Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #6: Election 2016! Where Do Clinton and Trump Stand on Space?

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Just in time for election day in the USA, we take stock of the major candidates' space policies (as far as they go), comparing statements and policy op-eds put out by both campaigns. We also look at the broader implications and challenges of the coming Presidential transition for NASA.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to another edition of our monthly series, the Space Policy Edition part of Planetary Radio, which of course is brought to you by the Planetary Society. It's my pleasure to join you once again. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Welcoming back Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Hi there, Casey. Hey, Matt. And joining us from D.C. is Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society. Hello to you as well, Jason. Hey, Matt. Hey, Casey. Good to talk to you guys. Gosh, what should we talk about with, as we speak speak five days before one of the most momentous elections in the history of the nation?

If you listen to the cable news networks. Well, Matt, I was actually going to propose we ditch the topic today and just talk about the Cubs winning the World Series. Because what an epic game. Way more fun to talk about. What a series. What a game seven. What a bunch of extra innings. It was fantastic.

Yeah, we're recording this the day after. And so all of us, I think, are a little bleary eyed, particularly on the East Coast there, Jason, I bet. Is that a football game? Soccer? Yeah. So it was, I would rather talk about that than probably, you know, this election, of course, has just been grinding on for a long time now. We're almost to the end. But we thought here at the Space Policy Edition that we should probably discuss to some degree both candidates, both primary candidates, thoughts on space policy and what NASA would look like under a Trump or a Clinton administration to the best

of our abilities, since, of course, we don't have a ton of information out there. And this is not something that has been ignored by you or Jason or the Planetary Society, which has some great resources online, which, Casey, can you say a word about those before we jump into this? So we've tracked every statement made by both Trump and Clinton in the entire campaign. And you can go and see everything that they've said, and as well as every statement put out by their campaign to questions submitted by Space News and some op-eds that they've published at planetary.org slash election 2016. And that gives you just a firsthand

account. You can look at everything that they've said. Because the Planetary Society, and this is probably something I should emphasize here as we go forward, the Planetary Society, we're a nonprofit, we are nonpartisan. So we are not taking any sides on this debate as an organization between which candidates. So we are going to just basically provide to the best of our ability, a summary of each candidate as we understand it without any implicit or explicit motivation to go vote for either. We do not do that as an organization. And in fact, we'd be in trouble if we did as a nonprofit. Yeah, we should not do that.

And this is philosophically. We don't want to take sides on this stuff because we want to work with everybody who is going to be in the position to set the direction for NASA and space policy in this country. So we shouldn't take sides. So anybody who thinks they hear a slant in the conversation to follow, I am hoping that... Write to me. And I'm hoping, of course, that we will get roughly equal numbers saying, why were you pushing candidate X over candidate Y? And then we'll know maybe we got it about right. That's the best we can do, folks. So an apology up front.

But we'll keep it as fair and nonpartisan as possible. And if you think that this kind of stuff that we're doing, what Casey just described that you can find at planetary.org, and conversations like the one that we're having now are worthwhile. And you, as not just a policy fan but a space fan, think this is worthwhile. Well, won't you consider joining us and standing behind all of this by going to planetary.org slash membership. And you can actually become a part of all of the stuff that we're up to. Not just this, but LightSail and all the other wonderful things that the Planetary Society is up to. Okay, that's it for the commercial.

Gentlemen, let's go through this more or less broad issue by broad issue before we then go into a discussion of how policies are formed by campaigns. And maybe a little bit, Jason, I know that you're kind of a historian of NASA transitions in the past, and that may inform what we can expect for the future. But let's start with those issues. I want to give credit to Space News here, because they have done a pretty good job, wouldn't you guys say, of doing the best they can to bring us the positions of both candidates and their campaigns? Yeah, absolutely. We saw both have been featured op-eds from policy advisors in the Clinton and Trump campaign. And we've also seen

a series of questions that they posed to both campaigns, which both were answered. So you can kind of compare directly on specific issues. And they're definitely the best example of that that I've seen in this entire campaign of getting some statements from the candidates on the record. So good props to Space News on that. So when you're done reviewing what we've provided at planetary.org from the space advocate, you can take a look at Space News as well. Why not? What surprised me, knowing how far apart these candidates, and we're talking about the two major candidates at the moment, how far apart they are on so many issues, is the enormous amount, it seemed to me, of intersection between what they've said about their space policies, what they would like to implement. I mean, if it's a Venn diagram,

that football in the middle is surprisingly large. Do you guys think I have it right? Well, I think there are a lot of issues in space policy that tend to be sort of non-controversial amongst presidential candidates. I think that the real differences are actually very contentious. They just don't talk about them as much. So it's a lot easier to talk about the positives than it is the negatives. And I think that's what we've seen a lot of, which is fine, but we'll go through each of these issues and sort of lay out the context behind them. Yeah, I think I can say to elucidate just a few of those broad overlaps, what I saw between statements by policy advisors on the campaigns was a commitment to the International Space Station, at least through 2024,

if not longer, a commitment to increasing the amount of public and private partnerships that NASA does in the vein of commercial cargo and commercial crew. As a side note, I think, and we can talk about this, I think that's actually the biggest development compared to when Obama took office eight years ago, that this is now being talked about on both sides of the aisle as a no brainer. And that's been a big change, I think, in policy. And the other one that I saw was the focus on technology development to enable deep space human exploration and wide application of that technology to broader society. Those are some of the core things that I saw a commitment to. You know, I think, as Jason said, they're not particularly controversial, I think, at this point. But

