Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #3: Plutonium-238, Europa via SLS, Cost of the Next Mars Rover Rises

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

In our third episode, we debate the risks and rewards of tying the future of a Europa mission to the fate of NASA's massive Space Launch System rocket. Also, NASA just announced that the next Mars rover will cost $2.4 billion—$900 million more than initially thought. But the mission is not considered over budget. Why not? Lastly, the U.S. just generated 50 grams of Plutonium-238, the largest amount in nearly thirty years. We celebrate the successful effort to create this critically important, though highly toxic, power source for deep space spacecraft.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Big rockets to Jupiter, a rover that's over budget that is not over budget, and why Mars needs plutonium, among other places. That's what we're going to talk about on this month's edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome, everybody. Welcome back. We're glad to have you. of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome, everybody. Welcome back. We're glad to have you. And we are so thrilled to be getting all those wonderful reactions from those of you who've heard the past editions of this little conversation that we've got underway.

It is great to receive those. It is also great to know that this program and so much of what the Planetary Society does is thanks to our members. And so a plug right up front, we have a brand new membership program at planetary.org slash membership. It is taking off like wildfire, which is a bad thing to say in California right now. Too soon, Matt. Too soon. Too soon. During. During.

It is going great. You should check it out. We can say that because this is a podcast. We have great new levels of membership, great new incentives, and lots of reasons, great ones, like supporting this program for you to consider becoming a member, joining us as part of the Planetary Society. All right. Let's introduce my partners in this effort, beginning with Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. Hey, Casey. Hey, guys. Jason Callahan joins us from Washington, D.C.

He's our Space Policy Advisor at the Society, and welcome back, Jason. Thank you very much, Matt. How are you doing, Casey? Loving it here out in the other Washington. The other Washington. Yeah, the one that's not 98 degrees and humid. That's the benefits. Exactly. Where are we going to start out this time, guys? I think we're going to start off talking about the current state of the Europa mission at NASA. As many of our listeners may know, the appropriations language coming out of Congress dictated that NASA will launch the Europa mission aboard the SLS,

which is the Space Launch System, which is the giant rocket that NASA is building to send people beyond low Earth orbit. An important capability of this rocket is that it can also lift a whole lot of mass way beyond low Earth orbit, which makes it really, really unique as a capability for sending robots into the outer solar system. Launching this Europa mission on top of SLS not only helps the scientists get to Europa much faster than they would be able to do on an expendable, or excuse me, an evolved expendable launch vehicle, an EELV in NASA parlance. It also helps with the workforce issues and capabilities issues here on Earth, building SLS. So I think those are sort of the issues that Casey and I wanted to discuss a little bit and talk about how this really,

really benefits NASA and benefits the space program. I'll play more your side, which is and the risks that this will entail as well. Because so a lot of this discussion, this has been an issue for a while. This particular discussion has been motivated by a very nice article on the Space Review by Cody Knipper, Knipper, I'm sorry, I don't know how to spell his last name, from Space Policy Institute, master's student there at George Washington University, bringing up this very issue. And it's not a new issue. It's been around for, the idea has been kicking around for a couple of years, right? That we want to do a mission to Europa. NASA has this big new rocket

that they don't have enough missions for. And hey, maybe we could send this mission to Europa on NASA's big new rocket. There's a few issues with this, right? I mean, we'll talk about the good things maybe here in a minute. But the main issues is one, the rocket doesn't really exist yet. And there's this whole issue of when you're making a spacecraft, you actually have to decide at a certain point which rocket you're going to use. And you kind of commit to that rocket. And you change that in the future, you make your spacecraft too heavy, you can be stuck in a very bad position if you're overly reliant on kind of the single point of failure. And I think, Jason, you know more about this than I do, but this very thing happened to a mission that also went to Jupiter back in the 1980s, right, with Galileo. Right, right. Yeah, Galileo was built

specifically to fly on the space shuttle, as all NASA missions were supposed to do in the 70s and 80s. And the Challenger disaster changed the thinking of the country on a single point of failure, you know, using a single launch system to launch everything meant that if that system failed, you couldn't launch anything. And Galileo and a number of other spacecraft were delayed for many, many years because of the problems with the shuttle. What you run into, as you said, is as you're designing this spacecraft, it takes years and years to develop and build a spacecraft. And you have to build it to the launch environment. And different rockets have different launch environments. Some of them are very, very shaky. Some of them are very, very smooth. They have different power capabilities. The spacecraft will be plugged into the rocket's power system for a long period of time during the launch itself. And those power requirements differ from rocket to rocket.

So you have to take all of these things into consideration as you're building your spacecraft. You have to take all of these things into consideration as you're building your spacecraft. And the earlier you know what kind of rocket you're going to fly on, the earlier you can design to that and the more efficiently you can develop your spacecraft. I want to remind people that that delay in the Galileo mission may have been responsible or at least partially responsible for the difficulties that happened in that mission because of that antenna freezing up. I was also reminded in the comments that followed that terrific article by Corey, by somebody who mentioned, sorry, my mistake, that mentioned Bruce Murray, former director of JPL, one of the founders of the Planetary Society, full disclosure, wrote years ago about using Saturn V rockets, the older predecessor, the only rocket that comes close to the SLS in power, using Saturn Vs to do the same kind of thing, to go into deep space missions to the outer planets. Well, it wasn't just Bruce Murray,

right? I mean, that was the idea behind what you would do with a Saturn V back in the day, right? Yeah. And for many of the same considerations, we were building Saturn V rockets, but we were capable of building them faster than we were capable of actually sending human spaceflight missions into space. And you needed a reason to keep that production line running and you needed to keep the skills of the workforce up to date. You didn't want them to languish. So looking at outer planets missions using these heavy lift capabilities has been something that's been discussed for a very, very long time in the space science community. This has to do with this maintaining a cadence, like one a year? That's absolutely correct. That's absolutely right. So if you have a lot of people who build rockets and you have to stand them down while you're waiting for a mission to build the rocket, it's not only costly because

it's what's known as a marching army cost, right? All these people have to remain on the payroll or they will dissipate into the economy. They will go and do other jobs. And it's very difficult to reform that team. So you either have to pay them or they leave. But on top of that, their skill sets will atrophy. As anyone who's ever written a paper or worked on a car knows, if you don't do the activity over and over and over again, it takes time to remind yourself how to do the activity and you're less efficient in doing that activity. And it's the exact same thing with building rockets. So I want to jump in and I want to kind of make a bigger picture pitch because let's just jump back for a second. And I'm going to make an argument for why this is, I think,

a pretty good idea overall. And then, Jason, you can pit this against me a little bit, because this is actually something we tend to disagree on somewhat. And I guess I should probably say, because this is just a minefield of issues, whenever you're talking about the SLS, that this is just us talking and not official representation of the Planetary Society, blah, blah, blah. But this is some things that we think about. I think this is a very smart move. And here's my argument for this. And this is going to address a couple points in Cody's article and a couple points that I think a lot of our listeners may have. I take as a given, in a sense, I take this as axiomatic that the space launch system will continue for years. People kind of throw this around that, oh, a new administration is coming in. You know, it's an expensive rocket.

