Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #13 – The 2018 Budget Proposal and Is Mars Exploration in Retrograde?

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

The Trump Administration released its proposed FY2018 budget just days ago. Casey Dreier, Jason Callahan and Mat Kaplan dive deep into what this controversial plan means for NASA and how it has been received by Congress.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, Policy Wonks. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, welcoming you for our 13th episode, the beginning of our second year together, for June of 2017. And we are very happy to have you back with us. This is Matt Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio, joined once again by the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome. Hey, Matt.

Happy to join you from the beautiful, expansive, luxuriously furnished offices of Planetary Society DC here in Jason Callahan's house. Very nice to be here. And Jason Callahan's house. Very nice to be here. And Jason Callahan is with us as well, the Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society. Hey, Jason, thanks for turning your place not just into one, but two studios this month. You guys are very, very welcome. And yes, Casey, I agree with you. It is quite luxurious. It's a real work into it, yes. All right. So, Casey, let's establish up front that you're in D.C. not just for the weather and Jason's smiling face, but because there's business to do.

As always, I make it out here probably every six weeks or so. Fortunately, I have a lot of help in the D.C. area with what Jason does and, of course, our new colleague, Matt Renninger, who is not far actually from where we're recording this right now. And they're the ones really doing the work every day here in DC. And I get to pop in every six weeks or so. And we do some meetings, we check in on some areas and issues that we're working on, we brainstorm together. This time, we get a little bonus. It's a board meeting coming up for the Planetary Society. So I've got a full board to brief on the work that we've done, the great fundraising that we had this year for the program. And yeah, otherwise enjoy the beautiful DC summer weather, I think. Jason, I want to thank you because I was in DC a few weeks ago for the Humans to Mars Summit, and I had one of the best conversations over beer that I've ever had with you and Matt Reninder. Well, thanks.

Kind of what we do. That's what got him hired. That's right. That was our first meeting was something like that. It was just terrific to talk to a couple of insiders and get some very special insights, which, of course, is what we specialize in here. We are going to hopefully give people an insight into a budget just proposed by the White House, by the Trump administration. Before we do that, though, let's do our commercial and let folks know that if you are enjoying Space Policy Edition, maybe you've just discovered us. Maybe you've heard all 13 episodes as they've come on the first Friday of each month.

We hope that you'll back up that enjoyment by becoming a member of the Planetary Society. You can do that at planetary.org slash membership, and then you will be putting your money where our money is, our money and our expertise, and supporting this podcast, but perhaps more importantly, supporting the work by Casey, Jason, and Matt Renninger in Washington. Guys, anything to add? I did a lot of pitches the last couple episodes, and I just want to give a quick rundown. So for anyone who did donate on top of their membership to support our annual fundraising drive for this program,

the Advocacy in Space Policy program. That wrapped up the other week, and we finished at about, I think we're $195,000 raised from our members this year. So I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who donated for that. It's, I think, one of our best fundraising tallies in, I think, the best in 10 years, something like that. Very, very good numbers. We unlocked multiple challenge matches that were furnished by other society members.

And we will put this money to good work. And that'll actually be the topic of maybe the latter half of this episode. We'll talk about the budget. And then we've got something extra special, some original research that Jason and I have been working on regarding NASA's robotic Mars exploration plans. So there's lots of cool stuff. And when you're a member of the Planetary Society, or you donate, you help directly to support that kind of work. Yes, and congratulations to everybody that was involved with that a tremendous success. That's really going to enable

us to continue and expand the work that the society has been doing to such great effect. And that work is going to be very, very important. And there's good evidence for that. In the first major topic that we're going to tackle this week, let's start talking, guys, about that budget that the White House just put out. year or so working on with all the federal agencies and government. And Congress takes that as the starting conditions of the budget discussion for the next fiscal year, which for fun, I guess they make the fiscal year, the first start of that is October 1 2017 will be the start of the 2018 fiscal year. So yeah, we have our proposal. Now this is kind of following up on stuff that we've talked about earlier, right? A few months ago, the Trump administration released, they called it the skinny budget,

just some very broad, I think it was only, what, 40 page document, looking at kind of the broad top line amounts, some other highlights for various federal agencies. So we knew roughly the numbers we'd be looking at for planetary science and NASA. And those didn't change. What we do have is about 650 pages of supporting material that really drill down and say how every part of the agency is proposed to be funded next year. And this is the fun part. I recommend everybody read the 2018 NASA budget proposal, because if nothing else, you'll

learn something what your space agency does that you probably didn't know did and how many millions of dollars they spend on that every year. It's pretty fun. It's important to remember that this budget was supposed to come out in February, and it's not unusual for a new administration to delay the budget for a couple of months so that they can put their own stamp on it. But by not releasing the budget until May,

it shortens the congressional calendar to debate this budget, come up with their own numbers and pass the budget. And given all of the other things that this administration is trying to do in the course of this Congress, that's a really difficult amount of time for them to work with. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There is no chance we're not getting a continuing resolution at the end, you know, at the beginning of the fiscal year, if not for the entire year.

Honestly, this is not a popular budget. I'm going to go on a limb. I think dead on arrival is the term I've heard used a number of times. They need to find a better phrase because they use that

every time Obama released a budget. But this is like super dead on arrival. This is reanimated corpse staked to the heart, dead second time kind of a budget. The only thing I've seen that has united Republicans and Democrats in Congress recently has been the overall revulsion, dislike, rejection of this budget. It's not a popular budget. Begin to take us through it, if you would. What's the good news? What's the bad news, at least for NASA?

Sure. Well, let's actually step back, because I think one of the reasons why it's so unpopular, we should address, because that's ultimately going to impact NASA. So, Jason, you can jump in on this with me here, but broadly what this does, the federal budget, what the government spends is broken off into two major chunks and types of spending. It's called mandatory and discretionary. Discretionary is the part that we deal with. It's the part that Congress approves every year and has lots of granular detail over how that money is spent. It has to be voted on by every member of Congress every single year. Discret discretionary. And that is

actually the smallest part of the budget. The mandatory part of the budget is kind of self sustaining programs like the Social Security program or Medicare or Medicaid, they raise their own revenues, they automatically spend revenues based on kind of pre existing calculations, do you qualify to receive benefits? You get those benefits. Congress doesn't have to do anything. That's about $3 trillion a year, mandatory spending service on the debt, stuff that Congress doesn't really work on.

