Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #5: The U.S. Senate takes on the politics of Mars

Episode Date: October 7, 2016

We take a deep dive into new space legislation working its way through the US Senate. It embraces Mars and NASA's big rocket. But Elon Musk and SpaceX just announced an ambitious new plan to colonize Mars. Does this upset the political establishment? Or will they find a cold reception in the halls of Congress? Also, where does science fit into the politics of space?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I am Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, the weekly series from the Planetary Society. And it is the members of the Planetary Society that have made that show and this special edition, this fifth edition of Looking at Space Policy, possible. We hope, I'll say up front, that those of you who aren't already members of the Planetary Society will consider becoming members. That means that you would be a part of this show and everything else that we do at the Society. We sure would appreciate your support and that, that very meaningful vote of confidence.

And if you are already a member of the Planetary Society, well, thank you, because you are making this possible. Let's move on to meeting the other two regular participants in the Space Policy Edition. They are, of course, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Casey. Hey, Matt. And I should say, I'm also a member of the Planetary Society. As am, Casey. Hey, Matt. And I should say I'm also a member of the Planetary Society. As am I. Jason, it's up to you. I too am actually a member of the Planetary Society. And that means you get to stay on the show. That's Jason Callahan. He is our policy advisor there in the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Gentlemen, we have much to talk about as always. I also do want to

thank those listeners who are sending us their reactions to the show, which you can easily do by writing to planetaryradio at planetary.org. And we hope that you will also consider making comment wherever you may be listening to the show, whether it's in iTunes or SoundCloud or wherever, because that does make a big difference as well. But we do love to hear from you, and we are collecting your suggestions of what we may be addressing on the show in the future. Casey, go through what we are going to be talking about this month. It's a very timely topic.

Yeah, Matt, this is going to be a fun episode, I have to say. This is maybe my favorite episode that we'll have done, and I'm saying that before we have even done it, because I'm so excited about it. We're going to look at a piece of space legislation that is moving through the Senate right now. We're not going to go through line by line that we'll encourage you to do that. But we're going to use it as a way to structure our discussion. We're going to talk about how the Senate wants to make NASA transition to a new presidential administration, the politics of Mars exploration, particularly with the new SpaceX announcement about colonizing Mars and the plethora of other Mars plans out there. And we'll see where space science fits into all of this as well, not just in the Senate politics, but also in the broader

problems facing NASA and its science directorate as we speak. Now, for those of you out there who are saying, oh boy, we're going to go through legislation, you found the right place. But even those of you who may be thinking, wondering why Casey is excited to talk about this, I recommend you read the act that we are going to be discussing because it actually is terrific reading. I found it absolutely fascinating. Jason, how about you? Well, I've been reading a lot of these things over the years. So this was an interesting one in that what it says is unsurprising, but what it doesn't say is actually quite surprising. So we'll get into that as we talk through this. What's the actual name of the bill? The Senate bill, it's numbered, actually, as you can look it up, S3346.

Just rolls right off the tongue. It's so memorable. It's actually the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act of 2016. Authorizations. Let's maybe even step back and talk about what we're talking about here or what we're not. We're not talking about appropriations. We are not talking about a bill that will actually give money to NASA. It does not allow NASA to have a certain funding for next year. That is a separate committee in the Congress. This is the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. It has a subcommittee

called the Space Science and Competitiveness Subcommittee. That subcommittee is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and the ranking member is, I believe, Peter Udall of New Mexico, with Bill Nelson of Florida, famous space promoter. He's the ranking member of the entire Senate committee. So these are the subcommittees. They sit down and they write the first drafts of these bills. They have to move them through and get approved by the full committee. And then ideally, this bill that gets approved by the committee would go to the Senate floor, gets voted on by the Senate,

and you have a similar process ideally happening in the House. Ultimately, you would have to reconcile the differences between these two bills and then vote on them again and then have the president sign it. We're a long way from that, just to be clear. This is something that just came out of the Senate Commerce Committee, and it's a first step, but I think an important one considering where we are in this presidential transition. Casey, you mentioned the three individuals on the subcommittee chair, the ranking member and the committee chair. Bill Nelson from Florida represents not only the Kennedy Space Center, but he is also a former astronaut, so clearly has interest in chairing this committee. And then Udall from New Mexico doesn't actually have a

NASA center there, but New Mexico has a strong contingent of Department of Energy facilities, and that is also covered by this subcommittee. You can see a lot of the co-sponsors. So this bill is actually bipartisan. We should say that, too. Thankfully, you know, and again, NASA generally is a bipartisan organization in the federal government, has lots of support from Republicans and Democrats. We have it sponsored by Cruz. He's the one who kind of started to move this forward. But it has co-sponsors of Bill Nelson, Democrat Marco Rubio, also from Florida, right? Lots of people have interest in space. Peter's from Michigan.

You also have folks from Mississippi, New Mexico, both senators of Washington State, Kent Will and Murray, and then also the chair of the entire Commerce Committee, Thune, who's out of South Dakota. So a lot of folks here have generally have industries that are represented or are involved with NASA very deeply. You have folks adding amendments who are from Colorado. Gardner did that, added some amendments. Obviously, a lot of space happens in Denver with Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, University of Colorado, Boulder. So people's interests are generally reflected.

They sit on these committees to have influence on industries that are represented in their state, right? This is standard politics. This is what it means to represent your citizenry, right? So it's an interesting bill, and I'm glad to see that it has a mix of Democrats and Republicans sponsoring it. And that generally means that it probably doesn't have too many controversial things in it, which this one doesn't. But we'll get to that in broad strokes here in a minute. Not to flog a dead horse here. I mentioned that the Department of Energy was represented by this committee. The Department of Energy is also represented by several other committees, as is NASA, right? There are basically four committees in Congress that represent NASA, two authorization and two appropriation committees, subcommittees, right? And that's really important, though, again, because, you know, committees do the daily work.