You have SpaceX with the Falcon Heavy. Why is NASA going to make the space launch system? It's probably going to be canceled. Well, I don't think that's true. And I'll point to at least the history of the Constellation program, which we've discussed somewhat here, which is the last time NASA tried to cancel the big rocket system. Congress freaked out. You know, I think that the technical political science term is freak out. And they mandated by law, they would have to change the law to end the space launch system, they have to build a heavy lift rocket. They have spent the last six years building this rocket. And it's not

just a sunk cost fallacy, right? They've built flame trenches, and they've restructured the vehicle assembly building, and they're making ground systems that are all specific to the Space Launch System. And there are all those beautiful renderings, too. All that artist work would be wasted. That's true. I mean, think of all the human hours here we're talking about. But again, I mean, you want a different rocket, you need to build a new flame trench, right? There are costs to restarting. More importantly, Congress has been throwing money at this program. I mean, when does Congress do this? They've been adding $700, $800 million a year to this program,

almost doubling the budget year after year. That, to me, shows that there is a significant amount of congressional support that will continue this for a while. So I take this as an axiom that we have the space launch system. When we do that, the amount of congressional politics within the system is like, okay, we built this. We spent a lot of money. We got to justify its use.

Well, here's the other problem that we had. Planetary science was not being funded by the government very well the last few years, right? We've talked about this big collapse in funding for planetary science. We could not do a Europa mission. We had literally the Office of Management and Budget writing in. I don't know if I've ever seen this before. Writing in to the actual budget request in 2014, we cannot afford a Europa mission. Basically, stop asking us to do this. It was

pretty clear. How did this change? Now we have a Europa mission. Now we're building one. Well, we were able to, we broadly, I think, NASA was able to make an argument that you could build a Europa mission and you could solve a larger political problem. Once you have, and Jason talks about this a lot in some of his other work, they solved the problem. Europa became a solution to a problem that was of actual priority for Congress and for the space agency. And so by aligning that, I think that was a very smart political move.

And that will ultimately enable us to get a mission to Europa many, many years faster than we would have otherwise. And I think ultimately that's where we are at the end of the day. And SLS, again, continues. In a sense, you have to take a risk when you're talking about these big programs that would just not happen otherwise. So that's why I'm actually pretty positive this is a smart move internally by NASA to hook these things together.

And then you hopefully just assume that JPL is building it flexible enough so you have multiple pathways forward should the SLS not go forward. But again, I think it will. Jason, before you jump back in, isn't that same argument you made for the establishing and maintaining that cadence of production of the rocket, it applies to the mission as well. I mean, if you can cut four years off of getting to Europa, what about that entire staff of mission specialists, technicians, engineers, scientists that you don't have to pay for all those years without much to do? No, that's absolutely true. And looking at Congress, who in the past decade and a half or two decades has really taken the cost of missions overall very seriously, that's absolutely a consideration. But when you're talking about a Europa mission, you're talking about, even as a flagship mission, you're probably talking about a thousand employees total. And that

includes everybody from the attorneys to the people who are cleaning up the offices at the end of the night, a thousand000 to 1,500 people on a mission that size. Whereas when you're looking at something like developing the SLS, you're probably talking about an order of magnitude larger workforce. Congress tends to notice those numbers more readily than they will notice an individual mission's workforce. That said, giving the ability for that mission to get there in four years also puts it within a political timeframe for a Senator or a president, right? If, if a mission launches in someone's tenure, they can actually claim credit for having funded that mission while they're still in office reliably. And that that's, it's sort of sad that that's a consideration for a science mission, but nevertheless, it is a consideration for a science mission. Now, Casey, some of the issues that you and I have had, you are looking at the optimistic side of using SLS for a science mission. And there

are many, many good reasons to do it. I don't want to come across as a naysayer. I agree with all of the good reasons to do it. I tend to be a bit more pessimistic when it comes to the it. I don't want to come across as a naysayer. I agree with all of the good reasons to do it. I tend to be a bit more pessimistic when it comes to the risks. The risks of tying a science mission to SLS, there are several. The first, of course, is the development cycle of SLS, right? We don't know for sure that this rocket will be available when it's supposed to be available. And the costs of that mission may, or the costs of that rocket may skyrocket. To coin a phrase. Right. If those costs are significant enough, it can actually affect the science mission budget.

We've seen that historically with human spaceflight missions that have gone over budget. They've affected the science outlays. So I'm concerned with that. Going back to the concept of a marching army cost, if the rocket is delayed and the mission is dependent on that rocket, it's much harder to find money to pay for that science team because of a rocket delay than it is because of a delay in the mission itself. If there's an instrument that doesn't work, you can descope that. If there's a, you know, we'll be talking about this in a bit. If there's a power issue, if your RTG isn't ready, you know, the Europa mission is using solar power, not an RTG.

But if the RTG isn't ready, these are things that are easier within the science community to work around. A rocket is a slightly different issue. It's a risk that the project has to take into account that they have no control over. And that always bothers me. The other issue is it's costly to design a spacecraft to fit on multiple rockets. So if you have to design for SLS,

but you also have to take into account, well, what if we have to launch on a Delta IV or an Atlas V? That's really, really expensive and it takes a lot of time. And it adds to the end cost of the mission. And Congress looks at that kind of stuff. Now, the Europa mission is in a unique position in that it has a lot of congressional support. But we've got elections coming up. The people who are supporting both SLS and Europa may or may not still be in the positions of power that they're in currently. And that's a consideration. That is a risk that the mission has to account for.

