientists. I mean, we're talking average scientific grants, probably $150,000. And so dozens of more scientists on long-term grants helps pay their salaries, pays their students, pays for travel publication, and just doing the research itself. That's really nice to see. This is a great budget for planetary science. And I was running the numbers last night. This is the best budget maybe this century for planetary science, even adjusted for inflation. If you kind of adjust for some of the programmatic consistencies, you take out the deep space network operating costs and things like that. This is a fantastic

budget for planetary science. So I couldn't be happier. Yeah. So looking at the rest of the science mission directorates budget, planetary does very well. Honestly, nobody took a massive hit. It's not that planetary science was experiencing this increase to the detriment of somebody else. The earth science budget went down a bit, and I'm sure that there are people who are disappointed by that, but I think that that had more to do with programmatic development curves than it had to do with any cuts to any programs, right? I think it stayed exactly the same. Oh, it did stay, okay. It stayed exactly the same as what it got, which is, I think, accounting for inflation is down a little bit.

Right. But they're still the largest science. 1.921 billion is what Earth science will get in this budget. But in the meantime, in astrophysics, JWST seems to be right on time and on schedule and budget, which is fantastic. WFIRST is still getting its development money in heliophysics. The Solar Probe Plus project is also performing wonderfully and on schedule for launch. Science did well.

Planetary did great. Science did well. That's a great point. Planetary didn't eat anyone's lunch. And that's a really critical thing. And that's something I should emphasize that we, this is a message that we always take to people in Congress. You know, it doesn't have to be a zero sum game for things like science.

Every science can win and every science did win. Now, if I had to choose one who just didn't win as much, I think this is kind of interesting, is astrophysics. Astrophysics, you know, and James Webb Space Telescope in the NASA budget are split out into two separate line items. And that's basically the punishment for going over budget on James Webb back in 2011 or so. So if you add those two together, astrophysics and the total for James Webb, that's really your total budget for astrophysics, because James Webb is an astrophysics mission.

And James Webb is going down on its development curve. It's the cost every year. It is your standard general curve for cost of making a new space mission. You peak at a certain point and then it declines as you don't need as many people working on the mission. And we're on the downward slope of James Webb. Now, they talk about this as this opens up a wedge of future funding. As James Webb gets finished and built, that wedge of money that they had previously devoted to that mission should open up. And theoretically, ideally, could go all back to new astrophysics missions. While astrophysics, the rest of astrophysics increased compared to last year, it didn't increase at the same rate at which James Webb went down.

So that wedge actually didn't fully go to astrophysics. And within astrophysics, they actually kind of earmarked or directed, I should say, $105 million of its $750 million budget to WFIRST. That actually functionally behaves as a, I wouldn't say a cut, or, you know, it limits by about 40, I think they said, 40 or 50 million dollars yesterday of savings they'll have to find elsewhere within astrophysics to make up for that directed spending on WFIRST. So while astrophysics grows, it doesn't grow at a rate commensurate with what they are telling them to spend on W-first mission. That's a really good point. And the idea of the budget wedge, the savings that you're realizing from the development curve on the downward side of JWST, the fact that that's not feeding directly

into astrophysics is a lesson that I think will be relevant for future conversations as well. When we make budget plans, people often assume that the downward trend of development on one project frees up money to start new things. And more often than not, that's not what happens. That money ends up going elsewhere in the government or not being spent, period. It's a really good lesson to keep in up going elsewhere in the government or not being spent, period. It's a really good lesson to keep in mind as we talk about budgets going forward. We should, for the benefit of the newbies out there, remind them that WFIRST, that's the next big space telescope beyond the James Webb Space Telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope, which is going to do some more terrific work, but definitely more on the astrophysics side. That's the one that they inherited or were gifted a giant space rated mirror from the National Reconnaissance Office.

NASA just got that kind of wrapped up in a bow. And it's actually I don't know if this would be great to look at more holistically sometime. at this more holistically sometime. But Jason, I saw a couple of weeks ago that the estimate for WFIRST has now gone up, I think into the $3.2 billion range now for WFIRST. They're still debating what the instrument suite is going to look like on that spacecraft. So I think everybody's just trying to hang all of their instruments on it at the moment. And I suspect that eventually, once the price hits the scream level, we'll start to see a V-scope. that eventually, you know, once the price hits the scream level, we'll start to see a V-scope. Three already? That's no planetary mission has been three, at least three and higher since Cassini, I think. Is that correct? Even Curiosity, the big one, was two and a half. Yeah, no, that's true. But this is also sort of a difference in culture between astrophysics and

planetary science. Astrophysics tends to launch fewer larger missions than planetary does. You know, they have the fleet of great observatories. Hubble is one of those. And they just get enough data from a single spacecraft that they can placate a large swath of the astrophysics science community in a way that you can't do with a single planetary mission. Good point. All right.

And just to highlight a few other things here, and I should say that I have a rundown of this budget on planetary.org. We will link to this on the show page. Commercial crew, fully funded. Commercial cargo, fully funded. Everything else is pretty unremarkable. Jason, do you have any more highlights that you noticed from this budget? No, I think that pretty well covers it.

The interesting thing about the commercial crew and cargo programs is that was the from this budget? No, I think that pretty well covers it. The interesting thing about the commercial crew and cargo programs is that was the perennial fight for years, and now it's a non-controversial issue. I find that really interesting. Yeah, I think these reports that we are talking about may have helped seal that deal, I think, on our next topic. So should we just move into that? Let's do that because we need to talk about that big rocket, which I guess we're not going to see light up in 2018. No. Sorry. Yeah, the short answer is no.

Right. Jason, do you want to bring up the context on this one? Sure. couple of weeks, one by Congress's investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, and another by NASA's investigative arm, the Office of the Inspector General. And both of these reports looked at not just SLS and not just Orion, but also the ground system segment of these projects. Basically, you can launch stuff into space, but if you can't talk to it, there's not a lot of point in it. And so the ground systems are integral to all of this. And what these reports both found is that if you look at all three of these systems, they're operating on very, very razor thin margin for error from a

development standpoint. So very little schedule margin, very little cost margin. And at this point in your development cycle, that's not a good place to be. That's an indication that you're very likely to go over cost. And NASA has already admitted, at least with SLS, they're going to go over schedule on the launch. The reason that you have cost reserves, which in NASA parlance are not called reserves because people are afraid that if you say it's a reserve, then it's money you don't really need and they take it away. So it's referred to in NASA as an unfunded future expense. And what they mean by UFE is this is money that you know you're going to need, though you can't say why you're going to need it yet. It's just, it's based on historical

models of projects of similar size and complexity. You know, you're going to need it yet. It's based on historical models of projects of similar size and complexity. You know you're going to run into unknown difficulties in your development, and you're going to need a little bit extra money. So you can't calculate exactly what you're going to run into, but you can, from a statistical probability standpoint, calculate what you're probably going to need to deal with those uncertainties. And we can go really into depth on how NASA calculates this. It used to be that they would figure out how much they thought they needed and add 50 or 30 percent. Now there's a much more stringent strategy to figure these numbers out. But basically you have reserves or UFE held by the project and also another bunch of money held by headquarters itself that they can distribute throughout the entire program rather than just the project.

