Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #20: Looking back on the year in space policy. Also, your questions!

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

It’s the space policy guys’ turn to look back at a year that saw great achievements in space. Were they matched by events in Washington DC?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everybody, it's Matt. Don't worry, the new SPE is just moments away, but there is on Monday the 5th, the Monday following when we would normally do the show. So right now, we're going to hold off on doing the show until the second Friday. That would be February 9th, 2018. February 9th, 2018. But stay tuned because, as you know, things do tend to slip a bit, especially on the ice right now in D.C. So who knows, we might be back to going on the 2nd. We'll alert you on the website, we'll tweet it out,

and I will certainly keep you up to date on the weekly version of Planetary Radio as to when you can expect to hear the February edition of the Space Policy Edition. The January edition starts now. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, back with this monthly special edition of the show where we talk all things policy and advocacy with two members of the space policy and advocacy staff at the Planetary Society. Casey Dreyer is with us again.

He's the director of space policy. Casey, howdy. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jason. And Happy New Year to everybody listening. Happy New Year, yes. And Jason, space policy advisor in the Belt listening. Happy New Year. Yes. And Jason, space policy advisor in the Beltway in Washington, DC, where pretty much everything we talk about

every month is centered. Jason, welcome back to the show. Thanks, guys. Good to be back. It's very quiet here in the Beltway. Between Christmas and New Year's, basically the entire town just flees to parts elsewhere. So it's been really nice. Welcome relief. Yes, absolutely. Hey, how cold is it there? Has it reached down south to where you are? Oh, it's about nine here.

And that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius. All right. Well, stay warm. You can use the new Frontier selection to keep you warm at night, Jason, and all the potential science thoughts. Puddle under the bed covers. It'll be very nice. Gentlemen, before we get underway with this special program,

and a lot of our listeners may remember that we said that we would review 2017 with this show, but that we also would try to address some of the many questions and comments and thoughts that we've received from listeners to the Space Policy Edition, which we will be doing in a moment. But even though when you hear this, the new year will have started, we want to let you know that supporting the Planetary Society, which means you would also be supporting this program and all of Planetary Radio and everything else the society does, is something that we still would very much love all of you to do, either by becoming a member by going to planetary.org membership, or you can go

to planetary.org donate. You can direct your donation to just the space policy and advocacy work of the society or to Planetary Radio. You can designate it or you can not designate it and it will benefit everything that we do. But I guess most of all, would you guys agree we're looking for new members because members are the core of the Planetary Society? Yeah, absolutely. Whenever we walk into a new congressional office, we open with how many people we have as members. It's a sign of our respectability and credibility, and it really gives us a good platform to engage people with. So it's not just the money. It's not, which, of course, is important because it allows us to do all this.

Don't get me wrong. But, you know, as Casey says, for us to be able to say we are the largest space advocacy group on this planet, that does make people sit up and take notice in the Beltway. Yes, absolutely. And then also, just as a plug, I know our development officer would want us to mention this. You know, we just had a big tax bill signed into law here in the US. So if you're a US citizen, donating in the 2017 tax period, which is still goes through, strangely enough, January 15th for nonprofits,

you actually have a slightly, potentially advantageous motivation to donate to charities like the Planetary Society before the new provisions take effect for the 2018 tax cycle. So just another actual... Yep. I had no idea.

Yeah, I know. All sorts of interesting things happen when taxes are rewritten very broadly. All right. Well, I guess that's enough of a plug for this time. And so we hope you will join us, folks, and leave it at that. 2017, would you call it, guys, a momentous year in space exploration? No, I guess is the answer. I was reflecting on this.

We were just talking about this before the show. 2017 was interesting. You know, there was so much, like a lot in U.S. politics in 2017. You know, there was so much, like a lot in U.S. politics in 2017, there was a lot of initial energy and uncertainty about what could be changing. And ultimately, not as much changed as a lot of people would have thought. And I put myself in that category. And let's just, you know, obviously focusing on space here. We had a brand new administration come into office, we had a brand new Congress, he had Republican majorities in

Congress, the House, states all over the country, and the White House. So you could theoretically push a lot of legislation through. And you know, they did kick off the year we had a NASA authorization bill for the first time in seven years. But that bill didn't really change much. It just kind of said, great, whatever you're doing, let's keep doing it. We had lots of talk during the last presidential race about excising earth science from NASA entirely and focusing on sending humans further out beyond not just the moon or Mars, but throughout the solar system. And that didn't happen. We had a change to space policy, but it was a broad one. And not to mention, we don't even have a new NASA administrator yet. We've had the acting administrator for almost the entire year of

2017, which is unprecedented. So, you know, you look back, SLS program, Orion, still going strong. You know, you've got your same commercial crew providers going forward. Got the same major science missions going forward. Nothing has really been fundamentally changed. You know, I write about this in the latest issue of the Planetary Report. And so far, it feels more like a transition year than a momentous space policy year. Yeah, and that's really not uncommon with presidential transitions. The first year, nobody really wants to start anything brand new. They want the administration to come in, figure out where all the agencies are, and start enacting their own agenda. It's generally in the second year that you start to see major changes, and those changes are sort of first discussed in the president's budget request, which is supposed to come out in February. So I think that's where we'll really see the big new bold pronouncements. But we have seen some interesting work towards that, right, with the beginning of the National

Space Council, and as you alluded to, sort of their announcement of a broad change in space policy, particularly civil space policy, or at least hints at a potential broad change. We really don't know what that means yet. You're right. It's hard to know because they changed one paragraph so far. What the official space policy has changed in this country this entire year has been one paragraph, but it could mean a lot, right? Yeah. It depends on the interpretation. It depends on what it means to go back to the moon, right? And that could be actually no real significant change to the plans that NASA has been enacting now for a number of years, or it could mean a radical shift in the human spaceflight program, which would have impacts throughout NASA and throughout the industrial base and lots of other aspects of space travel. and lots of other aspects of space travel.

