Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #2: Why Juno? Why Jupiter? Why Now?

Episode Date: July 1, 2016

This month Jason Callahan, Casey Dreier and Mat Kaplan ask whether the Moon vs. Mars human destination debate makes sense, highlight a new report on the science potential of CubeSats by the National Academies, and explain how a thrilling planetary science mission like Juno gets a thumbs up from NASA.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition. This is our second program posted on July 1, 2016. And we are very happy to be back with you and very happy that so many of you have had nice things to say about what we have done so far. Without further ado, I want to reintroduce my colleagues, beginning with Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Hey, Casey.

Hey, Matt. And Jason Callahan coming to us from within the Beltway there, the advisor also on the Space Policy staff here at the Planetary Society. Jason, welcome back. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? I am very well off, and I hope that you guys are as happy as I am about the great reaction that we got to the first show that was posted a month ago. You know, I have an issue with positive feedback. You know, I'm... No, it's great. Very happy,

great listenership, and eager to kind of keep building this show. And thank you for everyone who's listening. It's great to know. It's really quite gratifying. It's been a lot of fun. And by the way, I think our listenership is going to just shoot through the roof now that we have this kick-ass new theme song by Jason. Can we say that on the show, that Jason's song is really good? Compliment ourselves. I'm a big fan. I think this is very nicely done. This is a podcast you can say whatever the F word you like. We'll work up to that. Isn't that a hell of a theme? It was worth waiting for, wasn't it, people? I mean, we told you it was coming a month ago, and it's just wonderful. I'm thrilled as a former

rock and roll DJ who lost his hearing doing that stuff. I couldn't be happier. So thank you, Jason. I got a great segue for this. So what else makes you swear? Oh, man. Defunding of anything to do with space will get me. Oh, well, then you will be very noted to know that the asteroid redirect has been defunded by the House Appropriations Committee, at least in their recent budget that came out. But what makes me swear, this is my labored way to try to bring this forward here, is this argument that's come back up. Should I tell you guys about it? It's an argument I think that comes up cyclically, cyclically. Jason, maybe every few years here, it feels like maybe when presidents are about to change and policies are up for grabs.

How about now and then? Now and then? wanted to go, and we ended up kind of sticking around low Earth orbit. But now we're talking about Mars again. And suddenly, though, in that same congressional legislation that defunded the asteroid redirect mission, you saw some really interesting language appear kind of surprisingly, which says that NASA is encouraged to develop plans to return to the moon to test capabilities that will be needed for Mars, including habitation modules, lunar prospecting, and the landing and ascent vehicles. Now, that's interesting. You've seen a spate of articles around the web. Eric Berger talked about this.

He had Lauren Grush at The Verge starting to make arguments for the moon and even had ex-astronaut Leroy Chow jump in on the Space Foundation's newsletter and make a real strong case for this. It's been this that we've had actually a couple of listeners write in and said, are we going to talk about Moon versus Mars? Because the Planetary Society, of course, has this humans orbiting Mars report. Where do we fall in? And I'm just going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say, I don't really care that much. Is that okay to say out loud? It's just between us, right?

No, it's an argument that, at least couched in these terms, I find deeply uninteresting. Why is that? Because there is no objective answer. You want to go to Mario's point? It really doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't really matter which direction we go, right? The argument devolves into who's right and who's wrong about unknown risk. It's not a particularly interesting argument from a policy standpoint.

What about the concern expressed by some people that the money it's going to take to get us back to the moon is just going to be that much less to get us to Mars in spite of whatever we may learn going to the moon? Let's just do a thought experiment here. Let's say that the president announces that we're going to return to the moon and the NASA administrator wholeheartedly embraces this idea and directs the entire agency to return to the moon. What would that budget look like? Just hypothetically, we don't even have to do that, right?

This was the Constellation program that happened mere 10 years ago. And that was canceled because it was threatening to eat up NASA's entire budget. Here's the thing, though. We can devolve into arguments between the two. And I think the point here that I think is really interesting is that when it comes to the moon, there's really legitimate programmatic reasons to go to the moon, right? I think the most compelling reason you can give is you can launch every month and get to the moon in a couple days.

You just can't have any other celestial body can compete with that. You have easy access for telecommunication. You have astronauts can come back pretty quickly. It's a lot easier in a lot of different respects. Mars, you have to launch every 26 months. You have issues with data rates and talking to them, and're so far away and it takes a long time to get there and back. Those are totally legitimate reasons. But you can't really say that one is objectively better than the other or else we would have decided that over the last 40 years. And so this

has been this interesting debate that comes up. I actually want to ask you, Jason, kind of historically, why has this never been resolved? Or is it just irresolvable? Well, I think the main reason that it's never been resolved is that there hasn't been a particularly serious issue to get out of low Earth orbit since the early 2000s, right? That was the first effort since the Apollo program. And so you could have this conversation over and over and over again without any real ramifications. It didn't really matter. But now that we're actually starting to put money into going beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in a generation, suddenly the stakes are a lot higher. have been debating Moon versus Mars for decades suddenly see that there is an end game here. And unfortunately, these entrenched interests or these entrenched preferences are really starting to clash. And that becomes problematic from a policy standpoint in that Congress and the White House generally aren't all that knowledgeable on the issues that these people want to talk about. And so what they see from the outside is just a lack of consensus within a community,

and they're unlikely to fund anything if they don't see consensus. So these arguments are actually damaging to the long-term health of the human spaceflight program. And that's an interesting, the idea of consensus, right, Matt? So we're actually going to talk about later in the episode, I think, about what NASA's science division does to form consensus. You bet. That'll be our main topic of discussion on this month's show.

Why don't we have that kind of consensus in human spaceflight? And I think it's remarkable. Maybe that's not the right word here. I think it's telling that we don't have consensus because we don't have a means to reach consensus, I think, for human spaceflight for this very point that I'm trying to make that there's no objective authority here to help you define or bring people together to coalesce around a destination beyond kind of your programmatic reach. And I think this has been this this core of the problem in the human spaceflight side of being able to focus on a single destination, because there's always going to be good reasons to go to a different place. And I think we're trying to build hardware. This is the idea behind the,

what was the, the enabling hardware, right? It's not destination driven. SLS and Orion were called capabilities driven approach. And we just build a big rocket, it can take you multiple places. Though notably, I believe in the NASA authorization bill that created SLS and Orion, the moon is basically the destination that's enabled originally by both of those. If you build it, they will go. Right. And that's an interesting approach, but it was a very specific approach.