It's concerning to see that these cost and schedule margins are as low as they are on these programs or on these projects within the human spaceflight program because it's an indication that there are going to be problems later when they start to run out of money. Now, as Casey mentioned, these programs have consistently received more money than they've requested, which has alleviated some of that concern. But that's not an indefinite. And at some point, somebody is going to start to get upset if these projects go too far over cost or schedule. Again, these margins, the way that I like to think of them is this is your unknown unknowns budget, right? And this is like when you do something really complex, you don't know how to do it the first time. So you're just like, oh, something will go wrong. So I'll just give myself some padding to accommodate that, right? In time and in your money. So in case you need to like throw a bunch of engineers onto a problem that crops up, you can accommodate that. Right. And it's also important to note that it's not always problems within the project or program that result in the cost issues.

Sometimes it can be an external issue that you didn't anticipate. Like Europeans delivering the Orion service module 10 months late. That's right. There was nothing that NASA could do about that. Or a tornado hitting Michoud assembly facility. That's right. There was nothing that NASA could do about that. Or a tornado hitting Michoud Assembly Facility. Again, precisely. To just pull a random theoretical out of the air. That actually happened. Two months, right? Lost to that. Yes, exactly. And that's why you have reserves, is for the unexpected or the unknown problems that you'll encounter, that you inevitably encounter on a project. So I'm looking here at this report.

We will link to this. This is from NASA's Office of the Inspector General. They have guidelines for how much reserve they should have for these big projects. It says here that a program such as the Space Launch System should have between 10% and 30% monetary reserve. So of its total budget, maybe set a third of that aside, you know, on top of what you're already spending to deal with any challenges. And it says here, approximately 1%. Right. It's working with I mean, they said actually, for the last few years, the SLS actually had $0. I didn't

even know you could do that $0 of program reserves, they were literally spending every dollar they got. And last year, they had 25 million. So 1%. I mean, anything goes wrong. And this is kind of what you talk about in terms of Congress adding 700, 700 million a year. Congress is adding that reserve every year that is being spent. It's just wild to me. It's very different than what you see on the house side, or on the science side of the house at NASA. It's also a project that's an order of magnitude larger than what you see being done on the science side.

And I think that with complexity, you add risk and you add uncertainty. And so it's much harder to budget for these giant projects. And this is where they always go back to talking about Apollo, how they do Apollo. Well, they had something like 100% reserve on their budget. Is that right? Wow. Well, at what point?

I mean, they had 100% reserve to start with, and then they overspent that pretty significantly. So, yeah. The money was there as it was needed, right? You can keep your schedule and your budget goes, or you can keep your budget and your schedule goes, basically, right? It's this kind of inflexible relationship between the two. But again, as I was mentioning, the way that NASA does planning for reserves now is very different than they did back then. But that's because we have 50 years worth of projects to look at. When you were doing Apollo, no one had ever done anything like that at all. It was categorically different than any missile program, than any

rocket program that preceded it. So you were completely operating in the unknown. There was no way to plan to know what you were going to run up against. Both of these reports basically say there's no extra money. I think the GAO report said that Orion had zero days of schedule margin left. So a contractor could sneeze and be out sick a day or something, and that would throw off the entire program. And again, you're integrating three programs here

that all have to do this delicate dance to arrive at the same time, right? Your entire ground systems, which is upgrading, not just to talk to these missions, but to upgrade all of the infrastructure to launch a rocket at Kennedy Space Center and to move those pieces around the country, the rocket and Orion. NASA basically said that the short end of this is, and I recommend you read these reports because they are fascinating. They're great summaries of these programs.

But NASA has admitted in the response to the GAO report, and for some reason they haven't seen a lot of talk about this, in the response to the GAO report, and for some reason they haven't seen a lot of talk about this. In fact, they don't want to mention this. But they admitted that the original plan for EM-1, the first test mission, which is going to be uncrewed, no humans in this one, was for, I think, November of 2018.

They have admitted that they will not make that launch date and will likely go into 2019, but they will not say exactly when. And they will say say exactly when. And they will say sometime before September 30th, 2017 was the response in the GAO report. 2019. But yeah. No, no, no. I'm sorry. They will tell us the slip.

Oh, tell us the slip by September 17th. They will tell us before the last day of this fiscal year. Right. My guess is because they want to see what their funding is going to look like. Yeah. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that announcement actually slips to the FY19 budget request. So you're saying that the announcement of the delay slip will itself probably slip? That's right.

Wow. So historically, Jason, is this unprecedented? Oh, absolutely not. Throughout NASA's entire history, I don't think there has been a single major human spaceflight program that has been delivered on time and on budget ever. But as I say, a lot of the reason for that is because of the size and complexity of these endeavors. The International Space Station was originally budgeted at something like $10 billion. It's now north of $100 billion, depending on how you account for it. $10 billion. It's now north of $100 billion, depending on how you account for it. The space shuttle, again, took almost a decade longer than it was expected to and cost far more money.

We just discussed Apollo and how much more money it cost. These are really difficult programs, and they're managed very differently than the stuff on the science side of the house. To put it in context, what NASA spends every year on the Space Launch System is a flagship mission in science, approximately. It's like if they cranked out a Curiosity-level mission every single year for the last six years. Yeah, the annual budget for SLS is something on the order of three to four times the annual budget for the largest flagship mission. It's very big. And so, and again, I am generally one of the more understanding and supportive space policy folks out there about this program. And I think overall,

it's been managed very well considering. But this is something, Jason, you've been bringing up for years. Just you're saying just wait until phase D, basically, the integration period, and everything is going to go. And that's basically what we're starting to see here. And it is troubling because the amount of work that has yet to be done. I mean, EM1 was uncrewed. This is Orion with no life support that they can't get ready on time, right? This is Orion with no life support that they can't get ready on time, right? Right.

They have to then, after they launch this for the first time, completely redo all of that launch services stuff to handle the upgrade of the rocket. That's why it takes three years until the next minimum, three years until the next launch, because they have to make all these new connections, platforms to handle the 1B version, the upper exploration upper stage. Plus add life support to Orion. Right. And all these other things. It's just, it's looking unsettling, let's say. Right. So the real problem with the integration of these systems is not just the schedule, right? If one of these things is late, it holds up all the rest of them. They're just sitting around waiting for this one piece.

And sitting around waiting is one of the most expensive things you can do on a development project. It's not just that if Orion or SLS or the ground systems is late, they'll also go over their own budget. They'll drive up the other one's budgets as well. And in the meantime, it's not quite as big a rocket, but SpaceX says that first Falcon Heavy is going to launch this year, 2017. That's true, and I hope that they meet that schedule. You know, the Heavy has been delayed a number of times up to this point. As Casey and I have mentioned a number of times, we'd really like to see the first one go, because that means the second one is not far behind, and that will have our light sail spacecraft aboard.

