Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #14 – Ice Giants and Ocean Worlds Beckon

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

A new report builds the case for long overdue returns to Uranus and Neptune, while another proposal calls for exploration of the many bodies in our solar system that hide vast water oceans. Jason Callahan, Casey Dreier and Mat Kaplan dive into the troubled waters that determine which planetary science missions will get the limited funds available.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, the post-Independence Day celebration, our little monthly look at space policy. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. We look forward to another terrific conversation with you about the things that go on in Washington and elsewhere host of Planetary Radio. We look forward to another terrific conversation with you about the things that go on in Washington and elsewhere that determine what's going to be happening in space over the coming years. I'm joined as always by Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Hello, Casey. Hey, Matt. Jason, my colleague in space policy program here.

How are you? I'm doing well. That's Jason Callahan, one of our guys. Now we have two inside the Beltway, our Space Policy Advisor at the Planetary Society. They are two thirds of our three-person full-time space advocacy group working on behalf of all of us who want to see space exploration and space science advanced. You also can be a part of that. If you're a member of the Planetary Society, you're already part of it. So thank you for your support. But if you're not, we hope that you'll consider becoming a member at planetary.org

slash membership. And you can also, Casey, give directly to support space policy, even if you're space policy and space advocacy, whether you're a member or not. Oh, you sure can. We'll take your money either way. But I encourage you to become a member. It makes a great Independence Day gift. Everyone's favorite. And I hope you guys had a great Independence Day. I did. I love seeing amateur rocketry all over the place. Yeah, unfortunately, it tends to be the amateur rocketry that's really good at launching stuff, but not so much at returning it. Yeah. But it's still really exciting to watch.

I've yet to have sample return from fireworks. We have much to talk about. And in beginning with this discussion of what just happened in the White House a few days before we recorded this segment, the formation of a new National Space Council. That's coming up in moments, but much more, like where we're headed with planetary science and exploration of the solar system, some reports that have been issued, and then we're going to finish this month's program by letting you be introduced to that third member of the Space Policy Advocacy Team

at the Planetary Society, Matt Renninger. And it was a terrific conversation that you guys have heard, and I hope folks will stick around for that. But let's start with what the President of the United States, Donald Trump, put back in place just a few days ago. Let's just start and just appreciate the high visibility moment of the afternoon before the long July 4th weekend in the United States.

So well publicized, it was not even on the official timeline for the day of the president's activities. It was not even on the official timeline for the day of the president's activities. But we signed an executive order on Friday before the long weekend is reestablishing the National Space Council. Vice President Pence will lead it. He was there. Buzz Aldrin was there. Other astronauts and congresspeople, dignitaries around, joined the president as they signed the order to form the council. Maybe they put it on that Friday afternoon because there actually wasn't all that much information beyond the fact that he signed the order, which we knew was coming in general.

So we don't know who is on the council. We don't know who the executive secretary is. We know that Pence is on it. And that's about it. Jason, did I capture that effectively? Yeah, yeah. So the announcement sort of told us what cabinet members will be on this panel, the council, but a number of really key positions have yet to have been filled. So we know the position, but we don't know the individual. Like the NASA administrator. Yes. Yes. And the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy would be another one. Yeah. Without that key personnel, it's not clear yet exactly what the overarching goals will be beyond a couple of sort of really high level things that they said in the announcement.

We may know more soon. We know that the vice president, as we record this, is planning to speak this week at Kennedy Space Center. We don't know what he's going to say, so it could be potentially the announcement of a NASA administrator candidate. As our colleague Jason Davis has pointed out, we are officially now at the longest duration presidential transition period for NASA without an administrator at least being appointed. I think 165 days has passed now. It's longer than George Lowe back in the post-Apollo era. Longest time we have acting administrator Robert Lightfoot with no appointed replacement, basically. It's the longest period in history, basically, I guess, for NASA, right? Yeah, yeah. The first transition was the Nixon administration, and Nixon was singularly uninterested in space when he first came into office. Without a high prioritization, it took him a while to determine who was going to lead

the agency. I hope that that's not the case that you're seeing here, and that is sort of evidenced by the fact that NASA is not alone in having gone a long time without having leadership appointed by the White House. There are a lot of other agencies in the same boat. So it could just be that this administration is slow getting started in a way that most administrations have not been previously. And I hope that that's the case. And this is a point that's made by our colleague, Jason Davis, digital editor for the Society, in a July 3rd blog post at Planetary.org.

And in that, he also talked to a member of the Planetary Society board, John Logsdon, the professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of its Space Policy Institute. John had written an article in January looking sort of forward and backward at National Space Councils. I think one of the things that Professor Logsdon really did a nice job of pointing out is that the main focus of a national space council is not NASA. It's to align all of U.S. space activities. And the great preponderance of U.S. space activity is not the civil space program. It's the National Defense Space Program.

Right. There's the other space program at the United States, right? That, which actually has more money than NASA, uh, to spend on and they don't launch people into space. So it's all in robotic spacecraft effectively, right?

Yeah. And they're looking at things like, uh, everything from communications to weather prediction to GPS to, you know, all, all of these other sort of Earth-based capabilities. And one of the things that they mentioned in the announcement of the revival of the

National Space Council is that the role of this council was really going to be to go through and make sure that there weren't duplicative efforts throughout the various aspects of the U.S. space effort. And we've seen efforts to try and remove duplication before and not always with a great amount of success. is different than intelligent space, which is all very different than civilian space, even though you may have similar capabilities, they may be for very, very different purposes. And it's hard to build a spacecraft that meets both of those purposes or multiple purposes. So that's how you end up with things that end up costing way too much money and running wildly over budget with these interagency programs. And we've seen a lot of that in the past. Hopefully

that won't be the outcome of this. Sometimes in space, duplication can be good. Like it's not an inherently negative trait. You know, it's not like this idea is new. Like we shouldn't spend money we don't need to spend it on, right? That's not like this new concept. So why are we reestablishing the National Space Council? Why hasn't it been running this whole time or what happened to it? Why is this a step that needs to happen? In previous administrations, certain presidents have viewed the National Space Council as actually being a duplicative effort in and of itself. That's a good point.

