Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #15 – Congressman Rick Larsen, Could Russia Exit the ISS?

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

New U.S. sanctions against Russia have reignited speculation that global politics could undermine cooperation in the International Space Station. Could Russia cut off rides for US astronauts to the ISS? Later, Casey Dreier joins Spark Science host Dr. Regina Barber Degraaff for a conversation with U.S. Congressman Rick Larsen, Democratic representative of Washington state’s 2nd District. We also check in on NASA's 2018 budget, which is currently moving through the Senate. Did they provide funding for a new Mars orbiter?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back, everybody. It's Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, the weekly version of this program, joined once again by our two outstanding policy wonks. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Casey, welcome back. Hey, Matt.

As always, I'm delighted to be here. Great to see you in a padded room, too. You've never sounded better. I want to emphasize it's just for the recording. Not a permanent thing. At least I haven't tried the door, though. That's what they've told you. It's not locked from the outside, I hope.

Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society, working from inside the Beltway, that other Washington, because Casey's also in Washington, Washington State, something that may come up a little bit later as a little bit of a mysterious tease. Jason, welcome back. Thank you very much. Yes, I'm working from a different kind of asylum. I'll talk to you guys again. That's right. The one that has no padding on the walls. People get hurt. This asylum is run by the inmates. Yes. We have wonderful stuff to talk about. Casey, we're going to air a conversation that you had with a congressman who happens to be your local representative. You teased that for 10 seconds. Well, this is our first interview with a congressman who happens to be your local representative. You tease that for 10 seconds. Well, this is our first interview with a sitting congressman, Congressman Rick Larson, out of Washington's 2nd District.

He sits on a variety of aviation and defense committees in the House of Representatives, but has a lot of opinions about space, about the role of science and technology in education and apprenticeships. We had a really nice conversation, and we did that with a joint interview with one of my good friends and host of Spark Science Podcast, which is another popular science podcast online, and check it out. It was a great conversation, and yeah, we'll get to that here at the end of the show. Yeah, stay tuned, as we ancient radio people said. We're going to get into a budget discussion in a moment because of what has happened in the Senate. Then after that, Russia and the International Space Station, a truly great drama in space and in the capitals of these two nations. And I do want to let you guys have a chance to congratulate Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory team on its fifth anniversary, and the upcoming 40th

anniversary of Voyager. Both missions still extremely active and returning great science. Absolutely. And, you know, those are both going to happen right after we record this show. If you're listening to this on Saturday the 5th, think about Curiosity hitting its fifth year on Mars. And Matt, I remember very vividly standing with you in the back of the booth at Planet Fest 2012, waiting for that landing to happen. And I think we both had the biggest shit-eating grins on our face once we had the confirmation. I remember just like, just you and me in the back there, 3,000 other people after just kind of this exhausting gauntlet of running two and a half days at Planet Fest. It was midnight. That was a thrilling moment of my life I will never forget,

and so happy to see Curiosity still going five years later. One of the greatest and most memorable moments of my life as well. Jason, where were you on that night? I was actually at home because it was three o'clock in the morning here but i was awake and my wife and i were listening on the computer and uh drinking a pint of guinness and eating some peanuts in celebration so the better yeah right jpl approved peanuts yeah that's right that's right the better question is where were you for one of the last voyager events i guess you can have some choices, 89, 86, 81, 79, right? Roughly for our four major flybys. And you could throw in, I don't remember what year, when they were actually prepared to say,

yep, Voyager is in interstellar space, which of course is where the spacecraft, or Voyager 1 at least, is now. That happens every couple of years by my understanding. Yes, yeah, yeah, I think that's a moving date. It's just an amazing thing for me. Voyager, 40 years. Again, that's a good portion of the space age that that mission has been going. The majority of the space age has had a Voyager mission. You know what else is remarkable? We were just talking about this right before the show. There are some personnel on that project team that have been there since the first day that are still on that project.

That's astounding. That's like longer than the average career that people have been working on this single mission. That's really impressive. Prominently, including the project scientist, Ed Stone, who has had that job since before the launch of the mission. And we're hoping we'll be back on this show in about two weeks. Really looking forward to his return to planetary radio. Not this show, but the weekly version of this show, the standard version of planetary radio. I'm so excited to hear the interview. And we don't have a lot of time to talk about Voyager and Curiosity today. But one thing just to think about just from our policy perspective, these missions weren't guaranteed to still be going. Regardless of the quality of the engineering, every now and then NASA has to decide to continue

operating them. They have to request the money. Congress has to approve the money to keep these missions going. And it's not a ton of money as the overall budget goes, but it does add up. Curiosity is on average $60-ish million a year for operations. Voyager is relatively cheap these days. I think it's around $5 or $6 million a year because it only has a couple of instruments operating still. But that's a choice we make as a nation and as a space agency.

And it's just a spectacular long-term generational commitment to exploration that we've seen here. And it's just spectacular to see these things still going. Yeah, just to sort of follow up on two points there. The first about the process of determining which missions continue on. It was every two years, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recently released a report on the senior review process for extending missions. And I think NASA, in response to that, is actually going to change it every three years. Congress actually put that into the authorization bill earlier this year. So it's every three years

now. The other thing I was going to mention, you were talking about DSN, or excuse me, talking about Voyager costing less money, but it's far enough out that it's not just the cash. It's also time on the deep space network to be able to receive those signals. And the more missions that we have out there, the more that time is subscribed. And that's an issue that I think we're tracking more and more closely now, Casey. And it's something I want to do more research on in the future. Great infrastructure question. More discussion ahead. Sorry, Casey, for this program. Let's go on to what I said would be our first big topic of the day. And I want to note, Casey, that you wrote about this in a very good overview,

a summary of what has been happening in the Senate, what the Senate has passed, I guess, in a July 28 blog at planetary.org. I highly recommend it. But you don't have to go and run and read it now because we're going to give you a bit of an overview. Gentlemen, tell us, what has the Senate determined? Well, as we have gone through multiple times now on the show, right, the president's budget request came out earlier in the year. The House and Senate are now moving forward with their responses to it. The House did theirs a couple months ago. Senate has theirs now publicly released as the end of July. And what did we see? We saw $19.5 billion for NASA.

How does that compare? Well, that's about a little less than $200 million fewer dollars will be coming to NASA compared to 2017, substantially more than what the president requested, but less than what the House proposed, about $300 million less than the House proposed. So it's walking kind of this middle line. The big differences between the president's request and the Senate request here or proposal for funding NASA in 2018 comes down to your usual suspects, added money for the space launch system and Orion. You know, you could just tick that off this process every year. It's like, yep, the Senate's adding hundreds of millions of more. No critique. I was even kind of surprised. No

critique at all about slipping of the first launch. Just here's your money. Keep focusing. Keep working forward. The other actually very interesting thing to me in the Senate budget was a complete and utter repudiation of the cuts to earth science proposed by the president. So every every one of those five missions that science proposed by the president. So every one of those five missions that were proposed to be canceled would be restored in this Senate budget. And they also completely restore the Directorate of Education inside of NASA, also complete repudiation to the president's budget request. And that was really, I think, the surprising thing to me when you look at both the House and the Senate proposals here.