But it's also important to remember that the SLS and the Falcon Heavy are very different systems. It's not easy to simply replace the SLS with the Falcon Heavy. They have different capabilities. They're developed for different reasons. So it's not correct to see those as an apples and apples comparison. Excellent. And I would point out too that I do not think this changes anything in terms of political support for the exploration program at NASA. I think that's absolutely true. Which is very solid

as you guys have talked about in the past. Well, we just saw, yeah, that congressional legislation that Trump signed is all about the SLS. Generally, when you hit this level of political support for things, when you go over, that means Congress will just give you more money and try to enable it to limp forward. You look at this, this money is being spent in all of

these districts, all of these jobs, and nothing about having the Falcon Heavy changes that there are 30,000 people employed in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and 44 other states in the union from this program. And ironically, I always think a more efficient company like SpaceX has far fewer jobs to offer politically than something like the SLS. And so it depends what angle you're looking at this from which incentives. Do not discount this. And I think we will see this continue. It does sound,

since we've heard a little bit of the history from Jason, like we are seeing a pattern which has for good reason been repeated many times in the past. I see here an opportunity to transition to this very special conversation, Casey, that you had with Marcia Smith. To preface this, Jason, moon or Mars?

Yeah, the least interesting question in spaceflight. One thing I do want to say before we go to the interview with Marcia, the title that you had for this episode was, Is Space Policy Stagnant? And I think that one of the things you and I have sort of been discussing this whole episode is that it depends on what you think of as space policy. I think if you look at space science, the policy for space science has actually been remarkably successful. If you look at the decadal surveys and you look at the questions that they recommended NASA explore, and you look at the portfolio of missions we've had since then, I think it's a really successful use of policy to direct these programs. I think we're seeing a tremendous amount of success, even in tough budgetary times. Now, on the other side of NASA's house, the human spaceflight side, as Casey and Marsha are going to discuss, you've been basically having a lot of the same arguments

for over a generation now. It's a difficult question about space policy. Oh, I'm hearing asteroids. No, exactly. And Jason, that's such a great point. Really, it comes down to what people generally just assume NASA is. When people, a lot of people, the shorthand for NASA is human space flight. And you and I and a lot of our listeners know, and many, many other people know that there's, NASA does lots of things. I mean, we don't even ever talk about aeronautics. And we won't, but that's, you know, NASA does that. And you know, lots of different things. Science is incredibly successful. However, these big projects, I feel like in the five years that I've done this, the same

arguments and I couldn't decide if it was that the policy is right for how to solve them, but it's just never been implemented for the human spaceflight side. And so the discussion remains the same. Or that is, it is just an impossibility to drive any sort of consensus for what we need to do and how to do it. Or the basic politics are so strong that we can't overcome it. And I know a lot of people are going to be screaming at the radio or podcasting implement that they use about how commercial crew is going to, or commercial is going to come in and upset this whole paradigm. But as we were just talking before the show, there was a kind of an early movement towards commercial back in the 1980s. It never panned out. And Marsha and I discussed that a little bit too. And do you, do you see that as a,

as a possible way forward? The movement towards commercial, you know, sort of in the same way that NASA needed a lot of historical reference points in order to be able to accurately calculate the reserves that they would need for a project. We're sort of in the same situation looking at commercial spaceflight. I don't know that we have enough data to tell us whether or not commercial is ready to take over some or all aspects of a government system. take over some or all aspects of a government system. I'm inclined to think not, only because I look at the costs of the government program and I don't see the commensurate ability to find that kind of funding within a private funding stream at this moment. That doesn't mean that it won't ever happen. I just don't think we're quite there yet. But from a technological standpoint, we're seeing a lot of things happen commercially now that weren't happening in the 80s. So it's interesting. The question becomes,

clearly we've made strides forward on the commercial side. The question is, have we made enough strides forward for them to actually start taking over some of these abilities? And is there a profit motive for them to do this? Without rich investors at the moment, you wouldn't have a commercial space program of any sort. There's not a market for it at the moment. Just some background, Marcia Smith, we go into some of her history, but you know her. I mean, she's been around in space policy for decades. Oh, yeah. She's one of the most eminent space policy individuals in DC. And as you mentioned earlier, I think probably globally, there are very few people who are as knowledgeable about space writ large from a policy standpoint as

Marsha. Well, let's talk to Marsha then. So today I'm really excited to have Marsha Smith, the founder and editor of Space Policy Online, one of my personal favorite resources, of Space Policy Online, one of my personal favorite resources, almost go there every day to look at the current state of an analysis for big space policy issues, for budget analysis. And Marcia Smith is also the president of the Space and Technology Policy Group, a private policy firm that provides all sorts of good stuff for clients around the world. Marcia, welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Thanks so much for inviting me. For people who aren't as familiar with your work, would you walk us through kind of a brief

overview of the career that you've had and how that has shaped your kind of views on space policy and where we are right now? Well, I sort of fell into space policy. I didn't really have a plan as a young person to end up being a space policy analyst, but I'm awfully a plan as a young person to end up being a space policy analyst, but I'm awfully glad that this is where fate led me, and I've been doing it now for an incredibly long time. I came to Washington in the early 1970s, and by a twist of fate, ended up working briefly for John Logsdon, who is, of course, the dean of space policy. Through John, I met other people who introduced me to other

people. And so I ended up working for 31 years for the Congressional Research Service on Capitol Hill, which is a wonderful place to work, which is why I stayed there for so long. I did take a one-year leave of absence in the mid-1980s to be executive director of the National Commission on Space, which was created by Congress. Its members were appointed by President Reagan. I'd be happy to tell you a lot about that commission. I'm very proud of the report we came out with. And almost unfortunately, it is still very relevant today.

After that, I went back to CRS and I stayed there until 2006. And then I went over to the National Academy of Sciences, which also provides advice to the government, but it's a very different framework at the academies. And I was there for three years as director of the Space Studies Board and director of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. And then I decided to try it being out on my own. And so I set up my own consulting operation and the website, spacepolicyonline.com, which pretty much follows the kind of work I was doing at CRS. It's objective and nonpartisan. It just provides information so other people are informed and can make educated decisions.

Yeah, Space Policy Online is great. I can see that. I mean, it's a congressional research service. You're basically writing deeply researched reports at the request of members of Congress, correct? That's essentially what that service is. CRS is a department of the Library of Congress, but it only works for the members and committees of Congress. It does not work for the public like the rest of the library does. And it's essentially a think tank for the members and the committees. It has about 700 people and about maybe 400 of them are experts on some subject. And CRS needs to have an expert on anything that Congress is interested in. And Congress's interests change a lot. So you come with a background that's flexible enough

that you can change your subject area focus to match whatever Congress is doing. So over my 31 years there, although I always worked on space, I also worked on nuclear energy, I worked on telecommunications, I worked on some of the technical issues about the internet. So it was a fascinating and varied 31 years that changed a lot over that time period because of the advances in technology and therefore the expectations of our client, Congress, and how much time you had to actually do research or do analysis. And so you really had to become very good at knowing the answer to the question before it was asked. Because by the time I left there in 2006, they did not have time for you to start doing a lot of research and reading a lot of books.