And they tend to run from the National Space Council. That's right. And they tend to run... Exclusion from the National Space Council. That's right. So in past administrations, you've seen overarching strategy for space run through perhaps the Office of Science and Technology policy, or perhaps they'll divide it into military and civilian. And you'll see the military sort of run their own organization that doesn't include the civilian or at least not to a significant degree. This isn't fixing a problem necessarily. It's taking a different approach to an ongoing effort of strategy. And that just differs from administration to administration.

So the last time we really saw this, I think, as a really active council was 1989 with George H.W. Bush. And this all goes into history. We don't really have time for today, but with the Space Exploration Initiative trying to send humans back to the moon and onto Mars in the first Bush administration, correct? Yeah, absolutely. There's a great book about that particular effort called Mars Wars by an author named Thor Hogan, who sort of does the blow by blow of how that all played out. But yeah, that Space Council tried very stringently to change the direction at NASA and ran headlong into serious cultural issues at NASA, which is a really good case study in

the difficulty in implementing policy changes, significant policy changes in a top-down fashion without really working within the culture to get everybody on board. It's a great discussion about how not to do coalition building, I think. Again, it just shows you that there are pitfalls from this. There's no guarantee. We just do not know how this is going to come out. And a lot of it will depend on, as Dr. Logsdon has pointed out and others have pointed out in the policy world, that it really depends on how invested the president is in the council and how much kind of by proxy influence they then have. Does NASA and DOD and other parts of this group of people who would be affected by this, do they have faith that this council will represent actual political capital behind it? We will see. So far, Vice President Pence seems pretty gung-ho

about it. So that's a good sign. As I've been saying, this is a kind of a plan to make a plan. And we are currently in the planning stage of the making a plan to make a plan. So it's a step we will hopefully learn more soon, but the existence of it in its own self doesn't really mean that much. It's basically we are going to try to figure out what we want to do with this whole space program. And another thing that I've written about a little bit in the past, one thing that I think we've seen over the past 15, 20, maybe even 25 years, as presidential administrations have sort of taken a more hands-off approach, specifically with NASA, Congress has sort of stepped into that void. And it's not really clear to me that they're interested in relinquishing that new capacity that

they operate under. It's entirely possible that the National Space Council comes out and it has tremendous support from the White House and it makes all these very sweeping suggestions for changes or new strategies for all of the various space capabilities in the United States, and Congress says no. So we'll have to wait and see what happens there as well. Yeah, because there's no, at least that we've seen yet, any official congressional representation on that council. Now, there may be appointed people who are either staff or somebody, but it's not like Congress members themselves sit on this council. It's an executive branch council.

Big news that comes out of whatever Vice President Pence may have to say at Kennedy Space Center the day after we are recording this, since we're doing this on Wednesday the 5th. We'll probably have that for you at planetary.org and maybe on Planetary Radio as soon as next week, because, Casey, it might be a good idea for you to come on and talk a little bit about this on the regular show in one of those little short segments that we do. Yeah, twist my arm, Matt. If you need me, I'm there for you. Thank you. Let's plan on that for next week's show. Whatever influence the Space Council may have over the future of planetary science and solar system exploration. The wheels keep turning elsewhere. That, I think, is going to be our major topic for today. It looks like a lot of people are jockeying for position

as the nation and its scientists prepare to come up with a new 10-year plan for what may be happening across, what, the 2020s, guys? Tell us where we are and about some of these reports that you've shared. I just find this so fascinating. This whole process is just so cool to watch it happen basically right in front of our eyes. It's a very methodical process, and it's a process that I will appreciate probably when I'm an old man and maybe some of these missions are actually returning data. But a couple of reports came out since our last episode. They're not related necessarily, but they fit into this larger sense of exactly what you said, Matt.

People are starting to position themselves for the next decadal survey report, which will be, you know, they'll start working on that in a couple of years to be released, maybe what, 2021? It'll probably come out late 2021, I would guess. So they'll probably start working on it in 2020. Interestingly, you know, we're talking about people getting ready for that report now. We're also in the process of the midterm report on the previous decadal survey. So this is an iterative and ongoing process that has a lot of moving parts at any given time. So there's a committee now doing basically a report card on the previous report to determine whether or not NASA has been following it and how well and where they could

improve at the same time that the community is gearing up for the next decadal survey. And this is, again, the decadal survey from National Academies focused on that official recommendation of what the top priority missions should be. These missions would be from the decade of 2022 to 2031 or 2032, whatever, you know, that 10 year window. And that is a long time to think about. And mainly that period will be building the mission to launch probably after it. You know, it's hard to actually for some of these big missions to get those priorities actually built

in that timeframe, like what we're seeing now. What we're seeing here is two reports. Let's talk about them. One is on the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, and what types of missions we could send there. Now, this report came at the request of NASA itself. Is that right, Jason? Yeah, which is different than the second report that we'll talk about. But basically, NASA asked the community to put together a committee to evaluate flagship class missions to either Neptune or Uranus or possibly to both, because this is a portion of the planetary science community that has not had a mission to an outer planet aside from Cassini in a couple of decades. Well, there's Juno. That's true. But Jupiter hardly counts as an outer planet, let's be honest here.

Anymore, yeah, it's getting closer and closer. You can use solar, it's no longer an outer planet, I think, right? Is that the official definition? But you're right. Like that, yeah.

Yeah. This community, would you say they have a tougher time than even Venus' scientific community here? Because at least Venus has had a dedicated mission.

If you have studied Uranus your entire life, you have that one Voyager 2 flyby in 1986, and then you have ground observations. That's it. A little bit of Hubble data. Yeah, that's basically it. You're talking about a community of scientists that is actually at this point relatively small because they've either had to find other things to study to keep them going, or they've been focused on a very small data set for a very, very long time. But these people have been thinking about this planet for a really long time, or thinking about these destinations for a long time, and coming up with different and new and innovative ways that you could do science if you could get a

mission. And this report is sort of an encapsulation of all of that thinking. So for a preliminary mission study, I found it really interesting that it's really quite detailed. It's really well done and really interesting. 500 page report in the full thing, which is, you know, they have a great executive summary. I recommend people will link to this in the show page. To me, if you have the question, how do scientists get these missions? This is basically that part of that, like one of your early steps in this process. And if you are a scientist working in this field, you have to be pushing to do these types of reports. They may feel so abstract and so far away from meaning anything, but you have to put in the work like this now to get these missions 20, 25 years from now, right?