Acceptance of the risk. And the way that I kind of see it before is like beforehand, before this really came up as a solution, we had almost zero chance of getting a Europa mission within the next 10 to 15 years. Very, very much stacked against us. 180 degree turn from that. I think that's just where you say, what is the potential value of the return, which I think I, like many other people, are really excited about a mission to Europa. And we should mention that this SLS, it'll get a mission to Europa within about three years, direct ballistic launch, as opposed to seven and a half years with Atlas V. That's four years of one's life. And if you want to do a follow-up mission, and there actually is at the current law current law by the way is that we send a second sls with a lander two years later we're able to start acting faster when you get to this point of very large missions you have to start playing a larger political game in order to have any chance of success. Ultimately, like that old phrase, right? Nothing succeeds like success. Like you have to, when you look back on it, and it's done,

all the costs tend to fade away a little bit because they become so abstract. And that's not necessarily self justifying. But I think that in this case, it was a very smart move. And the risk in the sense, we have to take these risks if we want to see Europa mission, basically within our near lifetimes. The other big issue, I think that we kind of touch on, I think we're starting to run out of time here, is the cost of SLS. And I just want to say one thing about that, which is back in the shuttle days, shuttle launches were, you know, quote, unquote, free, they were provided by NASA or at very low cost to other parts of NASA. Now, it's not quite sure how people are going to pay for the SLS.

But my argument, I have a reasonably quick response to that, which is like, look, if they want to charge a billion dollars a launch to other directorates, no one can use the rocket. And so if the motivation is for people to use the rocket and keep the workforce going, they have to pay the overhead and to keep it somewhat affordable, at least in parity with these other rockets to use. And I think we'll see that. Yeah, you and I have heard both from separate sources that there's a handshake agreement at the moment that basically the science side of the house at NASA would not pay any more for the SLS launch than they would for a similarly capable, expendable launch vehicle. Well, I mean, SLS is expendable as well. But when I say EELV, I'm talking about the Delta IV or the

Atlas V family of rockets launched by ULA. SpaceX is a possible option as well, although they haven't yet actually launched a Falcon Heavy. So that's still a potential capability. It is not an actual capability yet. That said, if the agreement works out that the science side of the house only has to pay what they would pay for a comparable expendable launch vehicle, that would be fantastic. But that money still has to come out of the human side of the house, human spaceflight side of the house. And it's not entirely clear that they have that in their budget. So that's another issue we'll have to deal with.

Jason, I'm so glad that you brought up the Falcon Heavy, because that's a question I get asked by a lot of people. It is farther along than SLS, right? So it can't carry quite as much into space, but it's a lot cheaper too. Why isn't that being looked at more as an alternative? Quite frankly, because the rocket has not yet launched and it has not yet been certified in any way. So it is actually legally not a viable option for any science mission currently. That will change. I think everybody expects the Falcon Heavy to come online relatively soon. We certainly hope so because our LightSail 2 is going to launch on the second one. Relatively soon. We certainly hope so, because our LightSail 2 is going to launch on the second one. But that said, at the moment, you cannot, from a contractual standpoint, look at that as a viable option for your mission.

I wish we had time to go into more of the congressional side of this, the mandates for orbiters and landers, and that you will use SLS. I guess we'll save that for another time. I know. This could have been a whole single episode now that we're getting into it. We consider this a short topic, so we'll revisit this. All right. Our next so-called short topic, I'm making rabbit ears here, has to do with the next big rover to go to Mars, the 2020 rover, so-called. It's the one where I had that glib line up front, the rover that's over budget, but is not over budget. Jason, what the hell are we talking about? So actually, this is a really nice segue into our discussion about the Europa mission, because one of my other big risk concerns, and this is borne out by the Office of Management and Budget's opposition to launching flagship missions under the current budget restrictions. One of the problems that you have with Europa is that this

is supposed to launch in 2022, probably more likely something like 2023. But the development cycle for a flagship mission is six or eight years. And Mars 2020 is already a confirmed mission. It has just recently been confirmed. And we'll discuss what that means in just a second. What you end up with now from a budgetary standpoint is you're building two flagship missions at the same time. And that puts tremendous pressure on the budget for planetary science. It puts a lot of pressure on whether or not you'll be able to launch one or two discovery missions, whether or not you'll be able to launch the next New Frontiers mission on time. It's a lot of pressure. I'm concerned about having two flagships at the same time, at the same time that I'm really

excited about it, right? These are really cool missions. I call these a two-for-one flagship missions. Roughly, if they stay on budget, it can be roughly what a Cassini-level flagship was, if everything works out. Yeah. And what Casey is referring to when he says that is that these two flagship missions are budgeted at roughly $2 billion, a little over $2 billion apiece. Cassini was, in today's dollars, about a $4.5 or $5 billion mission. When he says that we're getting two for the price of one, that's not inaccurate. These missions have done a whole lot of work to bring the cost down, and that's really important to understand. Being called not inaccurate is one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about me.

Yeah, yeah, Casey, he's okay. He's not inaccurate. What is the recent development, this report that came out about the rover going into a new phase, which is where this talk of cost overruns that aren't came up? Well, let's say what the original, how this came to be first, and then let's say where we are now. The Mars 2020 rover was originally planned in the aftermath of NASA exiting the ExoMars program that it had partnered with the European Space Agency. ESA has now gone, they're continuing their ExoMars program. They are partnering with Russia instead of the United States. We are still contributing an instrument on one mission. I don't remember, Casey, are we involved in the rover as well? I don't remember. Yeah, that's where we have the big Mars organic analyzer. That's right.

It's a very, very, very expensive single instrument. I think it's over a hundred million dollars. This is, this whole thing is another topic we can take up someday, ExoMars, but go on. Yes, yes. So in, in the, the fallout from NASA having changed their, their participation in that mission, the Mars community was looking for another mission. And what NASA decided to do was launch a mission that was built to the blueprint of the MSL mission, which most people know as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory mission. So they were basically going to just rebuild that spacecraft and put a couple of different instruments on it. There was a whole lot of turmoil having to do with the recommendations coming from the National Academy's Decadal Survey for Planetary Science, which had said that the next Mars mission had to be part of a sample return mission. And the original configuration of Mars 2020 had no sample return aspects to it.