They really needed the answer when they were asking the question. See, this is why it's hopeless, I feel like, for me and other people who write online doing analysis of space policy, because by the time I even think of what I want to talk about, you've already written a thousand words on the topic of space policy online, and I just have nothing else to say. So you're a pain of my existence, Marcia. It's just like, well, I'll just retweet your link here and my job is done. And I also think it's really funny that John Logsdon, who's on our board of directors here at the Planetary Society, I have this working theory that something like 80% of every space policy person has been a student of his or connected through him at some point in history.

I believe that's true. He really is the dean, in quotes, of space policy and a wonderful role model. Yes. Yeah. Wonderful to have on our board. This kind of takes me into one of the big topics I wanted to talk with you about today. So this is our first year anniversary of the show, by the way. Congratulations. Well, thank you very much. It's been a wonderful experience, and we've had such great feedback from our listeners about it. And I wanted to talk with you in particular about this bigger issue of space policy in general. And you kind of touched on this a little bit with your reference to the pioneering the space frontier report that you did as part of the national commission on space it kind of is as relevant

today as it was it came out in 86 yes right after the challenger disaster uh though much of the work was done before we we were so just to tell you a little bit about it so uh the commission was created after president reagan directed nasa to build a space station as its next human spaceflight project. And that was in the State of the Union address in 1984. And NASA came to Congress and said the space station was the next logical step. And Congress said, the next logical step to what? And NASA didn't have an answer. Now, my friends at And NASA didn't have an answer. Now, my friends at NASA say they did have an answer, but they weren't allowed to tell Congress. But whatever it was, Congress did not know what the space station was supposed to be leading towards.

So Congress created this National Commission on Space and had the members named by the president, which is how these things were done back in the day. And they named 15 members, and it was chaired by Tom Payne, who was a former administrator of NASA. And in fact, he was the administrator when Apollo 8 went around the moon, and when Apollo 11 landed. And he was quite a visionary. And so the minute he was named as the head of the commission, it was pretty clear that sending people back to the moon and onto Mars was going to be a big part of what our report was about. But the report was much broader than that. It looked at all of civil space, including commercial space, which was a very hot topic back in the 1980s, and science as well. And when you go back and you look at the report today, a lot of what was envisioned for commercial space is

only back in vogue now. There was this long dearth of commercial activity, part of it because of the Challenger tragedy, because commercial companies were planning to use the shuttle, and then a lot changed after the Challenger tragedy. And the human spaceflight debate is still going on, back to the moon or not, to Mars, when, how, and all of that. The science part of our report, there's been great progress on. And so I think that that third of the report is probably doing pretty well. But the other two parts, if you read them today, they would sound very familiar to what's being discussed today. Now, our commission got started in the summer of 1985. And we had worked pretty hard on the report. And by January of 1986,

we had a pretty good draft done. But then Challenger happened. And that changed the focus. People were no longer thinking of the long term future in space, they were thinking of how to recover from the Challenger tragedy. And so by the time our report finally came out in the summer of 1986, it really didn't get the kind of attention that we'd hoped for because the landscape had changed so much. But we didn't change much of the report. The commissioners were fairly certain that the shuttle program would fly again. And our recommendations were for post-shuttle and station. It was, you know, where were they taking us? It was at what that time was considered the long-term future.

So as long as you assumed that the shuttle would fly again and the space station would get built, the recommendations really didn't change. And that's kind of the irony of this in a sense, right? Where the whole point of the report was to say, what is our long-term goal in space? What are we working toward? Then the whole

thing became lost, as you were saying, to this much more short-term, immediate reactionary position of what do we do now after the loss of the Challenger mission? That remained then an open question really to this day, right? I mean, that's the essence of this kind of long-term, particularly in human spaceflight, I think, this long-term problem of what are we doing this for? I mean, we had the Pathways to Exploration report from the NRC just a couple of years ago, trying to answer that same thing. Why are we doing this? What's the justification for human spaceflight and where are we going? So my big question to you then is, is space policy, particularly for human spaceflight, is it stuck? I mean, the questions seem the same. I mean, I've done this for five years now, right? A fraction of the time, a lot

of people have done this. And I feel like I'm just hearing the same looping discussion about particularly human spaceflight over and over again. Moon or Mars? Where are we going? Do we do resource utilization? What's the role of NASA in terms of the private space companies? These haven't changed. I was actually reading, I don't know if you remember this old kids magazine, Odyssey. It's what I grew up with. Someone had sent in a letter. And I want to quote this letter because I thought it was so funny to read this. And then I was reading through your pioneering space frontier report just this morning, actually, Same feeling. These kids write in, what would you do if you were NASA administrator?

The quote was, NASA hasn't done much of anything lately. Oh, sure, they're planning things for 15 years from now. But I wouldn't sit on my duff waiting for the next millennium to come around. I'd wake up the current head of NASA and get things going or quit my job and join one of those entrepreneuring companies preparing to launch private astronauts. The year of that letter was 1988. You could have printed that same letter today with as

relevant of a reaction. So do you think space policy, are we stuck in a loop of what we're supposed to do for this? Is this even an answerable question? Well, it's kind of interesting to me because you hear a lot of people saying that NASA's not doing anything. And when they say that, they really mean the human spaceflight program. So NASA is doing a lot. NASA has a very robust robotic program. It's got a,

I won't say robust space technology program because it seems its budget often gets cut, but it's got a darn good space technology program, fabulous aeronautics program. So NASA is doing a lot, but what the public seems to focus on is human spaceflight. And for some reason, the space station just has not captured the imagination of the public. And the shuttle didn't seem all that popular except when it was coming to an end. And so I was surprised when they brought one of the shuttles over Washington, and I was surprised at how many people turned out to see this overflight. Half of them had written to their members of Congress and said, why don't you support the human spaceflight program? I think it might have been in better shape than it was then or than it is now.

So this whole NASA's not doing anything or hasn't NASA gone out of business seems to be tied to the human spaceflight program and not the rest of the great work that NASA is doing, which is quite unfortunate. But I would even push back on that a little bit and say, do you think that's necessarily the public's interpretation? Because it feels to me that this is honestly congressional interpretation as well. It's the human spaceflight program becomes the stand-in for all of NASA. flight program becomes the stand-in for all of NASA? Well, it depends, of course, on who you're talking about in Congress, because I would say that Congressman Culbertson, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA, is very familiar with the robotic program, and one of its chief advocates. For your listeners who may not know, he's the force behind sending a mission to Europa that has a subsurface ocean, Congressman Culbertson and

others are convinced that there is life in that ocean. And so even though NASA did not have the money to do that mission, the scientists at the National Academy of Scientists did what's called the decadal survey that listed the scientific priorities for this decade, 10 years, that's what decadal surveys do. And it had a Mars sample return mission as its first priority for a large mission in Europa was second. And NASA didn't have money to fund two of these big missions. So it took the first priority. But Congressman Culbertson thinks that Europa is a big priority, and he's the guy with all the money. So he has been putting money into NASA's budget for Europa and for other things.