Committees have staff members that are assigned to the committee that generally last through various political cycles. And so the staff members in these committees are supposed to be these kind of retainers of knowledge, be very familiar with these subjects, particularly with NASA issues. It's a very important area to follow. If you're interested in the future of space, you need to understand that the decisions and the funding and the policy of what NASA does is going to be decided by these folks who are writing these bills, even at these early stages. to be decided by these folks who are writing these bills, even at these early stages. And Jason, you used to work at NASA. You can tell us, even if these bills do not pass into law, they still have influence. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. When we would go through legislation, regardless of whether or not it passed, we would include that in our analysis of the regulations that NASA should follow, because these are the intents of Congress. Even if they don't pass, the stakeholders who pay attention to NASA,

this is what they're looking for out of NASA. So NASA takes that very seriously. There's that great phrase throughout the bill, the sense of Congress. It's not quite saying, this is what we're requiring you to do, but this is the conclusion that we have reached. Do I have that right? Yeah, yeah. It's not as legally binding as thou shalt. But yeah, it's a clear intent as to what Congress wants out of NASA. And so another dimension of all of this is that NASA is an agency that sits within the executive branch.

So technically they answer directly within the executive branch. So technically, they answer directly to the White House. But Congress, as everybody who's ever taken a civics class knows, holds the power of the purse. So if NASA wants money to enact the president's agenda, they also have to pay attention to what Congress is looking for. Before we really start digging into this, digging into the regolith, if you will, what's the current status of the bill? So the bill has been approved by the Senate committee, which means that it's gone through the subcommittee level. It got voted on by members of the subcommittee, got moved up to the full committee. The full committee, all the Senate members who sit on that committee voted to approve it, moves forward. And now we're basically just waiting for it to show up on the Senate floor in order to

have senators vote on it. It hasn't even been approved by the full Senate yet. Again, surprised there's kind of this thing called the presidential election happening right now. And Congress generally doesn't want to do very much before an election because they don't want to be held accountable for doing any kind of unpleasant vote. The less stuff that they do, the less they have to be potentially held against them by their opponents when they're running for office. As opposed to all the other times of the year, right? It's more relevant, right? So anyway, Congress is in recess right now. They won't be back until November 14th. Then there is this mad rush to do basically the entire nation's business in

about four or five weeks before the end of the year. The actual U.S. budget expired on September 30th. We have this thing called a continuing resolution, which is basically a stopgap measure extending last year's budget for about six weeks until mid-November, or is it December? December. I think it's December 6th. A couple months until, yeah, until early December. So they have to pass the budget. Depending on who wins the election, you may end up actually voting in a new Supreme Court

justice. There's the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to maybe move on. It's going to be a very packed schedule. So we don't even know if this will show up to be voted on. Right. And then we should also mention on the House side, they haven't even started this process. They have another authorization bill that they voted on a while ago, but it's very different than this one. So there's quite a bit of reconciliation. They might not even bother to do it. But this is still important. And I want to just emphasize that despite this not having a very high likelihood of becoming law,

this is still basically a bunch of senators going down on record to the next administration. This is a message bill, right? And we'll talk about what this says, but it's basically this, it's in the name. It's a transition authorization. So it's only for a year. And it basically says, let's keep things going. Don't screw with this. We're very interested in and what we've done before. We like the programs that are out there. We can do some tweaking on them. But, you know, no more big resets like what happened with the Obama administration coming in and canceling the previous moon program set up by George W. Bush. The Constellation program, yeah. I got to say, I mean, I'm not in the habit of reading legislation every day, as you guys are, so I guess I'm more of an average American. This was, like I said, pretty good reading, and I found it to be generally very positive, although some glaring holes and some kind of semi- ominous things as well. Let's start getting into this. You want to start right up at the top?

Yeah, well, let's talk really broadly about what this bill says, and then we can go into some specific sections. And again, as Matt said, this really is kind of an interesting read. And as Matt said, this really is kind of an interesting read. And if you really want to kind of level up as a space advocate, it's kind of interesting to read the bills and to see what exactly Congress is saying that NASA should do. Broadly, again, this bill says, let's not stop any of our major programs. It says we love the SLS. We love Orion. Mars is the goal of human spaceflight.

NASA should have a goal to explore Mars and to create a plan to do so. Then it goes into some other areas. The ISS, the International Space Station, is great. NASA should consider what to do after the current authorization runs out to run it in 2024. Space science is good. We should have a diverse portfolio. But, you know, it's basically just a let's keep the program of record going for the most part. And that is, again, this is a sign to the next president that Congress does not want to relitigate this program again. Don't cancel the SLS and make us come together and pass another big bill to create the same rocket again. Right. Because that's what happened in 2010. You had a president's budget came out, canceled Constellation. Congress passed the last time that

they actually passed an authorization bill. It created the space launch system, kept Orion going, created this idea of human deep space exploration, and accepted the role of commercial space, at least for cargo and crew in low Earth orbit, that was a very important bill. And that was in response to a very divisive period in NASA's history because they canceled the program of record. So this is a kind of a shot across the bow. Don't mess with us.

Stay the course. Now, that said, there are some interesting aspects of this bill that are not completely coherent with that message. In terms of the asteroid redirect mission, are you thinking? That's specifically what I was thinking. Or as it's referred to here, they added an R, which was new to me, asteroid robotic redirect mission. That's technically how NASA breaks into the two parts of that mission. mission. That's technically how NASA breaks into the two parts of that

mission. The first part would be the robotic portion, and the second part then would be the EFT-2 flight, I think? Or no, EFT-3. It would be like four or five now, because I think they're not coming back until 2026. Yeah, so that would be

some future Orion mission out to meet this relocated piece of rock. Let's actually step back and let's just start with what does this bill say about human spaceflight? So that's my first thing. We'll talk about that broadly, and then we'll go down into some of the sections. And I'll even name the sections here for all of you following along at home who want to be reading this online. And again, we'll link to this in our show page.

Let's start with Section 411, and it's called Human Exploration and Long-Term Goals. And I think this was actually, to me, one of the more important aspects of this bill was that it adds a few portions to, beyond doing the general sense of Congress and findings, to beyond doing the general sense of congress and findings which are you know nice but non-binding it actually does make a binding set of proposals to change u.s law and that's to add as a long-term goal the human spaceflight program to expand and i'm quoting here to expand permanent human presence beyond low earth orbit and to do so we're practical in a manner involving international academic industry partners. Okay, that's good.