They have recently added a sample return caching capability, which means that this rover will be capable of finding scientifically interesting samples on the surface, putting them into sealed containers that will later be picked up by another mission and launched into orbit. And a third mission, either human or robotic, will then bring those samples back to Earth. The mission originally, when it was a build to the blueprint of MSL, was supposed to be about a billion dollars. One and a half billion. That was during the formulation phase. So that was when the mission was basically just PowerPoint slides. As everybody went through and they figured out what the risks were, what those risks would cost to mitigate and figured out what exactly the mission would look

like. Well, now we've hit the point in its development phase, we've finished formulation and we've gone into implementation. It's marked by a process known as the key decision point C, marked by a process known as the key decision point C, which is the confirmation of the mission. This is when NASA makes commitments to Congress that it will accomplish a set scientific goal for a set cost on a set schedule. These are really important changes in this project. It now means that we know everything that we need to know about the project in order to start bending metal, to actually start building this spacecraft. It is also the point at which it is much harder to cancel this project. Once a project has been confirmed, it's very, very, very rare that those projects are canceled. You start making like long-term contracts and things at this point, right?

Exactly. contracts and things at this point, right? And you have lots and lots of business engagements, and you set schedules, and all sorts of things go into chaos if they cancel it after KDPC. Yeah. So it's really cool that this mission is now in confirmation. It is in implementation. It is on schedule for a launch. The cost has gone up. They baselined it at what, 2.4? 2.4 for a full lifecycle cycle. That includes a year of operations on the surface. Does that include a launch vehicle as well? I believe so. The full life cycle cost includes every aspect of the mission. That's true. With NASA's various programs in planetary science, the only life cycle costs that do not currently include launch vehicles are Discovery Program missions. This is something I want to just jump in for a second, because I actually remember I was at the

American Geophysical Union Conference in 2012, when they announced the intention to build Mars 2020. They announced that it was entering formulation. And it was really exciting, right? And also, very notably, it was after Curiosity had landed right because and also very notably it was after curiosity had landed successfully and was very popular then suddenly two months later oh hey look we're gonna do another one after literally just canceling the entire future mars program after that you see i think there's a connection there but i remember very much the argument is like we're gonna do this for a billion and a half. We have all these spare parts from Curiosity. We'll just use the same design.

We'll save all this money. $900 million later, it doesn't seem, I guess it's still cheaper when you take into account inflation and overall Curiosity was about two and a half billion, but not really that much cheaper. And I saw some people, I think recently, being a little upset about this. But Jason, this brought up something that we've talked about before, which has there ever been an example of a NASA mission using a previous design or a previous spacecraft and actually saving money? Does that actually ever

happen? Or is that just a wish that people like to talk about? Within NASA, they refer to this as using legacy hardware. If you have a legacy technology, it's supposed to cost less because you've already built it before. You're not going to have to endure the development costs of this instrument or this piece of technology, whatever it is. It's very, very rare that you see an actual spacecraft built to the blueprint of a previous spacecraft, at least in exploration. You see it in communications, you see an actual spacecraft built to the blueprint of a previous spacecraft, at least in exploration. You see it in communications, you see it in Department of Defense,

but not so much at NASA. And the real reason for that is because you're never launching the same mission. You're asking different questions every time. And even if you're using the same instruments, those instruments are being aimed at different things, or they're exploring different aspects of the same question that you were originally intending to ask. Or they're being substantially enhanced. I'm thinking of Mastcam-Z, the much more powerful camera that's the main camera on the 2020 rover.

Absolutely. That's absolutely true. And every time that you change that instrument, you're changing some aspect of its design. So it's the power requirements or the size of the instrument, and those things have effects that cascade throughout the design of the entire spacecraft. And that inevitably adds cost to your mission. The idea that you can use legacy hardware to save costs more often than not is not an accurate statement at all. As opposed to your statement earlier that was not inaccurate. This is not an accurate thing. Not accurate. I know. Cool down there, Jason.

I mean, people are going to be listening to this. I mean, it's an interesting point to me because I think what this also kind of demonstrates is that where is the real cost of these missions? I mean, it's the people, right? It's the amount of time. You're paying for employee time. Using the same hardware, you can only save so much but even as jason said you change one thing and you have these cascading changes and it's just you had a

nice phrase once i liked it was like every spacecraft is a boutique piece of hardware right it's like handmade even if it's generally the same they don't make enough of these craftsman yeah crafted handcrafted spacecraft and just you don't have a production line right to save money on these things um there's one other point that i'd like to to make on this one of the real reasons this probably went from 1.5 to 2.4 total is this addition of sample caching right and that really came i mean they went through this process they announced the mission then they did this thing in sdt, a science definition team, luminary Mars scientists get together, formally give NASA a recommendation of what the prime science goals of this mission should be. And on the four goals of this mission, caching samples is in one of the prime goals of this

mission. And so it's not like I don't think there was malintent. But I think this is an example of how you get these missions to happen. It's kind of a practical thing. You can sell the mission initially, maybe as a stripped down version, but then you can demonstrate that there is broad scientific support. And then you can point to the National Academy's report that, no, to do this mission, you got to do this right, or why are we doing it at all? It's not as simple as I thought, you know, or anyone probably thinks of just picking up a rock and throwing it in a bucket. Like this is a complex, and they've identified this as one of the prime areas of

untested technology, single points of failure. This is a hard thing to do to pick up sample things, drills, or all sorts of rocks, seal it in tubes that can last for 15 years on the surface. drills, or all sorts of rocks, seal it in tubes that can last for 15 years on the surface. All the kind of weird considerations. This is one of the prime drivers, I think, of the cost of this mission. Are you surprised that there isn't even more controversy about this? I mean, it seems like, my take is, that people are pretty accepting of what we've been told. Yeah, it's going to cost a little bit more because it's going to do more.