So it may be true that if you talked to 90% of the members of Congress about NASA, they would think of the human spaceflight program. But there are some members like Congressman Culbertson, and I would say Congressman Smith, Lamar Smith, who loves astrophysics, who's the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. I think that they would also be very familiar with the robotic program. So going back to human spaceflight, original question, I guess, and let's break down that a little more. I mean, do you feel like it's a stagnant debate at this point

for human spaceflight? It sure seems like the same debate year after year, doesn't it? It really does. Many have tried, but it just never seems to come together. Why do you think that is? I think a lot of it is the space community itself is not united on what it is that we want to do. There seems to be a consensus, not unanimity, but consensus that we want to send people to Mars. But all the steps in between are the problem. And it's the things on which there are sharp disagreement. So you have the Mars or bust people, the bumper sticker people, Mars in 2033. I call it flags and footprints missions. Other people call them sprint missions, where the only point of going to Mars is to go to Mars. It's not part of a bigger set of objectives.

They just want to go there. So you have the Elon Musk's, he wants to go there to send a million people, which I think is certainly a bold idea, but it's still not clear what those people would do there. He wants them to be the backup plan in case Earth is destroyed, but what would they actually do there? I'm not sure much thought has been given to that. There's that segment that just wants to go to Mars. And I think that's unfortunate. I think that's what we did with the moon. We just wanted to go to the moon and get there before the Soviets. And it became a dead-end program because once you'd achieved the goal, people didn't care so much anymore. So I see it and I'm, of course, still very partial to the National Commission on Space report that saw not just a mission to Mars, but the overall theme of the report was to open the inner solar system for science exploration and development. So it was a huge program,

incredibly expensive program, a 50 year program of which we've already used up 31 of them in order to do something to open the inner solar system for the commercial exploitation aspect of it, for the human exploration aspect of it. And it had a lot of infrastructure in it that hated I word infrastructure, because the point was that we were going to stay there and we were going to be doing things forever. So it wasn't just a one-time mission to Mars to say that you'd gotten there. So there is a segment of the community that wants to do this as part of an overall overarching goal of opening up space forever. And there are others who just want to get there to say that

we've been there. And I have not seen any cohesiveness amongst those groups. And I think that that is slowing down the overall mission because you still have all the infighting, all the people fighting against each other, rather than having a unified idea of what we should be doing. And do you think this comes from all levels of this? Or are we talking about individual NASA center politics, NASA headquarter politics, in addition to Congress and White House? Or do you see this as a fundamentally a larger political issue? I see it as an internal space community issue. You know, members of Congress are influenced by people who come and talk to them, people, their constituents, people from industry, people from the Planetary Society, and all of your sister societies. And so, you know, they're all hearing

from all these people. And then as individuals, they decide which of those approaches they think is best. And so you have Congressman Perlmutter, who at every space subcommittee hearing holds up his bumper sticker on Mars in 2033. And that's what's important to him. And there certainly are other members of Congress who feel that. I'm sure there are people in NASA who feel that, and there are people in the space community who feel that. So I'm not sure it's so much a matter of politics. It's a matter of how do individuals, whoever they are, think that the human spaceflight program should unfold. Is it flags and footprints? Is it back a plan to Earth? Is it part of an expansion of humanity into space that is needs to resolve so that it can, in a unified manner, start dealing with the policy and politics of getting it done. That's interesting. I mean, I agree with that, but at the same time, is it resolvable? We've had, what, almost 50 years to resolve this question

about what to do with the human spaceflight program. And I guess the fact that we haven't been able to unite internally, let's say within the space community itself, it strikes me because fundamentally, I would say, it's a non-objective direction. I think this is what's so interesting about what you mentioned, the comparison between the advancements and progress in the space science community, where you have kind of this general objective external driving force of scientific consensus that ultimately

brings people together to say, well, we can at least prioritize our missions for 10 years at a time in the decadal process. But for human spaceflight, I feel that there's not really any sort of external motivating factor to drive internal consensus. And so it becomes just, I like the moon better because I think you can do resource extraction there and have a lunar base. Well, I like Mars better because I think we should go to Mars first.

And, you know, there doesn't seem to be an objective way to answer that question. Do you disagree with that? Or do you feel like there is there is there even a pathway to resolve this internally that can bring people together? I wish I had the magic solution to it. But, you know, human spaceflight is very different from space science. And people keep saying, shouldn't we have a decadal survey for human spaceflight? And some people consider that Pathways report from 2014 to have been a decadal survey. I don't see it that way. I was at the Space Studies Board as director for three years, so I learned a lot about decadal surveys

while I was there. And there is not a decadal survey for space science. There are individual decadal surveys for each of the disciplines, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics, earth science, life and microgravity science to get them to reach a consensus on just what should be done in the next 10 years, much less, you know, for however long it's going to take to send people to Mars. So the decadal survey process is very difficult. It's not perfect. As we know, you know, the decadal survey committees are given a budget wedge to work with. And then halfway through the survey, NASA may come back and say, oh, sorry, this program overran. And so suddenly your wedge is only half of what we thought it was going to be. The decadal surveys are not perfect either, but they are very good guides as to what you can get one discipline of the space and earth science community to conclude are the top science

priorities and how to answer the questions human spaceflight just isn't like that human spaceflight the community is you know every american or maybe every person on the earth so you don't have the kind of community involved that can reach a consensus like that. So I don't have the magic answer, but I do think that the lack of a unified approach has been slowing us down and will continue to slow us down as long as the community keeps fighting within itself as to what the steps should be. So in the National Commission on Space report, you know, we fought through all those issues. And the decision was return to the surface of the moon to test out things and then go on to Mars. And it didn't happen because the money wasn't there. And, you know, the first President Bush said the same thing.

Money wasn't there. The second President Bush said the same thing. He didn't put the money into it. A new guy came to town, President Obama. He looked at it. He said, too expensive. And he said, you know, let's skip the moon, the surface of the moon, because we've been there already. Don't need to do it again. And he came up with the asteroid redirect mission, which now President Trump wants to terminate. So there are politics at that high level of looking, you know, what the occupant of the

White House want to be able to point to and say, I did that. That is part of the problem. But I do think that the getting an agreement on the timeline for doing these things and the stepping stones is critical in order to build the support to get the resources. And as someone famous said, and I don't remember who it is, a vision without resources is just a hallucination. That's an interesting point that the human spaceflight community is so broad. You look at the parochial political consequences of having human spaceflight centers really spread out. Marshall, Michoud, which I guess is part of Marshall, and Stennis,

and Kennedy, you know, you have a lot of motivating local political factors kind of driving that. And this broad sense of capability without I mean, the 2010 S authorization basically avoided that question altogether. Right. By saying, let's just take a capability. If we just build a big rocket first, then I guess we'll figure out the consensus of what to do with it. That seemed to be the kind of what to do with it. That seemed to be, they kind of just avoided that question altogether. Right. Because it's been so contentious and, you know, you can't go to a, an individual or, you know, a group or a company and, and, and get that kind of support that you need for a particular set of stepping stones. There's this consensus on a destination,

but a destination by itself is not a vision. It may not even be a goal. It's got to be the package. Where are you going? How are you going to get there? And how are you going to get the resources you need to accomplish it? All of those pieces have to be in place for it to really be a vision. Do you think the Apollo program kind of has twisted the internal expectations or at least part of the ways too heavily in terms of this? Like people want to go back to that so badly that they're not able to work on a more long-term stepping stone approach? Well, I think that for my generation, that is probably true. I can't speak for younger generations who weren't around when Apollo was happening. I think that for my generation, that is probably true. I can't speak for younger generations who weren't around when Apollo was happening.