always good to be reminded that space can still be somewhat nonpartisan compared to many other policy issues out there. And some of these are going to surface again as we start to go through some of these broad issues. Beginning, gentlemen, with human spaceflight. Why not? Getting more humans out there and getting them farther out there. Let's start with Hillary Clinton. Clinton's, I think, from what we can see, so Clinton's actually said less overall about space than Trump has. They've had multiple op-eds on the Trump side, I think just one op-ed on the Clinton side, of course, and then the same answers to the questions. And again, with human spaceflight, I see in a Clinton policy discussion, we're seeing a commitment to the International Space Station

and commercial crew. So that'll continue basically as is. I see a general acceptance of deep spaceflight. One of the answers, they said that she's always been an enthusiastic supporter of human spaceflight. My administration will continue to invest in this endeavor. Mars is a consensus horizon goal, though to send humans safely, we will still need to advance the technologies required to basically to get there. So I read that as, you know, that's kind of a big question that they may really look at the Mars goal for human spaceflight, the current journey to Mars that NASA is on, and evaluate whether that's realistic in some sort of timeline. And that's not clear.

Again, we don't have a ton of information here. But again, this is going to be, you know, I think we're seeing a broad acceptance of what Obama has done, which makes sense because it would be a Democratic administration coming in after another Democratic administration. You would have a lot of consistency in policy advisors and ideas between those two administrations. So I think you would see a general continuity with this kind of X factor thrown in that, you know, Mars is a consensus goal, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the horizon goal is in there. So it doesn't necessarily mean it will be the immediate focus. And to really try and read the tea leaves, one of the early statements that Hillary Clinton made as a presidential candidate about space, she had a discussion where she talked about having applied to the astronaut corps as a young woman. So clearly she had an interest in human spaceflight at one time.

But, of course, then they rejected her. So who knows what an interest in human spaceflight at one time. But of course, then they rejected her. So who knows what that that what effect that had on her opinion. Bad move. So but yeah, so again, and this is the difficulty here, right? I think we can just say even more broadly for both campaigns, we don't have a clear picture of what they're going to do. This goes to a deeper thing that we'll get to a little later, which in terms of NASA policy, it's not going to be a top priority for either campaign or administration should they come into power. It'll be something that they do after a while. They'll get to space, particularly civil space policy. Yeah. And later on, let's talk about why that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah. So, I mean, the point is, is that a lot of this may just be up for discussion. Trump, let's just contrast that. The op eds that have been published from his policy advisors, they say that NASA should have a stretch goal of sending humans beyond into deep space, beyond Mars, even by the end of the century, which is an interesting stretch goal. So very ambitious for NASA in that context. So really doubling down on deep space exploration. Mars is a goal, but it's not clear if it's the same thing, if it would be the immediate goal. Maybe it would be the moon instead with, again, keeping a stretch goal to send people very far out. Again, on the Trump side, support for near term commitment to the International Space Station and commercial crew and public private partnerships. I'm seeing, again, just a broader or maybe a direction on looking for on pushing further out and then also

again, in technology investment to make that happen, and to reduce travel times and so forth. So again, broadly similar, but also same kind of similarly vague in the sense that we don't know what the immediate near-terms decisions would necessarily be. They actually make a specific point to reconstitute the National Space Council, which would be led by the vice president and non-Senate approved, just basically appointees by the president, to look at the current state of civil and military space policy. And I don't know, Jason, you want to talk a little bit about what a National Space Council is and the history of that? Sure. The National Space Council has existed at various times throughout NASA's history.

It was originally started, I can't remember if it was under Eisenhower or Kennedy, It was originally started, I can't remember if it was under Eisenhower or Kennedy, but it's traditionally chaired by a vice president and it usually has four to eight members who are eminent individuals in usually technology, industry, and defense. The Space Council looks at the United States space policy writ large. So civil space is only one function of that. They also look at national security space, intelligence space, and try to figure out the best paths forward from a policy standpoint to benefit all of those various areas. The last National Space Council, I believe, was under the first Bush administration, George H.W. Bush, back in the late 80s. Since that time, none of the other presidents have chosen to use the National Space Council. They tend to run the

civil space program through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, and they make national security space policies through the Department of Defense or through the NSA or other organizations. And Obama even, sometimes they'll just constitute a blue ribbon panel for certain questions. That's what the Obama administration did looking at the Constellation program. They had an independent review panel, a presidential blue ribbon panel, analyze that and put out a report as opposed to doing some sort of National Space Council systematic way like that. Yeah, and that certainly wasn't unique. For human spaceflight alone, I think there have been something like 11 of those blue

ribbon panels over the years. Our friend and colleague John Logsdon talks about that, this series of blue ribbon panels that works very hard for some period of months, and then too often very little happens based on their recommendations. months, and then too often very little happens based on their recommendations. I suppose having something coming directly out of or in the executive branch on an ongoing basis might make a difference in terms of coordination across different areas of NASA? Well, it's not just executive branch, because don't forget, NASA is itself an executive branch agency, right? And the NASA administrator is an executive branch agency, right? And the NASA

administrator is an executive branch appointee. I think the National Space Council gets a little bit of extra heft, at least on paper, because you have the vice president heading it, which is what the Trump team called for. Theoretically, that would carry extra oomph within the White House if there's a good relationship between the president and the vice president in terms of defining policy. It's kind of unpredictable. And it really a lot of this is, I think, going to depend on individual relationships and individuals interest levels. And Mike Pence has said good things about NASA in the past. And Newt Gingrich is on Trump's advising team. He was a big space supporter. Robert Walker himself was a previous congressman, but also was

the chair of the House Science Committee that helped write NASA authorization bills. And so you have some level of interest from people associated with the campaign. And ultimately, though, I think a lot of this attention to NASA is going to come down to the personal fondness or personal interest of the president themselves. He or she will decide to spend political capital as they see fit, and whether NASA kind of rises up to that top of their interest level is really going to alter what we're seeing here and how it moves forward in the next four to eight years. Do we need to say anything else about how critical it is to any area of policy that the president has a personal interest in it,

as you just said. What you see generally with presidential administrations is that if they don't bring an issue forward initially, it's left to the agendas of those below them in the hierarchy. And those agendas rarely collude around space, right? It's very, very rare that you see space rising to the top of a cabinet member's agenda or, you know, and quite frankly, generally speaking, the administrator of NASA doesn't have as much clout as say joint chief of staff, right? So it's hard for NASA to get traction without some high-level support from the administration. That said, the president then also must continue that support. What you see more often than not is that a president will make a speech that touts NASA or touts some new movement within NASA, some new program at NASA, and then you hear nothing from that president for months or years afterwards.