They really did not seriously consider or the administration did not seriously engage the House and the Senate in following through on their proposals for NASA's budget. It was very remarkable to me. I think you see this more broadly in the rest of the budget process that we're seeing, where they have proposed this huge $54 billion cut to all of discretionary funding in the United States, they are not doing that. They may add more to defense, and they may cut a little bit of discretionary funding, but nowhere near the 10% they proposed. So generally good news, I would say. And then we'll talk about planetary in a second. But Jason, did you have anything more you wanted to add to that in terms of what the Senate has done? I think you sort of covered it. I just wanted to highlight the fact that the lower numbers

for planetary in the Senate's budget as compared to the House, this is also something we've seen basically every year for five or six years now. It's fairly typical that when these budgets then go into the process of reconciling the two between the two chambers, planetary usually ends up somewhere in the middle or slightly higher than the middle of the two numbers. The real question this year is not so much how that process will work out. The real question is whether or not we end up with a budget or a continuing resolution. Whether it works at all, I think is the question. So exactly. And just to touch back on the planetary side of things, the president proposed 1.9 billion for planetary, which is a great number for 2018. The House upped the ante and brought it up to 2.1 billion, a really great number for planetary.

And the Senate came out with about 1.63 for planetary, where it was at 2016, which is a functionally a couple hundred million dollar cut from where we were in 2017 and obviously far below what was proposed. I really read this and this is, as Jason said, this has happened almost every year. This is really a negotiating tactic between the Senate and the House sides over what their priorities are. So you saw the Senate come in very strong, support Earth science. The House had given additional cuts to Earth science. And here is kind of, we flipped that for planetary science. House came in very strong for planetary. Senate came in weak. What are their initial negotiating positions? I think we've seen those staked out pretty clearly. Overall, I am optimistic for exactly the reasons Jason said, and even optimistic for earth science.

And it was refreshing to see earth science restored and really just kept flat, which I think is a really great way to do it. Here is a great quote from Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama. He's the chair of that subcommittee that basically came up with these numbers, which I guess the full appropriations committee decided, yep, looks good to us. He said, the White House proposal would erode ongoing science missions, jeopardize core operations, and eliminate the entire education directorate, delay exploration launches. He said this committee remains supportive of science and innovation by preserving a balanced space program with NASA.

Fascinating thing to hear from a, well, conservative guy. Of course, he is from Alabama, as you've pointed out. So certainly his constituency has a strong interest in a lot of this budget, SLS, Orion. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and I think we've seen, it's not surprising that people with an interest in their constituency have support for NASA. But I think we've also seen historically that NASA just generally enjoys bipartisan support for the most part. I'm not at all surprised by Shelby's statement for both of those reasons.

Yeah. Still, though, as much as I support the philosophy of that statement, what did they really cut in the Senate budget was the science division. I mean, ultimately, the directorate within NASA that saw the lowest drop compared to what we have now in 2017, they lost about 180 million out of science. And even though they restored Earth science, it really hit planetary hard. They gave no direction on where those cuts would come from, which again, I think kind of shows you their intent here, right? That this isn't really a strong anti-planetary movement, but it would certainly undermine a mission to Europa. It would make things difficult for your Discovery missions and New Frontiers missions. Strangely enough,

the one area in the Senate budget that they really called out for support within planetary was the Mars Exploration Program, which by, let's just say, coincidence, this has been an area that the Planetary Society has been working very hard in.

You're too modest. Too up, yeah. Well, I mean, this is actually something, let's talk about this. This is really great to see. Within this area, I think we've seen really strong support. The House budget increased the budget for the Mars exploration program and had this really strong direct language saying that we need to have a Mars orbiter by 2022. Here's $62.5 million to start this mission in 2018. That was in the House version of this budget in their committee report.

That was literally, I could not have hoped for better language from the House regarding this Mars mission. You didn't see quite the amount of directness in the Senate budget. But what they did is that they increased the budget by $75 million for Mars without really any explanation why or where it should be directed to. The original budget contained enough money for the Mars 2020 rover. It had enough money for all the existing operating missions. There's really only one place that that additional money could go to, and that would be a Mars orbiter. So I see the Senate as basically endorsing the idea,

but giving far more flexibility to how they spend the money. And the House was far more directed in how they spend that extra money to the Mars exploration program. But regardless, we have both sides of the Congress implicitly or explicitly endorsing this idea that we need a Mars orbiter right now. Jason, before you jump in on this, let's just remind folks, because we have talked about this in the past, why is this important? Because we're sending a 2020 rover, we have all that other stuff going on at Mars, we're going to lose the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with Mars when Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter dies, and we're going to lose that big eye in the sky as well when MRO goes away. And that's why we've got to have this new orbiter. Yeah.

And to go a step further than that, we don't need it for the sake of needing those capabilities. We need it because the scientific goals at Mars include sample return. That's the highest priority laid out for Mars in the decadal survey. And without this asset, that entire program just dies on the vine. So that's really the impetus for getting this orbiter to Mars in this time frame. The interesting thing is that when Casey and I were talking to people on Capitol Hill and talking to people at NASA, that message really resonates. I think there's actually very strong support for the decadal survey process, particularly

having to do with sample return on this issue. So I'm very encouraged by this outcome in the budget. Here's your Planetary Society membership dollars at work. If we can take some credit. Hey, we forgot to plug to join the Planetary Society. We did. My fault entirely as the emcee for this. We'll throw that in right after you talk about why they should be happy with their performance. I'm joking a little bit, but this is really true. I mean, this has been our top priority for this fiscal year is getting this in the budget.

As Jason said, we've seen really strong support. We laid a really great foundation for the argument with this Mars and retrograde paper that we put together. We've had Matt, obviously, out. You interviewed him last episode, talking to people all of the time about this. And that's Matt Renninger, the 2T Matt, who is part of your team now with Space Policy. 2Ts, yeah, I like that. That's his nickname. But really, what we're seeing here

is that no one else was standing up for the Mars Exploration Program like the Planetary Society did. And we're seeing some really strong initial support for that. I'm very proud of the team. I'm proud of the work that we did. And I think we're really making a difference here with the Mars program. And we've still got a ways to go, right? These budgets actually have to pass and be signed into law, which, I mean, there's this broader thing. Let's just step back for a second. Despite the fact that we're seeing appropriations bills, there's not

actually a budget resolution yet in either the Senate or the House that has actually set how much they have to spend. They're using either last year's allocations for how much money they have to work with or allocations that are roughly in line with the Budget Control Act. No one actually knows how much money they have to spend overall. So these are rough guesses just to move the process forward. But it's a backwards process right now. We don't even have a commitment. And the reason why is that they were waiting to try to redo the health care program because it's complicated issues of how they judge long term implications of tax cuts. But it's has not happened yet. Not to mention,

I think Jason wants to jump on here with a couple other issues that are going to be worrying us. The way that the budget process works is that the House and the Senate, the House first, and then the Senate are supposed to come up with a top line budget. And then the appropriations committees within those limits come up with their various numbers. They reconcile those between the two chambers and then the entire House and Senate vote on those. And if they both pass, then they go to the president. Now, interestingly, the budget process, the top line budget numbers, those have not been passed while we're already seeing some of the appropriations bills pass. This has happened many times in the future. And what ends up happening, because these are all

internal rules to these bodies, they can change them or enforce them or not as they choose. So if they never come up with a budget, but the appropriations committees come up with things that are acceptable to the rest of the chamber, then it's not really a big deal. But because of these other issues having to do with the reconciliation process, not just for healthcare, but also with the upcoming tax reform issues. There's a huge push within the Republican Party to try and get a budget passed because that's the only way that they can unlock some of these sort of esoteric mechanisms for voting within their chamber. So it's a far more interesting process to watch this year than it has been previously. We're seeing the consequences of that, at least in the Senate, where we saw an amendment during the markup process of the Senate budget for NASA and other agencies, where I believe

it was Gene Shaheen, the senator from New Hampshire, was trying to add the money back to science. Chairman Shelby was supportive of the idea, but said, we just don't know how much we have to spend, so we can't support it now. They've kept themselves to a lower limit, which is not a bad practice if you don't really know how much you're going to spend. But still, that uncertainty is literally undermining our investment in science, space science, right now. We saw that process happen. Then we also have coming up, the United States needs to raise its debt limit.

up. The United States needs to raise its debt limit. And all of these appropriations bills have to either pass before the end of the fiscal year, which is going to be September 30th, October 1st, coming up, or a continuing resolution, or a shutdown. So we're back into that wild uncertainty going forward. But at least NASA generally seems to be going in the right pathway here. Seems to be the new normal for the budget process in the United States. Let's hope not. Let's hope there's some. I feel like we need like a jingle or something for this budget section because we have the same, I feel like we have a very similar conversation every time where we just talk about, okay, it's a budget process.