And also there's the peaceful settlement of a location in space or on another celestial body and a thriving space economy in the 21st century. I loved that phrase. Yeah, it's bringing in a lot of ambitious things, right? And this is where you start seeing, and we'll talk about this here in a minute, how all of these new Mars plans are going to fit into this broad policy goal.

But it also says here, too, the goal, it adds an additional goal and objective for NASA, which is to achieve human exploration of Mars, including the establishment of the capability to extend human presence, including potential habitation on the surface. So this is literally adding we need to land on Mars and have a habitation and long-term presence there that was missing from the previous authorizations. This would codify that. And I think that's actually a really good step and something that needs to be done because there is still this tension

between people who would rather have NASA go back to the moon or continue on this path to Mars. And so this is, I think, the Senate saying we're very much behind the Mars goal in a way that they haven't really clarified for a while. Oh, not just haven't clarified. Ten years ago, it was written into legislation that NASA was not allowed to look at going to Mars. Well, there you go. Yeah, so this is a good improvement. And, you know, all of this, of course, is done with very explicit say that you shall use your existing programs to achieve these goals. Specific mentions of the Space Launch System rocket, Orion, and developing cislunar deep space habitats. You know, and I should say broadly, this is all stuff that we

recommended starting last year with the stepwise approach to Mars. And we did give feedback to the committee and our recommendations. And I think the fact that this is in this legislation, it's not just because the Planetary Society was saying this, it's because a lot of people are saying this. And this is a sign for me that there is a large coalition starting to form and coalesce around this stepwise approach for NASA to explore Mars with humans and to do it in a sustainable way that kind of broadly matches our orbit first approach that we really highlighted last year in our report. This was popping up all through the bill, almost all through the bill. I mean,

there's another phrase, as the United States works to send humans on a series of missions on or near Mars in the 2030s, dot, dot, dot, which was a nice nod, I would say, to an orbital mission or a Phobos mission, right? the Senate basically blessed the idea of a stepwise approach. It's strangely controversial in some circles to even propose that we orbit first as opposed to just go full bore and land the first time. Despite the myriad practical benefits and historical precedent of your Apollo 8 and 10 kind of missions, you want to learn how to walk before you can run, and you also spread out the money requirements and again given the option would i take a mission to orbit versus no mission at all because the

you know the the initial expense would be so high i would orbit in a second and i think most astronauts would say that too most people would but i think there's this strange reticence because they feel like no you got to land all in one go, which is actually never something NASA has ever done before to try to do everything at once. It's always this kind of progression of capability and testing your hardware and safety. And so it's nice to see that reflected in this bill. There's another consideration there as well from a budgetary standpoint. In the public, we tend to talk about spaceflight projects in terms of how much they cost in total. That's called a life cycle cost. From soup to

nuts, how much did this project cost? Congress doesn't think that way at all. They think in annual budget increments. And the only consideration they have over long-term budget costs is, are we being forced into a position where we're going to have to allocate money in out years that we don't want to allocate? So it's a very different way of thinking about things. And if you can stretch that mission out so that the annual costs are not as high, that's actually very attractive in a way that going straight to the surface is not because it's just far more expensive from a year to year standpoint. That's absolutely true and a really critical point. This is why it's sometimes politically preferable that something cost more in aggregate if it's more affordable year to year and it's

just stretched out, right? It would be cheaper, probably total, to send a single mission to go retrieve samples from Mars, but it would just be so much money up front that it will never happen. But it's much more likely we could send three missions to return samples from Mars because that spreads the money out in a way that it can fit into these annualized budgets, even if the entire thing might cost more money. Well, I mean, we do that too. Mortgages. It'd be cheaper if I bought a house up front overall, I spend a lot more money paying a mortgage over 30 years, right, with interest payments, but it annualizes my payments in a way that I can afford to do it in the near term. And that's kind of what we were

looking at here. So that's a really important point that Jason just made. I assume that you're going to want to get to commercial human spaceflight as well, which is also addressed and pretty heavily supported here. But was there more you wanted to talk about? What this refers to is the activity of government astronauts. Was that the phrase? Yeah, that's starting to crop up. I guess that I think that's a that's a cruisism in some way that you're seeing that phrase,

but it's true. You will now theoretically have private individual astronauts, government astronauts being NASA astronauts. I just prefer to call them NASA astronauts. It sounds nicer to me. It does. What's really interesting to me, I want to look at how we have SpaceX's new plan and Lockheed Martin's plan and other plans, how they fit into this political space that the Senate is creating here. So section 433, section 433 of this legislation, it calls for, and this is not just a sense of Congress, this is actually a shall, the administrator

shall. And this says that the administrator shall develop a strategic framework, a critical decision plan to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit, including cislunar space, the moons of Mars, the surface of Mars, and beyond. So it's calling for what we have been calling for for the last year, which is NASA needs to define its plan for how it intends to get humans to Mars by the 2030s. And that gives us all sorts of benefits, right? It allows commercial and private companies to see how they can fit into this architecture it allows international partners to see how they could fit into it it allows us to measure nasa's

progress and success in into getting there right we'll know if they're on track or not it allows congress to know if they're on track or not everyone's been calling for this i'm sure nasa has internal plans that they are just not allowed to release yet. And part of this is because we're at the end of an administration. And so we don't want to have a, it's very unlikely, a kind of last year president's going to set up a whole new big executive branch project and then pass it on to their successor. They're probably waiting for the next president to come in. Maybe the next president can use this as their defining legacy for space. But it's a good thing. And this is a shall. So I like this a lot. NASA shall create a strategic framework that gives all sorts of

things that should take into consideration and that they shall have it done by December of 2017. One year to give us your real plans. That's a really good step. And I think that's NASA needs to hear that. It shows that Congress wants NASA to, again, take the stepping stone approach and to show us how you're going to do it affordably. In NASA's defense, and you know, I actually really agree with NASA coming out with a strategic framework for all of this stuff. But just for the sake of playing devil's advocate, NASA is not wholly unreasonable in not providing these plans up front. They've been burned in the past when Congress has asked them to put forth milestones and they have done so.

