Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #7 - The Trump Administration: What Can We Expect for Space?

Episode Date: December 2, 2016

The SPE team reviews the outlook for human spaceflight, planetary science, Earth observation and much more under the upcoming Trump administration. 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 the December edition of the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm your host, Matt Kaplan, the host of the regular show, the weekly edition of Planetary Radio. Back with this monthly special, along with our very special regular participants, my colleagues, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and calling in from D.C., inside the Beltway, Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor, also the composer of the theme that you just heard. And you'll hear again if you stick around to the end of the show. And I think you should, because, boy, do we have a lot to talk about.

Welcome back, guys. Hey, Matt. Hey, guys, how you doing? Great. And I was worried that we wouldn't have enough to talk about that it would all be we don't know what's going on. Well, we still don't do we? No, it doesn't stop us from speculating, does it? Or anyone else? We're in the parlor game part of the NASA transition. Now that we've had a presidential election. No one knows what or who will lead NASA in the next few months here, but we've got some relatively informed thoughts on this. And we will give a lot of context, too, to some of the things you may be seeing online. Not only that, it just seems like in the last two or three days, and I'll say that we're recording this on the 1st of December, Thursday the 1st,

the Trump administration and Congress have obliged us. They've made a few announcements that I think we're going to have, give us some things to talk about over the next hour or so. First of all, we need to acknowledge there is a president-elect. Yes, we do. We have a new president-elect. It was obviously Donald Trump, for anyone who has not been paying attention, which, why are you listening to this? Or for your politics news, anyway.

But yeah, we have a new president. Honestly, a lot of people did not expect him to win. And this is true within the Beltway, particularly for people who are planning on this transition, a lot of reorientation in terms of people's expectation for what's going to be happening with NASA. And also a lot of people suddenly trying to make a lot of new friends inside the Beltway to get in good with the transition team itself. We are following this very closely, as you might imagine. But again, we are in a very early period of this transition. And there's, again, a lot we don't know and a lot of choices

yet to be made here in the next few months. However, as you pointed out, we just learned something new. And it's actually a very good lesson as to why we don't speculate too early. Up until a couple of days ago, everyone thought that uh mark albrecht was going to be leading the nasa transition matt you and i talked about this on planetary radio uh the other week everyone was expecting that mark albrecht well respected space policy space insider and then the official announcement came out from the trump transition team mark albrecht was not going to nasa he went to the department of Defense. And instead, we have leading the transition team, the landing team that's going to go into NASA and, you know,

kind of lift up the curtains and look underneath and find all of the details of every NASA program to help prep the new administration is this person called Chris Schenck, also actually a generally well-respected, very experienced space insider in the D.C. Beltway. He worked in the Mike Griffin NASA administration. He's worked for Lamar Smith on the House Science Committee. Very knowledgeable guy. But again, totally different than what everyone thought for the last few weeks. So again, a good lesson that everything, everyone, even experts think they know. You don't know until it happens.

So that's just kind of a good thing to keep in mind. And I want to talk a little bit more about Chris Schenck, because I think you guys have met him, have had some conversations with him. I forgot to check whether Donald Trump is a member of the Planetary Society. Either of you guys know? We'll run the list. Maybe we should offer him an honorary membership. Regardless, I forgot to mention up front that if you're listening to this

and you're one of those people who writes to us about how much you're enjoying this Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio or anything else that the Planetary Society does, hope you'll consider going to planetary.org slash membership and becoming part of the family, joining us in this effort to bring you, well, Space Policy Edition, but everything else that the Society does. So the commercial came a little bit later than usual. Let me add one thing, Matt. It makes a great gift. What a great idea.

What a wonderful holiday gift idea. Thank you, Casey. For $4 a month, you can bring the joy of space exploration to someone special in your life for this holiday season. Give people the cosmos. What could be better? Chris Schenck. Maybe he's a member. Your paths have crossed.

Absolutely. We've met him multiple times. Again, he was deputy chief of staff for Lamar Smith, who is the chair of the House Science Committee. The conservative Republican congressperson from Texas, the guy with the Hubble wide field on his wall. Exactly. Huge fan of astrobiology. Yes, a big fan of astrobiology,

big fan of planetary exploration, deep space exploration, more critical about earth science, which is a trend I think we're going to see going forward in the next four years, and we will talk about that as well later here today. But again, Chris Schenck, yeah, very nice guy. We've, again, met him many times over the years with me, Bill Nye, and others working with the Planetary Society. So again, I think NASA

transition is going to be in good hands with experienced people. And we will see more people join this team over the next few months as well. One of the interesting things about having Chris as opposed to Mark Albrecht, Mark, his experience was primarily in the White House, in the executive branch. And Chris has been working with Congress for a very long time. So that would tend to indicate that the transition team will have a better rapport with Congress than it might have had it been under Mark Albrecht. So it's speculation, but it's an interesting thing. Another good point with that as well is that when he wasn't working with Congress most recently,

he was working with Mike Griffin in the George W. Bush Nass administration during the Constellation program. You can see probably a consistent view of the value of constellation, maybe a focus on interest in the moon, also a supporter of very likely the space launch system and Orion, which are direct descendants of the constellation program too. And so I think you see that ethos will be transferred with this transition. Really up until now, NASA has said there's been no contact from the Trump administration. So it's really just getting underway, up until now, NASA has said there's been no contact from the Trump administration. So it's really just getting underway, isn't it, with this appointment of Chris Schenck? Compared to previous administrations, this administration seems to be a little bit

behind schedule for the transition, but it's not catastrophic at this point. Their process is perhaps a little less structured than other people have been at this point. It's also not surprising that you see the delay in announcements for NASA. I don't think this was a huge priority for this administration. I don't think it was a huge priority for the Clinton team either. So it's not surprising that this gets pushed out a bit. And I suspect that you'll sort of see that play out with policy at NASA going forward. I don't think we'll see an administrator announced in February. I don't think we'll see a new space policy set forth in March or anything. And as we mentioned in the last episode, I think the budget will be delayed. And I think that when that budget comes out, that'll be our first indication of what the policy goals are of this administration.