Speaking of back to the moon, that's a nice way for us to get into the first of the questions that we want to address today that has come from listeners. And in this case, it's not just a listener, but a member of the Planetary Society, Kay Gilbert, who is a regular listener. She says an avid listener, not only to Space Policy Edition, but I know she joins us every week for the regular show as well. Kay addresses exactly this issue of the return to the moon. She says, everyone seems to see it as a zero-sum game where returning to the lunar surface depletes resources that should be dedicated to getting us to Mars.

I am certainly sympathetic to that view, but I think people are missing something that may be important. If humans are going to explore Mars and not just wave it as we fly by, we need to know how to live on worlds that are not Earth. The Mars simulations are an excellent tool and the lessons learned from living on the ISS are even better. But they really aren't comparable to surviving on a surface with a different atmosphere and gravity. Creating a viable moon colony would be a huge step toward learning how to live and function on Mars. I hope you will consider exploring this issue on a future program. Well, the future is now, Kay.

Let's see what Casey and Jason think of your argument. It really depends, I guess. That's not like the fun way to answer that. But I mean, so in the sense that going to the moon and making a lunar colony is a great way to learn how to live on the moon that I will agree with, right? Whether it applies to living on Mars is a much more tenuous proposition to me because not only is there just a significantly different environment on

Mars versus the moon on the surface. There's a significantly different operational issues and supply chain issues of going to Mars versus being on the moon. So we can use the International Space Station as the example here. We can use this as a test case. The space station is in constant communication with Earth. case. The space station is in constant communication with Earth. They have teams, hundreds, if not thousands of people at any moment, tracking every possible issue with it, being a service opportunity to the astronauts should they need anything. You have a team on Earth ready to help them. They have regular resupply missions coming every couple months to bring them fresh food, water, crew provisions,

whatever, you name it, and also get rid of things like trash and waste. So in doing so, we've spent the money and time. We know how to have people in low Earth orbit. But when you go to the moon, if you go to Mars, you can't resupply that often. You can't be in constant contact with the ground. And so in those sense, we haven't learned how to successfully operate independent of Earth contact and Earth access and Earth resources. And that's what you really need for Mars. Ultimately, it's at some level,

or at least significantly removed from Earth contact. So the lunar base won't be all that much different in the sense that you will have a what two, three second round trip delay, effectively real time. So you'll still have the same dependency on on Earth contact. And you will have all of the provisioning issues of getting to the moon in a couple of days versus a couple of a year or months. So, you know, waiting for the home and transfer windows, you know, you learn some things, I guess, broadly, but how they specifically apply to humans, specifically in a Mars environment that are hundreds of millions of miles away,

as opposed to hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth, I don't think you will necessarily learn unless you make a concerted, focused effort to do so. And that's where the program design comes in. And that's what we really need to make sure happens if this is actually going to proceed. Yeah, the atmosphere at Mars and the atmosphere at the moon, such as it is, are very different. The gravity wells of both bodies are radically different. The soil composition is radically different. So trying to build engineering systems that function for both of those is not only really difficult, but it's really expensive. It would make far more sense to design for one environment or the other as best as possible and use the systems that overlap as sparingly as possible, because they tend to be much harder to produce. We've spoken with a number of NASA astronauts over the past year or two on these topics,

and what we hear over and over again is, if the question is, is it necessary to go to the moon in order to go to Mars? The answer is no. If the question is, if we go to the moon, can you use it in a positive way to eventually get to Mars? The answer is no. If the question is, if we go to the moon, can you use it in a positive way to eventually get to Mars? Then the answer is yes. So it becomes far more of a policy question than a technology question. Yeah. And I would add to one of the, we can just maybe drop in throughout this episode, some of the good books that we read in 2017, because I feel like there, I read some really interesting things this year. You know, I usually don't get a lot out of astronaut memoirs, but Scott Kelly's Endurance memoir book about being on the space station for a year was really eye-opening to me for this very reason. And he talks, you know, a significant amount of his time was just repairing crap that

broke on the space station. And he talked about repairing the CO2 scrubber multiple times, and it would take all day, and he would be in contact with the ground, and they'd be stepping him through every aspect of fixing that giant machine that is required for them to live. And that's really hard to do if you don't have constant, immediate contact with a ground system full of experts. And a lot of reading his experience on the space station really put into perspective how much we have yet to truly figure out

in terms of maintaining human life in an Earth-independent context for long periods of time. The moon is going to be very similar. The other thing with, you know, in addition to that, what Jason just said, trying to design a multipurpose system will add expense. And so when the inevitable budget crunch happens, the first thing to go will probably be the nice-to-haves, right?

That's where you start to cut your design. Well, you could save a lot of money if you just design to the lunar environment. You'll end up through external bureaucratic and budgetary realities, probably dropping a lot of the nice to have long term payoffs for the immediate the immediate needs and necessities. And that just happens in these big projects. And so that, you know, you have to plan for that or accept that that's just a fundamental consequence of long-term bureaucratic programmatic implementation. The whole thing is, if you just want to say you want to go to the moon, then all of this becomes

moot. Then you're fine. Then you say, great, this is, we want to learn how to live and work on the moon. Okay, good way to start would be to building a lunar colony. And I'm happy with that argument. I have no qualms with it. Yeah, at the end of the day, there are really good reasons to start would be to build a lunar colony. And I'm happy with thatC., I don't see the willpower to do that in a reasonable timeframe by applying the requisite resources. So it becomes a question of Moon versus Mars, not because one is better than the other. It becomes an issue of political choice and political resources. Yeah. And that is generally zero sum to get back to the original core of her contention. Like the rest of us, I want and we work every day to add money to NASA. But the amount of funding needed would represent such a significant increase

compared to historical situations that it's unlikely, I guess we have to be realistic about that, particularly given some of the external pressures we're going to be having in terms of debt, in terms of broad, I'd say ideological commitments to shrinking size of government, but also more practically, the growing and desperate needs of the census, which compete for, strangely enough, NASA's budget within the allocation that they divvy up within Congress every year. And we have a census coming up in 2020 that usually costs something, what, Jason, like $15 billion ultimately?