I think so. I mean, I think also people didn't really believe that number for the long, I mean, for a long time, NASA has quietly been changing its messaging around this too. Starting a couple of years ago, they started saying about 2 billion, right, or at least 1.5 billion, you know, and they've been kind of slowly changing it. I think overall, the budget for planetary science is doing better. And so there is less feeling that it's eating up, you know, we have two discovery missions potentially being selected, we have a New Frontiers announcement coming out, we have a Europa mission on the books. And so Mars is still

there. It may not have that same kind of impact that people would have felt previous years. Interestingly, just to sort of finish this topic off, the other thing that we have to keep in mind is that NASA is also looking at building a telecommunications orbiter, the NEEMO mission, the new orbital mission for Mars. That is being sold currently as entirely a technology mission. It is only going to be telecommunications in order to communicate with the rovers that we have on the planet because the orbital assets that we have at Mars right now, Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are really, really long in the tooth. They're getting old and they're not going to last forever. But I think that what we will see, at the moment this NEEMO mission is tentatively budgeted

at about $450 million. I think that, as Casey said, the scientific community is going to look at this and say, why are we sending something to Mars without any scientific instruments on it? That's sort of silly. It's not going to cost us that much more to put a couple of instruments on this thing.

So I think that that mission cost will grow as well. And that's also going to put pressure on the planetary science budget. I'm hoping that this will be in addition to other missions and not at the expense of, but we'll have to stay tuned. I know when we're building our Europa on SLS and a lander and our new Mars orbiter and launching and operating Mars 2020 at the same time while trying to launch Discovery in 2021 and build new frontiers to launch in 2024, this is why we kind of talk about now

that planetary science budget, it has to grow. It's not an option. Like if it doesn't grow, we're going to be in bad shape. And so far, the last couple of years, it has grown. And we got to keep that going. I got to say, I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that we're so busy exploring Mars that we need to send a switchboard out there

that specifically is a switchboard, and I don't mind a bit if it does some science. That 2020 rover, of course, is planned to share, will share, a huge advantage that Curiosity has had on the surface of Mars, and that is how it generates its power. That big radioactive tail that both Curiosity and the 2020 rover have, or will have, that's our next topic, which Casey, you're going to take us into. Ooh, Matt, I love plutonium-238. It's one of my favorite topics. I mean, who doesn't love old plutonium-238? It literally is one of my favorite topics. It's a pet fascination of mine.

The society has been involved in this a long time. And it's just so interesting from just so many angles in terms of, you know, you look at this, this is an infrastructure problem, right? This is intersections of the Cold War overtones. This is a fundamental enabler of exploration. So many things are important about this, but it's so tiny at the same time. It's a tiny problem that's also really broad and a difficult problem. So, okay, let me back up and I'll just give some background on what we're talking about. I imagine the one or two of you who aren't familiar with radioactive isotopes, plutonium-238. This is not weapons-grade plutonium. That's plutonium-239, of course.

This is not weapons-grade plutonium. That's plutonium-239, of course. Plutonium-238, it decays into uranium-234. It just naturally spits out, you know, if you all remember physics or nuclear physics, it spits out a little helium atom, right, an alpha particle. And it's just, plutonium-238 is inherently unstable. When it spits out those little alpha particles, those things bounce around and hit a bunch of things, transferring energy, heats up. So it creates, it's a heat source. It's a very, very hot heat source, high energy density. And what NASA uses these for, and has used them for, for what, 50 years now, you pair it with a thermocouple and you generate

electricity. And voila, you don't need uh solar power anymore right you can go to the dark side of the moon or excuse me you can go you can oh man i'm gonna get a lot of emails for that you can go to dark spots in the moon for for periods of time you can go far out into space like your voyager spacecraft far from the sun where solar power just drops off the energy density of your solar radiation drops off to such a degree that you would just can't bring solar panels. You want to Mars where it's really dusty, just like the Curiosity rover. You can go all sorts of places. Plutonium-238 has a half-life, right? It's radioactive of about 88 years. And it does not occur naturally. It would just decay away. And so you have to make it. And then you can't just store it because it'll just disappear on its own, right?

It'll just decay on, you can't stop it from decaying. And here's where it gets really fascinating to me, which is where, you know, back in the Cold War, the United States used to make quite a bit of plutonium-239 and other related things for nuclear weapons, right? It was a national security issue. And so they just dumped many billions of dollars, right? It was a national security issue. And so they just dumped many billions of dollars, right? Particularly when building up this infrastructure in the 50s and 60s, you would make these huge processing plants

developing plutonium and other radioactive isotopes. You would then load your weapons with those and you'd have to maintain them and all those sorts of things. When you were doing that, people were saying, well, since we're making all this radioactive material, why don't we just make some plutonium-238 as well? Basically, all the infrastructure is there. You can just make a ton. And they made a lot. NASA was able to use those. The Defense Department was able to use these things for their own satellites. I think

once they would use them to put listening devices on undersea cables where there was no light, right, and to provide power. And you just had all this plutonium-238. You could put tons of it into your Pioneer spacecraft, your Voyager spacecraft, many, many, many kilograms. Flash forward to the 1980s, right, and you have a general, you have nearing the end of the Cold War, you're getting a series of nuclear treaties and disarmament. And you have this infrastructure that was built in the 1960s, particularly this place called Savannah River. And this was a big plant down in South Carolina that had been built in the early 1960s.

It was where most of the plutonium-238 that powered NASA spacecraft came from. That place was in bad shape. And they shut it down in 1988 because it had cracks in its cooling towers and coolant reactors and so forth, which is generally a bad thing, I think. I think that's an understatement. Yeah, we can agree on that.

Is that not incorrect, I think, too? That is not incorrect. Yeah, it's not incorrect. And so you had this, it was really fascinating. You can look at these newspaper articles I found from New York Times about this plant getting shut down. You can look at these newspaper articles I found in the New York Times about this plant getting shut down. They for years looked at starting it back up.

And they realized to repair it to modern standards would cost billions of dollars. And by that point, the Cold War had effectively ended. Of course, we're not going to pay for this anymore. Everyone celebrated the end of the Cold War. And at the same time, the United States lost its ability to produce this kind of critical power source for a steep spacecraft. Obviously, I don't think too many people were too upset about that, given the larger, more global stability kind of situation you found yourselves in. But that raised a problem that people would have to eventually deal with. We had a decent amount of stuff left in stock.

So it wasn't a major issue, but it was this problem just hanging out there. Every time you started using plutonium-238 to fuel like Cassini, right, or to fuel New Horizons or a Mars mission, that was less that we had in our stockpile. And at the same time, just as time went on, that stockpile decayed, right? We had less and less just because of radioactive decay. We actually started buying some from Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s because Russia used to make this stuff too. It's not clear, Jason, do you know if they still make it? They ended production about the same time that we did. They just had a lot more of it left over because they weren't launching it into space at the rate that we were. So they were selling it to us, but they had the same issues, right? They had a limited supply and it was also decaying. And as a result, the cost that they were charging us was increasing every year.