Yeah. You're like building your case for, again, this wide constituency has to be convinced that this is important and it would pay off well. That's what struck me about this report was that kind of that emphasis of we don't know very much about these planets. And they're all over the place. Neptune and Uranus, they are types of planets that astronomers find everywhere in the galaxy as exoplanets. And we haven't even really understood our own. And that's a really great point that if we're going to do more exploration of exoplanets using telescopes to try and figure out what we're looking at, we need a baseline. We have to understand the processes that make the planets closest to us work to understand

the planets that are that far away. So all in favor of these missions. I think they're really, really fantastic. Another aspect of these that I found really interesting, for a very long time, I've been under the assumption that getting out to those really far outer planets was going to cost billions of dollars. One of the interesting aspects of this report was that they did not only internal cost estimation, but then sent it out for an external cost review at Aerospace Corporation. but then sent it out for an external cost review at Aerospace Corporation. And what they came back with were four mission possibilities, one to Neptune and three to Uranus,

all of which were in a cost range of $1.9 to $2.3 billion. And that was the external cost. That's a far more reasonable cost envelope for this kind of a mission than I'd ever heard before. And I thought that was really fascinating. Yeah, I was really impressed by that. And that's the critical thing. And I really feel it's kind of interesting that the $2 billion threshold seems to be kind of the magic amount where it seems doable, that you can fit it in with some other missions, and it's not going to completely throw off the balance of your planetary exploration portfolio. The Europa Clipper had that, at least initially. Mars 2020 had that initially. And now they're trying to kind of baseline these missions to Uranus and Neptune

around that. This report doesn't prioritize any of these missions. It basically kind of makes the case for both. It does explicitly say both planets are equally interesting scientifically, but you would get different scientific benefits. You go to Neptune, the big thing there is that Triton is a captured Kuiper Belt object, and you can compare that to Pluto. So it's basically captured a Pluto, so you can get like a Pluto-ish mission and a Neptune mission, kind of a two-in-one. But then the subtext, though, that I got from this whole report was it's a lot easier to get to Uranus and a lot faster and cheaper. Because really they look at one possible mission to Neptune and then three to Uranus. All the Uranus ones are, I guess you have a flyby, you have an orbiter and an orbiter with a lot of science data, a lot of science instrumentation. All of those, again, around $2 billion.

We have to eat our vegetables if we want to see these missions, should they come to fruition, because the launch window really for Uranus is between 2030 and 2034, and then you're talking about roughly eight years after that to get there, 2040-ish in the ideal situation. Yeah, and two other points that the report made. First of all, there is no trajectory that allows for one mission to get to both planets. You have to pick one. You know, we had the opportunity to do the grand tour back in the 1970s with the Voyager missions, but those planets are no longer in that alignment and won't be for like 170 years or 150 years or something at this point.

We have to work with what we've got. And that means we're going to have to select one mission or launch two of these missions. That said, the other point that the report made was that all of these costs were baselined on existing flight hardware, so existing launch vehicles. Both this report and the one we'll talk about in a minute, really highlight the fact that using either the space launch system that NASA is developing now or something like the Falcon Heavy that SpaceX is developing would cut the travel time significantly to get to one of these planets. So that's a really interesting development. The one thing that these reports didn't discuss is who was going to be paying the extra cost for an SLS or for a Falcon Heavy. But that said, it's a really interesting development to see that you could really reduce the travel

times. Yeah, and you could squeeze two on a single SLS if you wanted, if you just had the money to make two. They tried to make this case that the science is basically a linear relationship between money and science. Like, there's no asymptotic approach of like total amount of science you can get. They say, if you double your money, you will probably double your science. There's so much to discover about these places. And on the flip side of that, if you put anything there, even with a small science package, it's kind of this mission of pure discovery that we don't really, we're not as used to these days because we're sending orbiters to Jupiter again, right, or missions to Mars again. And those advance science in really critical ways and have this real depth to the understanding of those planets.

But Uranus and Neptune is just, what's there? I don't know. Let's look and we'll find something. Nice linear relationship between dollars and science to be found there. And a point that was made on Planetary Radio not long ago, these worlds, Uranus and Neptune, there are far more of them we see across the galaxy as Kepler and others find exoplanets. There are far more worlds that look like Uranus and Neptune than there are that look like Jupiter. And, you know, part of that's a function of what we're able to find at this point. We're going to be finding other Earths

out there, hopefully. Matt Renninger, who we'll be talking to later in the program, he and I went on a tour about two weeks ago of the Space Telescope Science Institute up in Baltimore. Their focus is primarily on exoplanet research when it has to do with planetary science. Although they do some imaging with Hubble of planets in our solar system and other objects, we had this really nice presentation on exoplanets. And they made that precise point that their ability to understand what they're seeing as they gain capability in observing these exoplanets, that data is only useful if we understand what the implications are of it. And the best way to understand that data is to, as I said earlier, to look at planets closest to us, that we can actually get some

really good scientific measurements and understand the processes that formed it, the processes that are ongoing on the planets. So yeah, that would be critical. And those two programs exist in tandem. Okay, so I'm totally convinced. I think we should send missions. Jason, do you see any chance of these missions actually moving forward? Probably not. Well, in the next 10 years, possibly. In the next five,

I think it's unlikely. I think that it was pretty clear from the context of this report that this was NASA asking this community to put together this document to position itself for the next decadal survey. And given the launch windows that you were mentioning just a minute ago, it seems as though this is really to get everybody on board to understand how to build the coalitions, how to start building your teams, how to start petitioning your stakeholders to make this mission happen in the next decade. I'm having trouble, though, just seeing where it fits in. I mean, the planetary budget at NASA has grown very well and will do very well, I think, in the next few years. But even then, it is kind of, it's maxed out between Mars and this one Europa mission and

then our smaller class discovery missions that go to basically asteroids these days. Where do you add the mission for that Uranus mission? If you want to launch in that Jupiter gravity assist launch window for Uranus, you've got to start working on that mission probably no later than 2026. It's about as late as you would want to push that. And you've really got to start maturing some of the technologies for it. I mean, all of these will need plutonium, right? And all of them, the list, need that enhanced MMRTG with basically some more energy efficient upgrades, the existing radioisotope thermoelectric generator that we have now. And just like everything else, it seems like in NASA, decisions need to be made now that are going to be impacting

the space program in 20 years. And so I just have a hard time. And this kind of brings the other thing to me. Say we go through the decadal survey process again. Is there a responsibility to preserving built-up infrastructure to really go into the depth, the deepest parts of the questions of planetary science? And I'm thinking Mars here. Do we have a responsibility to maintain that investment at the sacrifice of things that we've never done before. Or do we say to the Mars community, sorry, we built up this incredible capability with this thousands of people in this field. But you know too much now and we need to go off of lower hanging fruit at the ice giants. You know, is that a fair thing to say?