And then Congress underfunds them annually, year after year after year. And then when the milestones slip because they didn't have the money to accomplish what they'd been told to do, then Congress beats them about the head and neck with the fact that they missed a milestone. So it's understandable why NASA managers are reticent to give out these plans. But as Casey said, there are tremendous benefits to doing so, primarily in gaining private sector and international support, because people can start to see how they fit into your architecture. Yeah. And again, I think this is the tightrope that NASA has to walk. They have to show exactly how they're going to do something that has never been done before and use all the pieces that they have been told to build, whether NASA wanted to or not.

You have to use a space launch system. You have to use Orion. You've got to use your launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center. You've got to test your engines at at Kennedy Space Center. You've got to test your engines at Stennis Space Center down in Mississippi. You've got to build these things in the Michoud Assembly Facility down in Louisiana. And you've got to design these rockets up in Alabama, right? This is NASA's big infrastructure problem that they have. They're told to go to Mars, but use everything that you have. You can't streamline any of it and do it in a way that is on time, on budget,

and is exactly as you predicted for the next 10 years. And you may or may not get the money that you were promised. And we may cut your budget by 30% in the middle of it randomly. So this actually brings me, this is a good way to introduce the SpaceX plan that just came out. And I wrote a post about this on planetary.org talking about SpaceX and the blank slate versus the NASA process that I just described. SpaceX has literally decided to take the opposite approach.

And so I called that the blank slate, which is SpaceX just say, okay, we want to go to Mars and we don't just want to go to Mars to do some science. We don't want to go to Mars just to have a few astronauts there. You know, they went big, right? We want a million people on Mars in 60 years, roughly. So you start that as the goal and they just kind of worked backwards from that goal to say, okay, so we want a million people in 60 years. So how many, how are you going to do that? Well, we can send lots of ships. Well, you get a 10,000 to be 10,000. You have opportunities to launch Mars every two years. What's a reasonable in air

quotes, number of ships to send to Mars, balancing the size and capabilities like, oh, let's do a ship of a hundred people, a thousand every Mars opportunity. You can get a million people to Mars in 60 years. Great. And they just kept working back from there. Okay, what does it take to build, to launch a ship that could hold 100 people? Okay, well, we'll need a really big rocket that can lift half a million pounds or kilograms. I'm sorry. I should know my units here.

I think it's metric tons. Up into Leo. This is where they come out with this plan of building the largest rocket ever in the history of humanity. A 12-meter diameter rocket. That is, what, two meters larger in diameter than Saturn V. It has three and a half times the lift capacity of your Saturn V rocket. Fully reusable up to a thousand times is their design. It comes back and lands precisely on its launch point, launches up, does in-orbit refueling to fuel up your crew habitation vehicle that then

shoots to Mars really fast, lands without a parachute, never been done before, builds in-situ resource utilization, never been done before. And then you have this interplanetary transport system. I was watching Elon give this talk at the IAC on video, thankfully, because it was apparently in that house. That's the International Astronautical Conference, which Congress did in Guadalajara a couple of weeks ago. They opened the doors and people ran and knocked. I think our communications director was knocked over by people running in to get seats. This was a rock star announcement.

It certainly got rock star coverage. It was a very ambitious plan. So people are all talking about the feasibility of it, which is debatable. Let's say it's very kindly say it's a debatable feasibility. Just for the sake of putting that into context, in less than 60 years, we went from the right flyer to the Concord. And what he's suggesting is an order of magnitude more difficult, probably orders of magnitude more difficult in about the same time frame. And huge segments, like you talked about, institute use of resources, which are not

really, it's just, we'll do that. There's no explanation of how it's going to happen. Yeah. But it's a grand dream, isn it it is it is and this is what's so interesting to me about the spacex plan compared to let's just contrast the nasa plan a little bit well there's not a nasa plan but there's a couple of of good options that we we highlighted this one by the jet propulsion laboratory which was orbit first you send humans to orbit in 2033 after doing a bunch of stuff in cislunar space throughout the 2020s, maybe land on Phobos. And then you come back at the end of the decade, you do a landing with maybe two people on the surface. They analyze this. You could probably do this in a budget that grows with

inflation from the human spaceflight side. Lockheed Martin has a plan out called Mars Base Camp, which basically took this idea from JPL and just amped it up a little bit. They want to build a big orbiting, kind of a mini space station type of crew capsule and science laboratory basically that orbits Mars, has a crew of six astronauts, and they have multiple Orion crafts. They can do sortie missions out to the moons. They can do lots of telerobotics. They set up to maybe a dozen rovers on the surface

controlled by astronauts. And you launch that in 2028. That's a very aggressive schedule. They haven't talked about budget as much, interestingly enough, on that one, but it's very much in the same vein where you kind of push off landing a little bit, but what can you do in the near term?

All of those, again, those use this idea of piecing together NASA's existing programs, minimizing new development. Jason, as you've talked about a lot, where does all the big cost overruns happen in development? Development and testing. That's where everything goes over. Of new hardware, right? Because it's these complex systems that, as they interact with even more complex systems,

that as they interact with even more complex systems, you have this unpredictable, emergent consequences of it that are just impossible to model. And you usually don't discover those problems until very late in the development cycle. And that's why the cost overrun becomes so dangerous. Right. So you have the Senate right now basically giving this blessing. And I should say that this came out before Elon Musk's announcement, basically giving this blessing. And I should say that this came out before Elon Musk's announcement, but basically giving this blessing to this stepwise approach using the major contractor programs of record that NASA is doing right now. And then Elon Musk is coming out of

this completely different approach, this whole blank slate and say, let's just do everything new. And to me, there's one actual subtlety, though, of this message that I think is really powerful. And I don't know, actually, I'd be curious to hear both of you say what you think about how this is going to impact the politics of this. Compared to NASA's kind of modest plans,

as if landing humans on Mars is modest anymore, but a more less aggressive schedule, if you're just reading about these two ideas, NASA doesn't sound very impressive compared to what Elon Musk is saying. And I worry about that in terms of public expectations for the space program. And if that's going to filter up to the political expectations of the space program, because think of it this way, right? In 2014, you had this report by the National Academy's Pathways to Exploration. Why do we send humans into space? This was like some of the best and brightest minds in the United States getting together,

trying to think of this, why do we do this? And they came up with what, 12 different reasons? They said there's no one reason why we send humans into space. But in aggregate, all these 12 are pretty good together. That is just a terrible messaging situation. I have 12 things that all kind of make sense as a whole. But you have to understand all of them. Yeah, any one of them is not in itself strong enough. Elon Musk, on the other hand, says, why do I want to go to Mars? I send humans to Mars because I want to save humanity.