Jason, what you just said about NASA Administrator 2, this is a good just lesson for anyone who's going to be following this. The NASA Administrator sweepstakes is, again, full of speculation. There's a couple names out there already, but don't read too much into it until it happens. And again, I think we just got a good lesson with the Albrecht to Schenck switch. And we should just, again, stay paying attention, stay vigilant, but kind of temper our expectations

until we see the actual people. And again, this is, I think, actually what we literally discussed in the last episode was until we see the people coming in, that'll give us a much more clear sense, as Jason said, about where we're going to go, start to see some budget actions and decisions, priorities starting to be implemented. That'll give us a sense. And then I would expect almost a year, maybe a little more from now to see a real true Trump space policy start to be pushed forward because it just takes some time for these folks to come in to understand the lay of the land, to understand what they want to do, and particularly if there's going to be a National Space Council, which has been, again, proposed. Let's also note here that Bob Walker, who wrote the Trump campaign space policy positions that

we talked about in the last episode is not involved in the transition. And he is he's very unlikely to be involved in the administration. He's a lobbyist and there's just a ban on lobbyists. And so he may act as an unofficial advisor, but we are not clear as to what the distinction is between the original policies, ideas put forward in his op-eds before the election, and what policies will be pursued by the people actually involved in the transition and actually involved in the administration. So that's just a good grain of salt to, again, remember, because he's interviewed a lot, and he's an interesting guy with a lot of ideas, but it's unofficial what he's saying, in a sense. So that's

just another thing to keep in mind. And just to muddy the waters a little bit further, the ban on lobbyists in this administration, it's not entirely clear what that ban actually means. So it's not entirely certain that Walker is completely out of the running for some role in the government. And this is the former long-serving Senator Bob Walker, also a Republican. I love the bit of advice that came from Charlie Bolden. I got this out of Jeff Faust's terrific First Look daily column for Space News, and he often closes it with a fun quote. Bolden said, you know, he's been asked if he wants to give any advice to the incoming administration or the incoming NASA administrator, whoever, whomever that may be. He simply says, pay attention to what happened over the last seven years and don't screw it up.

That sounds like Charlie. I think there are some hard lessons learned there. But again, I think you can look at that as the Trump administration will have a decision here, which is, are they largely going to continue current policy, which again, broadly is nonpartisan? Or are they going to try to really change things and change direction and change programs they can try to do, but that takes a lot more political capital. And it takes a lot more work. It causes a lot more disruption. And a lot of things get slowed down.

And so you have to make a strategic set of decisions. What do you go after? What's worth going after? And then to what end do you change things? And I think that's, again, a big part of what the transition is about. Big part of what a National Space Council would help delineate and to define. We are relatively in the dark until we start to see more concrete steps being taken. So we said up front that speculation is a dangerous game, and yet we're going to indulge in that as we have in previous programs. So guys, let's speculate.

What do you think we can see as sort of the top priorities and the big changes that may be in store? What we can start to look at are these big trends that are not just wrapped up in what the Trump campaign has said, but are wrapped up in what the Republican Party has been doing in Congress for the last few years. And that will be a coherence that I think you'll see a much more likely chance of this stuff happening. Let's maybe just start with the big one that has been in the news a lot, and is likely to be a flashpoint, and that's earth science funding. And then Jason, I'll toss it to you for a few other big picture things. So earth science is

NASA's most well funded science right now, it about $2 billion a year, a little less. It is the only science that has grown consistently under the Obama administration. It is clearly the top science priority within the Obama administration. Republicans in Congress have resisted that generally over the last eight years. With statements made by Bob Walker and general statements that are critical of climate science by Trump himself, you will likely see, at best, a deprioritization, let's say, of the budget of earth science at NASA. Jason, do you agree with that generally? Yeah. So the line that the Republicans in Congress have been using pretty consistently for a number of years now is that NASA should get back into doing space exploration and leave the Earth exploration to other agencies.

The problem with that bumper sticker announcement is that no other agencies do climate science the way that NASA does. You have organizations like NOAA that do weather research or do long-term modeling research, but nobody is really collecting the data on long-term climate change that NASA is doing. So this idea that those programs would leave NASA opens the question as to where they would go if they would go anywhere else. That has been completely unaddressed to date in policy. And NOAA has been specifically mentioned as the more appropriate agency to be conducting this science. But I think you guys have said in the past, that's not been said with any promise of funding to accomplish it. It seems like it's been not a

bad team between NOAA and NASA. NOAA has said so. So yeah, there's a history of this that a lot of times in the past, Congress or the White House has tried to move programs from NASA to NOAA, usually under the organizing principle that NASA is not supposed to do operations. They're supposed to build and launch things and then pass the operations off to another agency. Well, the issue that we've run into time and time again at NOAA is that they don't have the technical capability in-house that NASA has to operate these spacecraft. And their budget is much smaller, so they don't really have the ability to hire that capability. So it's always just made more sense to have NASA operate the spacecraft for NOAA to a certain degree and have NOAA just deal with the data. So if we talk about moving these programs from NASA to NOAA, it's not just

the money, it's also the expertise and the capability. Yeah, the bureaucratic oversight, and again, the mission. And I think that's a really critical thing here too. NOAA really is much more about weather in terms of its space operations, right? They manage the weather satellite, but actually NASA makes those weather satellites for NOAA, right? NASA is effectively a contractor in a way. Earth science, again, we're talking about right now $2 billion a year. It doesn't just fund missions. It funds a lot of research. It funds supercomputing clusters that do advanced modeling, climate modeling.