It is an accurate assessment of the types of decisions that are going to be – will have to be made. And I'm really glad that I'm not the one who's making them. I far prefer years in my job of just going and trying to elicit more and more support so that we can do all these things. I want all of them, yeah. That said, if you and I are not successful or other things happen and the world decides that we're not going to spend that much money on planetary science, someone will have to make those choices. The real issue here is that the community can get together and through the decadal process prioritize what they want. Do they want to continue with the Mars stuff? Do they want to, in what order do you want these things to be done? Because if they don't come up with that

prioritization, somebody else will do it for them and it won't be as thoughtful a process. That's true. It's going to be really fascinating to see how this comes out because let's bring in this other paper. It's not really a report, but it's a paper looking at a potential ocean worlds program.

Casey, before you do that, I just got a telegram from the International Association of Venus Scientists wondering when they're going to come up in this show. Venus has got a New Frontiers selection that it can go through at least. At least they have a shot. Yeah, and that issue comes up in this paper. It's been a while, and this is actually maybe instructive. Venus had Magellan and missions before that right

pioneer venus and others it has had missions neptune and uranus have had nothing except those flybys once right each one by voyager 2 with instrumentation designed in the late 60s early 70s that i mean just as a comparison even that that's i think instructive and i guess you have other isos at venus uh the japanese are at venus you know that you you have other capabilities there there is not even another space agency capable of going to neptune or uranus right and that could be an interesting argument that people could put out there that look even if we don't do mars other people other space agencies can at least pick up the slack there if we don't do it no one else could even possibly do the ice giants right now therefore we should do those at the expense of our mars program i'm not

i'm not validating that argument but i can see that just has a practical argument it's interesting because there's going to be a lot of competition coming up. And this is the other paper, right? The Ocean Worlds concept. That's correct. Let's get into that. Tell us about that one. This was a paper that was presented at GLEX, the Global Space Exploration Conference in China, back in June. This is basically a paper outlining what an Ocean Worlds program is and would look like. To put a little context to this, the last appropriations bill actually mandates by law that NASA examine an Ocean Worlds program, but it doesn't define what it means by what Congress meant by this. This paper tries to put some definitions to what that language could

be. First of all, it points out that there are oceans, liquid water oceans, throughout our solar system. Some of them are frozen, some of them are under ice sheets, but there are an abundance of targets, and it's not just planets. There are lots of moons, there are lots of Kuiper belt objects that have a lot of water ice on them. So there are a ton of destinations that we could arguably target in this program. They then look at what restrictions there are that they're up against. They sort of model a new program line against the Mars exploration program and sort of discuss what the commonalities are and what the differences are that you would see in this program. One of the things that they point out, of course, is that Mars is much closer and much easier to get to than a lot of these other destinations. And as a result, the mission class or the mission sizes

are going to need to be larger, just on account of the fact that you're going to need a lot larger lift vehicle or lift capability to get out to these destinations. In the same way that Venus has been competing in the Discovery small class mission, competed mission line for a long time and just hasn't won a mission. I don't think there's ever been a Discovery mission to Venus, right? And Venus is also capable of competing in the New Frontiers medium class competed mission line, which caps out at about a billion dollars. The Ocean Worlds program, the Ocean Worlds that this paper highlights, they're not capable of competing competitively in the Discovery line.

They've tried a number of times and the missions are just, they're never selected. And it's usually due to technical issues or the fact that you just, you can't get enough science for that kind of cost by the time you get out there. So one of the things that this paper really advocates for is either dedicating the New Frontiers line to ocean worlds or doubling the New Frontiers budget so that you're selecting four of those missions per decade instead of two, and then assigning two of those missions to outer planets. This paper, it's a great read. And I'm hoping we can put up a link to this as well, because you guys actually sent me the document, where people can check it out for themselves. It even has illustrations, nice pictures of some of these worlds.

It's written by several people from JPL, one person from Cornell. Can't generalize from a few authors at JPL submitting a paper, but JPL is the Center for Planetary Science in the United States, more or less, right? Yes, it is. NASA sort of looks at JPL as the go-to center, particularly for planning efforts like this. JPL tends to build most of the planetary spacecraft, though some of them are built elsewhere at Goddard or at APL or other places. But from the planning standpoint, I think almost all of that is at least led through the JPL offices. To be really clear, this is not an official JPL proposal or document. I shouldn't have implied that. I apologize. There's people on this who

worked in the Mars Exploration Program basically kind of giving some input on this paper, too. Like, what lessons can we learn from the Mars exploration program, and how could those apply to an ocean world's exploration program? Again, I think it points out some really interesting challenges, because Mars has the benefit of being one destination. You can send missions there and build up your, for example, telecommunications infrastructure that we talk about a lot. Or a variety of other things. The environment is the same. It's the same Mars every time you go. And you can learn from each mission.