The $1 trillion a year that we do spend, that Congress does have a say in on, is discretionary. And then you take that, and you kind of lop that in half. Half of that, more than half, gets shunted over to the Defense Department. The other remaining part funds basically everything else that you think of as the government, right? Your transportation department, your roads, infrastructure, education department, veterans benefits, you name it,

the Center for disease control farm subsidies everything comes from this other part of government nasa's a tiny chunk of that it's about what is about four percent of that the remaining uh chunk that is what the trump administration has proposed to slash by roughly what 15, and take that savings, about $54 billion, and give that all to the defense side. So overall spending would drop all discretionary money, but the amount that it would have dropped, it drops unevenly. They basically cut deeper into non-defense to buffer up the defense side so it doesn't

suffer a cut, and you get a double whammy on everything else. And so what they've done is really, you see this, the State Department gets cut a lot, the Environmental Protection Agency. Then you have broader things like the National Science Foundation would lose 11% of its budget. You would lose 20% of the budget for the Office of Science and the Department of Energy. Science in general, the National Institutes of Health, my God, $6 billion out of that thing. That is a steep, steep cut. And this

is one of the reasons why this budget is so unpopular, because it cuts really broad things. And particularly with our bailiwick here, science takes a real hit in this budget. So that's why it's pretty unpopular. Jason, do you want to add anything to that? No, I think you covered it really well. The only point I would make is that part of the reason that it's unpopular is the breadth of these cuts basically hits every single congressperson's district. That's not a really good way to build a coalition. Right. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Congress, I mean, lots of people in Congress want to cut spending, but in other people's districts, right?

Whatever's in your own district is very important in a valid use of government money. Everyone else, it's a bunch of waste. That's right. So when you have it cut everywhere like this. A really good way, I think, to summarize this, this is a budget that is resolutely focused on the now and kind of undermines investments that need to be happening for the future. And I think the scientific, the cuts to science are a really good way of kind of summing that up.

Like that is basically what you mean when you start to retrench. I mean, we're cutting, some of these agencies' budget would go back to budgets they had back in the 1980s, you know, not adjusted for inflation. Like it's just, it's a brutal series of cuts. I mean, NASA does better than a lot of agencies, honestly.

It's better in context, right? It's still a 3% cut. NASA would come in at $19.1 billion. That's down from $19.65, which it just got in 2017. So that's a cut of about $550 million. It's kind of distributed around. There's no really one single part of NASA that really sucks that up. They spend a little less on SLS. They spend a little less on Orion. They bring earth science down about 8, 9%. That's one of the biggest science cuts. Planetary science is maybe the bright spot, a bright spot in this

budget. It goes up to 1.93 billion. It would be its highest budget in history. And astrophysics grows as well. And so it's a pretty stable budget. It's a steady as you go kind of a budget. There's no major new programs. They do cut the asteroid redirect mission, but that was kind of a dead program walking anyway. They weren't making a ton of fast progress on that. You know, NASA kind of escapes the worst of it. But at the same time, we'll talk about this later, you're not investing in the things you need to be investing now for a forward looking program. And key to that point, Casey, one of the major cuts in the NASA budget is that the budget basically eliminates the Division of Education at NASA. One of the

primary programs in that division is called the Space Grant Program, basically a grant program to up-and-coming students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate level. Basically, everyone I know that works at NASA had access to a space grant at some point in their career. So when you talk about not investing in the future, that is as clear cut an example as I can provide. Right. And that's a part of NASA that the space grant budget is routinely doubled every year by Congress routinely, almost like clockwork, like to propose eliminating that entirely. Yeah, I should have touched on that more. The whole directorate, education directorate,

it receives 37 million in this budget, but only to close it out. That basically pays for your final contract obligations and everything. It's otherwise gone, which I think, again, is just kind of a shocking thing to do because it's not a huge part of NASA's budget, it's regularly about $100 million out of a $19.1 billion budget. Is this really where you're going to go to save money? No. And again, every single state benefits from something like space grant, every single state has a space grant, university, or grant making office in Guam and Puerto Rico. So there's a wide, you know, amount of buy in for this. And it's just it's silly. Before you guys go into additional detail, surely the White House knew that there was going to be

resistance to this budget. To what degree is this just an opening gambit for to begin the negotiations? That's really hard to say. Under any ordinary circumstances, I'd agree with you. And I'd just say that this was an opening negotiating position, and they figured you ask for everything, and if you only get half of what you ask for, that's still a victory. But when you hear Mick Mulvaney, who's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, discuss these issues publicly, it sounds as though they really want to press for these cuts in Congress. And I'm just not

clear exactly what the strategy is that's going to lead to basically all of the Republicans and a significant number of Democrats to vote for something so clearly outside of their own self interest. I think that's really goes to the heart of it, where Mick Mulvaney, the director of the OMB here, he came from the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, a very conservative member, very openly talked about fiscal austerity and cutting spending. And philosophically, he followed through on this budget. Now, the strange thing is that that is not what the president talked about when he was running for office. It's not honestly clear to me how aligned this budget is to the actual White House political office, for example. I don't I see this as very much a product of Mick Mulvaney and the OMB and less of this kind of Trumpian philosophy of

approach to governance, because it's just it's seriously, it's not a popular set of proposals here, even among Republicans in Congress, their own party. So it's, it's not clear how much effort the White House is going to push to advance this budget and its priorities through Congress. I think it's important to remember, Congress says this all the time. Oh, you know, the White House proposes, Congress disposes, we hold the power of the purse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is true. But at the same time, the White House has a much larger staff

and granular control and the detail and the capability to really drill down into the specifics of the federal budget and to control how money gets spent, when and where and why. Congress can come in and overrule them on what they would like to do. But unless Congress passes a law that specifically tells them not to do something that they've proposed to do, the White House, for the most part, can, particularly when it's like prioritizing resources and so forth, the White House can pretty much go ahead and do what it wants. So this is always a very important proposal, because it does show what are the political priorities of this administration? And also, what will they do unless someone actively tells them otherwise? Most people

probably aren't too surprised to know that Congress hasn't been great at passing laws lately. And, you know, and unless they pass a law to tell people not to do certain things, you will see parts of this budget get implemented no matter what. I'm very curious about specific sections of the proposed NASA budget. For example, SLS and Orion, and almost as a corollary, commercial crew. How do they fare? They all fare pretty well. Here, I can pull up and people can follow along at home on their, you know, nasa.gov slash budget. Follow the bouncing rocket. Yeah, exactly. You know, so it's 734 pages, by the way, it's what my document says here. So SLS, it is the favorite program, I would say in NASA right now, even though it just slipped its launch date and has a serious number of problems to work through. There is no discussion on Capitol Hill about doing anything but giving more money to this program. So I'd say that's a pretty strong place to be in. This budget proposes about $200 million less than SLS got last year.