They chose to do that. It was given a lot of thought to that, almost maybe to avoid this debate about Mars versus the moon. I think because everyone likes to blame NASA for things, let's blame NASA for something here. Part of this, I think, comes out. The fact that we're still talking about, after how many years now, three years of NASA's journey to Mars,

why is this moon issue suddenly coming back into focus? And I think NASA does bear some culpability because we haven't, NASA hasn't clearly defined its program to get to Mars. So it feels open-ended. It doesn't have a significant amount of commitment to resources to it. So it's still relatively easy to kind of pivot to the moon. of resources to it. So it's still relatively easy to kind of pivot to the moon. Casey's absolutely right. In absence of a plan, a defined plan to get to Mars or to get to the moon, what happens is there is a lot of opportunity for people with interests that are not necessarily met by one of those goals to muddy the waters, to present new reasons why their destination would be better than the alternate destination. And when you're talking about a human spaceflight program that is likely to cost tens of billions of dollars, there are a lot of people who are looking to steer this in a direction that best benefits them.

Speaking of muddying the waters, what about the call by the head of the European Space Agency for that moon village, the lunar village? Was that just a distraction? Jason, I want you to answer that, but I want to just add into this. That's actually one of the primary arguments that we're seeing right now through this recent semi-organized, perhaps, spate of articles and op-eds and debates about this, where they make this point over and over again that the international community is not interested in Mars and wants to go to the moon instead. And they extend this out to the commercial space community, these emerging commercial space community that is interested in the moon and not Mars. And so why would you go to Mars when you have the commercial and the rest of the world wants to go to the moon? So you have this idea of the lunar village. And Jason, I'll let you just explain that real quick and where that's coming from. It's important to understand, Matt, because I see a lot of loose talk about this being an ESA plan.

The structure of ESA is very different than the structure of NASA in that it is a coalition of states, of member states that contribute to this organization. So leadership is different at ESA than it is at, say, NASA. If the NASA administrator says that he or she wants to build a lunar village, that's usually an indication that they've spoken with the White House, they've spoken with Congress, and this is actually the objective of NASA, right? But ESA is a little bit different. So having the director of ESA say that he would like to establish a lunar village is very different than all of the member states being on board with this. And that's really critical to understanding. There's a lot of

dissent within ESA as to what the direction for the human spaceflight program should be, or even if they should be involved in one. Different states have different interests. I should point out that ESA's human spaceflight program itself, I think is around a whopping 200 million euros a year out of their 6 billion ish euro budget. It's a very small part of that agency beyond a very real, you know, international political benefit of having a really strong partnership there. There's not exactly a strong monetary benefit to be had by partnering with ESA on this. That's true. And it's also important to note that ESA's director made the comments about a lunar village in the context of starting a conversation

on a direction for the human spaceflight program internationally. It was never intended to be the end of the argument. It was supposed to be the beginning. And he actually stated that very overtly in a sort of town hall discussion that I was a part of at the recent space symposium meeting. He just wanted to get the conversation going. I don't know that he even cared that much where it went. I want to say two more things about this, because it's an important issue, and I'm being a little, treating it a little lightly here, because it's not one of those issues that I think there's so many interesting policy issues to discuss in space and really, really important relevant ones. Arguing and demonizing and vilifying Moon versus Mars,

like putting them against each other, is not one of those things that's really an interesting policy discussion. But it tends to be a very visible one. And so it is worth engaging on. So I do want to make sure that we do take this seriously. The other thing is that I think, again, you can make these arguments. You can make a great argument to go to the moon. You can make a great argument to go to Mars. I think what you can't make a good argument for is using the moon to get to Mars in a time frame that's of interest to any

of us who wish to be alive when we land on Mars. And that's actually what most of we've seen. And I think there are two real kind of fallacies that are being made in those arguments. The first argument is exactly what we just talked about. This international, the international community, quote unquote, wants to go to the moon. And so NASA has to go to the moon in order to be a leader in space. And if you think about that, that's kind of a strange way that we have to, because they also tend to make the argument that Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, intends to go to the moon, and that China has its eyes set

on the moon. And beyond the fact that Roscosmos just lost half of its projected future budget in the next decade, and China's ambitions are vague at best, no definition of leadership that I'm aware of involves you doing what everyone else is doing. There's a strange fallacy in there. They're like, oh, by NASA not participating in this and going, so another question, we are not leading in space. I think that's actually precisely what leading in space is. The other thing is, it's just a real pragmatic and practical consequence. You look at that house language of studying the lunar surface as a step to get to Mars. There may be things you can learn. I think there's debate about how close the lunar surface is to the

Martian surface. We can even step back and avoid all of that in that landing on the moon isn't free, right? Everything in space is harder than you think it is, even if you think that it's going to be harder than you think it is. So true. You have the situation where no matter what you do, if you're going to establish a lunar base or a series of visits to the moon, that's going to cost money. And particularly if you have a base that costs money on an ongoing obligation. Right now we have the International Space Station. It costs us roughly $4 billion a year to maintain it, run it, supply it, communicate with it, everything. $4 billion a year out of NASA's $19 billion budget. That is something that we can't use towards exploration because we have

to use it for the space station. If you use a lunar base, you have to pay to operate a lunar base. That's money you cannot use to go to Mars. And so you actually diminish the amount of resources available to the space agency in order to focus on the moon. And again, that's fine if your goal is landing on the moon. But if you want to go to Mars, it's like saying you want to buy it. You live in the West Coast and you want to buy a timeshare in Miami. So you buy like a gas station in like Poughkeepsie. And you just like set up shop there because you're closer to Miami than you used to be. But you end up, you know,

repairing it and running it paying property tax on this gas station somewhere. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. So there's a couple fallacies in that argument. And so people should just make this argument. If you want to go to the moon, just say you want to go to the moon. I'm okay with that. So you're back to that original question that I asked. And by the way, I think you said you reduce your resources to go to, you said to the moon, you meant to Mars. Excuse me, yeah, to Mars. Just want to make sure the audience understood.

Hey, because I brought up the European Space Agency, let's prevent ourselves from becoming the only podcast in the solar system that doesn't mention Brexit. We're not going to go into any detail, but I know there are some people who are concerned about Britain leaving the EU, but that's not ESA, right? No, it's a very, very different organization. The EU exists under an agreement amongst European states that is completely separate from the agreement that established ESA. In fact, the European Union, to a certain degree, it is involved in space activities, but about 80% of its budget goes to ESA. But that budget is contributed to ESA much like any other European state's budget. So they basically act as a member state to ESA. The idea that the United

Kingdom may leave the European Union is a completely separate issue from its involvement with ESA. Participation in any ESA missions is not currently under any threat that I'm aware of at all. Obviously, a lot more to be worked out for how that's going to work for many, many reasons. So that's about as much as we can say on that. The future of anything going on in Europe right now is a matter of speculation. So yeah, it's not really up to us to figure that out. No, we will exit this brief Brexit conversation and move on to our next topic with- Oh, can I say one more thing about the moon?