Yeah. And that starts to really need funding. I think they even put an emergency supplemental request for a billion and a half dollars this year. So that's going to put some real pressure on the ability to grow NASA's budget in the coming years. Going back to that census issue, one of the problems that we're running into is that normally you start funding a census about six or eight years out and you build the funding as you get closer to the census, and that hasn't happened yet. So the census has been running at far below normal levels for the buildup to this point. Well, you're going to have to make that up sooner or later if you're going to meet the

2020 census, which is mandated by the Constitution. That money's coming out of somebody's pocket. Unless there's a huge increase in the budget, which I find unlikely, the budget agreement between Democrats and Republicans doesn't really allow for that. So unless there's some sudden bipartisan change that increases the budget by, you know, $10 billion in order to accommodate the census, it's going to be a really tight year for everybody within that budget pool that Casey was mentioning that includes NASA. Matt, can we talk? I just want to talk about the census thing a little more.

Let's say this is something to look forward to in 2018, how this starts to resolve, because this is where the census really needs to start picking up money. And we've been seeing hints and signs of the census. Let's just say it's managed by the Commerce Department. NASA's pool of funding in Congress is called Commerce, Justice, and Science. We've talked about this before. CJS, that's the subcommittee of appropriations that NASA lives in. And it competes with Commerce

Department, the Justice Department, so think like the FBI, think National Drug Enforcement Agency, other things like that, and add federal judges, federal prisons. And then you have the National Science Foundation, you have, you know, kind of a scattered few at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. NIST. NIST. Yeah, that's another good one. But that's it. And what happens is that when they set top level spending agreements, the committee chair of the Appropriations Committee divvies that total, let's say, a trillion dollars up.

And he doles it out to the subcommittee chairs that fund the rest of the government. And so that's the allocation. And so the allocation for CJS generally is around $55 billion a year. And so NASA is $19 billion of that, right? Or maybe not. So to grow NASA, you need to either cut into any other agency within that allocation, or your allocation needs to grow. Same with the census. If the census is going to grow, it either needs to cut into other agencies in that allocation or the overall size of that pie needs to grow. That pie has not been growing the last couple of years.

And that's what the real difference is. And NASA, this is the other thing fascinating to me. This is only the second time that NASA will be grouped into a competitive situation like this with the census. Previously, NASA used to be in a kind of a weird grab bag mixed with the Veterans Affairs departments and a few like Housing and Urban Development and other areas. The census was always separate until 2009. And they went through a cycle of this in 2010. They spent the money for the census. It grew and had

been building before that. But this is really the first time since the beginning NASA's head to head with the census. So we don't have a lot of historical analogs to really see what the impact will be. But this will be a really fascinating upcoming pressure point budgetarily that I don't think enough people are really paying attention to. It certainly is the thing that I worry the most about. I mean, whatever grand plans might be made for NASA and the moon and Mars, things are not looking good in terms of budget, particularly with the constraints that are going to be caused by the new tax regulations. Jason, before we leave this, you mentioned one thing, soil, and that the soil on Mars and the soil on the moon are quite different. But they are united in that they both want to kill you.

And I just wonder if there isn't going to be some value in learning how to deal with toxic dirt on the moon that might help us on Mars, even if they are quite different. So again, I'm not an engineer. So I'm only speaking to answers I've gotten to similar questions from people who know far more about this stuff than I do. But my understanding is that, yes, both kinds of soil do want to try and kill you, but they want to kill you in very different ways. And building a suit that mitigates the impact of the soil and the atmosphere on Mars leads to very different design parameters

than building a suit that mitigates the problems that you find with the environment on the moon. And trying to build a suit that accomplishes both things at the same time is much harder than building a suit to accommodate either. It's not that there isn't danger. The problem is the type of danger that's presented and the solutions are different. And maybe that's a question that we can address on the regular version of Planetary Radio sometime because that also fascinates me. Guys, we got two questions from our listener and Planetary Society member, Kay Gilbert. And the second one builds on the one that you just addressed a little bit. Kay remembers that back in mid-December, we had a discussion with the president, President Trump's

space policy directive, but she says that she thinks we buried the lead. You played part of the president's public statement, including the words, and space has so much to do with so many other applications, including a military application. Wait, what? A military application? And then she talks about the Outer Space Treaty, which the United States ratified 50 years ago, actually, that says states shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies, or station them in outer space in any other matter, the moon and other celestial bodies should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. Kay says, perhaps I am alarmist to consider the president's comment, at best ominous, at worst a threat to abrogate the Outer Space Treaty,

but I think the Planetary Society needs to at least weigh in on this. If you think returning to the lunar surface will take resources away from Mars exploration, what do you think building military installations on the moon will do? Shades of the mid-60s, there is a book that I talked to Rod Pyle. He wrote amazing stories of the space age, one of the great conversations we had on planetary radio this year. And he talks about plans that were actually underway to build military bases on the moon. Not much idea of what they'd really be able to accomplish from there. But that kind of stuff was being actively considered in the 60s. Military applications of space, not something we talk about much on this show.