And the program just sort of atrophies as other interests within the government sort of slowly eat away at their budget. It really requires a concerted effort from a president to push a major effort in space. Jason, I'm concerned that you're implying that concern about where we're going with space exploration and development is not going to change the results of this election. Well, as we have seen from public opinion polls for 40 some odd years, public opinion on space tends to be a lagging indicator. You know, people are very, very happy when we accomplish something. But when we start talking about spending lots of money to develop a program in order to go somewhere, people tend to be less interested in doing that.

And that's true of basically any program that doesn't directly impact national security or an individual's pocketbook. So it's not surprising, other than small groups like the Planetary Society, who have wonderful ardent supporters who write their congresspeople and write their president about space, the population at large generally doesn't move the needle one way or the other on these issues. The classic phrase is that support for NASA is a mile wide but an inch deep, and wherein people are generally fond of it. I think, just to put it more at a basic level, the way I think of it is that there are

very few, if any, single issue space voters, right? I mean, there are single issue voters for Second Amendment rights, for abortion, for climate, a variety of issues. Space is not one of those. And I wouldn't even call myself a single issue voter for space, right? I do this all the time. And so I think that also then drives the politics, right? This is why space tends not to surface to the top because it's, as Jason said, it's not a big political, it doesn't engage people as directly as much. It's a little different in states like maybe Florida, right? A swing state and has a substantial presence for space infrastructure and spending.

But those are exceptions. And you don't see that focus as much. And so we have this situation where, you know, the White House is going to kind of has to deal with NASA. We'll have some nice ideas about it. And then the big question is the X factor is what's the attention level and energy from the president on down on implementing change or even sustaining an existing program. Yeah. And I should probably clarify as well, when I was giving my little

speech there about the necessity of presidential support for programs, what I was really referring to was programmatic change. I think that you can still do big things in space without necessarily the strong support of a president, it's more difficult and the change is more gradual. Is there more that we need to say about the ISS to contrast these candidates? Let's start with Hillary. Well, I think with the ISS, again, the thing that really strikes me is that it is just a 100% non-controversial program within NASA. And you can contrast this to its origins or its votes of passing, you know, surviving by a single vote in the House of Representatives back in the early 90s. The ISS now is an unquestioned program that will continue.

And you see both major candidates saying that. I'm not disagreeing with it, but it is, it's one of those things. It is a $4 billion a year program. I'm not disagreeing with it, but it is it's one of those things. It is a four billion dollar a year program. More if you add on the ancillary funding for commercial crew, which exists to service the space station. It's a big chunk of NASA's budget, but it is fully supported by both. And the question seems to be which one is going to support it for longer. That's interesting to me to see that there's this and this is a broadly bipartisan.

This isn't unique to them. So I think that's really interesting. want to support that until 2024 would actually be going up against interests in Congress. And I don't think either presidential candidate has this as a huge issue on their agenda. So it's easier to just let it go until 2024 and then fight the battle over whether or not to continue it further later on in the administration when things are a little more clear. So, right. And that's your path. That's a great point. And interesting thing is that come the 2019 budget, the 2020 budgets that this next administration will be putting together, each one of the president's budgets contains a five year projection for NASA funding.

end or potential continuation of the space station that they will start to have to at least address in initial planning. And if they don't want to continue it, you've got to figure out what to do with it. And I know there's a lot of talk about finding ways to engage, again, public-private partnerships to try to lower maybe the ongoing cost of the station. That is a big question mark to see if there is a market for that or what that would even look like. And so the next president will actually have to start grappling with this potentially, or they could just put the money and keep it going and worry about that later. spokespeople for the campaigns on both sides who seem to be saying, why would we allow this $100 billion investment fall in the ocean? Should we be trying to get commercial entities to take more of a role on the International Space Station? Is this another point of agreement as we head into this public-private partnership zone? I think it's an area of agreement at the moment just because, again, it's very non-controversial and there are no details to this plan.

So when you talk about a public-private partnership, what you're talking about is government investing early to help industry come up with the technology, the capabilities, and the market necessary for them to then take over whatever the activity is. And at the moment with the International Space Station, it's totally unclear how you get from point A to point B. I've seen no convincing market study that somebody could take over a four plus billion dollar operating budget and make a profit on that without NASA paying them to do it. So it's a really interesting question. And, you know, it's not supposed to be a public private partnership is not supposed to be an instantaneous transfer. You know, you gradually move from mostly public investment to mostly private investment, but we haven't even taken those first steps yet. You've got some organizations

like cases that manage some of the science that's being done on the international space station. That's an interesting model to sort of start with. But it's not at all clear whether or not the government investment could be handed off to industry at a profitable level between now and 2024. That's not a lot of time. Yeah, and CASIS is helping to coordinate some terrific science and research that's being done on the station. But, yeah, is it a $4 billion proposition? Yeah, it's a big question. So, and that's, that's what the next administration will really have to grapple with, with ISF. And there's a good article by Jeff Faust at Space News,