Everything's crazy. We don't know what's going to happen to be continued or just to replay it. We could do this very similar song and dance every episode here. Now, I don't know what else you guys might want to add about this, the budget process and the specific amounts that the Senate is asking be appropriated. But I do want to come back to the Education Directorate because I am so pleased to see that it looks like that's a sure thing, that we're going to see education as a clearly funded portion of the NASA budget. I think that's pretty much done. Even in a continuing resolution situation, you can't end a program under that.

And the fact that both the Senate and the House came in with basically the same budget as last year, very clear direction, do not end this program. do not end this program. I think the Senate basically said, too, we would be open to restructuring the education directorate if you want to move pieces of it around to other places. We have yet to see a good argument or any explanation of why I'd want to do that. But we remain open to it if you want to tell it to us. And so I think what you've seen really is just I haven't seen a ton of follow up probably., and the implication there is that NASA or the White House has not really been following up with this argument internally to the senators and House members who are voting on this budget. All right, then. We can move on to that next topic, I think. Russia and the International Space Station, the future.

And speaking of the future, either of you have seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets? There really is a tie-in here. No, I haven't yet. I'm planning on going this weekend, actually. Here's my capsule review. Utterly ridiculous story, but spectacular images. You know what the premise is? The International Space Station remains in orbit and is built on and added to and added to,

and we meet extraterrestrial civilizations. There's a constant series of handshakes on the space station over the next few hundred years until finally it is this absolutely humongous city in space where each little civilization from around the galaxy has its own little quadrant. And it's a fascinating but ridiculous premise. I wonder what the operational costs are. The ISS lasting past 2024, that is totally ludicrous. I just have to think of the trade studies that they've done to continue the operation of those.

Well, so here we are, 42 years after Apollo-Soyuz. Are we looking maybe at the end of Russian-American cooperation in space? Well, what's causing it? Let's step back and say, what's causing this tension? Jason has a lot to say on this topic because this is actually one of his academic interests and specialties here. We're referencing here a couple of articles that have been coming out in the last few weeks, where in response to these new U.S. past sanctions against Russia, partly in response to their actions in Ukraine and Crimea, as well as more obviously the hacking and meddling in the U.S. election process that the Congress passed by

these overwhelming numbers that you just rarely see anymore, sanctions bills to direct the U.S. to do a bunch of additional punitive measures on Russia. They also tossed in Iran and North Korea for good measure. President Trump signed them, though basically complained about it. But he had veto, you know, they had veto proof majorities. So Russia was hoping for a more friendly administration in the Trump administration. They have not received it mainly because of what the Congress has done here. They had a response kicking out a bunch of U.S. diplomats, sanctions of their own. And you saw you started to see some additional discussion, not from the Russian government, but from think tanks and other influential areas within the Russian policy sphere, talk about, well, NASA seems to be exempted from all these sanctions in these bills, which have had very clear exemptions for NASA engagements and also aerospace industry engagements. NASA engagements and also aerospace industry engagements. Why are we allowing that if it's clearly important for the United States to have the space program with Russia? We can hit back

at them hard using that. You also saw, I believe, the president of Roscosmos leave kind of an ambiguous answer to how long are we going to continue to work with the United States on the space station. He's kind of like, we'll see. And we've seen this before back, particularly when Crimea was first flaring up back in 2014, the same guy said that maybe the U.S. could take trampolines into space as opposed to riding Soyuz. And so we're seeing an increased amount of tension, obviously, between Russia and the United States. And so far, we haven't seen any consequence to our joint operations in space. But the question is, how long can that last? So Jason, I'm really curious to hear where you see this going and what kind of baseline of a relationship do we have to even go from here?

If you look at the history of the International Space Station, the reason that we entered into an agreement with the Russians to do this in the first place had to do with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. When that happened in the early 90s, the aerospace industry in the former Soviet Union was on the verge of complete disintegration. And keep in mind, this had been an incredibly capable industry in that area for a generation and had some of the best minds on the ability to build heavy lift rockets, which are also heavy lift missiles. So from a national security standpoint, the United States was extremely concerned that a lot of this talent would bleed out to places like Pakistan and North Korea. We were very interested in trying to keep that industry intact. And furthermore, we didn't really have a very good understanding of how that industry functioned in the Soviet Union or in what was happening to it in the fallout as Russia was reorienting itself politically.

Signing this agreement with the Russians gave us a tremendous amount of insight and allowed us to funnel funds into Russia at a time to keep that industry coherent, which was, as I said, was a national security concern. One of the consequences of that, however, NASA to that point had a very strict rule about international collaboration in which you do not exchange funds. You exchange capabilities, you exchange science results, but you do not exchange funds. We changed that for the ISS for the first and only time in NASA's history. It's arguable how that turned out from a NASA standpoint. I think it was a tremendous investment from a national security standpoint, but for NASA's role in this, it's made the partnership far more difficult than it would

have been otherwise. And I think a further consequence of that is now as we're looking towards the next steps, we're seeing other partners wondering if maybe NASA wouldn't be more interested in engaging in that type of partnership again. And I think that that's part of the issue that we're having, trying to figure out if we're going to go to the moon or if we're going to go to Mars or if we're going to do a Mars sample return with other nations, is they're interested in whether or not NASA will pay them to do this. That's a direct result of opening Pandora's box with ISS. Having said all of that, the current reason that I think the United States is still engaged

in ISS outside of the NASA science interests, NASA's human spaceflight interests, the research on the human spaceflight program, it's really a destination for the commercial crew and commercial cargo programs. So it's a tremendous boon to industries in the United States who are building lift vehicles. And there's also a national security aspect to that as well. Some of the Lyft vehicle technology that's being used to build these commercial capabilities is also applicable for national defense issues. That decoupling of our national security need from the insight into what's going on in Russia really changes the dynamic of how much leverage Russia has over the United States in demanding

concessions for their continued participation. And that's really what we're seeing play out at the moment. I think it's really remarkable to step back and realize just how intertwined the human spaceflight programs of both NASA and or both the United States and Russia are and have become within a generation. And I think a lot of people accept that or just take it for granted, really. But you step back 25 years or to the late 80s, and there was some talk of maybe Gorbachev and Reagan, maybe we'll go to Mars together. We'll have some kind of agreed upon capability. You know, we had the Soyuz stuff. we had some like shared scientific instrumentation

but when they built the space station russia wasn't just a partner it was the integral it was on the critical path of that station the very first module was a russian module on the space station and nasa gave money i guess it just shows you how important it was to the united states at the time in terms of the geopolitical interest of the country to integrate the Russian, your former kind of adversarial competitive human spaceflight program so deeply into the United States as human spaceflight program that not only is it, you know, with Russia pulled out of the station, you wouldn't really have a station anymore or a destination for U.S. astronauts, but you would lose the only current access to space for U.S. astronauts as well. We have completely depended on them for going on six years now to even get into space. Again, this is a remarkable thing of how tightly intertwined they became as a consequence of those decisions back

in the 90s. Like that was probably never the intention, I would guess, right? Yeah, I don't think that the current situation was ever envisioned when people were talking long-term planning for the space station. I think that's absolutely true. But the other interesting thing about that, we're sort of in a race against time, right? We have, the United States has been reliant on the Russians to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