Because I can't get over this. The moon. For a guy who doesn't care, you sure want to talk about it. Go ahead. Well, I know, right? You see how this just sucks all this energy. There's one more thing I want to say uh which i think is a legitimate point which is that nasa is already going back to the moon like i think we should make maybe emphasize that oh sure it is it

just maybe not on the surface but cislunar space currently the one real human mission or the and the mission that nasa has on the books for the human space flight is going to lunar orbit it wants to send people to orbit the moon. It wants to say we're starting to develop a cislunar habitat or deep space habitat that will orbit the moon. And NASA has basically stated that it intends to spend the decade of the 2020s in orbit around the moon. That's pretty damn close to the moon, I think, in a sense. We're most of the way there. And I think you have this opportunity. If the international community is really serious about going to the moon, I think, in a sense. We're most of the way there. And I think you have this opportunity. If

the international community is really serious about going to the moon, if commercial entities are really serious about going to the surface of the moon, NASA can play a really important part by assisting them in getting there and helping relay communications and, you know, being a partner while developing and focusing on Mars as it intends to now. This is the essence of what we call the minimum architecture. Don't build anything you absolutely can't use to go to Mars. SysLunar Habitat fits easily within that role, and you can enable a lot of lunar surface operations

by everyone else who wants to go by helping them to get there. So I think that's something we should make sure people remember, that NASA already tends to go back to the moon. Yeah, and just as a point of clarification, Casey, we mentioned earlier that the asteroid retrieval mission was just zeroed out in the House budget. It's important for people to understand that the issue under debate having to do with ARM is about retrieving the actual asteroid and the validity of that towards the larger mission of getting to Mars. I don't think anybody is seriously talking about canceling cislunar operations for testing to get to the moon. This is completely about the asteroid aspect.

Don't buy property in Poughkeepsie. Just sail up the Hudson River and look at the town from the middle of the stream there. There you go. Extending my labored metaphor here. All right. Now we're going to talk about something that, full disclosure here, the topic of CubeSats is something the Planetary Society cares deeply about. So do a lot of other people, Jason. Yes, this is true. NASA commissioned the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Sorry, they've just recently changed their name, and that's quite a mouthful at this point.

Commissioned the Space Studies Board of the National Academies to author a report called Achieving Science with CubeSats. The subtitle is Thinking Inside the Box. I love that title, by the way. And this was basically a National Academy's committee of experts gathering to look at the current state of CubeSats and determine whether or not the nation was investing correctly or not in this capability. And this wasn't just at NASA, although NASA is a major component of it. But actually, at the moment, I think one of the larger CubeSat programs is at the National Science Foundation, the NSF. So this report just recently came out. It was maybe a month ago. I think it was late May, I think.

Yeah. So this committee looked at CubeSats, and they came up with some really, really interesting observations. First thing, just to define CubeSats for anyone who's unfamiliar with this term, the committee defines this as spacecraft under about 120 centimeters cubed. So we're talking about pretty small spacecraft, but they can go down to about 10 centimeters cubed. So we're talking about very, very tiny things that you're launching into space. These capabilities were originally designed for university programs to teach students how to do satellite building from soup to nuts. You know, you start off with designing it on a PowerPoint,

and in the course of a student's career, you could get all the way through the development cycle, launch the thing, get the science return, and write up scientific paper. So that was the original intent of CubeSats, and they have since sort of morphed into this new capability that's really, really interesting. They define it as a disruptive technology, which is a really nice way of putting it. And they go through all the reasons why CubeSats kind of match your classic definition of a disruptor in a technological field. What I thought was a key paragraph in this summary for this report is right on the first page. The committee concluded all space science disciplines can benefit from innovative CubeSat missions. CubeSats cannot address all science objectives and are not a low-cost substitute

for all platforms. So they have their niche. That is correct. And I'm glad you brought that up. I actually had that highlighted as my first major point with the study findings as well. There's been an idea bubbling within the space community that as technologies are miniaturized and as the capabilities of CubeSats increase, that you could see plummeting costs for space science. That we could just launch everything on CubeSats or swarms of CubeSats, and we could do away with these really high-cost flagship missions. And what this report found is that that's just not really plausible at this point. There are many technical reasons having to do with the apertures of some imaging technologies or power requirements of certain instruments that you just can't fit on a CubeSat, or the timing and pointing and navigation capabilities of CubeSats are just nowhere close to what you

would need for certain types of observations. This report is a really strong endorsement of CubeSats as long as their role is well defined. We're talking about low cost here, but let's define how low of a cost. We're talking about, for something that will fly in space, single-digit millions of dollars. One to five or eight million dollars for most CubeSats, which is compared to a medium size mission at NASA is on the order of a billion dollars. So we're multiple orders of magnitude cheaper here, which is what everyone was getting really excited about with this CubeSat thing, right? You can have not just NASA paying for it or the National Science Foundation paying for it, but universities themselves or, say, space-based nonprofit organizations

to launch their own CubeSat missions. As they are wont to do. And a big question, too, with this report, which was really interesting to me, which is something I had thought about as well, it looked at, is there actually valuable science to return from it? And Matt, you kind of mentioned that in the quote that you read from it. And there is valuable science. But it's kind of clear that some sciences stand to benefit more from this than others. Obviously, Earth science is going to be the easiest thing to gather data from because you just need to launch into Earth orbit and you can get something there.

You have lots of data or imaging of the surface, measuring magnetic field around the Earth, all sorts. You can put things in interesting orbits around the Earth that you can take a couple measurements and then burn up because these things are so, quote, you know, cheap. But for issues like planetary science, it's actually a lot harder to build these small things and to keep them cheap and to send them out, God knows where, you know, out to Jupiter. Maybe Jupiter, yeah. Hard to imagine Juno as a CubeSat. Yeah, there'd be some interesting power or solar, you know, solar panel size proportionality. Clearly, space physics, I think solar physics is one of those things that stands to benefit quite a bit. And they pointed out that they looked at this. They actually had these really nice graphs of the number of scientific publications over time is just shooting up that had the CubeSat as its source of data. You know, it's interesting.