It's still a higher budget. It's much, much closer to the $2 billion a year mark that SLS has functionally been getting for a few years now. The Obama administration would regularly propose far less. It would propose around $1.33 or 1.4 billion a year. So this is the first time that we've seen the White House's priorities for the SLS align much more closely with congressional priorities. So even though it sees a small drop compared to 2017, it's almost the same as what they got in 2016 and roughly before that. So 1.9 is what they're asking for for SLS. Same goes with Orion.

It's about 1.2. I think Orion got $1.3 billion last year. So it's much more aligned in terms of priority. Commercial crew is actually going down, but not because they're cutting the budget, but because the natural program needs are diminishing as they're getting through the primary high development points for both the Boeing and SpaceX programs. So there's a natural decline that they're following. And I would say otherwise, Commercial Crew is fully funded. That's all accurate. As you noted earlier,

the human spaceflight side of the house does lose the asteroid retrieval mission. There's also not a lot of money in there for an important part of the program having to do with building a lunar habit or a lunar, cislunar habitat, often referred to as like the gateway to Mars. It's in fact, not necessarily a gateway to Mars. It's a gateway to any sustainable human spaceflight program outside of low Earth orbit. So the fact that they're not investing in that at this point, I think is really telling. Oh, yeah, that's a great point. And again, this goes to that idea of future versus just immediacy. The Cislunar Gateway, we need to be throwing money into that now, if we want to see anything in the 2020s just period like that those take a long time to make there's been study money that has been mandated by congress the last few years but on the order of 15 and 75 million dollars that's a lot for you and me but that's not a lot to build an actual you know lunar gateway or whatever they're calling it

now there's no money in there for in this budget for that and so it tells you that at least for this year they're not that serious about humans i mean doing anything but looping around the moon really what we're seeing here is that the sls and orion are eating up the exploration budget to the point where all they're making is the initial capability and this is always the problem with arm arm was kind of that too clever by half solution to give the human exploration program a goal without doing anything major in terms of new funding needs right and so it's just not clear what they're gonna do i mean i guess maybe it's a moot point because they won't launch until 2019 anyway at this rate. And then you have to upgrade to the block 1B, which takes three years to do. So we're talking maybe the second launch at this point in 2023. And then what do they do? Well, it's not clear, but we should be making that next step, that decision now. And no decision has been made. Yeah, because if you're not investing in it now, then by the time you hit 2021, 2023, if you're just starting to build a habitat at that point, it's going to be eight or 10 years before you actually have a destination for astronauts. We'll remind folks that that

Block 1B, that's that more powerful upper stage for the SLS, right? That's correct. And that's where most of the money that was added to the SLS last year, $300 million of that was earmarked for that upper stage. And that is also the exploration upper stage. That is what is required to get your, let's say, space probe out to Europa. You need that higher upper stage for your deep space outer planetary science missions to really get them on those direct trajectories. So it's a really important piece of development, but it's kind of wild that really when you

think about it, they're launching this first one, the Block 1A, once, and then they have to rejigger the entire top level of the vehicle assembly building. They have to rejigger the mobile launch tower. They have to add a bunch of extra fuel lines and other things and connectors. It's going to take them two to three years to do that because it's taller and it's a different shape of an upper stage than this kind of temporary one. There's a lot of work going into this. So it's going to require billions more. Again, just there's not many ways you can really increase the speed in which you do this because of the amount of construction that's going to be required. This brings up a really interesting

point because this is a theme that we're going to address a couple of times in this episode. The reason that NASA is developing this rocket in this way is because of the budget level that they have to work with. If you remember Constellation, which was the human spaceflight program under the George W. Bush administration that was originally going to go to the moon and then to Mars and was canceled early on in the Obama administration. The reason that that program was canceled was because it was going over budget. And they had a blue ribbon commission come in and study it. And what they found was in order to make that program work, you would need an investment of something like three to $5 billion a year over a five or six year period. And the Obama administration decided that they did not want to invest that money. As a result, they chose to cancel the program and retool, well, Congress who decided to turn

what was left of that program into SLS and to save the Orion aspect of that. But the result of all of that is that NASA is building this rocket in sequence as opposed to in parallel. And what that means is each component is constructed on its own. And the construction of the next component doesn't begin until the first component is completed. That's a really inefficient way to build a rocket. What you should be doing is building everything all at the same time. That way you can integrate all the systems, you can test everything all at the same time, the construction process is a lot faster. And while it's more expensive year to year, a lot faster. And while it's more expensive year to year, the overall cost would be far less. But because no one is willing to invest the higher annual costs to lower the overall cost,

NASA is developing sequentially. So this rocket is going to take longer and overall cost more money, even though the annual costs will be less. It's my favorite thing to talk about government accounting to new audiences and see the look on their face when I explain this very accounting preference to them. People say, why does it cost so much? Like, well, you could just put up more money up front and that wouldn't cost so much, but it's actually cheaper per year to spread it out, even if you ultimately spend more money. People have a hard time accepting that. It's just,

but again, that's basically, that's how a lot of these decisions get made. You don't have the money when you need it or when you want it. So, you have to make do for money that is just, it's kind of like smeared out into the future and you have to work within that cap. Kind of the notable opposite, Apollo was the other way around. You had the money when you wanted it, when you needed it, and then it just went away. It didn't stick around. That was why it could be done in the timeline that it had. SLS doesn't have that priority. And so it just gets, it still gets a pretty high priority, but it just gets, you know, stretched out indefinitely. Casey, I'm glad that you mentioned Europa, at least in the context of getting there quickly on an SLS. How do missions headed out there fare in this budget from the White House?