And the commercial crew program is not up and running yet. It's not clear whether or not that will beat SLS to the punch. But SLS is an incredibly inefficient vehicle to try and get to the space station. To low Earth orbit? What a waste. Right, right. To take three astronauts on something that could carry basically pieces of the space station. It doesn't make a whole lot of budgetary sense. But the question is, the only real leverage that the Russians have at this point is the fact that they're ferrying astronauts to and from station. If they quit doing that, we would basically have to either dissolve the partnership and end our participation

in the project, assuming that we couldn't get a launch capability prior to that. As I say, that's sort of the one piece of leverage that the Russians have. So we couldn't get a launch capability prior to that. As I say, that's sort of the one piece of leverage that the Russians have. So we're on this time clock to see whether or not they want to pull the trigger on that. If they do, it actually solves some of NASA's problems, right? NASA is in the midst of a really big debate of what to do with the space station after 2024. There are some factions that want to keep it running until 2028. It's not clear that the Russians or the Europeans or the Japanese are interested in continuing to do that. If they choose not to move it past 2028, then we have to figure out what to do with it. Do you divest it to a corporate entity or do you ship some

really large retro rockets up there and try and deorbit it into an ocean safely. If NASA's hand is sort of forced by the Russians, it sort of gives them an impetus to make that choice a little more clearly. And theoretically, it frees up a large chunk of the budget to do something else with the human spaceflight program. The Planetary Society, right, has looked into this, the redirection of that money, Casey, to getting humans to Mars. That's true. I just but I just want to point out first, we're not arguing for Russia to unilaterally pull out of the station to then free up the money. No, no, no, no. That's the most positive possibilities. I like Jason's most positive spin on that moment.

It's true. It would free up a lot of things and, in a sense, solve the station problem. But I think it would be a catastrophic move on their part to unilaterally pull out, to end the human spaceflight program temporarily in the United States, potentially throw away the $100 billion investment the United States has made in the space station. I think it's also important to mention, too, the talk that we've seen here from Russia about this stuff is always mitigated, in my mind, by the idea that they would be destroying their own human spaceflight program

as well. They've been having a terrible time in their budgets for their space program. They can't even fly a full complement of three cosmonauts anymore. They've cut back on the number of cosmonauts they launched at the station. All of their planned upgrades for the station keep slipping back in time. They're not in a great place either. If they lose the station, where would they go? They've talked about, oh, maybe they'll detach the Russian segment of the station. But, you know, I'll believe it when I see that.

So I see this as almost like a mutually assured destruction movement or decision if they were to pull out on that. And you would see, I think, just the political consequences of that would be disastrous to me. I can't take it that seriously because, again, there seems to be so much damage to themselves in that process. seriously, because again, there seems to be so much damage to themselves in that process. Jason, I know you want to jump back in, but Casey, you mentioned this detachment of some portion of or some number of the Russian modules to maybe make a Russian, independent Russian space station, or maybe work with China. That at least has been speculated about. Jason? Yeah. So the problems with those scenarios, the Russian space, human space flight program, actually the Russian space flight program writ large, has been really dependent on US investment

coming through the ISS program. And if that agreement were to end, it's not clear at all how they would replace that funding. And I don't think the Chinese are particularly interested in paying the Russians what the US has been paying them for the past 20 years. There's certainly not any money internally, particularly with the collapse of oil and gas prices. The Russian economy is not doing particularly well at the moment. It's not clear that that's indefinite. But right now, there's not extra cash in that economy to do something like this. So if the Russians were to terminate this agreement, it's not at all clear where they would go and how they would be able to continue, even if they sign an agreement with

China or with the Europeans without without an influx of cash. I don't know how they would continue to do this. Again, I think we saw a similar thing after 2014 with Crimea that a lot of those threats turned out to be they didn't really turn out to be anything that they were saying. Maybe we won't even sign on to the space station extension, but they ultimately did to 2024. This is in a sense, I suppose, is why you, if you are serious about using space and mutual space exploration as a geopolitical cooler of tensions or mutually important interest, you have to make it really hurt to not be a part of it anymore, right? Like the consequences by design should be really bad. Just a real indication of the calculus that the Russians are doing on this issue.

The other space issue that the Russians are dealing with is whether or not to continue to supply the United States with the RD-180 rocket motor that is integral to our Atlas V rocket. That has actual direct national security implications because the Department of Defense and the intelligence apparatus use that, they rely on that rocket to a tremendous degree for their space assets. So if the Russians really wanted to poke the United States in the eye, they've got more leverage on that issue than they do on the space station. And yet they're not pulling the trigger on that one either. So it's an indication that they're not really ready to do this stuff. That's a really great point, too, to bring in the RD-180 issue. I want to just mention, so the actual bill that was passed, if anyone wants to read this, it's very long. It's a lot of stuff.

H.R. 3364, Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. No clever acronyms on this one. But there's a whole section that specifically says this. And this was added by an amendment that came from Cory Gardner from Colorado and others specifically exempting activities related to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They have a whole section here, and I love the, I always kind of love legislative language. Just as an example, I just want to read this just to enjoy it, but to really emphasize this point that you're making about this need, both for national security and for human spaceflight, nothing in this act or the amendments made by this act shall be construed to authorize the imposition of any sanction or other condition, limitation, restriction, or prohibition that directly or indirectly impedes the supply by any entity of the Russian Federation of any product or service or the procurement of such product or service by any contractor or subcontractor of the United States or any other entity relating to or in connection with the Russian Federation of any product or service by any contractor or subcontractor of the United States or any

other entity relating to or in connection with any space launch conducted for NASA. Wow. Tell us how you really feel. Yeah. And so I'm just like, again, like that's pretty cut and dry. And that's, I think, why you saw some of those other like Russian policy people say, like, clearly this is really important to them. They're kind of giving away this as a pain point for them.

John McCain didn't want such a broad exemption either. I mean, mainly the issue has been RD-180s for national security launches. This is so important to us to have such a really broad thing. By the way, just so you know, we are really super serious. This is not meant to hurt any of the space stuff. And I love the response to this from the Russian space official, Dmitry Rogozin, who said, they, the Americans, say that space is outside politics. We take the space is outside politics slogan into account, but nothing lasts forever. That's true. You know, the eventual heat death of the universe, I suppose, shows us that. But again, I think just seeing there's the monetary value of selling RD-180s.

The previous threats, I think, about the RD-180s back in 2014, to me, all they really did was spook the national security apparatus to really starting to pony up the cash to develop a replacement engine. And that's what we're seeing. I mean, this whole issue is going to be moot in a few years once the United Launch Alliance stops flying the Atlas V, and they move to their Vulcan replacement, which is going to use most likely engines from Blue Origin, but possibly engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne. Notably, neither of those are Russian, and this disappears. And the restrictions that have been placed on, I think the U.S. tried to place restrictions on using them. They keep getting extended, but they don't even apply to civilian NASA or other science missions. It's mainly only for national security.