They're doing these operations to monitor the ice sheets in the Antarctic and Arctic areas right now. And there's a lot of important stuff that they do. And again, I think this goes to this kind of the sad situation where unfortunately, climate science has been politicized and it has become a flashpoint in an otherwise generally bipartisan, nonpartisan NASA. We will see again, no one knows exactly what's going to happen. And I think we've had a range of statements from a variety of people associated with a campaign or, again, associated in the Republican Congress from removing earth science entirely,

which I think would be one of those things I kind of mentioned a few minutes ago, where that would take a lot of political capital and be a big flashpoint. I think more likely we will see the budget go down. And that's basically what happened during the George W. Bush administration. Other sciences became favored. But again, a lot needs to be seen. And I think this is where the scientific community at large is already mobilizing very strongly, worried about the fate of Earth science. The point that Jason made is really important. NASA provides the data. That's the really valuable thing. You have these Earth monitoring satellites, climate monitoring satellites. No one else is doing that. The notion that you can just get the data somewhere else is

not, doesn't, there's no other place to get this data. That'll be a fight. I should also say that was the vice chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee that funded NASA and also just had a very, very good working relationship with the Republican chair, Richard Shelby. And so she was notable for her support of earth science. A lot of that went through Goddard in Maryland. So on the House side, you lost the ranking member of the same subcommittee, Mike Honda, who actually lost an election to another Democrat. So again, you have Democrats replacing both of these, Senator and House

member of Congress. However, they don't have the seniority that either Mike Honda or Barbara Mikulski has. And that makes a big difference. That means they won't be the ranking members working with the chair on these committees. If they serve on these same committees, they will start at the bottom. And so you've lost two high ranking, very influential members of Congress who were very focused on earth science, in addition to having a much more critical view of earth science represented in the administration and total Republican control of Congress. So it's going to be very likely tough times for earth science. But I think it'll be, in a sense, these tend to be galvanizing moments for the scientific community, because it brings a lot of different organizations and different scientists together

to really think about these issues and to really promote these issues in a much more broad spectrum. and to really promote these issues in a much more broad spectrum. It certainly has galvanized the mainstream environmental organizations who seem to be gearing up for a fight, of course, about this and many other environmental issues that may come to the head. But there is also this statement by John Culberson, another Republican congressman and a big fan of space exploration out of Texas, who kind of moderated the position a little bit and said that, quoting here, strong support in Congress for keeping a close eye on planet Earth.

And this is a guy who said on this show that NASA should be out of the Earth science business a little over a year ago. Again, we're speculating. We'll have to wait and see what happens. Another interesting thing having to do with Earth science, you've seen comments coming out of NASA's Earth science division discussing the fact that they're not really planning to build large flagship missions anymore. They're really looking at a fleet of much smaller spacecraft. And from a strategic standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. It's very easy to shut off funding for a really large mission that will have a huge impact on your data. If you have lots of small missions, there's less of a financial reason to get rid of any

single mission because it just doesn't have that much impact on your overall budget. And if you lose one or two of those, you're not losing the entire data set, right? You still have a lot of data coming down. I'm not saying that we can afford to lose a lot of data from a small mission. It could be very important, but it does reduce the risk to your overall program. Let's leave earth science behind and move to some of those other major issues. Where should we go next, guys? How about human spaceflight? Yeah, let's talk about human spaceflight. There are a lot of things to talk about. The most

pressing point, I think, is the fate of the asteroid retrieval mission, the ARM mission. We've seen a little bit of indication as to what's going to happen with that already. NASA recently, through the NASA Advisory Council, there's a division of the NASA Advisory Council called the Small Bodies Assessment Group that released a report not too long ago looking at the asteroid retrieval mission's ability to address strategic knowledge gaps, which are technical knowledge gaps at NASA, and also to address questions raised by the Planetary Science Decadal Survey that came out a few years ago. This report came out showing how ARM could address all of these things. The response coming from the House Science Committee basically said, well, that's interesting,

but why don't you give us a report that gives us options to address all of these strategic knowledge gaps and decadal questions, rather than telling us how this one mission that you want addresses these very specific things. So it was really sort of a blowback from Congress saying, addresses these very specific things. So it was really sort of a blowback from Congress saying that's not a winning argument in our eyes. Yeah, I think arm is in a very precarious place. I, I tend not to bet on these things, but I would bet on arm not making it through. The reason I say that is that a, it's, it's just tied very closely with the Obama administration and there's just going to be a natural inclination in the Trump administration to not continue tightly integrated Obama policies. The second is that it's not a very popular mission. It has not

engaged broadly the scientific community or the space community, a lot of hostility towards it, particularly consistent critiques from the Republican Congress, which is now again, working with the Republican administration. And so I think you will see a lot of hostility that the House budget that was proposed this year, zeroed out funding for it entirely. The science committees who write the authorization bills have repeatedly critiqued it. And then you have the issue of that it has grown in budget. That never helps in a situation like this. And it's not very far along. So it's relatively easy to cancel. There's not

a huge amount of, you know, it's not like the spacecraft is built. There's not even a contract for the spacecraft main bus yet. And so it's in a bad position in a lot of different ways. And to me, it's an easy way for the new administration to break symbolically with the past. So I would bet you don't see this, but we can revisit this in a year and see how wrong or right I am about it. Now, the problem with canceling ARM, however, is at the moment, it is the only mission of record that provides a destination for astronauts once the space station is done with SLS, with Orion. The original plan was to run this mission before the space station was, well, roughly

the time that the space station is supposed to come to an end under current policy. If you get rid of ARM and you don't replace it with something else, there aren't a whole lot of justifications for building SLS, for building Orion, for these multi-billion dollar programs at NASA. So I would expect that along with the cancellation of ARM, we'll see a lot of discussion as to where the human spaceflight program should go as a destination. Yeah, that's a great point. Let's pick up with SLS, the Space Launch System, that gigantic rocket, which, Casey, you just finished that rocket road trip, and there's that great series of videos featuring you and our colleague Jason Davis, digital editor for the Society, that is really terrific.