And you can launch every 26 months. And you can get feedback from that mission within a couple of years and work that into the design of the next generation of missions a few years later. You can see that that cycle can happen every couple of years. That is not the case for your ocean worlds. You send a mission out to Europa, it does not help you at all at Titan beyond a broad sense of learning how to operate in deep space. You don't have a communications infrastructure at Europa that then benefits you at Titan or Triton or Enceladus. All of these worlds are different. That presents a real challenge in terms of a program. Why does the program benefit you with every destination as a separate problem? There's still value, and that's what I think is interesting here. The bureaucratic choices that we actually make in terms of how we structure efforts to

explore parts of our solar system have real consequences to how many missions we'll see in our lifetime, what types of missions we'll see, and whether even we will continue to go in with these goals in mind. I think having this bureaucratic inertia is a really important part of long-term exploration capability. Right. And the other issue there, it's not just that the destinations are different, so it's difficult to build up the infrastructure, but the environments are different. It's not really technically feasible at the moment to put together a telecom operator or operations capability at Europa because the radiation environment is so harsh that it would eat your satellite alive much, much more quickly than it would at Mars. Or if, you

know, going out to one of the outer planets, it means that whatever you send out there has to be nuclear powered because you just can't draw enough power from the sun. So there are other constraints on these missions that don't align in an apples-to-apples comparison with the Mars Exploration Program. I thought another really interesting point that they made is the importance of having long-term directed technology development. To various degrees of success, the Mars Exploration Program has one of their own, a technology program. It reminds you that, again, exactly what you were talking about. There are technologies that are unique to the challenges of the outer planets and the ice moons of the outer planets. And even amongst themselves need significant investment.

And they point out here that right now there's investment in a large variety of technologies for a large variety of destinations, but absent a directed set of goals, it's very difficult to prioritize which technologies should we really focus on now over others. How do we choose? And again, this is where I think having that kind of bureaucratic commitment of a program can really help you, even if you don't quite get the same level of constancy you have with the Mars program? Like, how do you even just do this basic technology prioritization? Absolutely. And I think the other point that they made is that you have to have a variety of factors to have a successful strategy of exploration. It's not just the medium class missions. It's not just the technology development.

You'll also still want flagship missions. You'll also still want a data analysis component to all of this. And more than that, you want an overarching strategy so that each mission follows on the discoveries of the previous one so that you're not asking the same question over and over again at different locations. You're trying to build the body of knowledge in a very strategic way. I think they make a really good case. This is where I think that the Mars Exploration Program is a good analogy. And they make a really good case that having all of these components within a single programmatic structure just makes it a lot easier from a bureaucratic standpoint, from a policy standpoint, from a funding standpoint, to keep all of these aspects viable at the same time in a way that if they are not in a programmatic structure, each of those aspects has to fight for its own life separately. And that's a lot

harder to sustain. Let me ask you guys, would an Ocean Worlds initiative like the one proposed here or talked about here, get any extra points because there are powerful people in Congress who are basically calling for us to do the same thing, explore ocean worlds. Well, sure. Yeah. And I think really you can read this paper as putting some meat on the bones of proponents like John Culberson, who chair the committee that funds NASA in the House. He loves ocean worlds, outer planet exploration. He loves Europa. This would say, how can you pursue Europa missions in a broader context that addresses more scientific questions and builds a larger coalition, basically, which is what Jason, I think, always brings up. How do you sustain these for long periods of time? It can't just be Europa,

because there's a ton of people who are interested in Enceladus and Titan and other places as well. This gives us a series of options. It's not just one proposal here. And I think the most interesting aspect, and I think potentially the most maybe challenging but high payoff, would be basically Ocean Worlds absorbing the New Frontiers competed mission line. And saying so, you could double it. You could basically say, well, you could spend more money.

Or if you don't want to spend more money, take New Frontiers away from an open competition, which isn't quite true. It's not quite open. It's a series of preselected mission destinations, about five to six that the decadal survey lists. And then NASA competes of those missions and selects one every five years or so this is kind of saying well if you want a real ocean worlds program you can do one flagship a decade and new frontiers belongs to the ocean worlds exclusively and you compete

options within that under the guise of some program and technology development then you're not really adding to the budget but at the the same time, the Venus community, you have sample return folks who want to do missions to the moon. It really limits the options of what's left. Discovery becomes the only open competition left. And Discovery tends to programmatically favor missions to nearby objects, such as asteroids, which were the last two selections. So do you see, Jason, pushback from this idea of taking over new frontiers? I haven't seen a lot of pushback yet, but the paper hasn't been out all that long. I suspect if anybody starts talking about this seriously, you will see the beginnings of internecine warfare amongst the various communities.

I think that the community really likes the idea of open competition, specifically for destinations. I think that the Discovery and the New Frontiers programs historically sort of came about because there was a lot of grumbling from the community outside of NASA, that NASA's selection process tended to favor scientists that were within NASA. This alleviated that, and I think it's been fairly successful. But I think if people start feeling as though that system is being gamed again, there will be a significant pushback, which I don't think is necessary. I think what you and I were talking about earlier, Casey, is this may be strategically viable, but it may be,

from the standpoint of coalition building, it may not be viable at all. So it's a really difficult problem, but it's been an ongoing problem since the beginning of NASA, since prior to NASA. The selection of what science to engage in in space predates NASA. As you said, it's the most fascinating process to watch in space science. It really is. And again, what we're seeing here is, I think, are pieces being moved into place that are really going to be set up for this new decadal survey report that'll come out in the early 2020s, sets that direction. And man, this is going to be fascinating, because what

we're really seeing here is this kind of fight for the future of planetary exploration. Where is Mars going to be? We're going to have samples on Mars waiting to be returned, right? And that will cost at least two decent-sized missions to get them back. Right, after 20 years of investment. After 20 years of investment, right, with the need of an orbiter. So we have needs to build up the Mars program. At the same time, you have the ice giants community saying, we could do a mission to the ice giants, but we need to start in that next decade in order to pay off in the next 25 years so in order to be

alive most of us that needs to start soon so you need to start investing in that and then you have ocean worlds of titan enceladus europa and the relevant communities of saturn and jupiter scientists basically saying, no, you can choose this whole new opportunity to really invest in ocean worlds and search for life, and we need to build that up as well. So you have three major areas all requiring significant investment. I don't even know what kind of budget you would need to support kind of doing a little bit of all of them, but it's probably higher than what we have now, which is near record levels for planetary science.

Yeah, that's a safe bet. Yeah. Additionally, the other thing that's really not addressed in this paper is how do you do the selection of the targets? If you end up with an Ocean Worlds program, you're going to end up with a camp of Enceladus people and a camp of Europa people and a camp of, you know, outer planets people. Yeah, exactly. It's not entirely clear that the decadal process

is the correct arrangement or could be made the correct arrangement to determine which of those should be prioritized and how to do that. You know, maybe that community should do that internally. I think it would be stronger if they did it internally, but nobody has addressed how you would set that up. So again, a fascinating process to watch. I just love that phrase, internecine warfare. Either of you guys reading the terrific Expanse series or watching the sci-fi series? I've been watching. Yeah.