In the last five years, of all the CubeSats in history, the majority of them have happened in the last five years. 80%, I think. Yeah. And the vast majority of science has come from that in the last five years. 80%, I think. Yeah. And the vast majority of science has come from that last five years. And you also have companies that are not just planning, but beginning to, I think, launch constellations of these, mostly for doing the earth science, earth applications, earth observation that you mentioned, Casey. Planet Labs, I believe, I think now just called Planet, because they're relatively cheap. It's

easier to afford constellations of these. I want to jump back actually, Jason, because there's a really interesting history of the policy of how these came to be. Right. Like we can't just assume someone had to come up with this idea because an interesting point you mentioned about CubeSats is that this is a standard form. Right. Standard shape, standard interface into a rocket or into wherever is launching it from. Because of it's a standardized shape, you also have this growth of this supplier industry that provides standardized equipment that is relatively, you know, it's space rated that can fly into it. Right. And this is how you keep the cost down is by basically recognizing economies of scale. If you can build 1000 of a thing instead of one of a thing, the cost for each individual unit is going to go down, right? Yeah. And basic economics. And but someone

had to create the standard. And then you had to have some very forward thinking people in the right places in government to then support that standard, right? So I mean, you basically had Cal Poly in 1999, formalized the structure of what a CubeSat was. And you had these units, right? One U CubeSat is your 10 by 10 by 10 cube. And you can stack them together, but they have this defined shape. And then you had the National Science Foundation, I believe, as what this report said, was the first real source of funding for academic institutions to train future engineers and managers and so forth in creating spacecraft. And that was not an accident. And that was Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

And I think the other university that's gotten some recognition is Stanford. And just for reference purposes, a lot of people will know, a lot of people listening to this, LightSail from the Planetary Society is a three-unit CubeSat, 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters. You just touched on one of the findings in this paper from the academies that I also was very excited about, and that the recognition of using CubeSat sort of as driver training or maybe training wheels for future principal investigators. Yeah, so there's been an issue within NASA for a number of years that the community has recognized. And that is, if you want the most capable individual in charge of your missions, you want a principal investigator who has experience. But that becomes a circular problem

because the only way to get experience is to launch a mission. And nobody wants to trust a $300 million or a $1 billion mission to someone who hasn't done this before. But there's never really been a pathway to getting the experience required to become a PI. So this was seen as sort of a starting point where somebody could come in and lead an entire mission at a very early stage in their career and give them enough credibility to move up to a slightly larger mission. And this would begin to feed a pipeline of new talent into the upper ranks of the planetary science community. Yeah, the talent pipeline.

I love that phrase. And in terms of policy, when you're concerned about if you really want more exploration of the solar system or anywhere, you need people to build these spacecraft. And you need to have people who know how to build them, who know how to manage this organization or teams of people to build these things. And that's not really easy to do. There's a unique set of problems that face you when building a spacecraft that don't really apply anywhere else. You don't want to have untrained people building these things. And so you get to have training wheels and actually return real science at the same time. But the

beautiful thing about this, so NASA kind of had this thing in the 90s called better, faster, cheaper, right? They had this, this program is you wanted to lower the cost of missions so you could do more of them and more often. And you had these fantastic workforce benefits from that was the idea. It turns out that cheaper was still hundreds of millions of dollars and Congress and the public don't accept that that's a cheap price. It roughly is compared to most things in space, but $100 million does not sound cheap. Think about this, we lose a decent number of these missions, right? They showed that the failure rates or partial failures of CubeSats is still pretty high. But you don't make front page news in the New York Times when a $1 million CubeSat funded by the NSF doesn't return its data.

And then they just go and they attempt to refly. They have this whole mantra of fly, learn, refly. Basically, the cost of CubeSats are so low that it allows you to fail. And to learn from that and then to develop, you know, you can take that risk. It's totally acceptable. Can you name any CubeSat that has failed that was noteworthy or newsworthy even to begin with? I can't. No, I can't.

I got one other issue related to this that I want to ask you guys about, not to stretch this out too far, but... Let's stretch it out. They're paying me by the minute, by the way. Did I mention that? You know that. I got to talk to people. The great Jeff Faust of Space News wrote a piece about this report

that we are talking about, and he mentioned something that I've heard mentioned in the past. And that is with hundreds and really eventually thousands of these little spacecraft going up, and they're hard to track because they're small. Should we be concerned about the increased amount of space debris, which is going to be these thousands of CubeSats. No, it is absolutely a legitimate concern that these are really very small craft that are very cheap to launch into space. And at the moment, the people who launched them are really only obliged by their honor to come up with a system to bring these things, to deorbit these or to

figure out some mitigation strategy that doesn't allow them to just become space debris. So clearly there is room there for a policy answer to this to, you know, either from a regulation standpoint to mandate that you have some way to deorbit these. There's also a potential commercial side to this in conjunction with regulation. If you have to have a mitigation strategy, well, maybe somebody can come up with some way that, you know, for an inexpensive cost, they will go and just clean up all of this debris that's up there. So there are a lot of interesting possibilities that this brings up. And I like to think of that more of a challenge or an opportunity than a problem. a challenge or an opportunity than a problem. Just to finish up on that, the idea of the three challenges that the committee recognized, one was the CubeSats as orbital debris hazards.

The other two are radio spectrum availability, which is becoming more and more constrained, both on Earth and in space. And the third was the availability of affordable launch opportunities, which again, I think of as more of an opportunity than a challenge. But at the moment, it's not addressed. There are a number of companies that are working on different ways to meet this challenge, but we're not there yet. Yeah, that was one of the difficulties for LightSail was actually finding, I mean, we had ways to get up into space, but also when you're hitching a ride with another payload, you go into that payload's orbit, right? And if you need a particular type of orbit, you don't get to dictate that as the CubeSat. You know, you're not paying for that rocket.