So ultimately, this is going to go away regardless, missions. It's mainly only for national security. So ultimately, this is going to go away regardless. And Russia just ends up losing the funding stream from the RD-180 sales. And we lose access to an incredibly reliable great engine. Maybe this will be the end of that period of that Cold War story where we had this hope where we could have a more normal set of relationships, I guess, with the Russian Federation. The story of the RD-180 is actually an interesting one, too, and dates back to the Cold War issue. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the federal government in the United States was looking at reducing its expenditures on military budgets. And one of the things that they decided was that we had entirely too many military contractors. So they encouraged a period of conglomeration of all of these aerospace corporations. And this was in the late 90s. And by the early 2000s, you'd gone from something like

150 firms down to probably 12, five of which were major contractors. So it was this huge period of conglomeration. Out of that came an agreement from the Pentagon for Lockheed and Boeing to enter into a dual company called United Launch Alliance, which was basically a government sanction of a monopoly for the launch vehicle market. Boeing brought the Delta IV and Lockheed brought the Atlas V. And at the time that Lockheed was developing the Atlas V, they wanted to purchase the RD-180 from the Russians. The Pentagon gave them the okay to do that. Lockheed actually had the option to just buy the patent for the motor and manufacture it indigenously in the United States. And they chose not to do that

because it would cost them a lot of money to put together that kind of a production facility. The military said, that's okay with us. And now fast forward, and that's become a huge problem. So it's another interesting story of policy decisions that have unintended consequences. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and just such a sign of the times to again, in the early 90s, it was so much optimism, in a sense, it was clearly in the US interest to keep ex Soviet scientists and engineers from developing nuclear weapons for rogue states. But at the same time, it's like, let's tie the interests of this area so tightly into our own,

Let's tie the interests of this area so tightly into our own because this is a new dawn, right? A new era of cooperation because the Soviet Union is gone, Cold War is over. And through decisions, even if they weren't necessarily thought out for decades, but the decision to just so tightly engage the process to U.S. interests, to me, displays a sort of optimism about where they were hoping the future would go. And I feel like I see a lot of that reading accounts at the time or reading about the decisions being made at the moment of trying to engage this kind of nascent Russian Federation to develop as more of a friend than a foe. And again, we're not anywhere close to where we were in the Cold War, but I feel this tied commitments was a sign of a positive thinking, and maybe that's not gotten us into a great place. But again, it's important. I mean, that was a good thing. Should they not

have done that, I guess, would be a question. Well, at least we were able to keep the North Koreans from getting nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, that worked out. Right, yeah, and we kept the Pakistanis from developing nuclear weapons. Yeah, it all worked out great. I mean, it was clearly— So here's the question, I guess, Jason, for you. Do you consider this a tragedy in some way, that we had such aspirations to work with the Russians as partners, and we integrated our hopes and our programs for human spaceflight so tightly together. And we had this an industrial base that fed into critical national security operations for the for the U.S.

The fact that we are now even discussing this as almost like a yoke around our necks, as opposed to one of the great moderating success stories of our age. Do you believe that that's a tragic outcome? Yes, but not for unpredictable reasons. I think that a lot of the policies that we undertook in the 90s were enacted in haste. I think that what happened in Russia was somewhat unpredictable just because we didn't understand the system as well as we should have in Russia. The trajectory since then has had as much to do with things like the difficulty in running the shuttle program, the difficulty with budgeting, and the fact that we were not able to send as many science modules

to the ISS as we wanted to. These were smaller policy decisions that have had as much impact on where we are now as the larger implications of the post-Cold War era. It's a tragedy, yeah, but it's also just kind of life. I mean, this is how things work. It's messy. It's not possible to predict all of the contingencies moving forward. So it's sad that we ended up there, but I don't know that we could have stopped it. And I don't want to sugarcoat the entire experience. In prepping for this podcast episode, I was reminded that the relationship between NASA and Roscosmos back in the 90s wasn't exactly the easiest relationship when they were working together right in that post-Cold War era, right? There was a lot of

arguments over funding. And as you kind of were mentioning in terms of NASA, this one time making the exception about cash payments out to other partners, they ended up literally paying for that decision quite a bit, right? Yeah. At this point, I should probably go ahead and plug my wife's book

just because a lot of these ideas came from her research. My wife, Dr. Angelina Callahan, wrote several chapters in a book called NASA in the World, where she discusses the early activities leading to space station and really highlights all of these sort of national security issues

and what was happening in the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, then in Russia at the time. I only say this not because she's going to listen to the podcast because she hears me ramble on about this stuff all the time, but just because it's a really great book, and I think it's the only serious work that's really been done in this field to date. And it's an area very, very ripe for more research.

Jason, what's that title once again? NASA in the World. We can put up a link on this week's Space Policy Edition show page, to NASA in the World. Gentlemen, I remember that period so well. And while not even all of the motives on our part were admirable, I'm still proud that there was an attempt to make things work between the world's two superpowers, at least at that moment in history. And I think it's something to be proud of. We should probably get on pretty soon here to that great conversation, Casey, that you had with your representative. Anything else that you want to add, though,

to this discussion about Russia and the ISS? Well, let's briefly talk about where we see this going. And I think that'd be a good place to close off. We won't even try to make predictions, but I think just the lay of the land here. Jason, I'm curious to hear what you think. As the U.S. regains its independent access to space, do you see this relationship deteriorating more as we no longer have absolute necessity to continue working with them? There are two possibilities, and I think that they both rely on what the Russians decide to do. The important thing to remember about the success of this program was it wasn't just the ISS. There had been many steps prior to that in building confidence

between the two nations. So you had the Apollo-Soyuz test project. You had the Mir shuttle project. These were all confidence- building measures before you could ever engage in something like ISS. So going forward, as the US regains its capabilities to go into space, I think that you will see NASA once again try to re-engage the broader community in human space flight, the broader international community with potential adversaries like China who have human space flight capability. You're not going to enter into a lunar base or a Mars mission initially. You're going to have these small steps. So I think that that's probably where NASA will start to look first, but they will also be interested in

partnering with Russia because of all of these other benefits that you get, all of these international relations, national security, economic benefits that come not just from handing money to the Russians, but being involved in more traditional NASA partnerships. I think that that's been one of NASA's major roles since its foundation. So I would be very surprised if NASA didn't continue to reach out in that regard. It's unclear to me what the other side of that would be. I want to echo, Matt, what you said. I think the intent to closely tie the futures of human spaceflight together with a former adversary was an admirable decision. The fact that it is a painful process right now, again, I think it's by design. It should be painful if you're really real about tying your futures together and you want them both to be successful, you will then be forced to work together at least on something.

That's really important if you get tensions in other areas where you at least always know you have something that's a shared critical commitment from you and a potential adversary. And so I'm very proud of this situation we have, in a sense, even though it's frustrating, it forces some sort of distance, and maybe cooler heads will prevail. And it'll at least keep us with a shared goal in mind of continuing the International Space Station for the immediate future. Let's hope. And it brings to mind the phrase, though it is not usually used in this context, space is hard. Yeah, right. That's very, I like that.

Very, very good finish there. We are in the midst of the 15th, number 15 of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, coming to you from the Planetary Society. Let's make up for that omission made at the top of the show. If you like what you're hearing, this program, if you are interested in the work that the Planetary Society is leading in many cases in Washington, D.C., in dealing with space exploration and space science, well, there's an easy way to become part of that. Go to planetary.org slash membership and join us.