I've been watching the show. I guess the technical term would be interplanetary warfare, though. Yes. Well, it's the internecine warfare among Earth and Mars and the Outer Planet Alliance, the OPA. So here we have a miniature lo-fi, low-budget version of it, perhaps shaping up as we look to the future of planetary science. This is why, just to wrap it back into kind of what we do, this is one of the challenges for us is to say, why don't we just do all of them? That's my preferred thing, right? Because, again, we talk about this as it's a lot of money, but compared't even know if a renaissance would be the right word. You would be returning to nothing like an unprecedented level of planetary exploration in the next 15 years of our lifetime if we just erected small percentages here and there. And this is what we have people like Matt Renninger to do, who we are about to talk to here. So you like that transition? I sure do. Nice segue. I'm getting

better. Very clever. And here I was just fretting over, you know, if only there was a powerful, talented group of advocates working on behalf of this in Washington. Well, it just got bigger by 50%. That's true. That's quite an investment. So let's hear our interview with Matt Reniger, who I was very happy to hire onto our team earlier this year. He's just wrapping up his first 90 days. I think he's doing a great job for all of you at the Society. And let's see what he has to say. Yeah, he's a great guy.

And he was at the office in Pasadena for the first time a few days ago. That's when I got to sit down with him, as you're about to hear. Matt, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. But at the same time, and I didn't know this, welcome you to Planetary Society headquarters for the first time. It's your first visit. The very first visit, that's true. I've been a member for a long time, and I helped out on the advisory council for a bit,

but I've never actually got to come out here. And it's actually really great. It's beyond even what I expected. Yeah, it is a really cool space. Although you got to see our old home, right? At least from the outside. That's true. I did. Emily walked a while, actually drove me by. I still miss that house, but there's no way they could have shoehorned all of us in and still had a guest desk for you to sit at when you make it here, when you exit the Beltway. Yeah, that's true. They had a seat ready for me. It was all ready to go. It's like I was here the whole time. You are, if only at a distance. I mean, you're full-time with us now. That's right. With the capabilities we have with Google Hangout and having Jason just

actually a couple houses down in D.C., the overlap is pretty incredible. It's like I'm here a lot of the time. I didn't realize you guys were neighbors. I told my wife that night after I got together with you and Jason Callahan for beer and macaroni and cheese that that was one of the greatest nights I've had having beer anyway, if not macaroni and cheese. It was such a fun discussion. Yeah, it was great. And it's just completely serendipitous that Jason lives right down the street. So it couldn't have worked out better. serendipitous that Jason lives right down the street, so it couldn't have worked out better. You're new to the Planetary Society, but you have been in this business of advocacy for a very long time and policy, right? Policymaking. Because you come out of, actually, what? You're sitting on the

other side of the desk now when you go up to Capitol Hill. Yeah, that's true. So that's a great way to put it. I've been swimming in the soup for a long time, just on two different sides of it. So for about four years, I was a congressional staffer on the Hill. And then I spent the last year on an assignment as the senior congressional liaison at the Australian embassy, where I sort of got my first taste of advocacy on the other side of the coin. And now I'm doing this full time. And if this wasn't just a space show, we would talk about your time working for the Australian embassy, because there's some great stories out of that. But what pulled you in? What was attractive about going to work for this place?

Since I was a kid, I'm sure like a lot of your listeners, I had the science bug and the space bug. I mean, even from middle school, it was the Jovian moons that did it for me, that pulled me in. I've been fascinated about it since I was young. But in college, I got the policy bug also and got pulled into the policy world. And I never thought that I would ever get the opportunity to reconcile those two. And part of my portfolio when I was a congressional staffer was covering science and technology issues for the member of Congress that I worked for. And I got to keep that portfolio going at the embassy. So I was the principal liaison between the Australian embassy in DC and the

Congress, the US Congress on science and technology issues. So that progression has been natural, and it's just been nice to see it evolve and actually culminate in something like this, which I never thought would have been possible. But this is sort of the pinnacle of it for me. That's good to hear. And I hope you've also heard how really thrilled Casey and Jason are. I mean, we've talked about it on the show, that you are now the third full-time member of the policy, the advocacy team here at the Planetary Society, and that you bring to it, I guess it's a really good meshing of skills. I mean, how would you describe that balance? So Casey likes to say that we have a full bench now. And I think that's a great analogy. So we have a sort of a advocacy triumvirate. We have a complementary skill set. Casey's been doing this

for a long time and understands the landscape really well. Jason has, I think, more degrees than all of us put together and knows the policy inside and out. And they're able to generate products. And then I can leverage my experience, which is understanding the mechanics of the hill, having the relationships up there with the key people. And I can go then what Jason calls shopping around. I can go shop around their ideas and their products and get them in front of the right people, which, you know, if you don't have both ends of that process, one sort of isn't as effective without the other. Let's talk about one of those products, something, again, that was talked about on a previous edition of Space Policy Edition. And that's this Mars white paper. I think that's the appropriate

way to call it, right? Which I read. In fact, I recommended it on the show as just a terrific read for anybody who's interested in the history of Mars exploration, at least by the United States. It's extremely well written. Jason and Casey are the primary authors on the paper. They got it into about a 40-page white paper that packages these issues that we're really concerned about. Then I was able to get my hands on it and use my experience, having been on the other side of this, and knowing what congressional staff need to see to be able, in their limited time and bandwidth, to wrap their head around it. We repackaged it into sort of a one-page congressional summary, and that's what Jason and I are taking to the Hill every day in a targeted approach. And eventually, it'll culminate in a sort of a broader net that

we're going to throw at Congress to make sure we get this in front of as many offices as possible. Well, expand on that. What is it that congressional staffers want to see? I mean, how do you shape your message? I wish we were the only ones hitting them up. But obviously, Washington is full of people who have their agendas and want to get them in front of the same people. Casey and Jason and I always talk about this idea of it's an uphill battle for bandwidth and credibility. Everything moves very quickly up there. In a typical House office, you only have about seven to nine staffers. So imagine for a constituency of 750,000 people, you have seven to nine staff, four of which are probably policy staff.