Casey, I also want to break in and say you've implied, but I want to state explicitly, 238 is not nice stuff. You don't want it in a jar on the shelf in your house, but you can't make A-bombs out of it. Actually, you could have it in a jar on your shelf and it would not be that harmful yeah the only time that it's really dangerous is in a powder form if you inhale it then it becomes a very very serious carcinogen but as a pellet itself it's hot and it will burn you but it won't cause won't cause cancer well somebody should have told mark watney the martian because he was really frightened of that thing and when he stuffed it in his uh yeah my personal nitpick of that thing. That was one of my personal nitpicks. My personal nitpick of that movie was like, come on, dude, this is 238.

Like, literally astronauts in Apollo had basically one of those in the module with them landing on the moon. The ALSEP, the Lunar Science Packages, were powered by plutonium. They were not too worried about it. Big radiator. Yeah, and as Jason was saying,

it's because they're primarily alpha emitters. Alpha particles are very big, so you can put a piece of paper between them. Yeah, they're stopped by your skin. Yeah, so just don't swallow it, which is just generally a good recommendation for anything that's not food. And so this is one of the reasons actually why they like to use 238 to provide power, is that it's it's not as dangerous to deal with it it's not a doesn't emit a lot of gamma rays and these other things it's definitely still radioactive but it's and it's also stored in actually quite a solid

ceramic form that does not powderize easily it's one of the reasons they also use in case your rocket explodes or something yeah there were a lot of protests when Cassini was launched, uh, specifically because it used an RTG and there was a small community of people who really thought that that was dangerous, that because it was doing an earth, uh, assist that if it came back and burned up in the atmosphere, that that plutonium could suddenly become powderized and dangerous. But NASA did amazing amounts of studies on this. And what they found was that the risks of this are far less than the risks of winning the lottery twice in the same day and then being hit by lightning and attacked by a polar bear and a brown bear at the same time.

I hate it when that happens. I've only had the polar bear. Risk of this is really, really low. Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of the Juno mission. When I asked him, of course, they had to go to tremendous trouble to build those huge solar wings that are powering Juno at Jupiter right now. I said, if you'd had plutonium available, RTGs, would you have used them? He said, in a millisecond. Absolutely. It saves a whole lot of issues, right? Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that although plutonium-238 is not a weaponizable substance, the RTGs, the radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are of military significance. I mean, these things were originally designed to power spy capabilities to go down to the bottom of the sea and clip into transatlantic cables.

And they were first launched on Navy satellites for position and timing capabilities. So as a result, these RTGs are still covered under the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations, known as ITAR. They're still restricted. So any mission that uses these has to work with the Department of Energy, has to jump through a whole lot of regulatory hoops, even to get these things on board their spacecraft. So these are serious considerations, right? I've heard just kind of rough number is if you want to have plutonium on your mission, it adds roughly 70 to 100 million dollars because of you have to do environmental impact studies. You have to do all these. You're dealing with the Department of Energy. You have to pay for all this stuff. It is an expensive addition.

You don't take this on lightly. And it takes years to procure this stuff, too. I was looking at a recent presentation. Department of Energy says they need about six years of lead time to provide you with plutonium, a fully fueled plutonium radioisotopic thermoelectric generator. Sorry, RTGs. I'll just stick with that. And on top of that, it makes it difficult to collaborate with other countries, right? If you bring in researchers from Europe or Japan or anywhere else, they're not allowed into certain meetings where you're discussing the power generation of these RTGs, which is sort of crazy in and of itself. But that's part of the arms restriction regulations. So it's a serious issue. So I just want to set the stage, though,

for where we are, because obviously, plutonium-238 is really important. And I should also say that they've done tons of studies, and there's no good alternative. Europeans are looking at americum, mericonium? Americium. Americium. Clearly a word I've read more than said. 241. But it's not demonstrated. I mean, this is where we talk about high heritage. We know that RTGs can last roughly 40 years of providing power because Voyager has done it through the entire solar system.

There's no moving parts on these things. You have to understand how the power curves. It's very highly reliable. And you need it, it again for all of these places in the solar system. In the early 2000s, we were running out. The quality of the plutonium we had was diminishing. And the amount that we had was diminishing. And the Russians decided to stop selling us theirs too in the early to in the mid 2000s, because they wanted to use it for their own stuff. And so we had this problem where NASA, I remember Jim Green, who's the director of planetary science division at NASA, came in roughly 2006. And I talked to him about this once. And he said it was

one of our main priorities from day one was to figure out how to get the US to start making plutonium 238 again. And again, it's harder than walking up to the Department of Energy and saying, hey, do you want to make this highly dangerous substance for NASA? Again, pretty please. There's so many regulatory issues, but also you're working across federal agencies, right? So the Department of Energy is the only agency in the government, in the country, that is allowed to produce radioactive isotopes. That's their job. And historically, they've produced it and given it to NASA, to the Department of

Defense. The DOD said that they had no national security need for plutonium-238 anymore. Suddenly, Congress basically said, at least the people who covered the Department of Energy's budget, no, we don't want to pay for this anymore. It's not our job to pay for this. And because it was a major new expenditure, it needed an approval by Congress. It needed a request to start that funding from the White House. Yeah, it was also illegal for any other federal agency to be paying to produce nuclear material that was within the domain of the DOE exclusively. So you had to actually change that legislation to be able to do itE exclusively. So you had to actually change that legislation to be able to do it. Right. So you're talking about like three to four different

committees and the White House policy having to all line up with this. And so this government does not move that fast. So you eventually had this report come out in 2009 by the National Research Council that said, surprise, plutonium is really important and we need to do this. Kind of amazing, actually, the power of these reports sometimes, because once that report was council that said surprise plutonium is really important and we need to do this um kind of amazing actually the power of these reports sometimes because once that report was out all of the stuff started to appear in legislation after that everyone could point at a respectable source and you started to see requests coming from the department of energy actually said okay congress can we have 50 million dollars to start making plutonium again for NASA?