That is a clear narrative. That is a very easy message to send. Even if it's far more ambitious and unlikely, it is such a better narrative, right? It makes sense. People can get it, right? Oh, Earth, you want an offsite backup for humanity. You got to colonize another planet. You got to be an interplanetary species, or we have no hope to

maintain consciousness. He doesn't want the light of consciousness to be extinguished. Getting back to the difference between Elon Musk and NASA and the pressures to which they respond, NASA could say that exact same thing. But the immediate question is, well, why do we have to do it in 30 years or 60 years? What is the likelihood of humanity actually coming to an end in that timeframe? And the likelihood is very, very small. If you're talking about in a thousand years or a 10,000 year timeframe, that argument makes a lot more sense. But Elon Musk isn't constrained by public opinion or federal funding guidelines, right? So he can say these things and 60 years is an arbitrary timeline that he's determined on his own, which is great. You know, I suspect that he picked that time frame because he could see

significant progress in his lifetime. Since he wants to go. He's not constrained by lack of imagination either, but I agree with you, Casey. It sets the bar so much higher that it's kind of the Star Trek effect. Why aren't we already flying around the universe? Well, for a whole bunch of reasons. But, you know, when you look at that animation of the Musk plan and you see this spacecraft with a whole bunch of windows for those hundred people to look around, and they're going to get to Mars in three months, it just makes everything else look a little puny, even though the challenge is tremendous. To me, this is just another important difference between basically publicly subsidized space exploration and a business.

Right. And we compare these two as if they're equal. They're not. Elon Musk has a job. He's a promoter. He's a businessman, a salesperson for his company and his vision. So it behooves him to get people excited and to push these big ideas and to sell it. NASA is a public organization that is funded by Congress, and they have a responsibility to not oversell themselves, in a sense, right? It's a very different set of inputs and they have to answer to and kind of be told what to do by this varying group of disjointed levels of influence that can may not have to always agree with themselves.

And this is why almost by definition, a public entity in a representative democracy almost cannot be efficient. It has to be somewhat inefficient in a sense, because it has to address a broad coalition of people in order to get the support that it needs, right? There's a reason we still have NASA facilities in northern Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Virginia, because that's where NASA support comes from. And if you didn't have that spread, you probably wouldn't have the same type of political support. Building coalitions, building consensus is inherently inefficient, right? Right. But we compare the two that NASA should be run like a business, but it's not a business, right? If NASA was run like a business, you would not have the political support to fund NASA as it is now, right? And that's an interesting thing that I think we're going to see

more and more of this tension, in a sense, rising. As a quick aside, because I know a lot of people who work at NASA, I've never found a lack of vision within the people working at NASA. They're just not allowed to discuss it publicly, right? That is a great point. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that's true. And it's, I mean, when we ever said, we always have to be careful when we say NASA wants to do X, right? Because NASA's 17,000 civil servants and, you know, all sorts of different internal issues. Contractors, right?

Yeah. There is a huge amount of vision, but how they can talk about what they're doing is very different than someone whose job it is to sell their company and their vision. And I'm going to be very interested to see how the Senate and the House committees that are responsible for NASA digest this ambition from SpaceX. Because again, SpaceX is saying, we'd love to do this with government, right? They acknowledge it's going to be expensive. Elon Musk said 10 billion, which I think is a very optimistic, very optimistic number. You think?

And 10 years before maybe you can start launching. They're not making that much money yet. I mean, they're making no money right now because they can't launch. But when they do, they only make so much revenue from launching rockets. And there's only so big of a market right now. There's like a peak about how much revenue they can pull in. This is why they're trying to, big of a market right now. There's like a peak about how much revenue they can pull in. This is why they're trying to hopefully the market grows. But even with that, to do this on their own money is very unlikely. This is to me the interesting political situation where you have such buy-in from the Senate and honestly the House on the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule that I see very little effort by the Congress to throw money to SpaceX

to compete directly with that. Right. They want it. They're going to want to protect their investment. They're protecting their constituencies. Right. This is this is the coalition that I was speaking of. This is the consensus that I was speaking of that so many needs are met by SLS that had to be met in order to get federal money for that. Elon Musk's project simply hasn't met all of those same needs. So he's unlikely to gain the same kind of support from a federal level. There is so much more to this bill. We're just beginning to talk about what's included in this because it covers virtually everything that NASA does, I mean, by definition. What are some of the other major sections of it that you want to talk about,

Casey? You're going to tear us away from human spaceflight now? Reluctantly, reluctantly. Yeah, here's a good, I mean, and as I said, this was our very first episode I said this, you could see how human spaceflight just like sucks all of your oxygen out of the room talking about it, because it's so much going on. But there's so much else that NASA does. I basically said what I wanted to say there, but there's some really interesting stuff happening. And again, the political side, we can never ignore

the political side of any ambition in space, even if you're a private company. It's not just a technical problem. It's always also a political problem, as Jason was saying about coalition. Okay, I do want to say one more thing that's slightly human space related, and then we can go on. But this is a different section. This is the asteroid redirect mission.