I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about those Apollo years, the 1960s. People think that the president stood up and gave a speech and that was it. And all the money just flowed in and they got it done in eight years. It's that simple. As John Logsdon pointed out in his second book on JFK's role in the lunar program, the first one back in 1970 was very focused on what led up to that May 25th, 1961 speech before Congress. But his more recent book takes it all the way through the Kennedy term. And he talks in there about the questions that Kennedy kept asking himself as to whether or not it was the

right thing to do and the troubles he had getting the money out of Congress because Congress was not blown away by this idea either. It was a struggle to get the money. The fact that it continued after his death, I think, really is attributable to Lyndon Johnson, who was the majority leader of the Senate when Sputnik went up. He was very interested in space. And I'm not sure if he had not succeeded Kennedy, both as interim president and then as an elected president himself, I'm not sure that Apollo would have happened. So it was a struggle back then, but people don't think about that. And they think the public just loved the Apollo program. But Roger Lanius at the Air and Space Museum has done wonderful research

looking at those opinion polls back in the 60s and showed that there was only one year that more than 50% of the American public supported Apollo. So I think that a lot of it is, not really being fully aware of the history of Apollo, but they did succeed in getting men to the moon and returning them safely to Earth within the decade. So they achieved that goal. They did it on cost. And of course, everybody laughs about how they came up with a cost estimate for Apollo. NASA came up with an estimate and Jim Webb, the administrator, doubled it. And then when he was in the car going up to Capitol Hill to sell it to the Hill, he doubled it again. And that's how

they came in on budget. At least that's what the myth is and uh you know so apollo was not as easy as people think it was and it's just it's an era that i don't see coming back and so we need some other formula to get the support and again if if your goal is not to just land on mars if you want to open the inner solar system for science exploration development that is a long-term program and you can set deadlines to do certain pieces of it but what should be important is not the deadlines as much as achieving the goal of opening it up permanently so i mean that is what that's one of the big arguments you know what are what are we doing? Why are we doing it?

I want to follow up on that. But you said something really interesting that I wanted to touch on just a bit, because this is something that strikes me as I have learned more about this field over the past few years. You mentioned how important Lyndon Johnson was to the success of the Moon program back in the 60s. And you also mentioned earlier, John Culberson and his critical role in enabling this mission to Europa to happen. I feel like the history of space, it's littered with individuals at the right time and place who, through their own kind of personal passion for this idea enabled the program to move forward. This strikes me as like maybe this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to move policy forward is if you have to depend on people who just personally are passionate and agree with you already to make that happen. Do you think that that's the case in space history more than in other fields or is this just the way

politics works? Well, you know, I don't know enough about all in other fields, or is this just the way politics works? Well, you know, I don't know enough about all those other fields to be able to say whether it's, uh, different in space versus other fields. I do think that at a lot of things, it, the key is to have one or more individuals in powerful positions who want to do something and that they have got the power and the resources to make it happen. But it's not always true, however. So on the other side of the coin, Senator Proxmire, who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee back in the 70s, did not like the shuttle program. And he tried to kill it year after year, and he did not succeed. And there were people in the House in the early 1990s who thought that the space station

was a white elephant, and they tried to kill it, and they did not succeed. So maybe there are more examples of where a space program has had the right people in the right place to get it going, but the people who should have been powerful enough that tried to stop programs did not succeed. If you see what I mean. Is that the advantage of being very big? You build these large coalitions of people who want to see you succeed if you're a big enough program with enough political presence or contracts or so forth around the country? Well, no, I wish I had the time to go back to that famous 1993 vote on the House floor where the space station survived by only one vote. You know, I know some stories from my times at CRS that I can't tell because CRS works

on a confidential basis with Congress, but I'd love to see what's available in the public record about how it came to be that it finally did pass by that one vote. But you can imagine that, generally speaking, when you have votes that are close like that, you do have a lot of politics going on and saying, you know, well, if you vote for this or vote against this, then I'll vote for or against something that you want. And I do think that by the time that vote came along, that the Clinton White House had decided that they did want to continue with the space station for geopolitical reasons, if nothing else, and so that they may have twisted some arms in order to get those votes. But, you know, I don't want to be too critical of the space station program, but I do feel to some extent that it is part of the reason that we are not as far along on the human spaceflight path as one would expect to say in 1986. NASA sold that space station program

as something that was going to be built in 10 years for $8 billion. It ended up taking 25 years to build. And how much it cost is another matter of debate, but it's somewhere between $60 and $100 billion for the U.S. part of it. And I think that the fact that it took so long and cost so much and eroded a lot of goodwill because NASA kept having overrun after overrun after overrun after promising that they'd fix the problems, that I think that that really sucked the air out of the room for anything beyond space station.

And the only good thing is that so many years have elapsed that a lot of the people who lived through that have gone now. They've gone on to other careers or whatever. And so you can almost start afresh now talking about what comes after the International Space Station because people have forgotten the history of it. And NASA has done a very good job, and I'm not ascribing any blame to them or anything, but they keep saying that the space station started in 1993, and it didn't. The space station program started in 1984 and NASA spent 11 billion dollars between 1984 and 1993 that they just don't talk about anymore. They never got any hardware built. It was a sad part of the space station program. But even if you say that it started in 1993, it took way longer than it should have taken to build, cost a lot more money. It's

all in the past, water under the bridge. You know, we got the space station and now NASA has to decide what it's going to do with it and what's going to follow on in low Earth orbit, never mind beyond low Earth orbit. Right. That's one of the big questions that just really doesn't garner much in terms of headlines is the future of the space station. We'll have to talk about that one another day. But though I would say that the space station, ultimately, I think one of the most powerful legacies of it will be how they leverage the space station to invest in the kind of this new commercial marketplace through commercial cargo contracts and commercial crew contracts, ultimately kind of making progress on some of those recommendations you made in that report all the way back in 86. Would you agree with that in terms of the COTS program? Well, I think they ended up putting themselves in a position where they had to do

something. The decision was made to terminate the space shuttle before the space station was completed. You know, if you look back at the intergovernmental agreements amongst international partners for the space station program, you know, the whole deal was that the shuttle was going to be there not only during the construction phase, but during the operational phase. And that's how the U.S. was responsible for taking the European, Canadian, Japanese astronauts back and forth because we were going to have the shuttle going up there five times a year. We had plenty of room for passengers. the shuttle going up there five times a year. We had plenty of room for passengers. When the decision was made after Columbia to terminate the space shuttle, NASA had to do something if it was going to keep operating the space station. So it led them into COTS for cargo. And they were thinking about using something like that for crew. But during the George W. Bush administration,

when Mike Griffin was administrator they didn't move forward with that commercial crew component and so it was the Obama administration that really picked up and ran with that part of it building on what they viewed as a success of commercial cargo. Now there are still people who are going to argue that commercial cargo and commercial crew have not proved themselves and certainly commercial crew hasn't it hasn hasn't even flown yet. But never mind from a technical standpoint, but from a financial standpoint, an economic standpoint, whether those programs are going to stand the test of time, we're going to have to wait and see. I don't know what the market's going to be for either one of those if there's nothing to follow along from the