People ought to check it out at planetary.org, five-part series. SLS, and of course, what's supposed to go on the tip of that rocket. We hope other things will go there as well. But Orion, the crew capsule that is supposed to take us beyond Earth orbit. Are they still in pretty good shape? They have a lot of friends in Congress. I think SLS is about as safe of a program as they come, at least for the next few years. Congress is very supportive of it.

Not just the appropriators, but the authorizers. We talked about this a few episodes back in the Senate authorization bill that's working its way through Congress. Huge support for SLS and Orion. And it's not just Republicans, it's bipartisan. So you have Democrats and Republicans agreeing that this is a great program and they keep throwing money at it. I think there are a few ways to judge political support more than to see where the money goes. They keep upping our SLS's budget by, you know, anywhere from six to eight hundred million a year, which is to me, that thing ain't going anywhere. Chris Schenck, we don't know exactly his thoughts on SLS.

But again, he was a very strong supporter of Constellation, which was SLS in a different guise. You know, that was the Ares V, I think, heavy lift concept. And Orion was already selected back then. So I think it's probably not going anywhere, at least for a few years. So I'm not worried about SLS or Orion. More of what it is is what Jason said of where are we going? What are we going to do with these? Are we going to send them to Mars? We're going to send them to the moon, we're going to send them to cislunar space? Are we going to make deep space habitats to send them to? These are all the questions that need to be answered

pretty soon. Because SLS's first launch is nominally 2018. First crude launch, 2023, 2021-ish, you know, depending on budget and things not going wrong. But 2021 would be the end of the first four years of the Trump administration. It's basically done all the work by that point to get it to get it there. And I think you're going to see a pretty safe couple of missions despite any troubles they have because you have the chair of the Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby, won re-election in Alabama, which is where Marshall Space Flight Center is, which manages the SLS program. He is a huge supporter of that. Bill Nelson, still Senator of Florida, ranking member on the Space Subcommittee in the Senate,

that writes the authorization bills. You have support from Ted Cruz. You've got support from Lamar Smith. All of these politicians are still there and in positions of pretty strong influence over this stuff. I very much doubt you will see a Trump administration of the same party coming in and trying to tear this up by the roots. That said, it's a function of how much effort and time and political capital they want to spend to do that. I think this is what Charlie Bolden said. Learn my lessons about my experience at NASA when they basically tried to do that with Constellation and draw your own conclusions from that. Many of us, of course, have dreamed of SLS as being a major building block in getting humans to Mars, either in orbit around that planet or perhaps someday, we certainly hope, down on the surface. But now we're hearing increasing conversation about the moon, which is something that one advisor to the Trump administration, Newt Gingrich, he's always

been a big fan of the moon. In fact, he took a lot of flack for that back when he was Speaker of the House. Is this looking like something that is going to be a viable option for the big SLS and Orion? I think it's important to keep this in historical context. So if you look at what happened in the George W. Bush administration, they started this program called Constellation that was planning to go to the moon first, build a base there, and then on to Mars at some later undefined point. That program was over budget, over schedule. And when the Obama administration came in, it canceled the program in favor of a different series of missions. But the important thing to remember about Constellation was that it enjoyed tremendous support from bipartisan support from Congress. And so when the Obama administration

came in and uprooted this plan for a lot of budgetary reasons that made sense to that administration, and it was not an illegitimate move that they made, but it really upset an awful lot of folks. And a lot of those people are still in Congress. So now that there is a Republican administration, now that there is an executive branch that is interested in working with Congress on their vision for space, or at least it seems to be the case, I would not be surprised at all if we see elements of constellations start to creep back into NASA's planning. And I think that that's sort of where the door opens. NASA has been talking about the journey to Mars now for a number of years, that we would go to cislunar space and then on to Mars.

Well, the door is now open to start talking about maybe landing on the moon first. The conversations are really in the early stages, and there's a lot of distance between here and there to figure out how you would pay for these kinds of programs. But that conversation is already starting in D. in DC and it's interesting to watch. And I think that conversation happens because of who is likely to serve in the administration. When a Republican administration comes into power, they will look for Republican space policy experts in a sense to serve their needs at NASA and Office of Science and Technology Policy and

wherever else they need them. A lot of Republican space policy experts favor the moon for a variety of reasons. We've discussed some of those before. So I think that just the association, again, of the people is telling, you know, again, it's kind of the writing on the wall that at least there will be a serious look at what can we do with moon. And I think, again, what's also interesting, one of the lessons that I think both Congress and NASA learned from the cancellation of Constellation was not to have their major

hardware programs tied too specifically to a single destination. That was the lesson. So they came up with this thing called the capabilities driven approach, which is where SLS and Orion come in of just saying, these are a big rocket and a hardy deep space capsule. You can go lots of places. And so NASA could pretty easily at this point pivot from the Mars goal to the moon goal without having dramatic programmatic change. to the moon goal without having dramatic programmatic change. And again, let's also just be clear, NASA is already planning to go to the moon as part of Mars. It's just not landing on the surface, right? So it was already planning to, and SLS and honestly, and Orion are basically designed as moon rocket and a moon capsule. And that's what their first variant is capable of doing. And this is that phrase we hear a lot, cislunar, which simply means the space that is near the moon, and maybe doing what Apollo 8 did so many years ago and flying around it.