looking at this as a long-term transition that's going to be happening with the next administration. And we'll link to this in the, in the show page. But he has quotes from Rudy Dilan, who works at Center for American Progress, which is a left-leaning think tank. And then Robert Walker, who is actively advising the Trump campaign on space issues. And both of them seem to generally agree that they're not going to just dump the ISS into the ocean. And so there's interest on both sides. But as Jason pointed out, it's not clear how you get to that point. They probably should start figuring this out pretty soon. Notably, I think Walker says in this article here that he references 2028 as if they're already going to kind of

de facto extend it to its existing lifetime or rated lifetime of four more years beyond 2024, which is an interesting question because you got to get the international partners to agree to that its existing lifetime, rated lifetime of four more years beyond 2024, which is an interesting question because you've got to get the international partners to agree to that extension as well. And let's not forget that you've got companies like Boeing, SpaceX, and Orbital ATK who are very interested in keeping this program going. I also shouldn't forget that

that's going to become a kind of creaky machine up there after a while. Space takes a toll on machines, and that may enter into this as well. Well, by 2024, it'll be a quarter century old, which is, that's a long time to be in space. That's older than most satellites last, and this has people aboard, right? Older than any car I've ever had. Where else do we need to go with this discussion that focuses on public-private partnerships? Again, there seems to be agreement that we need to keep pushing this. We've seen on the Trump side from their advisors here in their op-eds,

they basically call out as why are we duplicating efforts in government and in private industry to create, particularly they say, launch vehicles. To me, this reads as a critique of the space launch system, right, which is managed in an old school government contract. Orion, old school government style contracting, as opposed to, you know, SpaceX and Blue Origin now are saying that they intend to develop very heavy lift rockets beyond the Falcon Heavy, right? Your intercontinental, interplanetary transport system on SpaceX side and your new Armstrong rocket on Blue Origin side. You know, you also have the pseudo kind of quasi-government relationship

with United Launch Alliance, with the Atlas and Delta rockets. And Robert Walker's notably talked quite a bit about privatizing big port portions of space in terms of launch vehicles. I think you'll see much more interest on that on that end. However, I would say that the Republican Congress, Republicans in Congress are generally much more supportive of space launch system. And this is an extra thing we should consider to our last episode, we talked all about the Senate bill, the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2016. That was sponsored by Republican Ted Cruz from Texas, co-sponsored by Republican Marco Rubio, who has a decent chance to stay in office as a senator for another six years. Multiple other Republicans on that, as well as Democrats. And

that was a bill that very much supported the program of record to continue building the space launch system, continue building Orion, keep Mars as the focus. They made their position pretty clear. Now, it's not clear if that bill will pass, but they're definitely on record as supporting space launch systems. So it wouldn't just be as easy as a Republican coming in, turning off that big program, and then saying, public-private partnerships. I think you would see quite a bit of politicking going on to try to figure out what would the role of that be. This is always kind of at the core of the space launch system. It exists for a reason, right? They tried to do this eight years ago to turn off NASA's big rocket program, and Congress was very adamantly opposed to that.

So I don't see the fundamental politics of that changing, no matter who becomes president. Yeah, that, of course, the Constellation program that we talked about, we've talked about in previous shows. Jason? The other issue I just wanted to cover regarding public-private partnerships, there are a lot of people who look at NASA and its roles

and see that it's sort of diverged from its early model of the NACA, the National Aviation Advisory Committee, that was sort of the basis of NASA. That organization's role was really to do fundamental research on aeronautics and then pass that research off to industry. And there are a lot of people that feel that NASA should be doing something along those lines. So when you see political support for technology development at NASA and then public-private partnerships, often what you're talking about is basic fundamental technology research that will then be passed on through technology transfer to industry as sort of a pipeline into industry, that this is where government can invest and have an impact on the economy. So it becomes

an economic argument, not just a science or technology argument. I want to note that while most of the talk about support for public-private partnerships in space stays pretty close to home, low Earth orbit, there are, from SpaceX and others, some talk about going beyond. And it was only just this morning I saw announcements from Planetary Resources, the people who hope to mine asteroids someday, about a big investment from the government of Luxembourg that may enable them to do the first commercial asteroid mission sometime in the next, I think they said by 2020, they're hoping for. So, you know, who knows, maybe public-private does have some promise beyond 200 or 300 miles above our planet. private does have some promise beyond 200 or 300 miles above our planet. Well, we've seen this sort of cycle in the past where private industry believes that they've reached the ability to operate in space without exclusive government funding. And then it turns

out that space is really hard and the companies all sort of disappear over time. I think that this is actually a really interesting cycle because we're seeing people actually building hardware and getting to the point where they're able to put it into space. So we're sort of in uncharted territories. Let's move on, gentlemen, to space science, which covers an awful lot of ground, the universe, including our own planet. How about the position of the Clinton campaign on the continuing search for understanding our universe and ourselves? Well, if you look at Jim Kolenberger's op-ed,

and he's the space advisor for the Clinton campaign, who was also formerly a chief of staff at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Obama. One of his main focuses in that op-ed is on earth science and climate change science. Very enthusiastically supporting that. Obama's NASA, one thing that it definitely did do was prioritize earth science and funding. And we've seen nearly a doubling in budget since Obama took office of earth science. And it's been the one science that's done very, very well. I mean, nearly a doubling in budget since Obama took office of earth science. It's been the one science that's done very, very well. That fits in, I think, as a great example of how earth science fits into the broader

political priorities of the Obama White House. And a very similar set of priorities, I would expect, from a Clinton White House, obviously very concerned about climate change and NASA being able to provide a unique data set that helps scientists understand the changing climate. You see kind of a more standard discussion of Earth science on the Trump side, which echoes a lot of the Republican opinions about this, which is that NASA should focus on deep space and let other federal agencies handle earth science or earth observations. Particularly, they tend to talk about NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. So basically, kind of a sense of saying, diminish the priority of earth science. They don't go much into the details of that. But I think it's safe to say you would see a shrinking earth science