The redheaded stepchild of NASA at the moment, you have President Obama said that US would go to an asteroid in the 2020s. NASA had no extra money to do that. So they came up with this wonky way to go and grab an asteroid, bring it to the moon, and then you launch astronauts to go and chip off pieces of that rock around the moon. It got de-scoped down to grab a big boulder off of an asteroid and bring that to the moon. Very little money has been spent and they've definitely been, I would say, slow walking this mission through development. So we're at this point where it's still in formulation. They haven't really started bending metal. They asked for six million dollars, I think, for 2017. The House gave them zero and the Senate in their draft budget did not say. They actually cut the area of funding where that would come from. It's in a dubious political situation right now because the Congress has not passed a full budget

for 2017. We don't know ultimately if it's going to get funded. But in this bill, in the Senate transition bill, they don't specifically say don't do it, but they have some pretty harsh findings about it where they say it's going to cost more than we thought. It's dubious about the scientific value. And they call for a report from NASA basically to justify the continuation of this mission. There are also directions in the language kind of separate from ARM, but I bet they're still thinking of this, that NASA needs to pay close attention to the findings in the decadal surveys. Yes, that's actually my favorite provision in this bill, and it's not new to this bill.

This is something that Congress has been saying now for about 10 years, but this makes me very happy. They're basically saying that NASA needs to listen to the will of the scientific community as expressed through the decadal surveys. Now, Arm actually was mostly referenced, I think, in the Pathways report, or was it the Pathways report or the second one that came out? Pathways talked about it. Okay. And it had a lot of dead-end technology development, I believe, was the problem with it. Right, right. And then the scientific community has basically come out and assessed ARM as well and said that this is not a high priority for them. This is Congress basically saying to NASA, listen, you can't just do an end around the scientific community every time you decide you want a mission for other reasons.

You need to listen to them. If Congress puts their weight behind that, that's a very, very powerful message to be sent to NASA. And they also call out the NASA Advisory Council, which has been quite critical of the ARM mission. Solar electric propulsion and underlying technology of the ARM mission is still broadly important to getting things to Mars. actually recommended that this be used in a mission in the Mars system in a place where it would actually be used as opposed to going to an asteroid, grabbing the boulder and bring it back. And so they mentioned that here in this legislation as well, that the NAC, NASA Advisory Council, was skeptical and to really take a close look as to justify why are we doing this mission. So I think that is not a good sign for arm in the next administration,

and it's basically telling the next administration, look, if you want to go and not do this anymore, we probably won't stand in your way. Yeah, and you saw similar language in the House bill, right? The House bill gave it no money. Well, sorry, in the authorization bill, I'd have to double-check what they mentioned. They were also skeptical of it.

How about science? There seemed to be a great deal of support, very positive language regarding a whole bunch of the keystone missions, James Webb Space Telescope, the WFIRST Telescope, the follow-on to the James Webb, the 2020 Mars Rover, the Europa mission, thank goodness. And this is where there was this language that the administrator should consider mission priority adjustments. That seemed a little ominous regarding other

robotic missions. Matt, if I could, I think it's important when you mention all of those flagship missions, the very first section in the space science title, Title V, is Section 501, and the title of that section is Maintaining a Balanced Space Science Portfolio. So I think it's important, while also calling out the decadal surveys as the guidance for NASA for science priorities, they're also maintaining the same call that you've seen in all of the decadal surveys for small and medium class missions as well as flagships. And that's going to be very, very important going forward. Well, that's great, because that counters what I was afraid of, that it was kind of possibly telling NASA, hey, you know, keep your focus on those flagships. And if the other, you know, the New Frontier and Discovery missions have to suffer or be delayed, which is something you've talked a lot about, Casey. Yeah. And we actually have that spelled out even more specifically in Section 502,

which is all about planetary science, our bread and butter here at the Planetary Society. And that is saying, you know, a mix of small, medium, and large missions. And this is the fundamental balance aspect. We need these smaller, more frequent opportunities. We don't want to go back to a 1970s or 1980s paradigm where we're launching very infrequently the big Christmas tree missions, right, where they dangle on all these instrumentations, single point of failure, very few opportunities for young scientists to start building their career around these things. And that's very good to see.

And though I should emphasize here that there's a subtlety, we get this mention of science should be balanced. We get the sense that James Webb is great, that W first is important, that 2020 is good, that Europa is good. And I'm literally saying sense, right? None of this is binding language, which is an important thing to note. I'm glad to see that the sense of Congress is that they like all of these things. But unlike the human spaceflight side, there is no the administrator shall. And that's, to me, the fundamental issue

where science is roughly, what, 29% of NASA's entire budget, but it's split into four main science divisions, which then split it into a variety of smaller missions. They just don't have the kind of footprint, maybe James Webb is the one exception to this because it's so big. They don't have the budgetary and workforce footprint that human spaceflight does. And so I think that puts them generally at a disadvantage politically because they just don't capture most people's attention and that there are exceptions. John Culberson is one of the biggest exceptions to this,

but he's in the House, not in the Senate. No. And going back to your point, Matt, you had mentioned that you were concerned that perhaps these flagships were going to override the smaller and medium class missions. My fear is actually one that we've seen play out historically, My fear is actually one that we've seen play out historically, and that's that if the human spaceflight side of the House finds itself in budgetary difficulties, if they're finding lots of cost overruns and Congress is unwilling to give them more money to cover those overruns, there's only one place to go looking for it in the agency. And that's what I'm concerned about. Okay. What about a program that is addressed here, the International Space Station, which kind of sits between science and human spaceflight? There was language that I saw in the bill that indicates NASA needs to rethink how the space station is managed, that maybe NASA should just be another customer of the International Space Station, and they should be looking at commercial operators pretty much taking over. This is a larger issue having to do with the human spaceflight agenda writ large. And basically the problem is that the International Space Station, which took 30 years to build, costs about roughly $4 billion a year to continue to fly and to have astronauts visit and conduct the

science activities. Well, it's very difficult to spend that much money in your human spaceflight budget while also building new capabilities. We're spending about a billion and a half dollars on SLS, another billion a year on Orion, but we're not building other aspects that you would need. You know, we're not building a lander. We're not building the investment on infrastructure has been an issue at NASA. People are eyeing that $4 billion a year and saying, you know, ISS isn't going to last forever. It sure would be nice if we could just roll that money into these other issues. But nobody wants to, after 30 years, just dump this thing in the ocean, which, by the

way, would be really difficult and expensive to do anyways, because there isn't a de-orbiting rocket on board the space station. So that would cost a lot of money to develop, fly up there and attach. So the other option is to have somebody else pay that cost. And so this is the idea behind this, that somehow we would privatize the space station and NASA could just rent space for the experiments that they would like to do. And other people could then fly their experiments up there and somebody else would manage it. And NASA could then take the money that they would normally spend operating ISS and spend that on other things. I don't see a huge market emerging for a company that would love to come in and take over operation of the space station in any way other than having NASA pay them to run it.