That's like Platinum 1, yeah. I alluded to the problem earlier, though. You had the same problem with Constellation. One of the products, so you had the big rocket, the Ares V, you had the Orion capsule, you had the ground systems component, and then you needed a lander. And under Constellation, that was called the Altair lander. It was never funded. There was never any money in the budget for the Altair. It was always a paper project. Well, now we're having these discussions again about cislunar space or landing on the surface, and we're right back at the same issue. There's no money in the budget to build a lander. So unless Congress and the White House are willing to address that, all of this is really just talk. And I think the big

X factor that's changed maybe in the last 10 years has been the surge of commercial private fixed price contracts, you know, in the market, right? And that is seen by a lot of people as the solution to that problem Jason brought up. But notably, they still need to be paid too. And again, I always bring this back to the point where skeptical nature is still needed when it comes to commercial space, because you have SpaceX and others sending rockets into low earth orbit. That was a, again, quote unquote, solved problem. We, humanity or aerospace community, knew how to do that pretty well. And we, humanity or aerospace community, knew how to do that pretty well.

So when NASA went out and saying, we will pay you a fixed amount of money to achieve this goal of sending things into low Earth orbit, companies would take that bet and take that risk because they figured they could do it and not go out of business. No one has ever built a lunar lander since there's been one, right? And it was 50 years ago. There's no logical conclusion that private industry on a fixed contract can necessarily do that without going bankrupt. Maybe they could, but it's not at the same level of assurance that NASA was betting on with low Earth orbit rockets. And this is the fundamental problem where there's a lot of ideas with commercializing the

surface of the moon, but they all require significant government investment. And where's that going to come from? Maybe they'll find some money, maybe they'll try to do it very cheap, and maybe they'll pull it off if they decide to pursue that. But again, it's not a sure thing. And I think that's really important to remember. I think what was altered was that looking at 12, $16 billion kind of by the end, it was a very expensive concept for a lander. Landing on the moon is really difficult. Really hard. I can't remember, does the Air and Space Museum have a lunar module? I wonder if NASA has the right to repossess that just in case it became necessary. They have one, but it's an engineering model. So I don't know that it's actually space, it was ever intended to be space-worthy. Just kidding.

That's one of the bolder plans. Commercial space, is it looking good for the growing number of companies that want to do things in low-Earth orbit and get other companies' payloads up to low-Earth orbit in the Trump administration. Yes, I think that's an easy answer. That's actually been a really interesting development since Obama came into office. There was a lot of resistance when they canceled Constellation. They were doubling down into private space very strongly, and that was resisted through a lot of parochial interest in Congress. And this is why we have this weird hybrid program of having a commercial crew and cargo development

and old school kind of government contracting for the SLS and Orion. You've seen, I think, a real shift in how people on both sides of the aisle talk about commercial space and private space investment. There's a lot of interest in about commercial space and private space investment. There's a lot of interest in supporting those companies and supporting that market and giving that market room to breathe and grow, and also to provide sympathetic regulatory oversight to the development of that market. And I think that in itself, particularly the regulatory oversight, dovetails very strongly with ideological commitments of the Republican Party. So that to me, it seems like a very strong indication that they will do at least have a lot more continued opportunities, maybe more opportunities in the next administration. I'm a bit more sanguine about the possibilities for commercial space going forward under a Trump administration, because I think that the industry is still young enough that it's dependent on government expenditure. And I don't know how

much of that we're actually going to see. I can't envision an increase in expenditure on commercial space from the government in the next four years. On the other hand, Jason, hasn't Congress said no more rides on Soyuz rockets after an American ride, a US-built rocket is available? That is true. But we're currently paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million a seat for astronauts to go to the space station. We're sending probably, what, nine astronauts a year. That's not a tremendous amount of money for a company to run a rocket program off of.

So I don't think that that alone would sustain a single company, much less the multiple companies that we currently have bidding for these. They're doing a little bit of this kind of testing the waters with the concept of deep space habitats. They're doing the next step program, but that's a small amount of money, relatively speaking, less than $100 million for these concept habitat developments. And Jason makes a great point. There still has to be government involvement. These are public-private partnerships that we're talking about here. The government is the biggest consumer of space needs and services that will either have to grow to help accommodate the growth of the market, or the market will have to

somehow stand on its own without additional support. And that's always been the problem. We haven't seen that happen yet. It could, but we haven't seen it happen yet. And we haven't, we're not going to talk here very much, if at all, about the Department of Defense, which of course needs a lot of rockets to get stuff up into orbit on a regular basis, in fact, we should go on to planetary science. And I will note that there are huge segments of the NASA budget and some not so huge that we're not going to have a chance to talk about here. Of course, there's the aeronautical side, which is kind of outside of our purview. But planetary science, boy, that means a lot to all of us.

That's our bread and butter right there. And you know, so planetary science has the potential to do very well, I say, in the next administration. You have very strong supporters in Congress, again, Republican supporters who run in Congress right now. Trump administration, again, what they have said, at least before the election, was we want to invest in deep space exploration. Planetary science is part of that. John Culberson is still there, who is big supporter of Europa.