budget within a Republican administration, similar to what it was in George W. Bush, versus growing or consistent budget in a Clinton administration. Right. And it brings up interesting questions. Are the Republicans indicating that they would then want to increase the NOAA budget because NOAA's budget for climate research is very different than their budget for weather research, and it's far smaller than NASA's. Are they suggesting that we just move that money over and allow NOAA to continue the same program that NASA has been engaged in? Or are they just talking about eliminating the earth science budget at NASA and leaving the NOAA budget at a much lower level? Or is there some other arrangement? These are the kinds of details that are totally unclear from these policy statements, which is fairly par for the course at this point in presidential campaign.

Just to hook it into our last discussion, I know that one of the potential ideas there is that maybe private companies would collect this data on their own Earth observation satellites in addition to or instead of NASA. So that and again, that's not clearly worked out. But that is one of the things that they tend to mention on the Trump side. So that's a potential option in there. But I think that this is one of the core things that is not by that is not bipartisan anymore, is earth science, unfortunately, has become very politicized over the years. And I think this is one of the areas definitely would see a significant divergence between the campaigns. Other sciences at NASA, very much less ink spilled on those, which is probably generally good. That means they're

relatively uncontroversial between both parties. You would probably see things like planetary science and astrophysics rise in priority if NASA's goal is to focus on deep space under a Trump administration. It's not clear because neither candidate spelled out what the overall budget for NASA or for the science portfolio should be. And neither one has said, is the current budget enough or not enough? This is kind of a much very much a to be determined level. And that's a much bigger issue, which is if you have generally a shrinking amount of discretionary spending to to keep government functioning, NASA probably won't maintain its overall budget, it'll shrink as well. And then a lot of these other priorities becomes harder to do, or you have to pick and

choose. And that's going to be an outcome that's, again, it's relatively hard to predict based on what the congressional makeup is going to be and who the president's going to be. I'm glad you mentioned the congressional makeup because, of course, we have seen in recent years enormous support, at least for planetary science, from Congress. They have had some influence over the executive branch, haven't they? That's absolutely true. And it's been very strong from a bipartisan coalition, particularly in the House of Representatives. The problem is that it's hard to do long-term program planning when you have to depend on an act of Congress every year. I think a lot of folks have noticed that Congress, it's getting harder and harder for them to

do even the most basic levels of work, right? It's just even passing a budget every year, which they have to do, has become this big drawn out political battle. So NASA can't plan for their five, 10 year missions here if they depend on these annual kind of bumps in the planetary budget, for example. You fix that by having more of an alignment between the White House who says this is a good budget for planetary that the Congress will agree to, and you can plan for that no matter what happens. Right now we have this disconnect, and that's made it very difficult. I think we'll probably get into this later in the segment. The function of this actually dates back to a legislative change that was enacted in, well, it was voted

on in 1974 and acted in 1976 that changed the budget procedures in Congress and also the fiscal calendar for the government's fiscal year. It moved the beginning of the fiscal year to later in the calendar year. And the reason for that was with the original budget year starting earlier in the calendar year, an incoming Congress basically operated on the previous Congress's budget for a full calendar year. And so an incoming member of the House of Representatives basically only had one guaranteed year of any impact on a budget. The interesting result of this has been that the budget request that the president puts out is supposed to come out in February. The new president will be inaugurated in January. So you have a very truncated amount of time for this new administration to formulate their budget or have their stamp put on the president's budget request. So inevitably, in an election year with a change of administrations, the next budget that will come out won't come out about past transitions and how that has affected NASA and the direction for space. The only other one that I want to bring up here is one that we've already touched on quite a bit. I don't know if there's anything else to say about the technology development role of NASA.

I mean, just in getting to Mars, of course, NASA has identified, what is it, six technologies, key technologies? Not sure I have the number right that we're going to have to figure out if we want to get people out that far. Is there, again, general agreement that this is the right role? I think you've said yes. Casey? That's what we see in both policy op-eds from the campaign advisors, op-eds from the campaign advisors, this idea that we need to invest in technology to enable particularly human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit and beyond the moon. The question there is, it's difficult to fund technology investment. Honestly, just from a political standpoint, the Obama administration has been trying to do so nearly its entire term. They propose more money, and Congress, I think,

every single year has given them less than they requested. I know people sometimes in the space industry joke about technology funding as they call it the bank of technology, because when any other program blows its budget, you go to the bank and take a withdrawal from the technology funding because you tend not to have a single program, right? A technology is you're doing lots of low level research, hammering out ideas, maybe flying some test things. But it's not a single, it's not a rocket, it's not a spacecraft, it's not a building

or something, right? It's much more conceptual. And so it's kind of easier to take money from it underfunded, because you don't immediately see any sort of consequence from it, right? It's nice to see both candidates talking about, well, you know, we need technology. Maybe you can reduce the travel time from humans to travel to Mars, for example. Or obviously deep space, closed loop life support, radiation mitigation, who knows? And both candidates generally talk about making sure that NASA investing in technology, that they then be able to use that technology for broad social benefit. You know, I think that's a very uncontroversial statement. And that's been said, I think, for many, many years. The problem with technology is that it's an investment in the future.