But again, we'll put the link to this report up on the show notes. And I encourage people, read it or at least read the summary. Because if you're interested in policy, this is what's so fun. And we're going to start highlighting, I think, a lot of reports from National Academies and the Government Accountability Office and NASA Inspector General, because this is how policy is made, which actually enables this stuff, right? The fact that we could launch a light sail spacecraft, a solar sail that fit into a predefined launcher system that had been created into a secondary payload, that didn't exist before, right? This is very new, this opportunity, and someone had to think of it, the government had to support it,

and people had to then really embrace this idea. And this report is a step along that way of making space more accessible and hopefully cheaper and valuable in a sense that it returns real science. And this validates the idea that CubeSats return science. And that was one, I mean, that's not a small thing. I've seen people at NASA kind of rag on CubeSats as a fad, because they don't think it really is valuable thing. But here they're saying, no, these are publishing in high-impact journals like Nature, building up a workforce of people who can then create these bigger, more intensely scientific, valuable missions. And again, I think once you're engaging people in space, you lower that cost, you lower that

activation energy, everyone kind of wins from this. So it's really fascinating to see and to understand and to follow here how space policy happens, because it's not abstract. People take these reports, particularly from the National Academies, very seriously. Yes, they do. All right, guys, as we are speaking, it is just minutes after two, not just one, but two major press conferences from JPL about the Juno mission, because we are only a few days away from its orbital insertion at Jupiter. Very exciting stuff, dominating planetary science news right now. I think we're going to talk about

what comes before that. And Casey, you're going to get us started on this. We figured because Juno is going into orbit around Jupiter, that we will talk nothing really about what science it's going to do. You know, what everyone else is talking about, which is great. It's going to be doing amazing science. It'll eventually get us some really beautiful pictures of Jupiter and we'll understand what the core is and we'll see some auroras and so forth. But why is Juno there? Why did NASA decide to invest in this spacecraft? Why did it decide to do it now? Why are we going to Jupiter? Why did Jupiter kind of get selected over what I would imagine to be or many other wonderfully interesting places scientifically throughout the solar system? So here's this great opportunity. Juno is going to hopefully have a

safe orbit insertion, start returning some great data. But let's look at what led us there and understand how NASA, in essence, how does NASA select its science? Maybe we should start with the bad old days, if you can even call it that. I mean, it's very, it's much more structured now, right? So we just talked about a report from the National Academies. The National Academies every decade for every NASA science. So here's pop quiz to listeners. Can you name every science division within NASA? Of course. Congratulations. I'm sure you got it. Of course, it's astrophysics, heliophysics, earth science, and planetary science. And astrophysics kind of encompasses the James Webb Space Telescope, which is broken out separately for unrelated programmatic reasons. But we have four main sciences. Each one of those sciences, every 10 years, the National Academies comes together,

brings a bunch of leading scientists in each one of those fields, and they spend something like 18 months to two years They spend something like 18 months to two years working through a series of white papers and debates and arguments internally to come up with what is called the decadal survey. You know, there's no shorthand for it. I don't even think anyone calls it the decadal survey. And it's a big report that essentially provides NASA with a prioritized list of top level science goals for that field for the next 10 years. The decadal surveys actually formed in response to difficulties that we've seen throughout the planetary science community over NASA's 50-year history. To understand this, it's really important to go all the way back to the very beginning of NASA and understand how the National Academies got involved in all of this to begin with. In 1957, the United States got

involved in an international effort called the International Geophysical Year that was a worldwide scientific endeavor to study the atmosphere of Earth. And this involved a lot of ground-based studies, but also the very first space-based science studies with balloons, sounding rockets, and eventually actually even an orbital rocket. The IGY is a really fascinating story that we won't get into here, but the key point for us is that the National Academies ran the program for the United States. Other countries had their own organizations that did, but for the US, it was the National Academies. And they had a standing board called the Space Science Board that ran all of these activities.

So when NASA was formed, the National Academies sort of assumed that they would continue this role in the nation's civil space enterprise. They would still be the ones in charge of determining what science this new organization would pursue. But in fact, what happened is that the civil servants at NASA, when it was formed, looked at this and they said, you know, we are the ones who are charged with spending the taxpayers' money, not this nonprofit group that is not answerable to the democratic process. And so you got, you had this split within the civil space program where the national academies became the advisor to NASA and it would recommend the strategic structure. It would

basically determine the scientific questions that NASA would pursue. But NASA would determine the programmatic method in which the nation would pursue those questions. So the scientific questions are determined by the National Academies, but the projects that go and collect the data to answer those questions were chosen by NASA from its outset. And that was the state of affairs basically until the 1990s. And it's not like that was a disaster by any means, right? I mean, this is what got us Voyager and Viking and Galileo, which interestingly tended to be very large flagship-level, multi-billion-dollar missions. But at the same time, it was kind of opaque as to how those missions,

why those missions would happen versus other missions. That's right. And more often than not, the science teams that were supplying the instruments for those missions were based at NASA centers. And that's also a crucial point, that it was much more difficult as a scientist based at a university to get an instrument on a NASA mission. Or at least the perception was it was far more difficult than it was if you were stationed at a NASA center. And I know from talking to many, many scientists, mostly planetary scientists, but it's across all fields, the decadal studies are really kind of revered. It's sort of the gold standard for getting recognition that what you want to do out there is something that is going to be great science and ought to be done.

Well, the decadal surveys are extremely highly regarded to the point that passages are written into legislation stating that NASA will follow the decadal surveys from a scientific standpoint. That is, I mean, that's law. That's a really, really powerful tool. Even at the White House, they will instruct NASA. NASA is part of the White House. It is an executive branch agency, and they are instructed by the White House and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to follow the decadal surveys. That, again, is a really powerful tool. And when you talk to the leaders within NASA, they're happy to have that direction. They really want, they feel that they are serving the scientific community,

not dictating to the scientific community, right? So they really value this input. So occasionally you will see a senator or congressman who has a particular parochial interest or finds a mission that they're really, really fascinated with. And they may try to figure out some funding stream that is external to the decadal survey process. That works less and less these days. I think the community has really seen the power of having a unified document, a document that demonstrates the unified nature of these decisions.

And people don't want to see that go away. So even if it would benefit them, they tend not to fight it. And it's really recent. Yes. At least for planetary science. It started earlier, I believe, in earth science and astrophysics in the 90s. Planetary science at NASA had its first decadal survey starting in 2001 is when they started to put this together.

And it applied to the years 2003 through 2012. That was the first decadal survey. And so if you look at this, if you read through this old document, it's called New Frontiers in the Solar System. It's actually kind of interesting how they differ. So we have this new one now called Visions and Voyages that applies to this now through 2022. But it provided the recommendations from the scientific community, and's meant to represent right the consensus of the scientific community for whatever you can define that as but broadly generally true and it gives you some big missions to go after and it also started to give you what they called medium-sized missions because there's this whole new program opportunity opened

up at nasa around the same time This was called the New Frontiers Program, and it was modeled after this other program called Discovery. So any listeners now should start remembering Discovery, New Frontiers, and Flagship. We're going to be using these terms quite a bit. And what they mean is just different levels of expense for planetary exploration missions at NASA. Discovery is the cheapest, New Frontiers is the medium, and Flagship is the most expensive. And the numbers change over the years. And there's one other really, really key difference,

and this is sort of the huge sea change at NASA in the way that missions are determined, and that is that Discovery and New Frontiers are called competed missions as opposed to flagship missions or other missions at NASA that are called strategic missions. And the strategic missions are basically selected the same way that NASA has always selected missions in that it is the internal NASA structure using recommendations about the science from the National Academies, from

the decadals, goes through and chooses a mission and chooses the instruments internally that will answer that scientific question. And they assign it to a NASA center to manage it to. That's kind of a key point as well. And it's always, almost always, it always is a NASA center. That is the key management that creates that spacecraft. So we'll talk someday more about flagship missions. Of course.