Well, it's a mixed bag even for Europa, but let's actually, let's just acknowledge, because this is still a good thing even if it's in the context of an otherwise kind of a dreary budget, that planetary science, the proposed budget for planetary science in this president's request would be, I think, Jason, we have the numbers to back this up now, even adjusted for inflation. This would be the highest planetary budget in history, basically, when you adjust for programmatic, like you don't have the deep space network being paid for in it. No, that's absolutely true. They're being asked to do an awful lot, but they're finally actually being given a budget that enables them to do all of the things that they're being required to do. Yeah. And so this budget provides 400. Here's another

good difference of congressional desire matching now the White House desire, or at least in terms of priority. Last year, the White House requested $50 million for the Europa mission for the Europa multi flyby, the Clipper, I guess the official name, and Congress gave 275 million for on that 50 million. This year, the White House is requesting $425 million for that mission. And I guarantee you Congress will give them that money, if not more. So you have seen a complete shift in how NASA and the White House and the OMB are prioritizing that Europa mission. So that's a big step. That's money really moving them forward for a launch in the early 2020s. We should talk about the out years, the future, the projections that

it makes. But for this year, that is on track for a 2022 launch. So that's a good sign. For those of you who are interested in sort of following the budget year to year, one of the things that I think I'll really be looking for next year, for the past two years, NASA has included a separate projection of costs for this Europa mission to show what it would cost to launch it in 2022 instead of in the mid-2020s, which is the current launch date for the mission. The extra budget numbers that they put in there are required by the Appropriation Act because there are people in Congress who want to see this mission launch sooner than later.

there are people in Congress who want to see this mission launch sooner than later. So what will be interesting to see is this year, if Congress continues to give additional money to this project in order to meet the 2022 date, and then to see next year if NASA actually finally says, well, if they're going to give it to us, maybe we should aim for 2022. It's kind of a doozy because the problem is, as jason and i have discussed over beers before is that this europa mission has rapidly no longer saving money is that a correct way to phrase that like it it was kind of pitched this flyby mission was pitched as it'll be so much cheaper than this orbiter concept that we had in the decadal survey which was priced out to be four billion dollars and said too expensive and they said oh we can do this flyby.

We think it'll cost half of that, maybe about two. And that's what they're kind of budgeting for in that five-year run out. We haven't seen formal numbers yet because the part that they're in right now is formulation. They're actually trying to come up with the exact number that they'll commit to spending. But that has grown between $3 to $4 billion, I think, is what the Government

Accountability Office listed. And I know, Jason, you think it might ultimately be even higher if you kind of wrap in the cost of a potential SLS launch. So the cost range is what NASA gives to the GAO and to OMB during the formulation phase of the project's development. They will then go into the implementation phase. The beginning of that is called phase C. And I think they're due to go through the test gate to get into phase C sometime later this year. And at phase C, they basically

make a contract with Congress that they will launch by this specific date for this amount of money and achieve these specific science goals. We'll find all of that out later this year. But at the moment, all that they're giving is a cost range. And I think it was something along the lines of $3.1 to $4 billion. And that does include a launch vehicle, but it's not the SLS. They specify in the budget that we don't know what an SLS launch would cost yet. So at the moment, it's on an EELV or an expendable launch vehicle, probably a Delta IV. That vehicle is really expensive. So that probably accounts for $800 million to a billion dollars worth of that extra cost. But that's still, even if you take the launch vehicle out of that, that's still higher

than the $2 to $2.5 billion that they originally proposed this mission for. Between phase B and phase C, you tend to see costs go up. Not always, but just historically speaking, I would not be surprised if the cost is at a minimum at the $4 billion mark. The projection for the future years that this budget gives, it's clearly just placeholder numbers. They don't make any sense if you just look at it. They kind of pop around $300 million for a couple of years. It's just this budget does not make one hopeful for a 2022 launch of the Europa Clipper. I think it was about 10 or 15 years ago that Congress started requiring NASA and the Department of Defense, and I think those are the only two agencies, to include five-year projections in their budgets. About

five or six years ago, NASA started using the word notional in reference to their five-year projections, meaning we're basically making these up. And their excuse for that was that the budget process was taking so long and they were having to deal with so many continuing resolutions that they couldn't really come up with accurate projections, but it sure does give them an awful lot of wiggle room. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of numbers you look at that are projected out into the future that are clearly just kind of being rounded to fit.

Beyond your just kind of standard programs here, we're looking at a projection of no new money, no growth to NASA's budget for the next five years. That's what this is committing it to. That's what at least the White House is saying. While NASA has done okay this year, if you stretch that over the next five years of just keeping a flat budget, that is a functional cut. If you don't grow with inflation, that is a functional cut of $3't grow with inflation that is a functional cut of three and a

half billion dollars over the next few years on top of that we can't just be growing with inflation we have to beat inflation or else nasa ain't doing anything i mean particularly human spaceflight this is national academies wrote this in their report a couple years ago the human spaceflight program needs to grow minimum with inflation ideally five percent or more yeah if you want to do anything and i think this is actually a good proof of concept of that this does not grow and this does not give the human spaceflight program anything to do right it barely keeps their current exploratory hardware going much you know it's not giving them any destination new hardware all sorts of problems are cropping up you know, it's not giving them any destination,

new hardware, all sorts of problems are cropping up here. And so it's, this is not a good in the long run for NASA or any of these programs. It's going to be very tight and very difficult to work with them. Yeah. And again, you mentioned this at the beginning of the program, Casey, but I really want to stress it. This is not the best scenario for NASA, but NASA is still doing really well compared to most of the other science agencies in the federal government. Yeah, I'd much rather have this than trying to claw back a 20% cut, because that is a brutal cut to try to come back from that. Because even if that doesn't pass, and this is the interesting thing too, even if Congress undoes those cuts, because this is what we were basically doing

with planetary science the last five years, right? Where even though Congress would ultimately put the money back, you didn't know, A, when they were going to do it because they can't pass budgets on time. So you didn't know when the money was going to show up. And B, because of that uncertainty, these agencies are not allowed to assume that Congress is going to come in and save the day and they will functionally behave as if they've been cut. So you have a lot of agencies around the government, even if Congress says this is DOA and we're, you know, we're going to fix this, that are planning to implement cuts in six months. And they have to spend at these

restricted levels unless Congress tells them otherwise, which they may or may not do. So it's a bad place for them to be in. It makes it really, really difficult to make any plans for the future. Before we move on, Europa orbiter, really a Jupiter orbiter, but the Europa Clipper at least has some kind of a path forward. What about the lander that Congress also wanted? Oh, yeah, that. No money for the lander in this one. And I'm kind of sympathetic with the White House on this one a little bit.