We have Lamar Smith, House Science Committee chairman, big supporter of Mars exploration and deep space exploration. So it's possible you will see increased support from the White House itself on planetary science. But again, it's not like that was ever discussed at any point in the policy realm during the election or even yet, because, you know, it's a relatively small part of the NASA budget is eight, nine percent. Same for astrophysics, I would say kind of would get lumped into that generally of a more positive disposition. But let's actually talk about a bigger picture thing that'll affect all of this. Because I mean, there's actually just not that much more to say about planetary science that, Jason, unless you want to jump in here, beyond generally,

it seems to match with their priorities. Yeah, I think that's true. You've got a small number of programs in development in planetary science already, and I think those are pretty safe. As a result, we'll have a number of launches between now and 2022 or 2023 when Europa goes up. But it's the longer term outlook that is a bit more concerning. But we will talk about that as we go forward. So let's actually talk about one final thing with Trump administration here. One thing that has been talked about a lot and does seem to have a lot of momentum behind it, and that's their broad fiscal policy. And that will have some indirect but potentially very impactful consequences for NASA and their policies for NASA. Well, perhaps of the greatest consequence, because no matter what they may say about what they like about all these other things we've talked about,

you've made the point, Casey, you do it. Most recently, you've done it on Planetary Radio last week, but also in this Scientific American piece that just came out yesterday as we speak, November 30th. We'll put a link up to that on the show page where people may be listening to this discussion right now. It may not matter how people feel about the missions if the money's not there. Yeah, the money is the pretty important part of this equation. Here's what we know. We know that Trump ran on a campaign of a very large tax cut on the order of five to six-ish trillion dollars over

10 years. Now, that's campaign rhetoric. We don't know exactly what's coming through, but we do know they have a very sympathetic Congress for passing large tax cuts. So let's just say a six trillion dollar tax cut over 10 years is passed. At the same time, there's also a campaign promise to have a very large infrastructure spending bill on the order of a trillion dollars over the same time. Again, we don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but let's just say lots of money spent on infrastructure. They also said that they want to increase spending on defense, which is the primary

source of spending for all of the discretionary money that Congress spends every year. So we have increased expenditures for defense and infrastructure. We have a decreased revenue to the U.S. Treasury from tax cuts. What that does is place enormous pressure on the remaining parts of government to either just completely go into the red and spend that all on deficit, which is possible, or more likely a combination of deficit and cutbacks on large social programs, which they've, again, started to spell out already. Paul Ryan has spelled out his intention for

privatizing Medicare to some degree, maybe reducing benefits for Social Security, and reducing the cost of spending on what's called non-defense discretionary. Basically, every other thing that government does that we think about. Right. So that's housing assistance. That's veterans assistance. That's, you know, running the Commerce Department, the Education Department. That's national parks. That's roads. That's everything. Right. That's the FCC and NASA and NOAA and the National Science Foundation. And, you know, everything, all of basic government research comes out of that non-defense discretionary.

What we're looking at is if they do start to cut that non-defense discretionary, it's already at a very low point when adjusted for inflation. NASA is part of that. NASA would have to compete in its particular little chunk with funding for the FBI, with funding for federal prisons, with funding for federal judges, things that basically you don't have a lot of leeway to cut without some really serious consequences. So we're looking at a potentially shrinking, dramatically shrinking budget, or at least dramatically shrinking pool of money that the government can spend on things that aren't

defense infrastructure and tax cuts. NASA's part of that, and classically, NASA does not get a pass from that shrinking pool. It tends to track with the amount of spending and discretionary money. If that comes to pass, regardless of what the rhetoric is or the priorities are, the policies are, if there's just less money, NASA is not going anywhere. And we know that that's not just me saying that. That's not just Jason saying that. This is the National Academies have put out multiple reports.

NASA needs more money for human spaceflight or humans don't go beyond low Earth orbit. NASA needs more money for science or we don't search for life. Even if they really cut Earth science, you can't increase spending for planetary science with all of NASA's going down. And I should mention just one more piece of bleak news to mix into this. We have the census coming up, which is one of the very few constitutionally mandated expenditures of government. And the census is not cheap. It's on the order of $10 billion. And it ramps up. So they have to start spending that money, billions of dollars now. That census, unfortunately, comes out of the same chunk of non-defense discretionary spending that NASA does. So in addition to all these other cuts, you have an increasing pressure on that same

chunk for the census over the next four years. And so that's a very tough budgetary scenario for NASA just in general to maintain its budget, much less grow it. Yeah. And from a planetary science perspective as well, as NASA's budget stagnates or starts to go down, the pressures within NASA become very, very competitive, the different programs. And what we have seen historically is when NASA preferences human spaceflight over science, the science budget goes down. We've seen this with Apollo. We saw this with the space shuttle.

The only time that we haven't seen it was with the International Space Station. And that was because NASA needed internal support from the science community to not have ISS canceled. And as a result, they made an agreement with the science division at NASA, the directorate, to retain a certain percentage of NASA's budget, about 30% of NASA's budget for science. That agreement has not really been discussed in many, many years. And in fact, the budget for science at NASA, I think at the moment is somewhere in the neighborhood of 27, 28%. Yeah, that's a great point. And you look at what programs should NASA's budget start to shrink. We have the International Space Station, not a lot of fat to cut, because again, we're talking

about human life. And that's always going to take a priority. And it's operational now. That's roughly $4 to $5 billion a year when you take into account the commercial transportation parts of it, resupplying it, commercial crew. You have then this SLS and Orion. As I pointed out, they are very popular among Congress. They will get their funding. They're going into the portion of development where costs are most likely to increase. Yes. They're going in the most of development where costs are most likely to increase. Yes. They're going into the most challenging part of their development.

So let's just say that they get their money, we've lopped off, that's roughly $9, $10 billion of NASA's entire budget right there. And so if NASA shrinks, what's left? Science, aeronautics, then you have other parts you can't really cut, which is basically civil service employee salaries. The only way to cut those is to lay people off, which maybe they'll take another look at. But that's pretty politically disruptive as well. And so it's a tough situation we're looking at here.

Tough, tough choices across the board. I mean, do you want to see NASA boosted over, let's say, the National Park Service or medical research by the NIH. I don't, much as I'm a space fan, but it's going to be a very, very interesting time. As we lead into this, since we don't know exactly what we're looking at in the long term, in the meantime, there's this thing called the continuing resolution, Jason. Yes. So the normal budget process involves the executive branch presenting a budget request, usually in February. Congress deliberates and then votes on a new budget through the appropriations and authorization committees, goes to both houses of Congress.