International Space Station. Yeah, when your main customer is NASA, and NASA says it's getting out of the low-Earth orbit business. Right, and NASA has made it clear that the government is not going to be building another space station in low-Earth orbit. And so they want the commercial sector to take the responsibility of finding customers who are going to pay to have this infrastructure in low-Earth orbit built. infrastructure in low Earth orbit built. And I think that NASA would use part of it. But I think that they do not want to have to foot that bill for beyond International Space Station while they're trying to do cislunar space and, and Mars and the other future aspects of human spaceflight. Let's switch now. And let's just talk briefly about this new administration. So you've seen multiple transitions. Obviously, we're very early in the Trump administration, and we don't have a NASA administrator, though we have seen some initial legislation move through. It's not entirely that consequential, really coming from previous work done in the last year of the Obama administration, the NASA Transition Authorization Act.

Authorization Act. I think the weather satellite, there's some stuff on weather satellites and a few other things. Looking at kind of where we are in this Trump transition, does anything strike you just, you know, is it moving kind of in concert or normally within kind of previous transition for previous administrations that you've seen? Is there anything that's really standing out to you at this point in this new administration for what kind of direction or discussion or what issues are rising to the top when it comes to civil space? Well, having been through quite a few presidential transitions in this town, I can say that it is not uncommon for presidents to come in and say they're going to shake up everything and close down federal departments and fire half the federal workforce and do all these other things. There are so many presidents that have come to town and said that, and usually it's never as dire as they said during the

campaign or even their first year in office. So these things do tend to smooth themselves out over time. The first months of any new administration tend to be fairly chaotic. What's different this time, I think, is that there are a lot of mixed messages coming from the Trump administration. So in the past, you might have had an administration that just wouldn't commit themselves one way or another about anything. Whereas with the Trump administration, you see him submitting a fiscal 18 budget that wants to terminate NASA's Office of Education. And then President Trump and his daughter call Peggy Whitson up on the space station and talk about how great STEM education is. So I mean,

that's a really mixed message. And, you know, when he signed the NASA Authorization Act, and he was in the phone call to the space station, he talked about wanting to go to Mars, And he was in the phone call to the space station. He talked about wanting to go to Mars and all that. And yet his budget request does not indicate that he's going to put the resources into doing anything like that. So there are a lot of mixed messages. It's hard to tell where the Trump administration was going to come down on it. But they did set up the Augustine Committee pretty quickly. But we still waited until the next year to really find out what it is that he had in mind for space. There are some similarities and some differences. But this period of time in any new presidential transition is really chaotic. Yeah, I feel like we're seeing a lot of churn, particularly in the transition and beachhead team that went to NASA. And you've seen some folks just leave out of frustration, maybe out of that same sense of mixed messaging. Definitely, I think Trump administration and his campaign was built in

of factions of different types of people with different ideologies. Factions tend to in this camp, you know, in this administration, to me, seem to come in and out of vogue or in and out of power, and that may influence part of this. I feel like there's kind of this fundamental tension between folks like maybe Jeff Sessions or others who are and maybe the more congressional contingent of the big existing exploration programs, kind of the status quo approach, versus the more, let's call them entrepreneurial new space types who want to tear out all the old ways of doing things and have this renaissance of commercial investment.

And they both seem to be vying for his attention or maybe the hearts and minds of the top folks in his administration. That may be part of what's going on there, I wonder, or if it's just, as you said, just the standard kind of shakeout of what we're seeing here. Well, the NASA transition team was much larger than I've seen in the past. They had, you know, eight transition team members. Usually it's two or three. So I think the fact that some people were leaving was more newsworthy

because it was just such a large team, and it was much more in the headlines than I think transition teams have been in the past. So that was different. That was a little unusual for NASA to have so many. And I think it's not uncommon to not have a NASA administrator this far into a presidential administration. It's only May, early May. So I don't find it surprising that that hasn't been worked out yet. There's still the National Space Council that they're debating about. And Bob Walker said on Monday that the executive order is very close to being signed. So if that was signed in May of a

new presidential administration, I think that would be actually pretty quick work. So there are a lot of balls up in the air right now. I think that it's not clear who the personnel are ultimately going to be and who's going to be calling all the shots. So it's just too early to really make any judgments about what's going to happen going forward. How do you feel about the idea of having a National Space Council reconstituted? Do you think that will basically create the policy of the administration? Or is it, you know, I know historically it's been kind of mixed its performance in the past, particularly during George H.W. Bush's ill-fated Mars program concept. So what would you say? Can you just broadly describe very quickly the National Space Council? And then I'd love to hear kind of your

thoughts on the utility of that moving forward. So there was a Space Council, a then I'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on utility of that moving forward. So there was a Space Council, a National Aeronautics and Space Council created at the same time as NASA in the NASA Act in 1958. It was supposed to be headed by the president, but then it changed to be the vice president. And so Lyndon Johnson actually chaired that when he was vice president. And it was one of these White House offices that, you know, was in the background and may have had some influence, but it's not clear really as to how influential it was. It was abolished by President Nixon. It came back by law.

Congress recreated it. And they tried in 1987, and President Reagan vetoed the NASA authorization bill because he did not want Congress telling him how to organize his White House. NASA authorization bill because he did not want Congress telling him how to organize his White House. And so Congress tried again in 1989, and they were much less prescriptive in terms of what the Space Council should be and who should be on it. President George H.W. Bush decided it was okay, he was going to do that. And so he, based on the law, he wrote up an executive order and put his vice president, Dan Quayle, in charge of it. Dan Quayle picked a man named Mark Albrecht to be the executive director. And Mark, he was not really a civil space guy. He was more of a defense guy. But he had some very strong views on what he thought NASA should be. And he conflicted a lot with the NASA administrator, Dick Trulli.