But government inherently is about the needs of the now. Any money that's being invested that you're not going to see the return on that investment for quite a long time, it's a lot easier politically to say, we can put that off. We can kick that can down the road. We need those resources for this project now that's going to give us return immediately. That's why it turns into the bank of technology. It's interesting. You mentioned six technologies identified. I think you're six or eight, something like that for the human spaceflight to get out to Mars. The Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA actually has hundreds of technology development

programs at very, very low levels. Each one of those has its own little constituency. Many of those programs are actually sort of forced upon NASA in appropriations or authorization bills by members of Congress that have an interest in a certain project in their district. So it's difficult to really sort of rope that into a coherent strategy. I think NASA has done a really good job with the constraints that they work under, but there wasn't a technology mission directorate at NASA for many years. The Obama administration restarted it. And for the first two years that they opened the STMD, Congress gave them no money to invest in this directorate.

Congress was much happier spending money in technology development in individual programs throughout NASA. So it's really difficult to keep that kind of an initiative going just from an executive standpoint. And that's a great example of whether there's going to be a clear vision from the executive administration, the leadership, that has clear marching orders all the way down the chain to NASA and the Office of Management and Budget, and also working in a way that Congress is going to be happy with. Again, it's very difficult to predict at what amount of attention this is going to get.

I do have a relevant passage here that I'll just leave with from the Clinton answer to these questions posed by Space News, saying that we must increase investments in science, technology, and infrastructure, and STEM education, and public outreach to ensure NASA continues to capture imaginations and so forth. So there I see this more broad sense of what NASA is to a Clinton administration, right? It's not just sending humans. I think that's actually kind of an interesting, maybe philosophical difference, reading the entrails here, parsing your tea leaves or whatever metaphor you want to use, where from the Trump side, I see that it's our duty to send humans to explore the entire solar system as our goal. We have to push deep out there and focus on that as the driving force. And on the Clinton side, you see a much more of this broad social good of NASA and investing in that aspect of it and the

science return technology that you then are broadly applicable to society, and also STEM education, which is one of the core, more practical values that NASA benefits us. If I had to choose some sort of fundamental difference between the two campaigns, I think that's what I would choose, this kind of philosophical shift of what is the role of the space program. Casey, I don't think those tea leaves that you're looking at or those entrails are telling you who's going to be the next president of the United States, though some people listening to this may have an advantage over us doing this five days before the election. Nevertheless, both of these candidates have scores of people on their transition teams who are coming up with how they're going to run the country.

Space may be pretty far down the list. I mean, you know, you've got defense, you've got foreign policy, the economy, education, endless, endless issues. Let's talk about how policy is formed, how it comes together. I think that there's probably no more fascinating topic that we'll cover today. Just to start with, Matt, you mentioned that there were scores of people on the transition teams for both candidates. It's interesting to note that it's only been in recent years that that's been congressionally mandated. It's now law as a presidential candidate 60 days before the election that you form a transition team. And the reason that that law came into place is that Congress was noticing, everyone in the political realm was noticing, that administrations that did not form these transition teams early enough had massive difficulties in keeping the federal government running when

they first started. You need a good 90 days of understanding what the issues are at each of the agencies, understanding who the personnel are, just figuring out what the phone numbers are of the people that you need to talk to. And that can take a lot of time, shockingly, in a bureaucracy. So it's now a federal law that you form your transition team long before you even know if you're going to be transitioning your administration into a position of power. From there, once a president is elected, so after the elections next week, that transition team

will actually go into action. They will start setting up offices, if they haven't already, at each agency and start handing out what the new policy directions are and working with the heads of the agencies, working with the high level political operatives in each of the agencies to start enacting the president's agenda. But those plans have been formulated, hopefully, earlier at a high strategic level. But now, you know, we were talking earlier about how do you enact your technology plan for NASA? How do you enact your public-private partnership policy for NASA? Well, now you're at the point where the rubber hits the road. You actually

have to start forming those policies with the agencies that'll enact them. And no matter what position you take, whatever policy you want to put in place, you're going to have external forces, and I would include Congress in that, but also companies that have a vested interest, and even groups like the Planetary Society who may want to have some influence over it. Absolutely. You'll have lots of people trying to influence the policy to the direction that they would like to see it go, but it's not even just external. Even within the agencies, there are people who have their own agendas and their own desires to see their programs or their projects move forward. So you'll have pushback

on some of these issues within the agency. And this is why communication is absolutely imperative. Policy is not a top-down directive. Policy is very much a negotiation between all the interested parties. If you just dictate what you want done to the people below you and expect them to enact it, it's probably not going to end up looking the way you want it to look, right? But if you have them on board, if you work with them, you meet their needs in order to move your policy forward, it's a far more successful recipe for enacting policy. And something we should just be clear here too, when we're talking about NASA and space policy, these are going to be relatively low on the priorities of the transition. I'm trying to think of how many months it was in the Obama

administration before Charlie Bolden was even nominated, but it was at least six months or something like that. Yeah, it was pretty close. I think it was four and a half, five months before his nomination, then about a month or six weeks before confirmation. So yeah, it took a while. Yeah, and the Senate has to confirm the NASA administrator and the deputy administrator. You have this whole thing of what's called, in a sense, political appointments. So the president gets to appoint thousands of people in the federal government to help enact their agenda.

So they have to A, find those people, vet them, position them, and then some of them, not all of them, but some of them then have to be approved by the Senate. It's really going to depend on the makeup if you have a hostile Senate, or if you have a friendly Senate, how quickly you can get your nominees through. Finding people at what priority. Usually, I think, as Matt said, you're going to focus on State Department, Department of Defense, some of these big, big, big, big parts of government first. Rightly so, I guess, I would say. Darn it. And start getting your people into those positions, right? And so you have to, you transition,

and then there's all just the mess of transition and learning all these new jobs. We have a civil servant workforce that continues to work between administrations that have to learn what the priorities of the new administration is going to be. And maybe we should just enumerate, Jason, what are the main agencies that we'll be looking at where they will be appointing new people? So obviously NASA is one of them. The Office of Management and Budget, which writes the budget. Yeah, Office of Science and Technology Policy, the President's Science Advisor is the head of that organization. From a space side, you'll also be looking at the FAA, you'll be looking at NOAA, you'll be looking at the intelligence apparatus, the NSA, you'll be looking at what happens with the Department of Defense and what they do with their space command.