If Clipper is growing to $3 to $4 billion, Jason can tell you about the lander. The lander has grown in scope as well. That is a meaty, expensive program that I don't know how you do that, the Clipper, and have a healthy just planetary exploration program beyond Europa with that. You add on top of that, you still want to launch Discovery missions at least every two years, at worst every three. You still want to launch New Frontiers missions at least every five years. You've still got the Mars Exploration Program. I'm not really sure how you throw yet another flagship on top of this stack without increasing the budget fairly significantly. The pre-formulation activities for the lander mission are still really in the early phases, but they've done a fair amount of work so far. And what they're

looking at now should be like the best it's going to look over the next couple of years, you know, as they run up against new technical problems, you know, the mass will grow, the power needs will grow. But right now we're looking at arguably the largest spacecraft we've ever launched. I think at this point, it actually requires an SLS. I don't think it can launch on a Delta IV. I've read that, yeah. Yeah. Any kind of cost estimate for this project, you got to go back and look at the largest flagships that NASA's ever launched. You're talking about something that's probably, at the end of the day, conservatively going to be in the $8 to $10 billion range. And I just don't know how you stack that on the current budget

with the portfolio that we've got going forward for the rest of this decade. That's basically what happened with the James Webb Space Telescope. They doubled down on it, and I don't think I would have done otherwise. But there is a real cost to that, right? I mean, astrophysics that is shouldering the cost of JWST has no other missions. I mean, they've basically gotten no new missions in five years. They're going to get TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, but that is a tiny, sub-discovery-sized astrophysics mission.

James Webb became the entire program for this division of science, space science, and that is not a healthy place to be. Particularly if something, God forbid, goes wrong, that is your everything. Your entire program rides on that one mission. So it's a tough place to be in. So as Jason says, I just don't see how they can afford to do Clipper and a lander in a realistic way. I think this is actually a bigger problem here, particularly for planetary science. As listeners know, planetary science has been the science that NASA has been picked on for the last five years.

It was every single year. It was cut of hundreds of millions of dollars every year from its budget. Congress had ultimately put a lot of that back, but we had this seesaw effect that really damaged the agency's ability to plan for long term missions. And so what they ended up doing was they just deferred all these new mission starts for five years. And now we're in this period where we're facing an aging fleet of planetary missions. And we have a bunch of new missions that are coming down the pipeline, but they're all coming at the same time. You know, this is like a snake swallowing a, I don't know,

something really big, a big clown. A goat. That's better. You know, and it's just like this giant bulge moving through. And this is the bulge of developing new missions when, you know, they're all peaking around the same time to launch in 2021, 2022. That itself isn't driving this huge growth in the planetary budget. Now, I want to be clear, if somebody wants to give planetary science the money to do all of these missions, I would love to see that. I'm absolutely not saying we shouldn't do a lander mission. No, I got you down on paper, Jason. You're arguing for less money for planetary. No, I'm just saying from a realistic standpoint, I don't see a significantly larger budget coming

in the future. I've been playing with these numbers a lot for the past year, and I can't make that budget work without a serious influx of cash. Yep. That's where it comes down to. What else do you want to mention about this budget before we talk about what needs to be done with robotic exploration of Mars? Well, let's talk a little bit about Earth science because that's getting a lot of attention. That is the science at NASA here that has actually been cut the most out of our four primary sciences. It was one of those kind of good news in context, but not good broadly kind of things is how I felt about it. I talked about this last time, where planet Earth, sorry, where Earth science here is getting funded

at, they're requesting 1.75 billion. So that's down about 170 million from what it got last year, which is about 192. But if you had told me the day after the election that the Trump White House would be requesting 1.7, 1.8 billion for earth science in perpetuity for the next five years here is what they have. here's what they have, I would have been very pleasantly surprised. I mean, they were talking about removing this science from NASA completely and shoving it off into other federal agencies. So low baseline, we beat that expectation. But honestly, a lot of the big projects that are in process now are continuing. So all the missions in development will continue in development. now are continuing. So all the missions in development will continue in development. It was these weird set about four smaller missions that were basically built. This is what's so kind of silly about it. Basically finished, were all canceled, like orbiting Climate Observatory 3,

it had like a technology demonstration mission for a big flagship. You had a few others. And it really seemed like it was much more of a political move than any sort of smart management or anything else. I mean, they're literally for orbiting carboning Carbon Observatory three, OCO two spacecraft is up there now OCO three was going to get bolted on the space station, it was using leftover parts from OCO2. The budget says we're going to finish this and then put it into storage. That's, you know, just like that just does not seem like great management or use of resources to me. And it also diminishes the science return of the space station, which is designated as a national laboratory who desperately needs to generate more science

to help give us our return on our investment as taxpayers for it. Things like that. It's just, it could be a lot worse, but I also just don't want to use that as the only excuse. It's sad to see the types of budget that we just had in 2017 really helps with that where earth science didn't get cut planetary was able to grow to go back to help rebuild a program as did astrophysics and heliophysics right so there are ways to do this and also ways to get us our return on our investment more since we've already built most of these missions it seems silly to end them so it's a

very mixed bag on that one but it really again it could be far worse i guess is what we've already built most of these missions, it seems silly to end them. So it's a very mixed bag on that one. But really, again, it could be far worse, I guess, is what we've seen. The way I think about the earth science cuts, if it were just an issue of the money, it's disappointing, but it's not catastrophic. One can envision legitimate science or technical or budgetary reasons that you would want to reduce that budget by 6% or 8% or whatever it was that it went down, or 11%. It's possible to envision that, but I don't think that's what happened. I think that this budget was cut for political reasons, and that's far more concerning. Anyplace else that you want to go with this budget before we move on to this,

what I think is a pretty brilliant document that has just been issued by the Planetary Society. I'm going to propose maybe spending 45 to 65 more minutes on this. We can go through. I'm just going to give you a teaser. If you have never read the NASA budget request before, I encourage you to do it. Again, you find all sorts of funny things. One of my fun things that I always like to read through just to be, you know, just like a gosh, you know, just

like a gosh, golly, gee, what kinds of weird stuff do they do? The construction of facilities budget. So NASA has all of these NASA centers and other places around the country. They spend on the order of $400 million a year maintaining these in addition to center operations. And they actually break down any project at any NASA center that's over a million dollars gets listed in this budget. As a teaser for anyone who wants to delve into this on their own, you can learn all about the project to restore part of Kennedy Space Center's coastal shoreline. They're going to build a new dune, a four and a half mile dune to help with storm surges.