They vote on it. The president signs the budget. And all of this needs to happen before October 1st, which is the beginning of the government's fiscal year. Now, that process almost never happens. As a result, you have a number of other avenues to keep the government funded. when Congress can't agree on what the budget should look like. They will sign a CR to give themselves more time into the fiscal year. And what that does is it funds the government at the previous year's budget levels. So that's what's happened this year. We signed a CR back in late September that kicked the can down the road to December 8th, I believe. Something like that. Early December.

Yeah, early December. December 8th, I believe. Something like that. Early December. Yeah, early December. So we're coming up against that deadline where Congress needs to either come up with a budget plan that they can pass or they need to kick the can down the road. It looks more and more likely like that they're going to pass a CR and kick the can down into the March timeframe. So that means that half of the fiscal year, six months of the year, the entire federal government will be running at the previous year% budget cut for the first six months of the fiscal year. And we still don't have any idea whether Congress will pass a budget for the full year or what that budget will look like. And there's an extra rub to that, which is even worse because you would look at, let's say, the planetary science budget in 2016 and say,

that was a pretty decent budget, $1.6 billion. That means I get to keep spending that during the entirety of the CR. That's not actually true. So the Office of Management and Budget, which is the kind of the budget tier of the administration, they control how the money flows from the Treasury into these federal agencies. And when you have a situation like we're in right now, we're in a CR, they will say, well, we don't know what the final 2017 budget is going to be. What are our options? What have been proposed? They'll look at the president's request for 2017. They'll look at the Senate and the House proposals, if they exist. And they'll say, okay, we have a series of different numbers proposed, let's say again, for planetary science in 2017. Since we don't know which one is going to pass, ultimately,

planetary science in 2017. Since we don't know which one is going to pass ultimately, you will get funding commensurate with the lowest number. Right now, that lowest number is $1.3-ish billion, which is functionally a cut of $300 million over 2016. So even though we're in a CR, planetary science at NASA is getting funded as if they're on a budget of $1.3 billion. $300 million out of the planetary science budget is basically a flagship mission for the year, or the entirety of the research and analysis budget and the technology budget and some more money left over. It's a huge cut that Jim Green, the director of the planetary science division, will have to find out of his budget. And looking at the next year's budget, current levels that are being proposed for the following fiscal year's

budget is another 100 million, 150 million below the current levels. So that's a huge chunk of change that Jim will have to find. And this is particularly heartbreaking for us because planetary science could have had a fantastic number. The House had proposed one point eight billion for planetary science, the best in recent history and in a decade. And it was likely to get something like that. Just historically, they've been very good at getting that extra money. If they had passed a budget, Congress wanted to pass this budget now just to get it out of the way, because it's not easy to pass these budgets. Right. And they had done all this work during the run up to the election, kind of behind the scenes, working on a final like omnibus or collection of spending bills just to get out of the way.

And that the future Trump administration asked Congress to not do that now. On the idea that the Republican Congress would have a better time negotiating with a Republican president. But again, to kick the can down to March, so we're talking about at minimum six months in a CR, that will mean they will have to deal with a new budget right when they're trying to do whatever agenda is in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, right when they're trying to have the Senate pass all of the Trump administration appointees need to be confirmed, maybe a Supreme Court appointee, and the 2018 budget will come out and they will have to work at that at the same time. They were disappointed. And honestly, on both sides of the aisle here, they were disappointed that they couldn't

pass this now. I would say just given the amount of work that they will be in the midst of and come March, I say there's a high likelihood that they just do a full year continuing resolution, which would, again, as Jason pointed out, provide some very tough budgetary situation for planetary science because, again, the money is just suddenly not there. We can talk very quickly. It's not hard to figure out what would happen in planetary science if those kinds of cuts were to be realized because we've seen what's happened with cuts in the past. And we can use that as sort of a guide to what Jim Green's thinking would be,

what NASA's thinking would be on this issue. The first thing that NASA tends to do is protect projects in development. So I think projects like Mars 2020, InSight, even the Europa mission, I think are still in pretty good shape. I think that those will continue on. But what you will see is a delay or cancellation of projects that are further out. or cancellation of projects that are further out. So the New Frontiers program, which is the mid-level program for projects in planetary science that has brought us such wonderful projects as the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the recent OSIRIS-REx launch to the asteroid Bennu,

they were supposed to release their announcement of opportunity for the fourth New Frontiers mission early next year. So as early as next month, actually. That is likely to be delayed indefinitely. In the Discovery program, which is the small class of missions at NASA, they are in the process of selecting the next Discovery mission. InSight is the current Discovery mission in development that will launch in 2018. They're choosing the next discovery mission. Insight is the current discovery mission in development that will launch in 2018. They're choosing the next one. They were initially planning on selecting two missions out of the five candidates that they have. It looks unlikely that you will see two selections. You'll probably see one and it will probably be delayed. You will also see cuts to

the technology budget, which is often the first thing to go in difficult budgetary times. So any development that we have of new technologies for future missions, that'll be delayed or eliminated. And you'll probably see cuts to the research and analysis budget, right? We send these probes out there to collect data, but then the science is done here on Earth. Well, we'll still be collecting data. We'll just be doing less with it, which is extremely disappointing. A bad outlook as well for all those young and rising scientists, postdocs, and people going after their PhDs who are going to be looking for work. And there may be less of it if all this comes to pass. That is absolutely true. And so it's still possible that they will pass a budget in March. And if that happens and they get the good budget proposed by the House for Planetary Science, they will get six months, you know, they suddenly get this influx of money coming in, which again, is not a very efficient or good way to manage these types of projects. But that would be that I think right now that is the best case scenario. And it's not a great scenario. So it's it's not good. And again,