But in this case, since we're using Juno as our model, I'm Scott Bolton some number of quite a few years ago, and I've decided, and I've got a lot of friends, who want to send a mission to Jupiter. Yeah, well, here's the key thing. Why even send a mission to Jupiter? Is that even a scientifically valid thing to do? And this is where this all comes together, right? This is where

Juno now, we're tracing all these pieces together, this history of how NASA selects its missions, this new program opportunities that NASA provided, and Juno happening now, we're intersecting at about 2003. So the Decadal Survey comes out, the first one, and it recommends a list of what they call medium-sized missions, New Frontiers missions. These missions, they list about five missions that will answer a variety of very big questions in the solar system. And the way that New Frontiers works is that NASA will put out what they call an announcement of opportunity, right? It's a very nice way to put it. And this opportunity is to send a spacecraft into space. As Jason was saying, people will compete for this opportunity. It's important to understand when the announcement

of opportunity comes out, it's not for any mission that anybody wants to throw together. There are definitions established within the decadal survey. It's usually a field of about five large questions that several types of missions can support. That's exactly right. And are those prioritized within the decadal survey, or are they all on the same footing? They were, in prioritized and we can look at the list. There's actually a very familiar one. The number one prioritized medium class mission of which people were allowed to compete for was the Pluto-Kuiper belt explorer or what became New Horizons became the first New Frontiers mission. That has a much more complicated political history. That wasn't quite, I was not even going to that one now. Yeah, that's a 20-year story.

Yeah, exactly. However, you had a list of other ones, and you had this number three is where this came in in the original Decadal Survey, and it was called a Jupiter Polar Orbiter with Probes. This is the rough mission outline, and it was basically a Jupiter Polar Orbiter with Probes. This is the rough mission outline. And it was basically what became Juno. But it was of the allowable things to apply for.

So NASA had this AO, the Announcement of Opportunity, came out. People apply to it. And you can have multiple teams applying for the same mission idea, right? It's up to these people. They're led by individuals, the PI, the principal investigator. They put together a team. It's kind of like Ocean's Eleven where they go around the world putting their team of elite engineers and scientists together, pulling people who thought they were out back in. And they all compete. They submit this big proposal. They get industry on their side to do some early studies of what they think it'll cost. It has to fit within

a certain cost cap. And they say, this is why you should choose us to do this mission because we're going to do it better than anyone else. It's not going to go over budget. It's going to be totally successful. And the science has already been pre-vetted and pre-approved by the National Academies. So 2004, NASA selects two of those proposals for further study. They get an extra million bucks apiece to do some additional trade studies. One of them was what became Juno, and the other one became nothing. It ultimately clearly was not selected. It's called Moonrise, which I had forgotten that this had been competed for back in 2004, but this was the number two priority.

So notice, Juno was number three. It wasn't the next slot below the Pluto mission. Number two was Moonrise, which was a sample return from the far side of the moon, this Aitken impact crater. I forget the exact term, South Lunar Base, Aitken Base sample return to try to understand the lunar history better. And that's been this kind of perennial mission trying to happen over the years. Which is now what the Chinese plan to do with Chang'e 4. Yeah. So they're going to take care of it. Well, perhaps. And I believe that they resubmitted in 2008 for the next New Frontiers call. And I believe they're resubmitting this year.

The lunar sample return is still out there for the U.S. side as well. That's a really common practice that missions that are proposed or missions that teams that put in proposals and are not accepted or they don't win the award, they will often revamp that same proposal multiple times before they actually get a confirmation for their mission. confirmation for their mission. Scott Bolton said exactly that when we were talking about Juno as a mission on the regular edition of Planetary Radio last this week's show, airing last, went up on our website last week in June. He said, you're right, he said that you're going to fail on one or more attempts, and then you just keep trying, you keep refining the proposal. That's right. That's exactly correct. So I found it really interesting, though, that Juno was number three in terms of the most important science, for whatever difference between number two and number three that means. But there was also something I was actually found really kind of insightful within that original decadal survey.

So the way that they structure these big reports out is that they have these teams over various scientific sub-disciplines within planetary science so they have a mars chapter they have an inner planets chapter they have an a giant planets chapter you know they ice giants you know they kind of scientists tend to specialize of these certain types of things in planetary science and each chapter had the top recommendations for their field that were then all mushed together for the overall rankings. And if you look at the giant planets chapter of the original decadal survey, Juno, what became Juno, the Jupiter polar orbiter mission, that was essentially the only thing that they recommended.

That, I think, is an important political thing here, because that showed that this community within planetary science was very strongly united behind this as being the top science goal of their discipline, to understand the core of Jupiter and the Jupiter magnetic field around it. Well, their top goal within this price category. Yes, right. But that is the I mean, the other thing that they prioritize was just continue operating the Cassini mission. That was the extent that it went. And I think that means something when NASA is looking at a selection here, if they're trying to choose what is the level of unity behind the community? Is it divisive?

Or is this really a top tier mission that will answer a need that this community has identified? So I thought that was fascinating. And that's actually a good segue into another major difference about this program, this and the Discovery Program from the strategic missions, is how exactly these missions are selected within NASA. Now, the strategic missions, as I mentioned a minute ago, are selected basically by civil servants, right? They're determined from within NASA's structure. But the competed missions are not. The way that they are selected is the chief scientist for the New Frontiers Program or the Discovery Program helps to put together two committees for the

initial selection. So you'll have all of the proposals come in for the AO. And then there are two committees that are established of outsiders, primarily from NASA. These are people who are selected by NASA who have to go through very, very strict conflict of interest requirements. And they come in to select the missions based on different criteria. The first board looks at cost, technical capability, and the management program set up within the proposal. And the other committee looks at the science. Now, these two committees remain completely separate from each other.