So that's the big question. Would it be, would it save any money? A big portion of the cost is just to resupply the station. You have to buy a rocket to launch things up there. Even with SpaceX, I think works out to around 110 120 million per launch uh with a dragon capsule and then plus all of the stuff you're putting inside that resupply capsule water and food and all these other things that the astronauts need so this legislation would call for the administrator to have a report. A lot of this stuff is just calling for them to do reports

on looking at ways in which this could possibly be done. Could you hand this off to a commercial entity? I share Jason's skepticism on this just because I have yet to see a big market opening. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but this is a hope that I think of a lot of nasa folks and and just space fans because i don't think anyone wants to see the station end unless it has to right i mean but again by 2024 which is what the u.s commitment to the station is it will have been in space for a quarter of a

century which is pretty astonishing to go beyond that to go to 2028 and beyond you actually have to start recertifying hardware to see if it would be safe to even be in the station beyond 2024 but you lose the station you lose uh opportunity to pay uh commercial crew companies to launch into orbit which won't come online now until it looks like late 2018 if that and so you want to have these, you're building these markets, like commercial cargo, right? SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract, I think, right now with NASA for cargo.

All that disappears without the station. And so the station actually, this has been one of the smarter uses of that platform has been to use it to really engage this new market. But you don't want that market to suddenly dissipate, whereas these companies going to be so the idea is, hopefully, you'll have a mature space economy by then. But it's it's a it's a tough question. And so I'm glad to see that acknowledgement in here. I'm also glad that honestly, that they didn't just blindly extend it to 2028. I'd like to see them study this more because, again, this is the trade-off. As Jason said, $4 billion a year roughly on the station. The NASA Advisory Council has said

the same thing. NASA right now cannot afford a human spaceflight program focused on low Earth orbit and a human spaceflight program to explore beyond low Earth orbit. You kind of have to choose one or the other. I'm going to bet that you guys have 10 or 20 more elements of this bill that is sitting in the Senate right now that you would love to discuss. But we are nearing the end of the time that we've got for this edition of the Space Policy Edition. What are the things that are just going to make you unable to sleep tonight if we don't talk about them? I think the big issue, sort of the elephant in the room that we have not mentioned, is the fact that this authorization bill does not mention earth science in any way, shape, or form. And that's really interesting. And it's not that they simply forgot. No. No, this was very intentional, right? I'm almost certain that

that's how they got a bipartisan group of sponsors on this bill. And that's unfortunate. And Ted Cruz has been very anti-earth science investment. He's held several committee hearings about this. He's very skeptical of the investment in earth science as opposed to exploration. Sometimes the best way to get along is to, it's like when you have your family over for Thanksgiving. There's just some topics you don't want to talk about. And I think that's what's happening here. Again, notably, this is a one year, this would be should this pass a one year authorization. The last NASA

authorization bill was three years. NASA is not supposed to operate without an authorization, but in practice, it happens all the time. If this doesn't pass, it's not the worst thing. If they've got their focus out on the transition, keep these programs going, which is what we broadly agree with in the policy committee here at the Planetary Society. The flip side of this is if you want to reset everything, what's better? What's a better use of the time and money

and the political impact of this? There's one other thing that's not in there. And this is actually something that I'm growing increasingly concerned about. This is actually, we communicated this to the committee staff and they didn't include it, but we're going to keep working to raise awareness of this. And that is the sample return of the Martian samples for Mars 2020 rover, right? So Mars 2020 is going to go to Mars and they are building a sample cache. They are going to be putting little tubes of drilled rock samples and corings all over the surface of Mars.

We have, at the moment, no plans, no even really initial studies of how we get that back. And that is a bad thing because those have a limited lifetime on the surface of Mars. And as we know with Europa, you can't just pull one of these missions off the shelf. You have to design it. You have to fund it. You've got to fit it within the funding profile. You've got to launch it. It's got to land.

You've got to get it back in time. There's maybe a 15 to 20 year window. I'm not exactly sure what the lifespan is at the latest incarnation of this. But we're at a point where we are not talking about how we get these samples back. And NASA is about to spend $2 billion on a mission to prepare these samples. We'd better not let that money go to waste. So we really need to push NASA and the White House, the next president, to say, what is your plan to get this back? And how are you going to do this in time? And there's tons of options here, right?

We can, this can engage with the human spaceflight side. I mean, there's even a bigger issue we have. All the orbiters at Mars are starting to get very old. They function as critical communications relays for things like the rovers. Otherwise, the rovers talk at a really, really low data rate, like 1990s modem data rate, right? This now we have much faster data with these telecom relays. By the time Mars 2020 lands, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is going to be about 15 years old. Mars Odyssey is going to be about 15 years old. Mars Odyssey is going to be almost 20 years old.

The Mars mission, the Mars exploration program, the whole concept that it was predicated on was a regular cadence of missions. Every launch opportunity to Mars, a new mission, small missions, medium missions, to just have a constant presence, build up a capability there. We did that for the first 10 years of the 21st century. We have not done that since. And we're approaching, I'm worried that there's a cliff approaching us that we won't be able to recover from easily. So I wanted to see legislation calling on NASA to clarify and to provide them at minimum with a report for how they're going to get these samples back,

how they're going to refresh the orbiters. I mean, you even need these orbiters to do high-resolution imaging of potential landing sites. So if you're serious about sending humans, you need a new mission there to scout out your landing sites for you. And that is not in here, and that's what we need to work on. Casey, I know you had to jump off of the teleconference earlier today for the MEPAG meeting, the Mars Exploration Planning Assessment Group of the NASA Advisory Council. But Jim Watson, the head of the Mars Exploration Program, was giving a presentation on the state of the Mars Exploration Program. He was talking about internal planning that they have looking at sample return,

which was the first time I'd heard anyone discussing internal planning. So I was very, very happy about that. So it seems clear to me that NASA is thinking along these lines, but they have no mandate from above, either at the White House or in Congress. So I think that that's where we and our members should be looking next to generate some excitement about this mission. Good point. There is so much more to this bill. It is Senate Bill 3346, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act of 2016. We could go on for probably another hour or two talking about what's in it and, as you've heard, what's not in it.