So you have four people trying to cover the entire gambit of all policy portfolios. So they don't have a lot of time to spend on things. And unless they're on one of the two key committees of jurisdiction that relate to NASA, the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee or the Space Subcommittee, they probably aren't putting NASA or space science or planetary exploration towards the top of their list. We want to demonstrate to them, we want to show value going in and taking these things and having solutions, ideas like the solutions proposed in the Mars white paper, there for them so they can understand and trust that we're credible. And then we become the go-to resource for them.

So in their limited bandwidth, when they need to figure something out, when a question comes up or their boss wants to know more about something that might be in the news, they come to us and we're able to, you know, frame and shape the discussion and get the right information to the right people. These are smart people, largely smart young people. But I got to think not a whole lot of them have deep knowledge of space issues, much less science. Am I wrong?

You're not wrong. It's actually one of the things that struck me and I was surprised by as Jason and I have spent time on the Hill taking the white paper around and explaining the problems that are identified in it to people who are key staffers, even on the two committees of jurisdiction that I mentioned. The phrase we heard over and over again was, how come I haven't heard about this? I can't believe this has happened. How did we get to this point? And we're able to walk them through that and just sort of make them conscious of it. We're able to walk them through that and just sort of make them conscious of it. Maybe you've just answered my question, but I was going to ask what kind of reception you get. Is there a spectrum? But are people, do they embrace the stuff that you bring in?

The principal reaction that we've seen is just gratitude. You know, staff don't have a lot of time, and they don't want to be the person who, when their boss comes to ask them a question, I can speak to this from personal experience, they don't want to be the staffer that doesn't have the answer, has to say, I don't know about that, sir or ma'am. I have to go look that up. So we're able to get that information to them in a way that's easy for them to digest and to understand and to be a resource there on the ground when they have follow-up questions. It gets trickier and there's some more nuance to it. So just getting someone to agree with you that this is a problem and we need to do something about it isn't enough. Casey, Jason,

and I are thinking strategically and trying to create actionable items to address these issues. So things like working on possibly doing letters to the administrator or finding a way to get language into appropriations bills or working with key decision makers and trying to sort of build coalitions of the appropriate people who are going to complement each other politically and also be in the appropriate position on the relevant committees to actually move things forward. And it's a very delicate act. So that's sort of what we're in the midst of right now. I made one trip to Capitol Hill on sort of an advocacy journey, a lobbying journey, if you will, for a university. And it was very clear that the staffers we were meeting with were really just trying to be polite to us. We were not approaching it with the degree of

preparation that you're talking about. That must make a big difference. And also bringing them issues that they think their boss can get behind. That's actually a great observation, Matt. A story I can share with you is, you know, Jason and I went into an office just a week ago, and it was an office that I didn't think we were going to get maybe a lot of traction with. Because of the way Jason and Casey have shaped this white paper, where we're not just coming in with a problem and saying, you know, if NASA just had a couple billion more dollars, things like this would go away. We just need a top line increase. Don't worry about the money's for. Everything will be better. Just throw a few billion dollars at us. The white paper is really thoughtful and crafts a suite of solutions. So you have different options and there's different starting points

you can do it at. We map out the funding scenarios through several fiscal years and doing it with different combinations of capabilities. So the staffer doesn't have to spend the time figuring all of that out for themselves, especially on a topic like space, where there's only a few handfuls of offices where maybe the space staffer has the expertise, the time, and the inclination to dive into that stuff. So we're bringing them not just these important problems that need to be addressed, but we're bringing the solutions with it. We're not just bringing them a problem. And so I think that's part of it. How much tougher is the job compared to, let's say, a big industry representative or a corporation who can bring a lot more to the table, let's say, money? We're just a poor nonprofit. We can't really do that.

That's also a great observation. So it's easier and it's harder on their side of the fence. What's easier for them is probably gaining the access. But where I think that corporations can get or companies can get into sort of a tricky scenario where we have a little bit of advantage is that we're member driven. So the original research that Jason and Casey are turning out is member driven research. So I'm able to walk into an office and say, this is member driven. This is just because we care about this. This is from the community. And we just want to keep moving the needle forward on planetary exploration. And we see these issues as vital to that. There's always a little bit of a suspicion on the part of a

congressional staffer. Again, I can speak to you from personal experience that when someone brings you these things and it's a bigger name or someone in the industry, you have to be asking yourself in the back of your head, well, what do they get out of this? And then you have to spend time. You have to go back to your desk and dig through all that and try to make sure there's not a way you're either maybe doing something that you don't want to see happen or making your boss vulnerable. People don't have to worry about that with us, which is really great. This is really reassuring. If this is true that, you know, Congress people really do pay attention when, let's say Bill Nye or one of you guys walks in with a couple of bushels full of petitions.

So we always talk about, within the advocacy team, the power of human agency. The DC you see on TV isn't the real DC. It's a bunch of nerds locked in windowless rooms just trying to do the best they can. And a lot of it happens based off relationships. And it's based off bandwidth and credibility, like we always say. And it's based off who you can trust. And so we're there building the relationships, and they trust us. So it makes it easier.

We all know how polarized Congress is, as well as the nation. Do you see a distinction between the people on the left, the people on the right, or let's just say Democrats and Republicans, in how they receive the kinds of things we bring them related to space exploration? Yeah, I mean, it's no secret, Matt, that Congress is polarized. It's also not a secret even the Science, Space, and Technology Committee is pretty polarized. But I would contend, you know, maybe with the exception of some of the Veterans Affairs Committees and some of the stuff around defense space is probably the least polarized of the subcommittees. So that's really helpful to begin with.