He conflicted a lot with the NASA administrator, Dick Trudeau. And I think that the conflict between the Space Council and NASA really limited what either one of them could do. George H.W. Bush was the last one to use the Space Council. It still exists in law, but it just has not been funded or staffed since then. So now President Trump is thinking of bringing it back. And I think the key as to how successful it's going to be, how influential it's going to be is twofold. One, is Trump going to listen to what comes out of it? It's going to go from the council chaired by Pence to Trump. So how much is Trump going to pay attention to it? And will he back up whatever they come up with in other fights within the

White House, like with the Office of Management and Budget? And the other is going to be the relationship between the Space Council and the NASA administrator. So if it's another tense relationship, I think that it's probably going to not be very helpful in moving policies forward. But if the executive director of the Space Council and the head of NASA see things similarly and can work together in harmony, then I think it could help. see things similarly and can work together in harmony, then I think it could help. Looking forward, we've kind of touched on some of the major issues really that NASA will be facing and the larger civil space industry ecosystem will be facing, particularly end of the space station, where are we going, particularly with the human side, budget issues with science. particularly the human side, budget issues with science. Given your experience and your history in this field, maybe we can just end on what are you hopeful about? What has changed kind of

compared to the previous few decades in terms of space policy in ways that will give us a brighter future or a different kind of path forward than previously existed. Is there something like that? What are you looking forward to seeing? Well, I must say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And so I see the fundamental problem for NASA is just the same today as it was four or five decades ago, which is it's trying to put 10 pounds of potatoes into a five-pound sack. And as generous as Congress is being with NASA right now, I mean, this $19.65 billion they're giving NASA for fiscal 17, I think is really a tremendous step. It's the fourth year in a row that they've done this.

And there are unique circumstances that are allowing Congress to do this because they waived the caps from the Budget Control Act in 2011 through fiscal 17. So we'll see what happens in 18. What happened for 17 may not be a bellwether for the future, but at least for these last couple of years when they've relaxed, I think is the phrase, the budget caps, I think is very good for NASA. But I don't know that that's going to continue in the future. But I think that the fact that it has such strong support in Congress is hopeful. And Senator Shelby, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA, and Congressman Culbertson, who's his House counterpart, they both are big NASA supporters. And in the House, they have term limits.

So Culbertson can only be in that job for six years. I've forgotten what year he's in now. Maybe this may be his fourth year. So no, that's not forever. But anyway, you do have strong support in Congress. So I think that that is hopeful in terms of getting NASA more resources. But as Norm Augustine pointed out back in 2009 in his report, if you really want to send people to Mars, even in the 2030s, you've got to increase NASA's budget a lot more than what Congress has been doing. He wanted $3 billion a year more for NASA. And that was back in 2009. I don't know how much that would be if

you used inflation. So it's hopeful that you have a very supportive Congress. And I think myself, I'm very hopeful that there are so many young people who are interested not only in the engineering and science space, but in the policy space. I meet so many young people here in Washington who are going through the GW space policy program with that's headed now by Scott Pace. And they're all enthusiastic about it. headed now by Scott Pace, and they're all enthusiastic about it. You know, and for an old-timer like me, who thought that Apollo was sort of the heyday of human spaceflight and see the space station as not being quite so exciting and seeing us bogged down in the mud for whatever's going to follow on, it's sort of surprising to me that there are so many young people

that want to get involved in this. But it's very exciting that they want to, and I try to encourage them as much as I can. I don't know how many jobs are going to be in this area, though, but I do think, and what's going on with the commercial sector, I think is very exciting.

I'm a little jaded on that because we went through this in the 1980s, and it didn't work out. That is different this time because you have the billionaires like Bezos and Musk, you know, putting, and I presume Richard Branson is putting some of his own money into Virgin Galactic.

So you have this new generation of investors, if you will, angel investors in commercial space that, you know, maybe some of these things will actually happen this time around. So I continue to be hopeful, even though it does seem sometimes that we've had these arguments too many years in a row. So maybe the fundamental shift has been by living in a new gilded age, our richest captains of industry will generously put some of their own money into these programs that can then have these long term goals that NASA is unable to have. Maybe that's like the way to look at it. term goals that NASA is unable to have. Maybe that's like the way to look at it. I mean, I think with the with the private stuff like that, that seems to be really what it comes down to is just by pure. And this is the same thing. These individuals happen to be personally passionate and are willing to put their own money into it, but only because they've become some of the richest men on Earth. Yes. And they also concede or maybe concedes not the right word, but they agree that

NASA is key to their success. So Elon Musk thanks NASA in every speech I've ever heard him give about SpaceX and Jeff Bezos, you know, he wants to do this blue moon thing and, but he points out, he wants to do it with NASA. Bob Bigelow wants to do his modules with NASA. So whatever happens in the commercial sector, NASA is still a huge part of it. I don't think NASA needs to be worried about its own future. I think it may need to keep evolving as it has been doing over the past decade or so. But I think, you know, there's plenty of work to be done. There's a role for the government. There's a role for the private sector. And, you know, we just need to get on with it. We will leave it there. Marcia, thank you so much for joining us today. Marcia

Smith is the founder and editor of the Space Policy Online website. You can find her at spacepolicy.com, on Twitter at SPCPLCYonline, Space Policy Online. Marcia, again, thank you for joining us. Really enjoyed the conversation today. It was my pleasure, Casey. Thank you so much. All right. Well, that was my conversation with Marsha Smith, SpacePolicyOnline.com. I go there almost every day. Not just a great resource for analysis, but there's a great calendar of space policy events around DC and the world of just highlights there. So check those out too. She also does really remarkable budget analysis over the past six or eight years. You can sort

of go through those documents and see exactly how budgets are formed. And it's an incredibly useful resource. I use it all the time. And I just want to agree with Casey. Thanks so much to Marsha. I really appreciate her coming on the show. Yeah, terrific conversation. Thank you very much, Casey. I think we're done, except to once again let people know that you can give to support the advocacy efforts, the space policy efforts of the Planetary Society at any time, but right now is an especially good time because of the campaign that, as we speak, is still underway and closing in on that goal. Right, Casey? That's right. You can help us.

Planetary.org slash advocacy. You can chip us a few bucks or a lot of bucks. We definitely can use it. Everything that you donate to this program is earmarked for this program. That's how we spend it. And we run a lean mission here, as Jason can tell you. But it goes into our salaries, it goes into travel, and then workshops. Everything goes to directly support this program. I may be a little biased on this, but I think it's a unique and precious thing that we've developed here. No other independent organization has the depth and breadth that we have here at the Planetary Society. has the depth and breadth that we have here at the Planetary Society. And just think, Casey, we haven't done the analysis yet,

but for every dollar that people donate, how much money do we end up getting for planetary science at NASA? I think the ROI was approximately 150,000% or something like that based on historical things. So it's a pretty good ROI to take full credit for everything that's happened there. Yeah, no, it's a good use of your money and it's tax deductible since we're a 501c3. So you can even save a few dollars on your taxes. So there you go. Bang for your buck and you can help us celebrate this one year anniversary. Thank you so much, guys. It's, as always, been great fun talking with you once again.

Oh, of course, Matt. Jason, it's been a pleasure doing the show with you. Looking forward to many, many, many years of us talking about the budget. That sounds pretty good to me. Thanks so much, guys. This is fun, as always. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Jason Callahan is our Space Policy Advisor, consulting within the Beltway there in Washington, D.C., and the composer of the tune that you're hearing right now

that will take us out of this edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We'll be back on the first Friday in June, won't it be, to begin our second year of the Space Policy Edition. In the meantime, the weekly Planetary Radio is available to you here at planetary.org or wherever you find podcasts are available, as well as on public radio. Thanks so much for listening once again, and we'll see you in a month.