60s. Military applications of space, not something we talk about much on this show. Well, speaking, if you want to go way back in the 50s, Wernher von Braun was talking about having a crude or at the time manned space station that could drop nuclear weapons on command at any point on the surface of the earth. That was one of his pitches for why we need to go into space. So this is not a new thing, necessarily, talking about at least an ambition. And the military had a lot of weird experiments with that right in the 60s, and then ultimately decided it's just way easier without humans in that mix. Well, sure. But we need to be careful about the definition of things here. The military certainly has had space programs. There was the manned orbiting laboratory, the mole program that was

discontinued. And some of the astronauts from that military program actually ended up in the original shuttle astronaut class. So there's always been some overlap between military and civilian space programs. It's even written into the 1958 Space Act that NASA will not compete with the military in space and in fact will trade technologies. So there is overlap, but there is a very distinct wall between the military and the civil programs for very specific international reasons related to the Space Act. But the other aspect of talking about military programs is there's a difference between putting weapons in space and putting military assets in space. So being able to monitor another nation to determine whether or not they're abiding by

nuclear treaties or being able to spy on other nations, these are absolutely military capabilities that are not at all restricted by the outer space treaties. And in fact, it's a thriving concern of aerospace industry is putting those satellites up. Yeah, absolutely. So when I heard that mention in President Trump's speech about the military and space, I think this was one of a long running series of gaffes by the president who is not always particularly well versed in the nuances of an issue on which he's talking. I think that somebody mentioned to him that the National Space Council was concerned not only with civil space, but also with military space programs and intelligence space programs, which make up a far larger portion of the U.S. space effort than civil space does. And I think he just, I think he misspoke. What about then the conversation that is very much underway in the defense establishment and in Congress regarding those resources in orbit, anti-satellite weapons, which there's such concern about? So, again, ASAT or anti-satellite technologies, those are covered by the Outer Space Treaties, but they're not covered in very specific language. So over the past 50 years, it's really been a matter of normative behavior. You don't want to engage in a behavior that other nations will copy because your assets are just as vulnerable as theirs are. Anti-satellite technology doesn't necessarily need to be in orbit. It doesn't have to be a missile that shoots down somebody else's satellite. You canUS, at other space-based meetings within the United Nations. There are bilateral discussions between various nations. Our military prepares regularly

different strategies for mitigating the effects of anti-satellite technologies from rogue states. It's a really, really, really complex issue that I don't think was addressed at all in Trump's speech. He glossed over the subtleties a little bit strangely. But another good example I was going to toss in is military application in space would be tracking launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles from North Korea, say. Sorry. Yeah. But the same tracking system that we use to track those missiles, we also use to track space debris. People forget, you know, commercial satellites use military functions all the time to avoid colliding with each other and debris. That is a clear violation of the treaty. I don't even, I don't think that that's a part of the discussion. Regarding the relationship to the moon, there is discussion, there's serious discussion about if you assume China, for example, is a primary adversary, particularly in a Cold War-ish geopolitical perspective,

then you want to be able to match or follow Chinese, perceived Chinese activity on the moon as a statement of your capability as a signaling effort in order to send them a message or to send the world the message that, you know, we're not being out competed or something like that. So the very presence of the US at the moon, if you assume that China's intentions are at the moon, and you assume China is a primary global adversary, then that becomes a military application merely by its intent. Right, regardless of whether or not there's any weaponization. Yeah. guys of military space. I would love to hear your thoughts, if you have any, about the proposal that basically Space Command, I think that's what it's called within the Air Force,

should be broken off and be an independent and equal service like the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines and the Coast Guard, for that matter. Do you see any viability in that concept? And I think this is something that came up at least once on one of our past programs. Yeah, we can share our personal opinions on this. The only reason I pay attention to it at all is just because I'm interested in space policy writ large. It is far outside my professional expertise. I can certainly recommend people who know far more about this issue than I do. previously, what you tend to end up with is an agency or a division that struggles to find its place at the table for a very long time. And then even when it does, you end up fighting for the same bag of resources and you end up with a lot of redundancy, duplication of effort between agencies. So the benefits gained are usually outweighed by the minuses, by sort of calving off this new capability. That said, space is a really important arena for our military. And I think at the moment, space and cyber are sort of combined within the Air Force. And there is a not unwarranted perception that they don't receive the attention that they might if they weren't competing with acquisitions for new air defense systems. Well, the only positive that

I can see in this, if we are giving our personal opinions, is that it might be the embryonic Starfleet someday. It's an optimistic take. That's very Star Trek-y and optimistic there, Matt. You think? You think? Shall we go on? I have a question here from Chris Oldroyd in the UK, which is somewhat related to this military question, since there are so many people building rockets out there. Some of them would just love it if the military threw some business their way. Chris says, I wondered which new launch system will fall by the wayside with so many coming on stream and also with the advent of CubeSats and constellliner, Dream Chaser, more delays with those. How many times will each system be used before the ISS is decommissioned? This is definitely something that we've addressed in the past, but it's worth giving some more time to. Yeah, there are two

meaty points to that question. Two questions really there. The first one about launch systems. Well, we know already two that are not long for this world, which is the Delta IV and the Atlas V. ULA has announced that their intention to end both of those and replace them with Vulcan, their new next generation launch system. So those are at least. And Jason, is the Delta IV for sure done or does the military want to keep that one around

as a backup? Let's find out. It's still undecided. Yeah. So we know Atlas V probably is going to be finishing up. I'd say beyond that, I mean, we know Ariane V is going to be replaced by the VI. Those are all kind of coming online.