In terms of reception, I don't think we see a huge difference in the reception of our message, but sometimes what we see is a difference in the solutions that maybe the offices have questions about or the things they propose. As you can expect, some of the GOP offices, a lot of the times they'll ask, you know, what is the private sector solution to this? And, you know, we're prepared for things like that. And a lot of times there is a private sector solution, or we can talk to them about the unique situations in space science and space policy, where there can be challenges to the private sector that don't exist in other industries where they might have seen a more advantageous avenue moving forward with a path like that. I'll tell you something which sort of indicates my bias, and I'm a little ashamed of it. It's like

when you walk into a congressman's office, and you know that congressman is very conservative. And yet he has a picture of the Hubble wide field on the wall of his office because this happened to me. And you may even know who I'm talking about. I know exactly which office you're talking about. And you think, wow, is that out of place? But that's like, Matthew, get with it. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to me now.

that out of place. But that's like, Matthew, get with it. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to me now. You know, why shouldn't he be excited about this stuff just the way folks farther to the left are? Yeah, space brings out the best in us. Who said that? That's the boss. I think I've heard that before somewhere. I can't remember where. But yeah, space brings out the best in us. And that's the exciting thing about being inside these offices. I mean, just like the story I shared with you a moment ago about Jason and I, we walked into an office I didn't think was going to be particularly friendly. And since then, that office, not only have we established a good relationship with them and were able to make the case that they found interesting, we're now a credible resource to them. And they've come back to us as a go-to source for questions that they

have. I'm getting less and less surprised by those things, especially because, like I mentioned, I think this subcommittee in particular is one of the sort of the last oases of bipartisanship. And we're going to foster that as best we can and keep moving forward with it. Well, there's a nice side benefit to the work that the society has underway. We all know that we live in some pretty wild and crazy times. You know that we like to talk on this show about what's the outlook for space exploration in the short term and in the longer term, as if anybody really knew in the longer term. What are your thoughts about this? Where

do you think we are, at least with the goals of the Planetary Society, fostering planetary science and the other things that we're up to? Well, as you know from, I think, a couple episodes back that you guys did on the budget scenarios, FY17 was a fantastic year for a planetary. Tomorrow we're going to have the House markup for the Commerce, Justice, and Science bill. So we'll have a better sense then on how things are starting to shape up for FY18. But I think that the mood is positive. The trajectory is upward and to the right, which is what we want to see every fiscal year. I mean, I honestly feel like the Planetary Society

is to a large degree responsible for that upward to the right trajectory. And that's been moving forward. So I feel positive. I feel optimistic. But we're not going to let up. You never know what's going to happen, especially in an administration that for better or worse is a little bit unpredictable. So we're not going to quiet down. We're not going to stop nagging people. And we're just going to keep it going. Man, I could quit right there. But you know, I'm just for selfish reasons on behalf of the society. The company line, of course, is that exactly what you said, that we have, we kind of punch above our weight. We have a lot of influence in DC. You. You're new to this. Did you see this even before you joined the staff here?

I saw this with a lot of issues. I think the National Endowments for the Arts is a good example. All of my examples are in that space because it's some of the policy that I worked on. But because there maybe isn't the largest community around it or because the community around it isn't as vocal as it possibly could be, or the folks who are being vocal aren't organized, it's harder to draw attention to it. But because of the capability we have now to coalesce around a set of ideas, and because of the credibility that we have, I'm not as surprised. I think I've seen it, I've seen the evolution of it gradually in other, in other issue portfolios over my career. And I'm happy that this portfolio

is an exception. Sounds like you're pretty happy with the new job. Yeah, I'm real happy. So Casey's kind of a crappy boss. Don't tell him I said that. Yeah, why would I tell him? Yeah, besides that, it's great. Thank you, Matt. I'm glad you're on the team. Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt. It's great to be here in headquarters and why I have the chance, I guess, with everyone listening out there. Thanks for your support. And thanks for contributing to the fundraising drive. It's in part why I'm here. And I get to have my dream job and help, like I said, move the needle forward on something

I'm really passionate about. Great guy. Really enjoyed talking with Matt Renninger. And it is just terrific to have him as a part of this team with Jason Callahan and Casey Dreyer, who are with me, ready to close out this edition of the Space Policy Edition. Guys, what might we be looking forward to talking about next month? Well, Matt Renninger is going to have his work cut out for him here in the next month or so, because as we continue to promote the Mars paper and try to get this legislative fix to get this new Mars orbiter on the books, and try to get this legislative fix to get this new Mars orbiter on the books.

We have the entire federal budget process is grinding forward to a variety of fiscal cliffs. Is that maybe the right term, Jason? Yeah, yeah. We've got an interesting summer ahead of us. We've got the debt ceiling that will need to be raised. The fiscal year ends on September 30th, so we'll need to pass a budget of some form or a continuing resolution by September 30th. And at the moment, it's not at all clear how any of that's going to happen. And in the meantime, starting in August, all of the federal agencies, including NASA, will start putting together their FY19 budget request. So we'll be talking with those folks and trying to get a sense of what's coming down the

pike in that regard as well. And there may or may not be a NASA administrator nominated by then. There may or may not be a executive secretary of the National Space Council by then who will be setting the priorities for NASA for that 2019 budget, should it be moving forward on time. So a lot of unknowns to move forward, I think we'll see next month. I think the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and even budget resolutions in the House and Senate will be the biggest drivers of that. Not easy things to do. Also, there's this thing called health care that's taking up a lot of time in the Senate. So squeezing that in, squeezing a NASA administrator hearing and then voting on them in the Senate may take a while.

Ceilings to raise, cliffs to be pushed off. I'm surprised there wasn't any talk of brick walls in there, but we'll leave it at that list of metaphors. This is why I like more down-to-earth, achievable goals like exploring Uranus in our lifetime. That's right. It does sound easier than solving the American health care problems. Gentlemen, thank you very much. It has been delightful to talk with you and with your new colleague, Matt Renninger. We will do it again next month, the first Friday in August.

That'll be the 15th installment of the Space Policy Edition. I look forward to talking to you guys. It's always fun. Thanks, guys. I love doing this. And special thanks to all our listeners who keep tuning in. I really appreciate it. Yeah.

And even more than those of you who tune in, and of course, we hope you'll continue to do that, those of you who are helping to make this program happen. Good point, Matt. I like them way more than people who just listen. Oh, yeah. The people who don't. Yeah, they're my super favorites. We do play favorites.

And you can become one of them. It's so easy to become our favorite. All you have to do is go to planetary.org slash membership or planetary.org slash what's better, advocacy or donate? Membership. Membership. Right now, I've become a member. Yeah.

Join us. We could use your company. Join us for the weekly standardized version of Planetary Radio, which we'll be back with you next week, perhaps with some updates from Casey. And as I said, we'll be back first Friday in August. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. That's Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor in D.C., Casey Dreyer, the Director of space policy for the Planetary Society,

and I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Have a great month.