And Congress said, nope. And like everyone else, social language was just, yeah. Because again, Department of Energy is in a different appropriation subcommittee than NASA. It's not exactly clear, but it sounds like there was one or two at the staff level people in this subcommittee who just personally thought that the DOE should not have to shoulder this cost, despite the fact, I would point out, they had historically done so and continue to do so for every defense need. But NASA is not a defense program, right? So the next year, the White House requested, the Department of Energy requested half the money to start plutonium-8 production again. And NASA offered to pay the other half. The Congress, Congressional Subcommittee went,

nope, again, right? And this is burned another year. I just thought you had a stamp, right? I know, just like, reject, big, big reject stamp. And again, this is, we're talking about some pretty near-term stuff, right? Plutonium, you don't just switch on plutonium production, right? Because we don't have these don't just switch on plutonium production, right? Because we don't have these giant fissile materials or production plants from the Cold War anymore, those were all shut down, we have to, we, the Department of Energy,

has to figure out how to make this stuff again. And they couldn't even start to figure out how to do it until they had money and approval by Congress to do that. And then once they would do it, it takes about 10 years to ramp up to production level of this stuff. So we're talking about mid 2020s. Every year that it was delayed was another year of decay for the existing plutonium, another year potential delay for any future emissions. So this was getting pretty bad. Talking about the infrastructure, it's important to remember this is really nasty stuff we're talking about making. So when they shut these facilities down in the late 80s, these facilities were not in pristine

shape to begin with. And then they sat and rusted for 20 plus years. And these are things that handled really, really, really dangerous materials and really corrosive materials. So when we opened those doors up, what we found is that the facilities were not at all recoverable. So we had to rebuild all of the facilities just to even start producing this stuff. Entirely new production methods because we're not making weapons in the same way anymore, right? That's right. It took, I think, about three tries, and NASA finally just threw up its hands and said, fine, we will pay you the damn money to start making plutonium-238 again. Yeah, again, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what Jim Green said.

Maybe paraphrasing. So, I mean, it was just this sense that, you know, it's fascinating to me that it's just this squabbling. Because I should point out, we're talking about roughly, initially it was proposed, $30 million a year or so. Department of Energy's budget is on the order of $27 billion a year. NASA's budget is on the order of $18-ish billion at the time. The congressional committee was squabbling over who would pay $30 million. It's chicken feed, yeah. It's glow-in-the-dark chicken feed. With real consequences. Yeah. But with real consequences about our ability to say, like, would we have to end the idea of going out beyond Jupiter, right? Ultimately, they got the authorization. It took them years from start to finish. I mean, we're talking about five years, I think fiscal year 2012 is when this finally started.

fiscal year 2012 is when this finally started. Jim Green came in in 2006. The report came out in 2009. Many, many years, right? That's a lot of years. Finally, this started to happen. And it's been this amazing process because they've had to figure out, I mean, just like the amount, you see why you need this level of industrial capability, right? This industrial base that you need that allows exploration to happen. We did this, I did this article in the Planetary Report a few years ago that traced the whole pathway of how you generate plutonium-238.

It starts up in Idaho, in the national labs up there, where they use this feedstock. Neptunium-237 is how you generate this now. It's something I learned. They had all of this leftover. Neptunium-237 is how you generate this now. It's something I learned. They had all of this leftover Neptunium from fissile materials back from the Cold War

that they just decided to store in Idaho because what else are you going to do with it? They actually didn't have a method to ship it, to grab it and prepare it to move. They had to build a whole that was one of the infrastructure. They had to build ways for people to pick this stuff up and ship it.

The Department of Energy has a network of highly secure trucks that drive radioactive material around the country. So you start in Idaho. You ship this Neptunium all the way down to Oak Ridge National Lab, which, Jason, I believe you're somewhat familiar with. I grew up in Oak Ridge, and in honor of this conversation, I'm actually wearing my Big Ed's Pizza t-shirt from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So, of course, the big Department of Energy National Lab there, and they take this neptunium, and they stick it into this big reactor, this nuclear reactor that they have there, which, by the way, is an order of magnitude at least smaller than the stuff that they used to use back in the Cold War. All these facilities are just smaller. smaller than the stuff that they used to use back in the Cold War. All these facilities are just smaller. They usually make, is this correct, Jason, that they make like medical radioactive isotopes and all these other like small things there in relatively small quantities.

Yes, that's true. Yeah, it's a nuclear laboratory. It does a lot of different things. It used, Oak Ridge was originally a city that was built in World War II to produce weapons grade uranium for the first atomic weapons. Was part of the Manhattan Project. That's correct. That's correct. The only remaining facilities now are all part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory

that does only research. The weapons capabilities have been removed from the city, but the lab does a lot of research and far less production. But the lab does a lot of research and far less production. So this is sort of an odd capability for this facility that they had to start up their entire production process from scratch as well. tested, right? This is all, it's theoretical. They spent the first couple of years. They have to figure out what size of things to irradiate with neutrons to turn neptunium into plutonium-238. They turn it into a liquid. They have to separate out all these daughter particles that aren't right, you know, that decay into these things that they just

don't want. They have to purify it. And again, this is all radioactive stuff, right? And you're using really caustic chemicals to separate this stuff as well. It's a nasty process. The stuff itself is toxic in addition to being radioactive. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Everything about this is nasty. Right? It's just insane. Then they ship this stuff to Los Alamos where they press it into these pellets, the actual pellets that fuel these plutonium power sources in spacecraft. And they have to like validate them. And so you start in Idaho, to Oak Ridge, to Los Alamos. And then I always thought this was kind of funny. When you're ready to actually fuel these back into an RTG, you ship them back up to Idaho. And that's where they put them into that. So you just make this big loop.

A true government organization. But that's, you know, it's crazy. So NASA pays about $15 million a year to the Department of Energy to just do the restart to build this again. And since it began in 2012, they're to the point where they validated the process, they have a few, it looks like a few efficiencies to implement. And they for the first time in the United States since the late 1980s, they have produced a few grams of plutonium-238. But again, this is how slow it is. Five years from now will be about the time when they start ramping up production to actually be fueling these spacecraft, right? At its peak, they're hoping to get 1.5 kilograms of plutonium oxide, right? This is the actual ceramic stuff.