The next generation rockets are coming online. I think Antares does not have that much of a lifespan beyond its contractual commitment to the ISS. I have not seen much interest from Orbital ATK in marketing that or competing for launches beyond its NASA contractually obligated lift capability. You know, that could change. But as the listener points out,

it's becoming a very crowded market. And with SpaceX, which we should talk about a little bit today, successfully reusing and refurbishing its rockets, and having a very successful launch year and capability development, it's going to be a tough market to compete in. What about, and we can go back to SpaceX, but what about all the companies, and there seems to be one popping up every week, who are building small boosters, small rockets to take small payloads into orbit? Is there going to be enough, are there going to be enough payloads to keep all of them in business? The payload market is really the open question for the entire launch industry. It's not just small sats. Keep in mind, the commercial program at NASA was originally envisioned as NASA

standing up this NASA launch industry that would then be able to stand on its own doing commercial launches, regardless of whether or not the ISS was still in existence or NASA still had need for their services. What we're seeing is the same thing we saw, I think, need for their services. What we're seeing is the same thing we saw, I think, in the early 90s. The promise of an emerging launch market is often very different from the reality of an emerging launch market. It's still an open question. We're in the early days of commercial space ventures where people outside of communication satellite companies, need space access. Communication satellites only need a certain amount, and as technology makes the satellites smaller and smaller and last longer,

there's less of a need for launch vehicles. All of that said, I think there's always going to be a need for the military and industry to put larger satellites in orbit. It's just a question of how often. And with the CubeSat market, it's really a question of how that technology finds its niche in the rest of the economy. And that will dictate whether or not there's a launch market. At the moment, I think we're in really early days. And I think it's anyone's guess as to whether or not any of these companies will be successful outside of government contracting. Yeah, I mean, you have some interesting stuff coming up with Planet and OneWeb doing their

huge satellite constellations, SpaceX doing their own, which they say they're going to start launching next year, maybe. The issue is, how many of those can you have at one time? And after you, you know, what's the rate of replenishment that you need to service that need? Is it profitable? Can they stay in business? I mean, it's, as Jason said, there's just so of replenishment that you need to service that need? Is it profitable? Can they stay in business? I mean, as Jason said, there's just so much unsure. And I mean, this is kind of the exciting thing sometimes about markets, right? You will see if this is a real market and sustainable. Likely, a lot of those companies won't survive just because that's the nature of the thing.

What's interesting is what you see other more established players doing or not doing, right? You don't see SpaceX rapidly developing a light lift, small lift capability to compete with that market, right? This is just put a bunch of them on our Falcon. The other thing that's interesting to me regarding heavy lift, there's been lots of ink spilled over the years about the value of heavy lift versus in orbit assembly of large spacecraft. Here's a let's look at SpaceX as an example, they had the they're building their capability, literally from the ground up. And what do they do with their broad Mars ambitions, they just make a really big frickin rocket. And they don't pursue the in orbit assembly. So at some level,

their own internal economics or operational complexity or whatever assessment said that we'd rather build heavy lift because that's an important capability to have for long-term deep space exploration in orbit assembly didn't seem to make sense to them. And no one else seems to be pursuing that at the moment. And maybe the ISS was a good lesson in how complex that can be. But I definitely think heavy lift and as Jason pointed out, if nothing else, the national security interests of heavy lift are always going to be there. Yeah. And it's interesting you bring up the concept of

in-orbit construction. Basically, at the end of the day, the difference between building something on the ground and launching it on a heavy lift vehicle or launching the components and building it in orbit, it comes down to a question of risk, right? And at the moment, it's far riskier to have people or robots up in orbit trying to assemble a bunch of components into a finished product, a finished system, than it is to build them on the ground where you have an atmosphere, you can take coffee breaks, and then just put it on a big rocket and launch it up already assembled. technology capability in order to perfect those techniques in orbit. And right now, that doesn't make any sense for a commercial company to be investing in because the step is too large. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense for government to be investing in that

because you can do it all on Earth already. So why would you invest in that? So that's the big hurdle that you have to come across. And of course, the same conclusion was reached well over 50 years ago by the United States in reaching the moon after a careful consideration of whether we ought to assemble in space or just put the whole thing up there on one big rocket called the Saturn V. I can't let this go by, guys, without noting that we are maybe weeks away from the first Falcon Heavy sending Elon Musk's car sailing past Mars. It went vertical this morning as we were recording this today.

That's like heavy lift. And then there's also the whole future of super heavy lift. The interesting thing, again, you look at the economics behind this, SpaceX is paying itself to design the Falcon Heavy. This is unusual, I think. Jason, you can tell me if this is unprecedented in that there is no public money being spent to develop this heavy lift vehicle.

It's purely an internal SpaceX project. Yeah, I'd have to go back and look, but off the top of my head, I think that's the first time it's happened. So that means that they see value in it in terms of their ability to service customers, which suggests a need for heavy lift. And that, again, that just kind of tells you where we are with everything that Jason said.

And one more thing I wanted to add to Jason's point about, you know, why rebuild this capability when it's already on the ground. Look how Scott Pace, the executive director of the executive secretary of the National Space Council, talks about this, the space launch system. He describes it as a national infrastructure, basically a national capability, an asset that you, you know, you don't design it to be a competitive commercial endeavor. This is a national capability that we have to invest in as a United States. It's like an aircraft carrier. And that you don't build aircraft

carriers to compete in the international market of like aircraft carrier pleasure cruises, you build them to serve a very specific national security need. And the space launch system is designed to that purpose. There's a broad set of needs that is perceived at national security and broad national interest level to have heavy lift launch capability. So I don't think they'll be going anywhere. And just to wrap the question about SpaceX launching a Tesla into orbit around Mars, the interesting thing for me about that story is I'm curious to find out about SpaceX launching a Tesla into orbit around Mars. The interesting thing for me about that story is I'm curious to find out how SpaceX is going to meet the planetary protection standards of sending a car into an orbit around Mars and be able to determine for certain that

it will not contaminate the surface of Mars. I thought it was just a flyby. I think it's a heliocentric orbit. So it's Mars. Oh, I see that change. Yeah, you get around that. But you don't think Mars needs a set of hot wheels? Sure, only if you can bake it to 1,100 degrees. We have, what, 12 hot wheels on Mars already, right?