All of these will impact NASA in one degree or another. Plus the potential for a National Space Council of naming people to that, figuring out what the exact policy is going to be, and then taking it out. So that might even be another step in terms of time. And in the meantime, NASA basically just chugs along with the last set of instructions it had, right? Unless something immediately comes down the line. And on top of that, you've got a national space policy that's supposed to be formed every four years. The last one was in 2010. Somebody will be ramping up that effort to rewrite that as well, I'm sure. And then, of course, those outside forces like the National Academies that come up with the decadal surveys.

And it leaves me somewhat amazed that any administration is able to form any kind of coherent policy and put it into effect. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of people. And this is why you kind of see it takes a couple of years for an administration to really find its speed, right? To just get used to those situations and get everyone in place, particularly, again, if you have a recalcitrant Senate who may not approve your nominees fast enough.

So you might be working with deputy administrators. Jason, correct me here if I'm wrong, but when you have a transition from a different party transition from one president to another, usually what will happen is a lot of the political appointees of the previous administration will tender their resignations and then they'll serve until they ask them to leave or they might be asked to leave immediately and then the deputy serves in their place or something. Yeah, you will often have an acting administrator, an acting deputy administrator, somebody who is a civil servant at a fairly high level who will just hold that position but doesn't really have the authority to enact new directions for the agency.

Jason, can we learn from the transitions that have taken place over the course of history in this nation and a substantial portion of that history now, looking at how space policy has fared through transition from one administration to another? It was really interesting. I started looking at this, getting ready for this episode. One of the things that I sort of noticed that had sort of slipped my attention previously is if you look at the past two presidential transitions from the Clinton administration to the George W. Bush administration, and then from the W. Bush administration to the Obama administration, what you saw with NASA was that the agency was actually in a fair bit of turmoil at both of those transitions. With Obama, you had the Constellation Project, which we mentioned earlier, was severely over budget and had issues both directly and

indirectly related to the program. And the Obama administration basically day one came in and had to figure out what to do in order to put their budget proposal out. They had to figure out whether or not they were going to continue to spend money on this project. If they continued, it meant that they were going to have to spend a lot more money on this project or move the schedule much, much further out to the right. What they decided to do was enact this commission, this blue ribbon panel that Casey mentioned earlier, often known as the Augustine Commission. It was chaired by Norm Augustine. The commission came back with a series of five recommendations, and the administration took those and decided, you know, one of the recommendations was that you cancel the program and start something else in its place. And that's what they chose to do.

That took, I think it was October that the report came. So the president comes in in January of 2009. The report comes out, I think, did the report come out in 2009 or 2010, Casey? I think it was 2010, actually, that it came out. So it took a long time to figure out what the transition was. Then the results of that decision basically dictated what happened between the White House and Congress on the space program for the next four or five years. It was a huge issue, all rooted around a circumstance that the administration found when they walked in the door. And if you look at what happened with the

George W. Bush administration, they were under sort of the same difficulty. An advisor of mine, a mentor of mine, who was on the transition team in 2000 told me, or in 2001, told me that basically he was there his very first day at 11 o'clock at night when somebody brought a file to him, laid it on his desk, and the file told him that, surprise, there was a $5 billion overrun on the International Space Station, and you'll have to deal with that, by the way, the budget's due next week. Have a good four years. Right, right. So the incoming administration is actually faced with something that we haven't seen in nearly 20 years, and

that's a NASA that is not in significant disarray on day one. And that's a unique position for them to find themselves in at this point. You know, there are a lot of good choices to be made here. That's a good point, Jason, because I think people talk about the Space Launch System as if it's a deeply troubled program. The worry about SLS is always in the future, and there are legitimate future worries. But as of right now, it's a pretty solid program for a giant, unprecedented rocket,, human rated rocket that NASA hasn't built in decades. So that's really good to point out. People always talk about the SLS. What are you going to do with it? Well, there's a lot of options, but it is, as you say, it is not that

we know of, I should say, facing a multi-billion dollar overrun. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's a hair on fire problem that you must deal with on day one, right? So so that's the interesting thing, right? Because NASA is in this immense transition. And none of these big transitions have completed yet when this new administration comes in, right? So none of them have formed a lasting coalition, no one, none of them have formed a deep base of support that is used to operating them, right, that we have. And the same goes for commercial crew, which is also going to be two to three years from the transition. So it's a lot of stuff is up in the air. And therefore, the next president will have a lot of opportunity to direct what we do with those, but in a sense, have a luxury, as you pointed out,

that nothing is on fire that we know of. That's a really interesting place to be. It means that you can take your time to make the decisions. It means that you can be strategic about the choices that you make. It also means that this president has the possibility to own the successes or the risk of owning the failures of these programs. Maybe that'll get them excited in their future. This is what is so interesting, right, that because it's not a huge problem, maybe NASA will go longer without getting a lot of attention. And you're actually seeing this in a lot of groups are starting to weigh in on what NASA should do. I just read Aviation Week's op-ed on what the next administration should do with NASA. We're putting together one of our own.

Other groups and coalitions are as well. And a lot of them are basically saying, let's not hit reset again. You know, let's keep the program of record going. You can tweak it. But not a lot of people see much value in tearing things out by the roots and changing it, going through that whole thing again. Because as you pointed out, Jason,

it took years to even get to the report. So i just looked at it as the end of 2009 very late 2009 when the augustine commission's report came out and then they implemented it in the 2010 budget request which came out or 2011 budget request came out early 2010 the whole issue here is that we have a nasa that has a lot of promise but is in a very uncertain area, right? We don't have a lot of, we have some momentum, but not a lot because nothing is operational yet. So we're not launching all the time with commercial crew.