They can ask each other for information or clarification, but they basically stay very separate. And then those scores are brought together. verification, but they basically stay very separate. And then those scores are brought together and the rankings from those two committees are mixed and whoever gets the highest ranking moves into the step two selection. So you go from, in discovery, usually 20 to 30 proposals down to three to five. Whereas with New Frontiers, it's usually probably three to five proposals, and you'll go down to two or three. The second step of this, the step two selection, basically you merge those two committees into a single committee, still of external people, still with conflict of interest disclosures,

and they are the ones who then choose the mission. It's not internal at NASA at all, and that's a key point to understand. And it's one of the reasons that you have so much support for these programs from the community is that they really feel that this balances out any possible bias from the selection process for strategic missions at NASA. Juno first applied to be selected in 2003. NASA. Juno first applied to be selected in 2003. It passed its first round of selection in 2004 when it was selected down to two, basically, as you were just saying. And then it took until 2005 for this entire process to finish. So this was a two-year process from submission to acceptance.

And I guarantee you they were working on this mission idea for years before this. 2005, it enters into, I guess, phase B is this in terms of the engineering cycle of how these things work. A great topic for another podcast, by the way. From there, it did not launch until 2011. So it was six years from when it was committed to before it launched, and of course now five years since then. You can see why, again, spacecraft basically are your one career,

in a sense, particularly for outer planets. This is a good six, how many years are we talking about now? I guess 13 years from its first application. We're talking about probably 15 years of their life, of Scott's life here. This is why you want to have a lot of these opportunities out there. Because if you didn't get selected for this mission, you don't have that many more opportunities in the course of your own lifetime to resubmit a mission idea. This is one of the reasons that we try to make sure we have

what we call a high cadence of missions. But anyway, Juno obviously was selected. They went through the whole development process. And this is kind of the fun part. Jason, I was sending you this over chat the other day. The idea that these missions are cost-capped, right? In order to keep the cost down. And generally, they do cost less than strategic missions.

It's very clear in the original announcement of Opportunity that this mission will cost no more than $700 million of $2,003, including the launch vehicle, including all phases of the mission. The mission ultimately cost $1.1 billion, and it is absolutely on budget, according to how NASA characterizes its budget. So I don't know what cost-capped exactly means, but it seems to be more of an ambition.

I mean, they do this because the actual definition of what the budget will be doesn't happen until they've already spent hundreds, if not tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars defining and understanding exactly what they need to build and build it in a way that they finalize the designs of it. Right. And it's also true NASA, their internal programmatic structure may change and money that was not initially thought that would be available

when this mission was accepted suddenly becomes available for any of a number of reasons. So maybe NASA is able to give them more money and able to get more science out of the mission as well. This is rarely a matter of cost growth. It's usually a matter of capability growth. I don't want to ding them on this. They have done a fantastic job on this mission and are within exactly the budget that they formally set out for themselves. But it's an interesting change of how these work. Their cost and schedule performance was excellent, yeah.

But does this explain what happened to those probes that were mentioned in the decadal survey that you told us about a moment ago, Casey? Probes are expensive. Right, that's kind of interesting. I saw that in the decadal survey, it says we need to understand the, basically it's to characterize the gas giant of Jupiter, right? And I actually have the text here. You know, they're saying the centerpiece of our effort should be a dedicated mission. And they wanted three entry probes is what they recommended.

And it would help you understand the inside of Jupiter, basically. They just don't understand very well. They don't understand what kind of core it is. And also just like what kinds of chemicals and molecular makeup of the atmosphere is, right? You had this one probe that went down with Galileo back in the, I guess, the 90s. And when it went down, it was designed in probably the early 80s. And it went into basically a very uninteresting, it had a bad luck when they dropped it into Jupiter's atmosphere. It went into a very boring, uncharacteristic spot of the atmosphere. when they dropped it into Jupiter's atmosphere, it went into a very boring, uncharacteristic spot of the atmosphere.

So they wanted to drop all these multiple probes throughout Jupiter to help take a series of measurements. In the context of an AO, the Announcement of Opportunity, the people who intend to submit for these missions have a series of questions and answers that NASA will formally answer to the entire group of people competing for this. And you can see a really clear question was posed by obviously what was ended up being the Juno team saying, should a mission be proposed to Jupiter without the probes, but gets the majority of the other science goals of the decadal survey, would you still consider this mission? And NASA basically said,

sure. And so I think what happened was they were doing their internal studies of what they wanted to build as a spacecraft, and they saw no possible way to have the probes and all these other mission science goals. They just could not fit that within $700 million at the time. That would be my guess as to what happened. You can actually look, there's several instruments on that mission that gets you kind of half the way there. There's ways that they will be measuring the composition of the clouds through remote sensing as opposed to dropping things directly into them. But again, kind of an interesting consequence of you put a cost cap, well, you can't do all your science. And that's exactly kind of the intent of it, right? If you had just done cap, well, you can't do all your science. And that's exactly kind of

the intent of it, right? If you had just done everything, it probably would have cost a lot more than they intended. And you would have maybe one fewer other mission out there that NASA's exploring this planets with, that you'd trade it off for a much more robust Jupiter mission. And of course, over the course of these multi-year processes of figuring out what mission you're going to send and what it's going to look like, the capability to do science improves enormously. I mean, the advances in remote sensing have been tremendous in the last 10 or 20 years. And so obviously, Juno is benefiting from that as well. So you got this handful of missions, barely even a handful, that actually are going to make it into space. But

there are so many other great concepts out there and great scientists who want to see these missions fly. How do you maintain a sense of balance with so much to explore and learn? Well, that goes back to what Casey was talking about a moment ago with the cadence of flight missions, right? Each of these different mission classes, the flagships, the new frontiers, and the discovery missions fly at different rates because of the complexity of these missions. It's much easier to build a small mission in a short period of time than it is a flagship. And fun, by the way. And fun. The goal for the discovery program is to launch a mission, according to the decadal survey, every 18 months.

Now, in reality, it's been longer than that. It's been closer to about every three years. And I think that might be the cadence that's in the new AO. That's the goal. At the moment, we're actually at a cadence of about 56 months because of the budget cuts. But the goal is to return to three years. The scientific community wanted 24 months. The original recommendation was 18.

Yeah, ambitious is what it was. Right. Well, to fly every 18 months, you couldn't have the cost cap that we currently have for Discovery, which is, I think, $500 million in the current? As of now, yeah. As of now, it's $500 million, and that doesn't include a launch vehicle. That's significantly higher than what the Discovery Program initially started at. It's an increase of close to 40% from the initial program cap. But that higher flight rate allows more missions, which allows you to launch to a larger variety of destinations, right?