You need about an MMRTG that like the Curiosity rover uses that has about four and a half kilograms of plutonium oxide. So you'll be able to fuel at its peak production in five years. You will fuel one of those one Curiosity every three-ish years, which is not a lot, right? The Europa mission, before they decided to use solar power, was looking at three to four RTGs, right? Which would take a decade to generate that much fuel for. And so even though we're to the point where we're actually making this stuff again, we have a bottleneck of production that this stuff is still going to be highly valuable.

This is why it's kind of been interesting. You see like these missions like Juno and now Europa being pushed to find any possible way to not use plutonium if you don't absolutely need it. Because it's beyond just the fact that there's not very much of it. It's just a headache to deal with. And the rockets that launch this stuff have to be certified to launch radioactive stuff into space. You have to do a separate certification process on a rocket to launch plutonium into space. Casey, that article that you referred to in the Planetary Report, which of course is the

award-winning magazine from the Planetary Society, that was a fantastic article, absolutely terrific. It really did a great job of tracing this whole complex process that you've just gone through. I wish we had time, and maybe you want to mention for a minute, this other topic that's related, the effort that now has gone away to create a much more efficient form of RTG. The ASRG, the Sterling Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, the Sterling radioisotope thermoelectric generator. This was looking at a more efficient method of using the heat to generate electricity. This would be using the heat to push a piston as opposed to using a thermocouple, which is a material that sort of translates heat into electricity. It was a really, really, really interesting mission. But again, it sort of fell

to the woes of government bureaucracy. It was a mission that was paid for by NASA, but run in the Department of Energy. And as a result, the mission didn't really have a clear set of directives and went massively over budget. And they were working on this for 15 years. Yeah. Yeah. This was very, very long, long long term project as it was just getting to the point where it was it was showing promise of actually developing results. This issue of plutonium production came about and NASA had to make a choice whether they wanted to produce plutonium or produce a new form of RTG. And they ended up basically canceling the ASRG in an effort to pay for plutonium production. This is a part of the story I kind of glossed over

but always really irritated me, that you can look at the funding, and ASRG, they were spending about $50 million a year to try to make flight-ready hardware that they wanted to demonstrate, right? And again, this stuff is hard. Why it took 15 years? Well, you're going from something that has no moving parts to a piston that has to move

continuously for the entire God knows how many decade duration of your mission in deep space. Think about your center of mass as you have a moving piston, or if your spacecraft is spinning, or all of these like weird issues. However, they were getting close to it. And then what happened was, the Department of Energy said like, hey, wait we got nasa to pay for plutonium production we're right now shouldering the cost of just the existing plutonium infrastructure of storing plutonium 238 of the people who know how to make radioisotope thermoelectric generators why don't they pay for that too and in 2014 they became full cost recovery mode and And NASA now has to pay Department of Energy, in addition to restarting plutonium production, they have to pay them to maintain

plutonium infrastructure. So that's 50 million a year on top of the 15 to create new plutonium. And so they basically, you can look at this, they basically took the ASRG funding line, zeroed it out, moved that 5050 million down to Department of Energy. And I should say, but this really grinds my gears, this is all happening, this is all paid for by NASA's Planetary Science Division's technology budget, right? So this is within planetary science that is paying for all of this infrastructure. And this is happening while planetary science is getting its budget slashed by the White House. They're adding in $65-$70 million of overhead costs just to maintain existing capability for plutonium, right? And so this is 8% roughly of that division's budget has been going to plutonium

at a moment where it was just hammered with development costs for a new mission. I mean, just its budget was getting hammered. Yeah. And 65 to 70 million dollars a year. That's a large mission every year. That's a decent amount of money. That's your that's almost a discovery mission, right? I mean, you're going to pay a billion dollars in what, 12 years or so for that.

So it's just like a totally unfair kind of a kick in the knees right when it was this really happening. But it was really happening. But it just couldn't be stopped. This is the cost, as Jim Green says, this is the cost of doing business, right? This is one of the fundamental infrastructure costs of if you want to go into deep space, you have to have a fuel source that will allow you to go there. And this is why many countries do not have this fuel source, right? It's a big investment. You have

all sorts of these infrastructure problems I think we'll talk about over the course of the show. But plutonium is a fascinating one. And it's actually a happy ending, right? It's happening now. They're making plutonium again. It just took five to eight years to actually go from zero to 50 grams. And it'll take another five to eight years to ramp up to 1.5 kilograms a year. The human on this planet who may have been most disappointed by the end of that application of the Stirling engine in space, and that's our boss, the CEO, Bill Nye, who owns two Stirling engines. He's a huge fan. Here is a great coda for this closing story in this edition of Space Policy Edition. On this week's Planetary Radio, the regular weekly series, Planetary Radio,

my guests are Philip Lubin and Travis Brashears. They're part of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. They want to start building towards sending these little wafers, laser-driven sails with a wafer in the middle, a silicon wafer, out to the stars, to Alpha Centauri. And do you know how they want to power those wafers until they get close enough to another star? I do. A few milligrams of plutonium, a tiny, tiny, tiny, a bite-size RTG, a bite-size wafer. Gentlemen, this has been so enjoyable and absolutely fascinating. a bite-size RTG, a bite-size wafer.

Gentlemen, this has been so enjoyable and absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much, and I sure look forward to doing this again with you in a month. Oh, yeah, we've got so many good topics. Keep those suggestions coming, by the way, anyone who's listening. We've been getting lots of great ideas, and we'll be working those in here soon. And I should say, I want to make sure that we don't ignore this plutonium thing. The Planetary Society was there every step of the way pushing for this plutonium production to happen. This is where I found letters going back.

We were sending to Congress something that I've worked on with Jason. This is a critical thing. Society's been there trying to make it happen. And that's why we've got Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy, on staff. One of our top people at the Planetary Society. And Jason Callahan, Policy Advisor, working away there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. It all happens because of our members. Planetary.org slash membership. You can learn about our entirely new and quite exciting membership program if you like what you've heard on this show,

even if you don't like it, I can't imagine that, but if you are intrigued and love all the other stuff, the advocacy work that Planetary Society is doing and everything else that we're up to, that's the place to become part of it, planetary.org slash membership. We will be back on the first Friday of September. So I will simply once again thank Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan, who is the composer and performer of that theme music

you're hearing take us out of the show right now. Gentlemen, once again, thanks, and I'll see you soon. Until next time. Thanks, Matt.