But before we go, guys, since it is your job not just to talk about these things but to do things about them, they're inside the Beltway. What is your role as the space advocacy people, the leaders within the society, what will your task be as the Senate and later the House decide what NASA's going to have to work with in this year, this fiscal year. So we're going to be coming up to that in, depending on who wins the election, I think, is what is going to have a lot of implications in the near term. I think Congress really wants to pass a budget. I know the folks at the subcommittee who are putting together NASA's budget are looking at

this. I think what they're going to be doing is maybe doing chunked up, trying to take the non-controversial spending bills and pass them separately, maybe as a package from the controversial stuff. Often known as the mini bus. The mini bus. Instead of the omnibus. Yes, the omnibus. Yes. And so we're going to be trying to make sure that goes through because again the house has a really really great funding level for planetary science i want that number so badly uh all of us should has good numbers it would help address some of this uh early planning work for mars it would have great funding for europa discovery missions and so forth so i'm i'm cautiously cautiously optimistic that has a chance of happening. They don't want to hedge that one anymore. Then the authorization bill, I think the biggest

aspect of this authorization bill is that it exists, honestly, and that they've put themselves out there on record saying this. The biggest strategic goal has been achieved. It would be great if they passed this one. Honestly, I think there's very little to dislike. The authorization numbers, it does authorize top line funding. Those numbers will change to match whatever the final appropriations are. So I'm not too worried about how that stands at the moment. So I think getting this authorization out would just be a good exercise in bicameral bipartisanship. I'm not as sure that will happen based on just the limited amount of days left in the legislative calendar when we come back. But

again, that this exists at all is good. So we'll be pushing this. And stranger things have happened. Yeah, I mean, this is very uncontroversial. So they could do this with a voice vote. They could do this very quickly, expedite it through the Senate. That's kind of what happened the last couple of times they passed authorizations. So we'll see. We'll be pushing this. We'll be saying we're happy with this, but really we'll be working on the appropriation for planetary science and NASA. Gentlemen, my favorite phrase in this act, the United States should continue to seek the unknown. United States should continue to seek the unknown. I love that that line is something that senators actually are considering and voting on.

Of all the legislation, you know, that comes through, this is why it's fun to read this. There's happy things in politics, too, right? It's a lot of fun to go up to the Hill and find senators and congresspeople who are really excited about this stuff. Speaking of fun and excitement, how about next month when we will be doing this again just before we figure out who's going to be the next leader of the United States? Why don't we talk about those candidates and how they feel about space? We'll do all of the entrail reading, divining, rod leading that we can do. I will bring my tea leaves and my chicken bones yes but we will do it we will we will go through what we know and what we don't know about both uh and we

might even we've had requests for for not just the two major candidates but we'll probably focus on the two major candidates we'll go through their records and see what they've said and see what we can predict about what their space policy would be like. So for goodness sake, listeners, don't vote early. Don't listen to Matt. No, please do vote. And then hopefully, you'll like what you hear when we do this next month. I like what I've heard, guys. It has been great fun talking to you once again. Thank you very much for doing this. Hey, thank you, Matt.

Yeah, really appreciate it, Matt. This is a blast. And if we leave you wanting more, I mean, we've said that there's so much more to this bill and so much more that we could have said. Would you sit still for an hour and a half or a two-hour version of the Space Policy Edition? Let us know. Write to us at that same email address, planetaryradio at planetary.org. And it's certainly not a scientific survey or poll, but we will take that into account. We'd love to hear what you think. And the deal is, you don't even have to sit still if you want to keep listening. I don't expect people to, you can run or go on a nice long hike.

And also just thank you for listening. I just want to say, Matt usually says it, but I want to thank you too. This has been great to hear the feedback. Thanks for listening and keep those emails and tweets coming. We can't get to all your requests. We clearly didn't get to the opportunity to do a hypothetical this month, but maybe in the future we'll get there. And again, let me do two shameless plugs, and then, Matt, you can close it out,

because I need to do my shameless plugs here. I just got back from a big tour of Southern NASA centers looking at the impact of the space launch system. The rocket road trip that we talked to Jason Davis about on this show a couple of weeks ago. You absolutely did. That was a great interview. I really encourage people to go on to planetary.org and find that series. It is just a stellar piece of reporting that Jason Davis is doing. His writing was great on that.

And it's just there's nothing else like it. It's going to be the canonical story of how we got to this point in our human spaceflight program at NASA. It's very, very well researched. Really spectacular stuff that we saw at these NASA centers. And then the other plug is, if you like what you're hearing, this show is really unique. No other show is like this.

And Planetary Radio is great, but Space Policy Edition, no one else does this. So if you like this show, consider joining the Planetary Society because this organization, again, it is an independent organization. And we talk about all aspects of space from creating things ourselves

to getting people excited and educated about space to politics. And this is a unique thing. So if you like the show, consider joining at planetary.org. You can go straight to it at planetary.org slash membership, where we've got this whole new membership program,

lots of terrific incentives, and it will tell you what your membership in the society will help to accomplish. And that is not just this radio program, this radio show podcast, but also the work of the two guys that I've been talking to, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor in Washington, D.C. Again, guys, thanks very much.

And I look forward to talking to you just before the election in November, the first Friday in November. Talk then, Matt. Thanks very much, and I look forward to talking to you just before the election in November, the first Friday in November. Talk then, Matt. Thanks so much. And we will leave you with our beautiful theme by Jason Callahan. Thanks so much for joining us once again. We'll talk to you in a month. In the meantime, I hope you will join us for Planetary Radio. You can find it in SoundCloud, iTunes, Spreaker, Stitcher, and of course at planetary.org. Take care. You mean rockin' theme, man. Maybe I'll drop that in.