Become part of this grand alliance that sees our future, our destiny in space. Now, having said that, we're not the only ones interested in space and science. Casey, you started to at the outset of the program with that little tease. Tell us once again, what are we about to outset of the program with that little tease. Tell us once again, what are we about to hear? I spoke with Congressman Rick Larson. He serves Washington's second district in the House of Representatives since 2001. So he's been in there for a while. Very smart guy, a lot of opinions about policy, a lot of interesting thoughts about the role of China in space. And he's also serves on the Defense Authorization

Committee. So very much of a national defense space investment. And then a lot of thoughts about the role of space and science in education, bringing people to apprenticeships and engaging how to bring more people into those types of STEM jobs that the country needs. how to bring more people into those types of STEM jobs that the country needs. He was coming through the district here in Washington state. And I interviewed him with my friend, Dr. Regina Barber de Graff, who also hosts the Spark Science podcast. And I recommend everyone check out her podcast,

where she takes more of a pop culture view on science and tries to humanize a lot of scientific people to talk about what they do and how they got into science. And we did a joint interview. So you will hear her and me talking to Rick Larson. And again, he had some really interesting thoughts about space. And what I like about him, or this interview in particular, is that he's not actually serving on any direct space committee. He's not on the science committee. He's not on appropriations. But there's still a role for space, and there's still a role for science in terms of how he makes decisions and how he prioritizes as a congressman.

And I thought that was really interesting to hear where those come into that process, even if you don't directly deal with the topic in a committee. All right, Casey, let's go into that conversation, your recent conversation with Congressman Larson of Washington State. So welcome to Spark Science. We're here with the Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition host and friend of the show, Casey Dreyer. Hi, Regina. Hi, thank you. And happy to introduce our special guest, Congressman Rick Larson. He has represented Washington's 2nd District since 2001. He serves on the Armed Services Committee as well as is the ranking member on the Aviation Subcommittee on the Transportation Committee in the House of

Representatives. Congressman, thank you for joining both of our shows today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot. I start off the show, or our show, the same with every single guest. And it's kind of going along with our tagline, you know, exploring stories of human curiosity. We like to go back in the Wayback Machine and think about your childhood. And when was that moment where you had your first experience with science? Did you like science? Was that a hard subject? Was it intimidating for you?

I think our listeners would like to know your kind of relationship with STEM, with science. With science, yeah. So thanks again for having me on the show. Thinking about the history, I was hoping to be an engineering major in college. I got a B in calculus. That's still pretty good. I didn't know why I got a B in calculus, but I didn't know why I got a B in calculus. So I decided that maybe there was something I should try something else. I'd also taken a sociology class. So I ended up

focusing on the social sciences and got a political science degree, which is almost science, really. No, I mean, there's a lot of science in social science. There is. The empiricism can be missing sometimes. Quite a lot. Quite a lot. But so going back further, so again, I got this B in calculus, but really had no idea how I got the B. So where did you go to school? I went to Pacific Lutheran University. And it was more calculus taught about a textbook as opposed to calculus taught to understand the concepts of calculus and how they apply in retrospect. At the time, I didn't really think that or know that, but in retrospect.

But I was interested in engineering because I was very good at math and still very good at math. I don't know if there was anything in my life that resulted in me being good at math. I just was. Good with numbers, good with concepts, good with organizing thoughts and processes. And so all that seemed to fit for engineering. Well, I didn't. My son, my younger son, however, is planning to be an engineer.

Oh, really? So he's headed off to college this fall, perhaps to live the dream that I could not. Well, that's why we have children, right? That's the only reason that we have children. She's in drama now. That's what I wanted to do. But I think the first experience of science, I really couldn't really pinpoint doing experiments or such. I think it really came from this love of math.

It wasn't just that I was good at it. I really very much, and still very much, enjoy doing math and math problems. Even I look at, I play the guitar poorly. That's acoustics. I mean, that's like standing waves. Well, what I say is playing guitar is math. It is. The relationship between notes, between chords, the acoustics, tuning, guitars, all that is science and math.

And it really falls upon my fingers then to turn it into music. Right. Which is where I fall down. I want to follow up on something you said that was interesting, that you had a, you know, you did well in calculus and then decided to move on. Did that experience, does that influence how you approach legislation? Do you see that as a problem for students that the federal government has an opportunity to engage in? Can you say students who either don't feel they have a natural fit or don't have the same opportunities that you did to be exposed to it or be encouraged by it, do you see an opportunity to find ways to

bring more people into that field through legislation? To be clear to your listeners, I don't think the federal government should be telling calculus professors that they shouldn't teach out of a textbook, strictly out of a textbook, although it might be more beneficial. My son is much more of a hands-on and applied kid and will not benefit from being taught out of a textbook as much as he benefits from looking at things and how you apply things. And so that's going to differ from college program to college program. In Washington State alone, I think there are 25,000 STEM-related jobs that go unfilled every year. And STEM jobs, science, technology, engineering, math jobs, are not limited to folks only with four-year degrees. There's a lot of science, tech, engineering, math in jobs that you can get with a two-year degree

because the technology of work is changing and technology applied to all kinds of work is changing. So you have to have some basic knowledge of technology, of computers, computer science, of math, to do almost any, if you want to call it a mid-skilled, high-skilled job. Where the federal government can step in, and we did in 2007 with a comprehensive piece of legislation that put more money into STEM education, put more money into training teachers in STEM in an effort to ensure that we were trying to approach this critical longer-term investment into education the way we approached building the national highway system in the 50s or the space program in the 60s. But we have since backed off that commitment, in large part because of politics, I think. And there's a majority in Congress that doesn't really believe in that the role of federal

government spending and investment, that everything happens magically through the wonder of tax cuts. And to your listeners, I might sound facetious and sarcastic, and I am facetious and sarcastic. However, I think I'm accurately describing the situation we face in Congress right now. A couple things there. This idea that STEM is something worth investing in, or at least supporting. Is that idea broadly accepted or do you, is that something you have to argue with your colleagues? Or that it has a payoff like that? Yeah. Yeah. I think from my perspective in Congress, the argument isn't whether or not STEM is an effective investment. It's what is the role of the federal government to do that because it's education-based versus the states.

State governments and local governments still represent 90% of all education spending in the United States. Largely, the federal role has been an attempt to equalize funding across school districts where they might have a lower socioeconomic status, therefore they're going to have a property tax base to support the schools. So that's largely been the focus, as well as a focus on first-generation folks through something called the TRIO program. Which is having a problem right now, right? We can get back to that. Which is targeted for cuts under this administration's current budget.

Yeah. But the reason we took the step forward in 2007 on STEM was because of at least a recognition by the majority at the time, which is the Democratic majority, that the investment in STEM education around the country was one that could supplement and complement what was going on in the states. But it had to be, sometimes the federal government is the only entity big enough to have a big enough impact to make something happen. And the thing we wanted to make happen was to really kickstart or leap over or whatever analogy you want to use to get STEM education to move beyond where it was. We needed to give it a jolt to move it beyond where it was, to increase its importance, to heighten the awareness of people around the country, not just educators, but people around the country, of how important it is to make this investment for the long-term economic health of the United States. Is that the primary argument is the economics to say

we're setting ourselves up for, are we in competition with other countries? Is that where this comes down to? Or just broadly, what is your argument to your colleagues as to why the federal government needs to take this on as opposed to letting states do that? Yeah, for me, it's long-term economic health of the country, that basic, consistent investment. States can experiment. We rely on states to experiment in a variety of ways on policy, including education policy.

But not every state is going to make the investment that another state might. When the kids in those states deserve as much opportunity as any other kids in any other state. But I will also note that it's sort of the can lead a horse to water, can't drink phenomenon. You can't guarantee the outcome of this kind of investment. You can't say you're going to get the next Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie. You just can't do that. Katherine Johnson. Katherine Johnson, Regina, Barbara DeGraff. No, that's fine.