And that's a project estimate of $16 million in FY 2018. It's all mentioned in the budget. So it's not just up in space, folks. We're building dunes. Some irony in that as we look at cutbacks in Earth science and tracking the progress of climate change. And yet we have to mediate it or remediate it at the Kennedy Space Center. A very fine point. So, Casey, I have to admit, I'm sort of shocked.

We've gone all this time talking about the budget, and you have not once mentioned plutonium. Oh, my goodness. That's right. That topic glows in the dark. Yeah, well, okay so um nothing huge happening there plutonium is funded out of the technology program within planetary science and that actually saw a nice boost to 207 million for all of technology and really half of that technology

budget gets shunted off of to the department of energy um they don't break out the numbers they i don't know if it's because the department of energy gets weird about plutonium you can ask them but they got 20 million for plutonium in 2017 my guess is 15 to 20 uh for 2018 but that program is chugging along it's getting the money it needs and it's on its way for a 20 i think they're what 2022 now is their kind of baseline date for full production that is chugging along from what we can tell they actually produced their first i think 50 grams of uh kind of finished plutonium oxide product as a test last year it's uh awesome getting there yeah it's just wild what you have to do to maintain the capability to make one and a half kilograms a year. It's going to cost probably half a billion dollars by the time it's all said and done just to build the capacity back up.

And you're producing at a very, very small rate. Yeah, it's a shame we can't just stuff spacecraft full of D-cells and leave it at that. You know, we can try it. We've got to try sticking that in our CubeSat, see how that would work out. That's right. Let's move on to this document that I want to hear from you guys, its creators, about. I read it on the train coming into the office this morning. I can highly recommend it to anybody out there who would like, you know, just ignoring why it was really issued, why you guys put it together. It is maybe the best primer on the history of Mars, robotic Mars exploration, and where we are now at the red planet

that I've ever read. So kudos to you guys. Well, thank you, Matt. Yeah, that's high praise. Thank you. One of my favorite things about building the program, the Space Policy and Advocacy Program in the last few years, has been able to bring people with these very specific sets of capabilities that are complementary to each other. Jason came in with a really strong academic background and degrees out the wazoo, and experience working on historical and modern budgets at NASA. And then at the same time, we've got Matt Reniger, who is our, you know, congressional, super outgoing and friendly. And, you know, unlike Jason, a professional extrovert basically is kind of Matt and understands Congress and passion for the topic. And we all kind of work together.

We all have complementary skills here that then we can leverage to serve our membership. And so one of the things that Jason and I have been trying to do is up the amount of original research that the Planetary Society does as a service to its members and a service to the broader community, right? It helps establish not just our credibility, but it serves a purpose. It helps people understand some of these big issues that we're talking about, right? It helps people in Congress, helps scientists, it helps NASA and other people. Because again, no one else is doing this kind of stuff unless they're getting paid to do it by government agency

or something else, right? So what are we talking about? Well, so we have this paper, and it's on the status of the Robotic Mars Exploration Program. It's kind of notably the thing we did not really talk about there in that budget discussion. The Mars Exploration Program, MEP, kind of the notably the thing we did not really talk about there in that budget discussion the mars exploration program mep is an actual kind of subset programmatic line within nasa it's underneath it's book kept in the science division within planetary science it as kind of

an entity has been responsible for the effectively this revolution in our understanding of the red planet that we've had in our lifetimes, right? This is really kicked off in 2000, at the very end of the Clinton administration going into George W. Bush. And it has given us these missions that we know, and have that we know so well, right? The Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, I was gonna say MaVEN, but I'm sorry, MAVEN is probably not really a household name. But, you know, all of these Mars missions were done under this umbrella, this Mars program. It's a program, I think, that is so easy to take for granted because it has been so successful. But what's happening and what this paper that we put together broadly shows is that NASA has been under investing in this program for years.

And we are about to hit a point of basically of consequences for that. And it's going to be very difficult unless we take action right now. It's going to be very difficult to actually reach this big scientific exploration goal of sample return and Mars science in general that we've spent the last 20 years investing in as a country. It'll be difficult to sustain it, much less even achieve it unless we start making some real changes right now. So this is what this paper is about. So the real strength of the Mars Exploration Program is that it's not just a series of missions. These missions are based on an overarching strategy. Each mission feeds the information that it gains during the course of its mission run. It feeds that information into

the next mission. The questions evolve based on the science that we're finding, but that's done from a strategic standpoint. I'm sure that anyone who has followed Mars exploration over the past 20 years has heard the term follow the water. That was the original first part of the strategy. We sent up Spirit and Opportunity, and they basically determined that water had existed on Mars. We're pretty sure that that was the case, but they were able to prove that basically categorically. And from there, we started to look at habitability. Was Mars ever habitable? Is it habitable now?

And the Curiosity rover that is there now has actually determined really early in its mission that at least at one spot on Mars, conditions were conducive to life. It was possible for life to exist on Mars at one time. So now the next stage is trying to determine whether or not there ever was, or if there still is life on Mars. That's the next step in the strategy. And we've reached this point in the program, where if we don't make the investments now, we're basically going to abandon 20 years of that strategy, right when we're starting to ask the really important question. What we're abandoning here, what this kind of apotheosis of this entire effort has been is sample return, right? Grabbing samples of the surface of Mars in a scientific and orderly way

in context of its geologic surroundings and finally curated by a scientific team, and then bringing those back to Earth so we can use the most powerful advanced scientific methods that we can think of or have not yet thought of to use in the future. Do you actually be even basic things like dating the rocks? We can't do that with spacecraft because of power constraints. And then not to mention actually searching for life, you know, finding they want to land this Mars 2020 rover, which will be collecting these samples, right? Step one of this program has begun with the development of the mars 2020 rover it's going to be collecting these samples what we haven't done what nasa has not done or has been not been allowed

to do is commit to any mission to get those samples back and that is the real problem why are we talking about this now and i think a lot of people particularly planetary scientists a lot of them feel like why does mars get all this attention i'm a neptune scientist we have we've had voyager fly by once in 1986 that is my son you know and i get some hubble observations that is my extent of my data collection why does mars need another set of missions well what we look at it this is what jason was talking about a program, you have these overarching goals and strategies that inform and feed forward and help you get better as you systematically explore another planet that has never been done before in human history until this with Mars. No other planet besides Earth has been explored with this

amount of detail and effort. And we've built up infrastructure to enable this to happen. Sample return has been identified by the scientific community, has been identified by the scientific community for decades as the goal. It's the holy grail of Mars exploration. And we are building now the first step in it. But at the same time, this is what we were talking about earlier, in terms of a parallel versus a sequential process. We need a parallel program here, because you can only launch to Mars every 26 months.