We're not launching, we don't have the full apparatus of SLS up. We have potential for trouble ahead on both of those major programs. But don't forget, we also have the James Webb Space Telescope launching in 2018. The Solar Probe Plus launching in 2018. Those are multi-billion dollar missions. Mars 2020 is going to be hitting peak development here in the next few years,

requiring five to six hundred million a year to build. All of these things are going to depend on the continuity of the administration's policies to some degree. And that's going to be an interesting situation to watch as we go forward. Yeah, I forgot to mention when the Obama administration came in, they were also dealing with the fact that MSL Curiosity had just announced that they were going to delay their launch for two years at a cost of a billion and a half dollars. And within a year, James Webb went over budget by about three and a half dollars. And within a year, James Webb went over budget by about three and a half billion. So there was a lot of disarray at NASA at that transition as well. And in the midst of a historic economic collapse in the country itself, which again, hopefully we won't

be in here for this transition. But again, I think that NASA tends to be subject to the larger political whims of what's happening. And this is what I brought up a little earlier in terms of, if we see Trump administration follow through with very large tax cuts, and then the implication being subsequently diminishing the size of government, that means cutting the amount of discretionary spending overall. What happens to NASA in that context? It's hard to see how NASA grows in that context, but nothing's for sure. Same with the Clinton administration with a very difficult relationship with the Republican Congress. Will they fund her initiatives anywhere, much less NASA?

So a lot of this is very theoretical i mean there's always going to be a difference particularly with space where all the words might be the right things right they might be all the right words and all the right phrases and broadly everyone agrees on them but if the larger political situation is really bad it's going to be difficult for much progress to be made if nasa can't even get reliable budgets and reliable budgeting. And so that's something we need to keep in mind. NASA, as I always think, it's kind of a surfer in a giant wave, and you don't get to control where that wave is going.

You just try to do your best to hang on. Right. And actually, one of the things we probably should have mentioned earlier when we were discussing the positions on NASA is all of this is sort of moot if we don't find out what the positions are on something like sequestration. Sequestration is a budget control act that was passed a couple of years ago, and it's a 10-year provision in which the discretionary budget is held to very, very draconian numbers. It's agreed upon from a bipartisan standpoint that sequestration is bad and it

needs to be gotten rid of, but there's no room for negotiation on how to get rid of sequestration. So at this point, it's better than likely that sequestration will stay in place, which will have devastating effects on everything in the discretionary budget, NASA included. Because they've essentially been offsetting the actual sequestration cuts for the last few years and pushing those into future years. And so the whole thing has to add up that they've been providing more upfront money the last couple of years that the overall math still has to work out in that 10 year timescale. And so every year they either have to decide to break it or let all of the sequestration cuts kick in, at which point you're looking at 10, 15 percent lopping off the top in a single year. And that's very hard to work with all of these new initiatives that we're talking about for NASA, much less any other federal agency.

Yeah. Guys, we will have a much better idea of the direction of this nation and its space program when we know who will be leading the nation. And I'm talking not just about President, but the new Congress in just a few days. Do you have any final thoughts? I'm happy for it to be over. I can tell you I've enjoyed this conversation far more than the recent weeks of the campaign. Well, I will say one thing. I encourage everybody to not just take our summary,

but to go ahead and read the actual op-eds and the policy statements made by both campaigns. To go to planetary.org slash election2016 has every statement that we could find

by both candidates. And we'll put the links to these op-eds on the show page itself. And you can read in more detail what they're saying, what they're not saying, try to read between the lines. You know, you think of it as a parlor game as to what the intentions are here. But again, it's part of understanding as a space advocate

what people are talking about, who's informing them, what are some of the core ideas, because broadly, I think the philosophy will reflect the ultimate policy. And I think trying to understand and see how they're talking is important as well. And for those of you who are really, really interested in policy, we'll also post a couple of links to some books that discuss presidential transitions and the impacts that presidential policy has had on the space program over the years. I love it. I will just add this. If you are hearing this program, this edition of the Space Policy Edition, prior to the closing of polls in your time zone on Tuesday, November 8th, and you are registered to vote in the United States, then you better do

so because if you don't vote, we're not going to let you listen to the December edition of this show. Don't you agree, guys? That's right. We will put a strict voters-only policy on the SoundCloud account. That's right. It's illegal for us to have an opinion, but it's imperative. It's your responsibility for our listeners to have an opinion. And after you take part in this great democratic experiment that is ongoing that we call the United States, maybe even before, consider becoming part of the organization that brought you this program. That's the Planetary Society, of course, and all the details, including the incentives and the nice things that will happen for you and for the society if you do this are at planetary.org slash membership we will be back on the first friday in december which happens to be december 2nd of 2016 guys we will i'm sure have much more to talk about once again i have thoroughly enjoyed

this conversation thank you matt thanks a lot guys this is a lot of fun. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, coming to you, as we said, monthly from the Planetary Society. We are thrilled that you have joined us. By the way, we have gotten a lot of great comments about past programs. Some of you would, I apparently would hope that we were just on all the time, Jason, Casey, and I, just talking continuously about space policy. I don't think that's going to happen, but we do care a lot about what you've said about this show and particularly about the topics that you have suggested to us. If you've got some more to say, send it to planetaryradioatplanetary.org. That's

planetaryradioatplanetary.org. Again, planetaryradio at planetary.org. Again, thanks for joining us, and we will see you on December 2nd.