this this has implications for every other project like this and NASA to that has a lower budget than the one it was likely to get from Congress. And it very irritating, let's say, as a policy advocate here to see this kind of stuff, because government works best when it has regular functioning institutions that are reliable. Consistency, predictability. Consistency, particularly with these multi-year projects that NASA does. Situations like this, transitions are always disruptive. And this isn't unusual. This happened, I believe, in the Obama transition too. They CR CR their first year budget, I think. It happens sometimes. And managers like Jim Green and other people at NASA, they know how to deal with it. They would much

rather not, because as Jason pointed out, you have a lot of consequences that are just will then echo down the years. You know, the further off you push these missions, you're working with orbital mechanics here, you're working with timelines and teams that may not stick around. These are long-term repercussions. We just don't know those yet. Gentlemen, we will be forgiven, I hope, by our many listeners outside the United States

for our pretty much exclusive focus so far on what we expect in this country, in this nation, as we move into a very new era of American history. We won't ignore the world entirely, certainly not in the future. I look forward to looking at programs around the world. As we speak, the member nations and the European Space Agency have gathered to talk about what their plans are for the future. And there are some very big projects, some of which the U.S. has a hand in, like the International Space Station. ESA is trying to figure out what they're going to do next. Do you have any quick comments about what's happening, at least with ESA?

What we're seeing with ESA is basically what we're seeing sort of globally. Everybody is having a difficult time finding money to do things like space. And, you know, at ESA at the moment, they're discussing how long they want to continue participation in the International Space Station. They're looking at long-term ramifications to their budget, to their capabilities. They're also reevaluating their funding levels for the ExoMars rover, which was the second part of their ExoMars program. They recently began orbiting the Trace Gas Orbiter at Mars, but their Schiaparelli probe, unfortunately, was not successful in landing on the surface. And that's been a setback for the program. Their rover is also over schedule, over budget. And so they're looking at trying

to reduce capabilities or find ways to cut the costs on that program. So the ramifications for NASA are basically that many of its partner nations don't have money either. This idea that NASA can sort of ratchet back its aspirations with the idea that it can work with other nations and they'll make up for the shortfall. I think that that's really not the case. And we're already seeing the implications of that with international space programs. One little bright spot was that the UK did recommit itself to ESA despite Brexit. Maybe that's a bright note that we can end on. This is kind of a doom and gloom episode here. So, you know, we apologize for that.

But sometimes, you know, there's just so much uncertainty. We have to be aware as space advocates, what are the larger pressures and start to think about how we can work to preserve and defend this kind of critical scientific research and capability in some potentially very challenging times. So it's good to keep this in your head. Which is why the two of you are full-time employees of the Planetary Society to put forth the feelings of the members of the Society and so many of the people who listen to a program like this because we care about what's happening in space.

I'd say it's a mixed bag, just from what you guys have said. Not quite as gloomy an outlook, or bleak was the word that you used, Casey, in the Scientific American piece that you were quoted in. We'll see. I hope we don't have to eat too many of our words by the time of our next Space Policy Edition, which is going to be the first Friday in January. That'll be January 6, 2017, if you can believe it. We want to make an appeal regarding that program because we want to look to you folks to help generate that discussion

as we kick off a new year, a new administration, a new, perhaps, as I said, era in American history. Casey, what are we asking for from people? Well, what do you want to know? We want to do kind of a more fun episode. We get such great feedback and comments from listeners like you that if there is a burning question you have about space policy, whether you have been unable to find it online

or you want a deeper discussion of it or just have been too embarrassed to ask, you can submit them, ask to be anonymous if you'd like send it to us and we will go through and answer some of our favorite user submitted listener submitted questions next month we'll kind of talk about what to look forward to in 2017 maybe look back a little bit on 2016 but let's have a kind of an open session for listener questions. And I think that could be a lot of fun since we get so many great pieces of feedback from you all anyway. And here's the place to send those, the best place. There are actually several options, but please consider sending them to planetaryradioatplanetary.org. That's planetaryradioatplanetary.org. That's planetary radio at planetary.org.

Guys, I can think of one other possibly good piece of news. We're what, a week or two away from the release of the next Star Wars movie? Yes! Awesome! Fantastic! That's the

best piece of news we've had this entire hour. So we'll look forward to that. And I should say, I should stick up here for some hard sci-fi. Arrival was a great piece of it. It was a great experience for me watching that movie. I love straight up sci-fi like that. And I thought that was a smart one.

So I might go rewatch that here the next couple of weeks. Fun movie and a thoughtful movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Boy, what did they call them? The Heptapods? Yeah. I wonder what they would be making of the political situation. They would tell us what happened already. Or did I give that... Sorry, spoiler alert.

Don't give away too much. But you know what a rival doesn't have? What's that? Darth Vader. That's right. Not a single lightsaber in the entire film. Nope. Alright, may the farce be with you guys. And we will get together again next month. In the meantime, would you consider visiting planetary.org slash membership and getting behind this effort, the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio and everything else that the Planetary Society does to bring you news of what is happening on the space front, not just in the U.S., but around the world, and fighting for those priorities that we think that you share with us, that we all want to see

happen as we explore our solar system and beyond, as we say on this show. Again, guys, thank you very much. Have a great holiday season, and I'll talk to you in a month. Thank you, Matt. Thanks, guys. That's Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, our man inside the Beltway, the Space Policy Advisor to the Society, and the composer of that music that you're listening to right now.

This has been the Space Policy Edition for Planetary Radio. And of course, we will be back with another episode of the regular series Tuesday morning next week. I hope you'll tune in each week and join us again here for SPE, the Space Policy Edition, on January 6th. Have a great holiday. day.