So you have an external limiting factor on when you can launch to the red planet. So you have to have a series of missions ready to go in order to hit those launch opportunities. You have something ready to go and you've missed your launch window by a week, you've got to sit around for two years until that launch opportunity opens again. And so we have a mission ready to go on the 2020 launch opportunity. Literally, we have no other missions to Mars. We have not had a new mission approved to go to Mars in almost five years. An average of five years to develop a mission. And that's on top of the many years involved in the pre-formulation activities, you know,

trying to figure out exactly how you're going to build the mission. It's 2017. If we're going to launch in 2022, we should be starting today. Like yesterday, right? I mean, like, that's the thing. It's just 2022 is already, I'd say, pretty much gone as an opportunity to launch. I think that's probably true. And that's really sad. And we're not just talking about missions. You need a mission to go grab these samples that are being collected by 2020. And then another mission to bring those samples back to Earth, basically. So you have one that collects the samples, launches it into Mars orbit, and another mission to bring those samples back to Earth. Basically, so you have one that collects the samples,

launches it into Mars orbit, and another mission that docks it in orbit, fires it, and brings it back to Earth. You need a third mission for your infrastructure. This is the crazy thing about Mars, is that we have, in addition to Earth, Mars is the only other planet that we know of that has a satellite communications network, right?

Which I always think is really cool. You know, you can get satellite coverage in Mars. You have the two NASA science orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, and they serve as data relays for the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. So every day they fly over each rover twice, every sol of the day on mars they fly over twice they have high powered antennas that they can talk to the ground with and so they in a burst of about 15 minutes curiosity sends hundreds of megabytes up to let's say mro mro has a two meter dish communicate back to earth and they send hundreds, you can get multiple megabits per second data rate from MRO back to Earth. Curiosity minimum has to get 250 megabits per day back to Earth to

function. That's its minimum success criteria. It has a little antenna on its body that you can talk to Earth directly with, but the average data rate on that antenna is about one kilobit per second one kilobit so multiple orders of magnitude slower what was the quote that we use it's like going from fiber optic internet to dial-up modem right you basically cannot have a mission that way if you don't have orbiters relaying data for you. So Mars 2020 has the same problem. As being designed, it's a copy of Curiosity in terms of its shape and size, so its antenna won't be any stronger. It'll actually generate more data from its instrumentation than Curiosity will. It'll generate more data from its instruments than any other Mars mission to date. And we need to get that data back to have a successful mission.

You need to have an orbiter. So here's the problem. These orbiters, Odyssey was launched in what, 2001? MRO was launched in 2005. Odyssey was designed for two-year mission, right? So it's got a little bit beyond that. MRO is designed as a five-year mission. Our satellite infrastructure is on the edge of, I wouldn't say collapse is too strong of a word, but they're rapidly aging. You cannot depend on them well into the 2020s. And so we need an orbiter. We used to alternate orbiter, lander, orbiter, lander

back when the program had more money. We haven't done that in a while. We need some sort of orbiter that can function as a data relay and has a high powered camera on it to help not just do science on the surface of Mars, but you use these to scout out safe landing sites for robots and humans that we're supposedly sending to Mars, right? So here's the problem. None of this is happening. We have a little bit of study money for a Mars orbiter, but nothing on the books.

If we miss the 2022 launch date, and we launch in 2024, we get there in 2025, that is four and a half years into the mission of Mars 2020, in which we just hope that nothing bad has happened to the MRO orbiter. In addition to these other missions to bring your samples back, the infrastructure is aging and needs to be replaced at Mars to communicate with these things. None of this is happening is what we're trying to raise awareness of. Right.

This is the most frightening thing that I saw in this position paper that you guys have issued. You do talk about some alternatives, some other spacecraft that are now at Mars, but they're not ideal. No, they're actually in very bad orbit to communicate with the rovers that we currently have there and the Mars 2020 rover that will be landing there in a few years. The one orbiter that will be there when Mars 2020 is there is a European space agency orbiter, but it will be dedicated to a different rover. The Europeans are launching their own rover as well. You add all of that up, and while we could sort of piece together some capability to retrieve data, first of all, it comes at the cost of the science from these other missions. And secondly, it's not an optimal ability to

return this data. So we're basically building a Corvette and then driving it at the speed of a VW bug only because we won't have an asset in the proper orbit to collect that data. So this document does a terrific job of explaining these challenges that we face, but that's not where it stops. There are some recommendations for actions that NASA should be taking, some pretty specific recommendations. We basically looked at all of the public documents that NASA has put out. We've gone to all of the meetings regarding the Mars Exploration Program around DC and around the country and looked at what NASA is talking about using that public information and putting together some historical budget data

to sort of map out what these missions are likely to cost. And putting that all together, we were able to put together some budgets showing what kind of investment needs are required in order to accomplish the goal of Mars sample return. And we lay out three options that are viable pathways forward. The first option is sending enough spacecraft out to Mars in order to bring the samples back in the 2020s. Now, that's a pretty aggressive strategy, but I think it's actually the lowest risk strategy. So it's the option that we're really promoting. The second option that we put forward is less aggressive. It's a slower rate of investment, and it would bring the samples back in the 2030s, which is also viable. There's nothing wrong with that strategy, but it is a

little riskier for many reasons that we detail in the paper. The third strategy is basically the strategy that NASA seems to be on right now. It's basically keeping lights on strategy. There's no viable plan for getting samples back. It's just keeping the assets alive at Mars. And we do some budget analysis showing why we think that this is the strategy that NASA is currently engaging in. We lay out why we think that this is not a great idea. It's not a great investment by the nation. After 20 years of investment, we should be doing more. It's kind of crazy, actually, when we did these projections. There's always a good sign that

Jason's numbers are on the nose when it actually perfectly matches something here. I mean, we basically, for the bad option that Jason was just talking about here, basically just infrastructure maintenance and you just let the program atrophy. If you kind of plot out what that budget would look like for five years and you just overlay it over the numbers we just saw in the 2018 budget, they just match eerily well. It is creepy. And that is functionally where we are. And again, that is a bad place to be. These samples, too, they're putting these in tubes that are being designed for a 20-year lifetime. Now, JPL is very careful to tell you that because it lasts a day longer than 20 years doesn't mean that the samples aren't viable anymore. But I know there is real scientific concern about what happens to the scientific validity,

usefulness, utility of these samples if you let them sit and bake in the Martian soil for 25 years, 30 years. What's going to happen to those? We just literally do not know. So if we want to get these back in the proclaimed lifetime of 20 years, you only have something on the order of eight to nine launch opportunities to Mars to bring them back in time. And so you better be ready to go and act on those. And really, NASA is not. And the worst option here, this infrastructure maintenance, abandonment, basically, of all this investment that we've made, it's not a good place to be in.