There can be only one. There is only one in the whole world. Yeah. But you can guarantee the opportunity for that opportunity. And that's really as much as you can do. And I think that is why some folks in Congress are back off that level of investment. Because they want that guarantee. They want to see the guarantee. Otherwise, it's a waste of money in their eyes.

And you just can't make those guarantees. As a member of Congress, you have a staff that helps provide you with information, distill information for you. How big is your staff? A member of Congress is able to hire up to 18 people full-time and two people part-time. That number is split between the people we have in our Washington, D.C. offices, and the offices that we have in our districts. 18 total. Total.

And they're supposed to help you cover literally every possible political topic that you will vote on. Yes, that's a very accurate description. And, boy, we pay them a lot of money, I tell you. I've heard about that, yeah. The pay is not great. The hours are terrible. And you end up finding young men and women who love the country enough and so much that they'll take the terrible pay and long hours to do this job. As a member of Congress, you choose your staff, right? There's no one assigns you someone. Here's an expert on science.

Here's an expert on agriculture policy. That's up to you effectively to build that capability. Right. That's right. How do you do that? Well, as more to my point is that just for our listeners, there's no reliable guarantee that any member of Congress will have a reliable source of information for science and science policy. Is that correct? On their own staff? Yeah. No, of course not. Congress will have a reliable source of information for science and science policy. Is that correct? On their own staff?

Yeah. No, of course not. Because you can't hire a science person and devote that one person to science policy all the time because you need that person to be working on transportation or on homeland security or on education or go down on healthcare keep going down the list there are just like my office I have a legislative director two legislative assistants

three legislative assistants and someone who is half time a legislative correspondent writes the letters back to folks and a legislative assistant just half time as well a Western Washington grad by the way it's just writes the letters back to folks, and a legislative assistant, which is halftime as well, a Western Washington grad, by the way. It's just impossible to devote a person to one thing.

There is a program on Capitol Hill to bring in congressional fellows from agencies, from federal agencies, from many of the federal agencies, whether it's the Department of Defense or National Science Foundation or Department of Education. And what you'll do is try to select people who can come in and focus, usually for a year, on one issue. I was thinking this is similar to the AAAS fellows, right? Yeah, right. Sure, it would be like that. And so my point that I'm really getting at is that it's completely up to your Yeah, right, district.

But beyond that, you effectively, do you depend on others coming to you to help share important scientific issues? Absolutely. Absolutely do. And so, but as a, for instance, in the last two years, we, I have reorganized a little bit in my office so that one of the issues that one of my staff members, an additional issue, I should say, that he has to focus on is space and space policy, because we have in our state Blue Origin, which is the Jeff Bezos rocket ship company, if you will. SpaceX from Elon Musk has a presence in Washington state. There is Planetary Resources, which are the, literally, they're the asteroid mining company. That's their tagline. They've actually smart enough to trademark that line. They actually call themselves Planetary Resources. Very, very smart. Very smart. Yeah. Do you want to know what they do? Just look at the title. Yeah. You have Aerojet Rocketdyne, which does

rocket engines for the military. And of course, we have Boeing. The point is we are building an ecosystem of commercial and military space companies or those that contribute to that, to commercial space and the military space in Washington state. So it was important for me then to devote a staff member, at least devote some of a staff member's time to space specifically. Not to mention at Western, Dr. Melissa Rice and her folks. I've heard of her. You've heard of her? We've both heard of her. Yeah, we've both heard of her.

She's been on the show five times. Yeah, right. Well, her work with NASA and working with undergraduate students with NASA and the Mars Rover program is not just interesting. I think it's unexpected, right? You wouldn't think at Western Washington University there would be a focus at all on that, but there is, and it's an important one. And I think one that, as a member of Congress who represents the district that has,

that includes Western Washington University, it really kind of look ahead 10 years, what do you need to be focused on when you're planning for your job, that plan the job that you do as a member of Congress? How do you reorganize the work that you do to focus on the things in the district? What's growing? What's not growing? What's the future and what's not the future? Space really sort of grew into one of those areas where there seems to be a critical mass of activity going on in the state and near enough to my district that I put some focus on. Does that change to growth of commercial space? Do you feel like that's really changed a lot of, particularly in Congress, people's

perception of, you know, it's not just a government program anymore that needs funding. It is a potential growth market of its own that creates a new tax base. Has that changed people's expectations? Oh, yeah, definitely. I think this started in the Obama administration. I think it's continuing. It's one of those areas where NASA itself has even stepped up to the plate as well and made its own choice not to sort of hold on to the past of NASA's –

only NASA does space, commercial space, and no one else does commercial space. NASA has really evolved culturally into a partner in commercial space with a lot of the space activities, commercial space activities taking place and being driven by the private sector in the United States, which is exactly where I think Congress wants it to be. I think where even this president wants it to be. And honestly, where NASA has its expertise in the basic research, in the basics of it, of space exploration. You know, look, I think the private sector commercial space folks aren't going to be putting the next probe on the next asteroid. That's like the European Space Agency did. I think that's still going to be driven

largely by public dollars. But the government activity, like at NASA, they'll be the ones stretching the bounds of Endeavor. And then commercial space will probably be coming in behind that. And that's where it should be. And it looks like it'll be a great long, long, long-term partnership if we do this right. So you're the ranking member on the Aviation Subcommittee. Yeah. And you have oversight responsibilities to the FAA, which has the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Yeah.

And there's a lot of regulatory opportunity there. Do you agree with easing access into space? Or what's the balance that you're trying to strike there with these new companies up and coming? Should government completely stay out of the way to let those go? No, it really can't. FAA's role is varied when it comes to commercial space. Its first role is the safe use of the national airspace. To get from the ground to the atmosphere, you have to go through commercial airspace.

First and foremost, the FAA has to ensure that if a company wants to launch into space, that that corridor, if you will, that corridor of empty air the rocket has to go through, that no one else is flying through that. And the FAA's job is to issue the license to the company so they can launch, but also ensure that at the time of the launch, the space is cleared so it can be launched safely and you're not running into anything, essentially. The challenge the FAA has, and I don't have the numbers here, and perhaps you all can look these up. Again, I don't have the numbers, but the launch is increasing at a very fast pace, faster than the FAA can keep up with it, faster than the FAA is equipped to deal with,

even though the FAA clearly can do it. It's just a matter of having people, enough people to take care of these applications. The budget of that office, I believe your colleague, Derek Kilmer, here in Washington congressional district in Washington state, helped add some extra money to that office the last few years to help grow, but it's still far below, I think. It's still far below what we expect from the commercial space sector in terms of the request for the use of the national airspace. You're flying through what looks like empty space until there's an airplane flying through it horizontally while you want to go through it vertically.

So you really have to manage that airspace well, and you can only manage the airspace if you have what people call situational awareness. You know what's going on in that space you want to use. And the FAA has that role above 500 feet. As far as I know, most commercial space activity is taking place well above 500 feet of the ground. So far that we know. So the FAA is going to be intimately involved in a lot of this. What you just talked about seems very reasonable. We need the space for launch.

There might be planes. We don't want to kill kill people and then we talked about this idea of wanting to integrate public sector and private sector talking about space exploration which seems almost bipartisan what i've seen with these kind of commonalities between um and logic of what we need in space what kind of partners do you have that you can kind of rely on on the Hill saying, like, this seems reasonable? The other person says, yes, it's also reasonable. Who are these people that are kind of working with you? You know, I have my role. Yeah. And that's on the aviation subcommittee. Yeah. Yeah. I can take care of that. My partner on the committee, on the subcommittee, the chairman of the subcommittee is Frank Lobiondo of New Jersey.