So the New Frontiers Program, they try to launch one of those about every five years. And we're currently a little behind schedule on that. Although this budget looks to be pushing that to try and get back to a five-year cadence. Our new one does. Yeah. But I think right now we're at a roughly eight to 10 year cadence. Yeah. It's really, really bad at the moment. But this is the result of the 2011 budget and sort of the fallout. 2013 budget. 2013 budget and the fallout from that.

Casey, this cadence, I know, and you may not be ready to get to this, but I know we will get to it, is something that the Planetary Society has been pretty clear about, the society's feelings about this. Yeah, we're for it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the, but I mean, yeah, absolutely.

It's because we talk mainly about a balanced program of planetary exploration. In order to do that, you have to have a decent number of missions getting out there. And you have to have a decent number of types of missions for the health of the overall workforce and the scientific community. Again, your discovery missions, the smallest ones, it's really hard to send a cost cap mission out to the outer planets just because outer planets are tough. You know, they're far away. It's really cold. There's very little solar energy to use solar panels with. You have to pay your team a salary for the five years it takes you to get out to the outer planets or longer. You know, this is overhead for that. It's immense. So that's why you see smaller missions tend to go into the

inner rocky bodies. New Frontiers missions are kind of interesting because if you don't get your preferred destination in that list of pre-approved New Frontiers destinations, you're kind of screwed for a decade. This is an interesting topic. I mean, and so it can't respond very quickly to new discoveries. We knew a little bit about Enceladus when this first thing came out, but we didn't know the extent that we do now, right? Same with a variety of other, the ocean, the amount of water out in the outer solar system, I think has been a discovery over the last few years and hasn't been, was not really taken into account

in the current decadal survey. So if you want to go to Enceladus under a New Frontiers mission, you can't. I mean, until actually very recently when this whole ocean worlds thing changed the decadal surveys recommendations a bit. There's a balance you have to strike, and that's why we kind of leave this up to the scientific community

to say, what are your most important questions? And the very active prioritization means that some places kind of lose out. But that's overall good for the health of everybody. You don't want a community fractured and fighting internally. This would be like the Mars versus the moon, right? In the human spaceflight side, you cannot get agreement. It's been impossible to get consensus over 40 years between the human spaceflight community. And to what end? Well, they've gone to neither destination. You have here on the science side,

when NASA selects its science, it depends on, and I think this has demonstrated incredible effectiveness, that the scientific community has been able to reach a level of consensus that they are politically able to support for a decade at a time. And NASA, you look at what NASA is doing in planetary science, Mars 2020, sample return. That was the top recommendation of the Decatur Survey. Europa mission, number two top strategic mission. You're doing mission OSIRIS-REx going at the asteroid sample return. That was on the New Frontiers list, right? You get this incredible benefit to science because scientists have, you know, are generally able to agree what the biggest scientific questions are in solar system science. That is a hugely

important thing and very, very beneficial to everybody. Keep in mind here, too, that it's not that these decisions are easily made. There is a lot of fighting in the process of putting together the decadal. But once the decadal survey comes out, the community aligns behind it. It doesn't mean that there aren't still a few people out there grumbling, you know, why aren't we going to Uranus and or Neptune? It's always going to be that way. Absolutely. It's their career. I mean, they are sitting around waiting for three to five to 10 years for another mission. But they also know that fighting means that they will never get that mission. That's the carrot and the stick. So Juno, again, so this is what's been fun about Juno is seeing the process that has been a relatively new process

that was established 15-ish years ago is really starting to pay us debit. We saw this last year with New Horizons flying by Pluto. We saw it, we're about to see it with Juno. We're seeing it now with Europa and Mars 2020 coming forward. And we're also here in OSIRIS-REx launching at the end of the year to address another major goal in the scientific community. Fascinating discussion, guys. Any closing comments before we end this second edition of the Space Policy Edition?

You know, as I said last episode, that human spaceflight policy is one of the most kind of contentious and it dominates a lot of the attention. So I've been really, this has been fun because there's, as I said, there's science selection policy. There was so much we could not talk about that was still beyond this that there's going to be so many more fun things to come. So this is just a taste of what's out there. This is how this stuff works. It's amazing how much effort goes into this stuff. I can't wait to go into this. Yeah, I feel the same way. This podcast sort of resulted from conversations that Casey and I were having on the phone every Friday anyway. So this is really just a lot of fun for us. We do try to temper the bad language, though.

And I'm glad to be able to make it into a triad. Gentlemen, thank you so much. We're going to be back on the first Friday of August with the third edition of the Space Policy Edition. We want to hear from you about any of these topics that we've talked about on today's show, Moon versus Mars, how science missions like Juno get selected, and CubeSats, what's their role going to be, what should it be, or anything else that you might want to hear on an upcoming edition of this Space Policy Edition. So write to us. You can write to planetaryradio at planetary.org, or you can comment on the program page where you are hearing this, whether you're in SoundCloud or at planetary.org or anyplace else that you might be catching this program. Gentlemen, did you have any other thoughts about getting reactions?

I love getting the feedback from people. Just no angry Twitter eggs, please. Yeah, I was actually really pleasantly surprised with the feedback that we got. It was for, from my part, it was all really, really intelligent questions and very, very gracious comments on the show. I was, I was really happy. And let's say too, if we didn't get to some of your topics that were suggested the first time around, we haven't forgotten about them. We just have lots to choose from. And I hope to get to all of those in due course of this program. It's a long game we're playing here.

Jason Callahan, Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society. Keep walking those halls in D.C., Jason. Will do. And Casey, Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. We'll be talking to you soon, too. Absolutely, Matt. Can't wait to be back next month. If you like what you've heard, well, you can thank the Planetary Society. We'll be talking to you soon, too. Absolutely, Matt. Can't wait to be back next month. If you like what you've heard, well, you can thank the Planetary Society.

And the best way to do that is to go to planetary.org and consider becoming a member. Read about all the terrific benefits, including supporting programs like this and the activities that Jason and Casey and Bill Nye and others have underway in Washington to make sure that we remain a space-faring society and boosting all of these missions,

which we will be talking about on this program. That's planetary.org. We would love to have you join us. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of this program, but also our weekly Planetary Radio series, which comes out every Monday evening, early Tuesday morning. And as we speak, the next program is going to be featuring somebody who has devoted most of her life to space policy. And that's Lori Garver, the former deputy administrator of NASA. And we'll get her on this show, I hope, someday.

She said she's interested. With that, we will bid you adieu. Enjoy Juno orbiting Jupiter. Keep those fingers crossed if you're hearing this before the 4th of July, and we will look forward to great science from Juno as a result of this process that you've just heard us talk about. This has been Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition from the Planetary Society. Have a great month.