It's an interesting example. We call this paper, by the way, Mars in Retrograde, which was a suggestion from our board president, Jim Bell, actually is a very nice one. Because again, Mars was the preferred planetary science program, I would say, for the first decade of this century. Still kind of stretching out. I mean, Mars 2020 is its second flagship mission in a row, basically. What we're seeing here is Mars fall out of favor. And the under investments that have been made in that program shifted it from a parallel process to a serialized process. And that is becoming harder and harder and harder to maintain

the workforce, the scientific workforce, the capability, institutional knowledge. scientific workforce, the capability, institutional knowledge. You know, NASA is the only space agency still that has successfully landed on Mars in human history. NASA is about to basically end the Mars program as we know it and ride on its laurels until it's too late to do anything about it. And this is a bad direction. So this is what we'll hope to help change people's minds with. This is a prime example of what we are now capable of at the Planetary Society. We've identified this problem. Casey and I were able to go through and do this

analysis. And now we have the capability to take this up to Capitol Hill and explain everything that we've just talked about on this show, we can tell that directly to stakeholders on Capitol Hill, and we can see if we can make a difference. It is a sobering yet fascinating document, and a lot of great minds contributed to this. Talk about some of the folks and organizations that participated. Well, this guy Casey is really smart. Yeah, he made up for all of the fallibility of this guy, Jason. Yeah.

So Jason and I took the lead on writing it. And then we had basically kind of an internal review process. We gave it to some of our own board members. Scott Hubbard, who was the original Mars czar, the program director at the Mars Exploration Program at its very beginning, weighed in on it. Jim Bell, Mars scientist who's been there for pretty much every mission since Pathfinder. We had some friends up at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine at the Space Studies Board. They were kind enough to take a look at it for us. A number of notable people within the Mars community, particularly associated with an organization called MEPAG, which is the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. They were also very kind to give us some notes that

were incredibly helpful in putting this all together. But all of that said, all of those people were a tremendous help to us. But if there are any inaccuracies or opinions that they don't agree with, those are entirely on us. They stayed away from that aspect. Yeah. Thanks, Jason. I was going to figure we'd have to put that little lawyer note in there. Little disclaimer. So where can our listeners find it? Next week, we're going to release this on planetary.org. Planetary.org slash space advocate is a good spot. It'll be on the homepage. Just go to the website, look for the advocacy section under get involved.

It'll be a link there. I mean, we'll be talking about it. Jason and I just put in a lot of work. Six months into our six-week project here. And we intend to get a lot of mileage out of this. But really, I honestly, you know what, I encourage you to read it. It's a it is a good overview. And it was written to be accessible to people who are interested in this field, or in this area, but don't have necessarily a ton of specific experience with it, right. So it's meant to be read by you. I mean, that's our

primary audience, ultimately, is our members to help inform and educate and empower you. In addition to people in Congress and staff and NASA and throughout, because again, if you can't communicate it well, no matter who you are, what's the point? I hope it's quite readable, and I believe it is. And Matt, good to hear that feedback from you. It's even got nice pictures in it. But I'm proud of it. It's really interesting. And it illuminates this point. And this is always the trouble with space. This ultimate point is that the results that you see are from work that was done a decade ago. It's so abstract. When the data finally comes home, that is the easy part in a way. I was just thinking about this with these gorgeous pictures

that we're getting back from Juno. I keep telling people that mission was launched in 2011. It was selected in like 2006 or something like that. And popped around in people's, you know, it was a glint in their eyes years like that. Yeah, and and popped around and people's, you know, is a glint in their eyes years before that Probably 20 years of someone's life has been spent on that mission to get this data Right now as we're building march 2020 You know and the budget is growing from the mars program again. This is actually the moment

We need to think about what the 2020s are going to be like for the Mars program. Because this decade, that's done. We made those decisions. There's nothing we can do about moving any other Mars missions in this decade. Everything we're talking about now is for the 2020s. And this is the moment we need to take action and make those decisions. We need to take action and make those decisions. And if this moment passes and we don't do anything,

we live with those consequences. There's nothing we can do. And so that is the essence of space. Always thinking five to 10 years ahead, which makes it hard to make those decisions now. It is abstract. Jason, any final thoughts? Something cheery. I've seen a lot of support in Washington DC for space exploration generally, the search for life

specifically. So I'm very optimistic about our chances taking this up to the hill, shopping it around and seeing if we can't get some traction on this issue. I think that this work will be worth our time and it wouldn't be possible if it weren't for some traction on this issue. I think that this work will be worth our time and it wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the contributions of all of our members. I just want to thank everyone out there who is a member of the Planetary Society.

We're doing all this work on your behalf and we're very grateful for the opportunity to do so. I like that. That's good. Thank you, everybody. And they're going to keep it up working on our behalf. I highly recommend this read. It is a very good read. And I congratulate you guys once again on providing this tremendous resource. of course, can react to anything that they have heard or read about space policy at planetaryradio at planetary.org. That's where you can write to, and we will make sure that your comments are read,

and some of them might even be responded to. Who knows? Maybe here on the air when we get around to doing the next edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, which is about a month away. We'll come to you on the first Friday in July, whatever date that happens to be. I didn't look it up. Gentlemen, I want to thank you again and just encourage everybody to visit planetary.org and consider becoming a member if you're not already one at planetary.org slash membership. Thanks, Matt. As always, this was a blast, and I look forward to doing the next one.

Absolutely, folks. And again, planetary.org slash membership. Fine, I plugged. I put in a plug this episode. We'll go with that. That's Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society,

and his colleague, Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor in Washington, D.C. Have a great month, and we'll be talking to you again in July. Don't forget the regular weekly edition of Planetary Radio between now and then. I'm Matt Kaplan. We'll see you soon.