He represents the Atlantic City area in New Jersey, and they have the FAA Technical Center. So at the FAA Tech Center, there's a lot of research R&D that's going on there, including R&D on how better the FAA can manage that airspace for commercial launches. Because it's not just a matter of sending out an advisory telling people don't fly in this, don't fly through this cone, this invisible cone in the air during this time. You actually have to track the launches. If it's a two-stage or three-stage launch, you've got to be sure that the stuff has a place it can fall down into or onto where no one exists, no one is.

There's a lot of research taking place from the FAA's perspective in partnership with NASA on how to not just clear the space, but manage what happens to the stages that drop off as the capsules headed into space. So Frank Lobiano is my partner. There's also the, there's a separate committee on space and technology in Congress, and they have a role to play. I believe Eddie Bernice Johnson shares, she's on your aviation committee and she's the ranking member. She's the ranking Democrat on the science committee. That's right. From Houston. And she's the ranking member on the science committee. Yeah, and she's the ranking Democrat on the science committee. That's right, from Houston.

So, like, Texas members and Florida members have a very direct interest in what happens with the space program. Cape Canaveral in Florida was basically going to die in terms of having space as an economic driver for that region but because of commercial space the advance of commercial space development and the infrastructure that already existed on the Space Coast they're using that using the Space Coast again and it's rejuvenated that area of Florida. So members of Congress in Florida have a great interest in helping out. So you see the connection. You certainly see a theme here.

If members of Congress have an interest, if you can get them to have an interest, it may not be in everything, but it can be in some things. So there does seem to be a bipartisan kind of agreement that this is beneficial to our region. Yeah, and I think largely because people see it as nonpartisan. Yeah. There's really not a partisan way to go to space, I think. So I'd like to talk a little bit about China. And I know you're the co-chair on the U.S.-China Working Group in Congress.

NASA is currently forbidden from doing bilateral direct cooperation with China on these things. And let me just ask, do you agree with that? Should NASA be able to work with China in space? NASA should be able to work with China in space. There are three countries that are largely responsible for sending people into space, the US, Russia, and China. Now, it's not to say that other nationalities don't go to space, but they're usually going on a vehicle supplied by Russia or the United States. It would seem logical that because there are three countries largely sending people to space, that those three countries should have, at a minimum, the ability to assist in the event of a problem. the ability to assist in the event of a problem. In the 2000s, we pressed NASA to try to develop just a common docking ring with the Chinese,

and that was too much for some members of Congress. What do you mean? An international docking ring, either on the space station or working with the Chinese because they're developing their own station, they're developing their own heavenly vessel, Shenzhou. Heavenly vessel, their own ships, rocket ships. But for some members, that was just too much for them to handle. They thought it was a national security risk. Most people, I don't want to say most people, I don't think it's a security risk. people, I don't think it's a security risk. I think it's more of a risk if you leave people stranded in space for the sake of not having developed a common docking ring in case you

need to summon someone up. And since we all saw gravity, we know how important it is. That's true. That's all real, real stuff. Do you think that, so in your membership on the Armed Services Committee, China obviously has its own geopolitical motivations. They're rapidly growing in capability. They have their own broad goals in space. How much of what China does in space should influence in terms of both defense and civil side of space?

How much should we be reactive to that, And how much is possible to work with it, work with them? Well, look, on the commercial side, I think it's certainly more possible to work with the Chinese. I will say this, in my view, the Chinese government's desire to work with US or Russia or anyone else isn't all that great either. The Chinese government wants to have a truly indigenous, homegrown, organic space program that is a point of national pride. And so getting help from others isn't on top of their list. So even doing something beyond just general information sharing is probably, we might say it would be in the interest of the Chinese government to do that. is probably, we might say it would be in the interest of the Chinese government to do that. They would probably argue back that even though it is in their interest, they're not going to do it because they want to have credit for what, again,

they would see as a point of national pride. And that's perfectly understandable. It's national prestige. It's important when a country launches its first rocket into space, whether it's India or it was China or Japan, it's a point of national pride. You know, you want to give people the space to do that. But as they're more active, as China is more active, I think it really cries out. And as other countries are, it cries out for any country going to space for any reason to have some level of cooperation. And I'll say this,

there are national security issues that definitely will create lines that China wouldn't cross, we wouldn't cross, Russia wouldn't cross, others wouldn't cross. And that's the reality of space, how countries use space as well. But we've dealt with things like that in the past. We can deal with things like that on space as well in terms of seeking cooperation. My personal view is just from a policy perspective, an underlying principle ought to be is that if you're in space, you ought to find ways to work with other countries that are in space. And where you can't, you shouldn't. And where you shouldn't, don't try. But where you can, you should try. Congressman Larson, thank you for joining both of us today. Congressman Larson is the representative in the House of Representatives

of the United States for Washington's 2nd District, where he has served since 2001. Thank you again. Thanks a lot. Great conversation, Casey. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And thanks also to Spark Science for allowing us to share it. And I guess it will be airing as part of that podcast as well. Yep, in about the next month or so.

as well? Yep, in about the next month or so. And also thank you to Congressman Rick Larson and his staff for giving about a good hour of their time when they were swinging through the district a couple weeks ago. Jason, your thoughts? It occurred to me after this long conversation we had about the relationship between Russia and the United States, for those of you who are interested in NASA's relationship with other nations, we will definitely be approaching that topic in further episodes. We were really just talking sort of Russia-specific this time because of the legislation that recently passed. But we haven't forgotten about you. So we hear you global listeners to the Space Policy Edition, and we will respond. Join us again, actually, next month.

It's the first Friday of each month that we bring you the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. So we'll be with you again in September with much more to talk about, no doubt. Gentlemen, thank you both very much. Casey? Oh, Matt, Jason, as always, one of my favorite things to do. And thank you for the listeners. I guess I should thank you, too. I love the listeners. And thank you for your support of the Planetary Society and the show. Yeah, thanks so much to everybody that tunes in. support of the Planetary Society and the show. Yeah, thanks so much to everybody that tunes in.

This is one of the highlights of my month, and it wouldn't be possible without everybody who is a supporter of our show. So thanks a lot. That's Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society in Washington, D.C., and his colleague Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Society, coming to us today from the 2nd District in the state of Washington. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of the weekly Planetary Radio, which will very soon be headed for Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. I will be there for that university's huge celebration of the Great American Eclipse on August 21st. Guys, do you have any eclipse plans? Eclipse? Is there an eclipse?

You hadn't heard, huh? Been under that rock too long or looking at policy statements too long. No, really, Casey. I haven't seen the GAO report on the eclipse yet. No, I'm going to be heading down to Salem, Oregon. I have some family. They have a farm out there. I'll be camping there for a couple of days and hopefully seeing a beautiful total solar eclipse for the first time in my life.

Jason. My wife's parents got several hotel rooms in South Carolina, so we're going to catch it on the very tail end. And we're taking our brand new solar telescope down to South Carolina to go check it out. So cool. All right. Very forward thinking on your wife's parents' part for getting that. That must have been years ago. Oh, yeah.

It was over a year ago that they made the reservations. It was great. Yeah. Smart, smart move. Gentlemen, I look forward to getting dark with you. Clear skies. Thanks, Matt. So that's the end of this edition of Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

Hope you will once again consider joining us at planetary.org slash membership. If you're already a member, thank you for helping to make this program possible. We'll talk to you again in September. Take care and clear skies.