That's right. Oh, what, 12 Hot Wheels on Mars already, right? That's right. That's true. Oh, what a great point. Do you guys have anything to say about Blue Origin and its new Glenn rocket that may just be a couple of years away? It's as part of the larger shift. The subtle stories of 2017 are the increasing capability of this new sector of rocketry, really, private space. And Blue Origin is not only just that. I think one of the most interesting things about Blue Origin this year wasn't necessarily its tests and working on the new Glenn and working on its own reusability and its capsules and so forth. But the contracts that it's been winning to develop its engines in potentially the next ULA rocket for the military, it's competing against these

established Aerojet Rocketdyne, Uber government prime contractor that has built these things for decades. And it seems to be winning so far. They haven't made a final selection, but it's exciting to see these new entrants coming on and showing some really exciting things that then they will directly feed back into their own ambitions, which is, to me, the primary difference between a new space company and a classical aerospace contractor. They have ambitions beyond what the government will pay them to do. And using the resources that they'll get from servicing government contracts, they will plow that into exciting things, like maybe launching a Tesla into space. I think it's the free two-day delivery that Bezos will deliver those engines with. Yeah. Moon's only two days away. But this all actually does highlight another interesting switch. This is more of a switch

in our culture than it is a switch just having to do with space. And that is the reason that these companies are able to take on these risks that are sort of the goals of their owners is that these companies aren't publicly traded. They're owned by individuals who have that kind of wealth that they can just go and start their own rocket company. That couldn't have happened 30 years ago in the United States. It's a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the country for good or ill. But it's also very different than what Lockheed and Boeing were ever able to do because they had responsibilities to shareholders and responsibilities to employees that are radically different from what Jeff Bezos

or Elon Musk have to provide for their companies. That's an excellent point, Jason. And I can't help but wonder if in 50 years, the anecdote that illustrates this current gilded age that we're living through will be the launch of a $150,000 luxury car on top of the same billionaire's private rocket into space. It's cool, but there's something unnerving about the implications of economic inequality that are contained in that action. Right. You could see 100 years from now reading about that in a history book, and it could either

be the bastion of the explosion of a new space age that took our economy in radically new directions and expanded opportunity for everybody, or it could be seen as this horrible example of wealth spent for reasons defying any logic, right? Right. Yeah. Almost like this boondoggle of an effort in order to just demonstrate incredible. I mean, but it's not, it's like Andrew Carnegie would be, you know, loading his like a gold plated statue on top of a train or something.

I don't know, like, you know, running it off a cliff for fun. But it's, you know, just looking at it in context, it does show and this is, you know, here's another one of the interesting books I read this year was The Long Space Age by Alex McDonald, who was on the show a couple episodes ago. That idea has not really been researched enough. And I really hope to see more discussion about this in 2018, of this correlation between investment in private space exploration and incredible social and economic inequality. There seems to be at least a surface level correlation between the two and we saw this with the rise of privately funded giant observatories back in the last gilded age in the

united states we seem to be seeing something similar to it now in our current gilded age or a period of high inequality and you know it seems to be some sort of canary in the coal mine for what where is the money in the society? And what do people do with it? And don't get me wrong, I love the fact that Bezos and Musk and others are funneling their incredible wealth into doing these things. But it's also the same idea that we are effectively relying on the kind benefactors, the billionaire benefactors to grace us with these types of investment that otherwise used to be the province of smart public research and development.

All right, guys, let's move on. We have Ken Douglas, a listener who says keep it up. He looks forward to both the regular show as well as the Space Policy Edition. He wrote to us not long before the news that came out of NASA just a few days ago as we speak about the New Frontiers program and the fact that we are either going to be going back to Comet 67P or to Titan with, of all things, a drone, something we talked with Emily Lakdawalla about on the regular show just a couple of weeks ago. He says he's confounded that with what has been termed a rising interest in space exploration, it has been almost impossible to find out any updates on when the selection will be made. Well, other than expected by the end of the month, I realize that you can only report on information made public.

And with these teams keeping their missions highlights under wraps, but with the two or three that should be selected, I'm sure information will have to be released. I'm not sure if he's right that it's really been like a gigantic top secret effort. No, I'm afraid the answer to his question is going to be really disappointing. Go for it. The main reason that they don't post dates for selections has to do with trying to get the entire selection committee in the same room at the same time. And these are all really busy people with really busy schedules.

And so it's just it's a logistics nightmare to try and get everybody together to make the decision. That's really what it comes down to. All right. That's really what it comes down to. All right. So having said that, we are down now to two finalists in the New Frontiers program, which, as you guys have described many times on this show, is sort of the mid-priced range in NASA missions. With flagships being by far the most expensive and the Discovery missions being the ones that are supposed to be the cheapest and the most frequent. How are we doing as that plan progresses? These are the Cheesecake Factory missions compared to your Denny's missions at Discovery.

That's me. A couple of things. And I shared some of my thoughts on a blog post written with Jason Davis on planetary.org about this. There are two things I found really interesting about this. One is that we did not see a moon mission. So let's maybe just jump back real quick. New Frontiers, unlike Discovery, which you can propose anything, basically, within the cost cap that doesn't go to the Earth or focus on the sun, anything can be proposed, right? They want to select it, but they can propose anything. New frontiers, you have to fit into a preset list of mission archetypes that they define

in the decadal survey. So we had, I think, five with an option for two if you really get extra funding. Of those five originally proposed, one was to say a comet sample return. The other was a sample return from the south pole of the moon. That has been on there a long time. I think that was in the last decadal survey, too. A mission, actually, the last time we went through a selection process that ultimately chose OSIRIS-REx, you had a competing one make it to the final round, which was moonrise, which would have done that sample return. It did not get selected, obviously. And this time, it didn't even make it to the final round, which was Moonrise, which would have done that sample return. It did not get selected, obviously.

And this time, it didn't even make it to the final round. And I thought that was interesting, given this new interest in the moon, that the science community, which would have had, theoretically, a very mature mission concept, they had gone through a whole phase A funding period on this Moonrise mission, was not able to parlay that into at least a semifinalist position for this. So that surprised me. So Casey, I agree with your assessment. I think that's really good. To add a little bit more to my response to Ken, which was a little tongue in cheek, what I said was accurate, but it's actually even more complex than that because you have not only

the selection board, but then it has to go through the management council, the correct management council at NASA, which are the highest level people at NASA involved in space missions. And you have to figure out their schedules as well. And you cannot, by law, announce anything until it's been signed nefarious on NASA's part to be trying to obfuscate this information from people who are really interested. It's really a matter of bureaucracy and legalese. That's really all it is. There's also the whole thing of they can't demonstrate or imply any favorability during the selection process because then they could challenge the selection. There's, you know, and there's also things with conflicts of interest that they need to make sure is all set and background checks. And these are big proposals, thousands of pages of proposals. These are meaty things to work through. Casey, I wanted to mention, you talked about that blog post that you did with our colleague Jason Davis, which people can find at planetary.org.

It was a December 20th blog post. TheCaseForVenus.org was a December 20th blog post. Jason had preceded that by a couple of weeks with one called, he titled, The Case for Venus. Just a few days ago on this show, Emily was bemoaning, Emily Lakawala was bemoaning the fact that Venus got ignored as well in the latest New Frontiers Down Select. And she was making a pretty powerful case for going back to that world. You know, wouldn't it be great if we could do all of these at the same time? Would be nice if we had more budget to do these. That's true. I think this is actually indicative of another feature having to do with workforce issues that Casey and I are really trying to delve into from the policy side. And that's the fact that the Venus science community in the United States

hasn't had a mission in over a generation. As a result, the community has been really depleted of talent because incoming grad students are not particularly interested in studying information that was gained by a spacecraft that went out of service before they were born, right? The community itself, while there are some really eminent Venus scientists in the U.S. and contributing to U.S. science from elsewhere, the fact of the matter is the community is not that large, and it doesn't have the resources that some of the communities representing other destinations have. So it's far more difficult for them to put forth a really complex, comprehensive proposal in the way that some of these other communities are able to field. It's a catch-22, isn't it? I mean, if you don't have the missions, the Venus community dwindles.

Absolutely. It absolutely is. Yeah, and I wonder if there's another subtlety to that, which is when you are making the case for the scientific return of a mission, you're also in the strange position of saying, unless you're like a brand new flyby where anything is going to be a major discovery and rewrite textbooks like Pluto, right? Where you don't know anything. Venus, we've characterized it to the first order or two pretty well, right? We've had missions there over the first order to pretty well right we've had

missions there over the first 50 years of the space age you've had you know japanese missions and european missions are there the japanese are there right now but you're at this point where you don't know necessarily to really advance the science you have to put in some significant legwork and effort and funding to really do it. And you don't necessarily know what you're going to get because you don't have this vibrant community with lots of data feeding into it. And so it's harder, I think, in some ways to make the case for, are you guaranteed to get a significant scientific return versus going to a place like Mars? You have thousands of people who are working on all aspects of Mars and say, here's five vectors that will be advanced in this,

with this mission with these very specific instrumentation. And you don't need to land in crushing pressure and 800 degree temperatures to do it. Or you can go to Venus and say, I'm going to buzz around with this cool drone and, or Venus Titan, buzz around with this cool drone and it's going to be totally awesome. And we'll find all these new things because we have all these hints of things. We have like a

five hours of measurements on the surface, but we'll be able to learn so many new things. So I wonder if there's just a subtlety of making that scientific argument for this very catch 22 as well that we're talking about. We have time for one more response to a question from a listener, this one from Ian. He also enjoys listening to the Space Policy Edition. And he's wondering, are there other teams of people out there who are doing the kind of space policy and advocacy work that you do, mostly within the, almost entirely within the United States, but who are working with the governments of other countries besides the US? He would love to see us report on this in future episodes. But I just wonder, are there constituencies out there in other nations that are sort of attempting to

fulfill the mission of the Planetary Society in their own countries? We've touched on this a couple of times in previous episodes. The real issue is not so much that there's not an interest in other nations. It's that the nature of governance and space policy in other nations tends to not lend itself as well to input like the kind that we're able to provide in the U.S. It doesn't mean that it can't be done. It just means that it tends to be far more difficult. Also, I would add that we do engage with governments of other nations on policy matters fairly frequently.

We were just recently at an event put on by the Australian Embassy and talking to them about establishing their new space agency. One of our colleagues, Kate Howells up in Canada, is involved with their space policy board. We're growing our ability to talk to other governments as well. But as far as other organizations that do the same thing that we do, it's hard to compare. There's the British Interplanetary Society that I think does a really nice job of working with their members to keep them interested in space. But as far as being able to influence British space policy, it's really sort of within the realm of scientists and engineers rather than common lay people to

have direct input to the British system in that regard. I know that's an unsatisfying answer, but that's about as best the best I've got at the moment. Casey, we certainly the Planetary Society wants to see space exploration taking place everywhere around our planet, right? Oh, yeah. Unambiguously, yes, absolutely. And I don't have much more to add to what Jason said. And it's it really is part of the nature of the system that we have inherited here in the United States that makes it unusually accessible for lay people to participate in policy processes like this. of resources. NASA is the largest space program by far in the entire world. And what NASA does has a lot of influence on the directions that the space programs take. So for a small nonprofit like us, it makes a lot of sense to focus on this. And beyond worldwide, I think this is an active opportunity for people around the world to find ways to participate and become space advocates in their own political systems and learn how to push those levers of power to build public support and political

support for more exploration. We want to thank everybody who sent us questions and thoughts, and please continue to do so. You can send them to planetaryradio at planetary.org because we're not going to limit these responses to once a year. Gentlemen, we're approaching one hour in. I don't want to leave before we talk about any other 2017 policy and advocacy highlights that you have in mind. And also ask if there's anything in particular that we haven't already addressed that you're looking forward to in 2018, even if you're looking forward to it with some level of dread. Well, let me address two of those quickly and then I'll turn it over to Jason. So just in terms of 2018, basically everything Emily highlighted in her What's Up in 2018 post on planetary.org,

I'm looking forward to. There is an incredible number of science missions that are going to be launching and some landing next year. So a Mars landing is going to be definitely in my highlights. Seeing Falcon Heavy launch is going to be really exciting for a number of reasons.

Hopefully seeing LightSail 2 launch on a Falcon Heavy next year is also going to be important. We have some exciting things in our program, in the space policy and advocacy program at the Planetary Society. Coming up, we're going to be releasing our online training system to how to become a space advocate, a better one. We're going to have some exciting announcements in terms of congressional policy and programs that we're pushing in the United States Congress. And

obviously, hopefully a new NASA administrator to deal with. So there's some exciting things for 2018. There's one thing I did want to mention about 2017 that I think deserves an honorable mention, though it's not exactly policy, but SpaceX's launch cadence was astonishing in 2018. They launched successfully 18 times. Last year was their previous record, and it was eight. So 18 times, that's more than most nations launch into space. And that was more than half of all US space launches last year. So really an incredible achievement. And five of those were reused rocket cores,

which is also pretty amazing. They landed a bunch of them as well. And they have a goal to do at least 30 launches in 2018. And I see no reason why they can't do that now. I've been just truly impressed with the capability of that company. You know, I remember talking to people about SpaceX years ago and they were saying, oh, you know, they can launch now. But what about when they're launching 10 in a year? How are they going to be able to manage that and still keep their prices down? It's like, well, they have found a way. And so I've been, I just, I think that's worth mentioning.

And that is an important development in terms of capability, particularly as you see, we talked about all these new rockets coming online. You were having a really, you were developing a very reliable launch system and a very affordable launch system compared to a lot of other options out there. So well done, SpaceX. Elon's got your check in the mail. No, I'm kidding. You can make it out to Casey. Make it out to the Planetary Society.

Sorry. So you're pretty confident that they've put that horrendous 2016 failure in their past. Maybe at least for the Falcon 9s. I think the Falcon Heavy is a much more, as Ilana said, has a higher pucker factor going forward. They have shown to me an ability to bounce back from failure and an ability to learn and to accommodate that. I mean, they were having, I think at this point last year,

they still hadn't flown again. I'm trying to remember when they had their return to flight after their 2016 disaster on the pad. You can't diminish this achievement. I don't know what the future is going to hold, but they are definitely demonstrating their capability. And it's pretty impressive to watch. Jason, your turn. Looking back, looking forward. And it's pretty impressive to watch. Jason, your turn. Looking back, looking forward. Looking back, I think that the year in space was far less tumultuous than a lot of people had predicted.

I think despite a lot of big headlines, I think things have moved apace at a really reasonable rate. From a planetary science perspective, from a science perspective generally, I think things are, for the most part, really on track in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time. Looking forward, next year, there are going to be some really important big missions going up that I can't wait to see. I'm really hopeful that JWST doesn't encounter any problems at all. Solar Probe Plus is going to be really cool to see. Landing on Mars is amazing. The fact that we've got missions to Europa in the process of being built,

I think is astounding. All of this is really good stuff. But because I am a complete policy wonk, the one thing I'm really looking forward to next year is the FY 2019 president's budget request to see how much rancor that stirs up. Because I suspect that there are going to be some pretty significant changes in NASA's direction in that document. And then we get to see Congress fight about how much of that they're going to pay any attention to. During an election year.

During an election year. Yes. For me inside the Beltway, it's going to be a lot of a lot of fun, a lot of late nights and a lot of frantic phone calls, I suspect. A lot of late nights and a lot of frantic phone calls, I suspect. Gentlemen, I will tell you what I look forward to, and that is 12 more Space Policy Editions. These really enjoyable discussions and very educational discussions that I've had with you. And we did just complete our first full year of doing these. Let's keep it up. Matt, it's been one of my great pleasures to do these episodes with you. And to all the listeners who make this show successful and engaging. Thank you for listening.

radio, which of course will continue until the first Friday in February, when we will be back with another SPE show with my colleagues, Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan, planetary.org membership. And as you heard, and as I learned from Casey at the beginning of this show, you have until January 15th, I think you said Casey to designate a gift, a donation to the Society at planetary.org slash donate. Thank you very much for those of you who do that to either become members or donate or both. And thank you for joining us for yet another edition of the show. Casey and Jason, thank you so much and have a great month. You too, Matt. We'll see you in February. Thanks, Matt. Talk to you guys next month. This has been the Space Policy Edition, a production

of the Planetary Society based in Pasadena, California and made possible by its members. We'll see you next month.