Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #8 - A Transition "Trumpdate", 2016 in Review, and Answering Your Questions

Episode Date: January 5, 2017

After an opening update on the presidential transition, Casey, Jason and Mat share their nominees for the biggest space exploration events of 2016. Then they take on fascinating questions submitted by listeners. You’ll also hear the surprising early announcement of NASA’s next Discovery missions.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings all. Welcome back to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio with that great theme going in the background by our own Jason Callahan, who we'll be hearing from again along with Casey Dreyer. I'm going to, in fact, introduce them now. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Casey, and Happy New Year. Happy New Year, guys, and everyone listening. I think this will be our first full year of Space Policy Edition episodes, 12 slated up, coming down your way. I'm planning to make it through December. Jason, I hope you are, too. Happy New Year to you, as well. Thank you very much. After the events of 2016, I make no predictions, but I hope to be here in December.

Oh, that's a show for another day. Jason is the Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society, some of the requests for discussion topics that you folks have submitted. We've got a little bit of business to get through before that, including an update on the transition to the new administration that is now, as we speak, less than three weeks away from taking over the executive branch of the United States of America. I'm going to thank those of you who are already members of the Society and others, some of whom are members, who took part in our end-of-year fundraising campaign. I just checked. It's still open. Would you like to support all the stuff that we do at the Society? You can do it easily now at planetary.org slash planetary fund. And if you scroll down a little bit, you can even see how you can directly support our advocacy efforts, the work, the great work that Jason and Casey do, and Planetary Radio. It's all there at planetary.org slash planetary fund.

planetary.org slash planetary fund. And you can learn more at planetary.org, of course, which is also where you can read all about some of the stuff that we'll be talking about. Okay. Can I make one just pitch into that, too? Because I can't. Why not? I can never help myself when you make these pitches. I just get so excited at the idea.

I just want to emphasize, I mean, first, to thank you. I think from what I hear, and these are unofficial, but I won't say any numbers, but we've had a very strong fundraising, so thank you. I think from what I hear, and these are unofficial, I won't say any numbers, but we've had a very strong fundraising. So thank you to everybody who has donated. But also, just if you haven't, please consider, because really, we depend on you. We don't have big government grants funding us. We don't have big corporations funding us.

The Planetary Society really is independently funded by small donors. As it should be. Across the world. Yeah. And that gives us the, I mean, just speaking, Jason might chime in here too, but just speaking on my end, as an advocate for space, we have incredible flexibility because we answer to you and not to big corporate sponsors or to other forms of big donors.

We depend on our membership, and that's really unique in this business, and it really gives us that credibility when we walk into any congressional office or anywhere else that we represent the public. It really does give us a much stronger voice in terms of advocacy to walk in and be representing individual people, individual citizens, as opposed to a corporation with ulterior agendas and a desire to benefit themselves. We represent people who are simply interested in space exploration and science, and that speaks a loud volume on the Hill. Yeah.

When we get new missions, we don't get any piece of those missions, right? We just want to enjoy the science return from them. We frequently get a pat on the back. We only get a pat on the back. And there are a lot of PIs, principal investigators around the world who say they owe us a debt of gratitude. Anyway, it's planetary.org slash planetary fun. You get the message, and we hope that you'll get with the program. All right, on to the transition.

Is there much to say, guys? Yes, kind of. So the transition is moving along uh the the landing team has been at nasa they've been working through browsing through all the programs asking all the hard questions there's been some reports of some interesting dynamics going on where they're trying to add kind of halfway through the process some extra people onto the transition team with very strong commercial space credentials. We know that Charles Miller has been added, and he used to be involved in the NASA commercial cargo program. He is an independent person now, but he also put out a report a couple years ago looking at a, I would argue, somewhat optimistic take, years ago looking at a, I would argue, somewhat optimistic take, but interesting approach to using private companies to help reach lunar exploration, surface exploration.

They're looking at adding Alan Stern, head of the Commercial Space Flight Foundation, but also, more notably to us, head of the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto. So really strong, and I would argue, the only person with a science background. Yeah, Alan was former associate administrator of SMD as well. And had a project to send a spacecraft to the moon, a private project. It's an amazing choice. You know, busiest man in space exploration, as I often say to his face. So they're looking at adding those, but we're rapidly running out of time for the transition.

Team effectively dissolves on January 20th when the new president and his administration takes office. So that's progressing. I think really the one thing I wanted to mention that is I thought was more notable and really is an often overlooked appointment was the proposal to appoint Mick Mulvaney as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And for those of you who've listened to a lot of our shows, we tend to harp on the OMB quite a bit, but it is a very influential, particularly at this level of space and for science missions, it controls, it's the bookkeeper of the federal government. They write the federal president's budget request every year. They approve how money flows to federal agencies after Congress

appropriates the money. They have to, they're involved at a very granular level for agency spending. And so they have a lot of power in that. The potential new director of the OMB is ideologically committed to shrinking the size of government and both discretionary spending, which is what Congress appropriates every year, and mandatory spending, which is automatic spending that usually is associated with large social programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food assistance, and so forth. Notably, he's also voted to cut defense spending, so he's ideologically consistent across the spectrum. But this is a situation where I always point out,

you can have the best policy guidance to NASA in the world, but if you have no money in which to execute that policy, it almost doesn't matter that much. This is the interesting situation where we may be heading. The quote in DC is that policy without budget is fiction. So yeah. Right. Yeah. And this is interesting because this actually brings up kind of a interesting historical parallel here, Jason. We were just talking about this. Yeah. Mick Mulvaney is a Republican from South Carolina who is a fiscal conservative. We saw a similar pick in 1981 in the Reagan administration when they chose David Stockman, who was a Republican out of Michigan, who was also a fiscal conservative, who came in with an agenda of lowering discretionary spending.

Stockman also, I think, believed in lowering spending in order to pay for tax cuts through a large series of issues. The tax cuts didn't or excuse me, the tax cuts materialized. The spending cuts did not materialize to the level that I think Stockman had expected. A lot of that had to do with the fact that a different party was in control of Congress at the time. Nevertheless, there are a lot of parallels in the ideology of these two individuals and some of the priorities being set up by the White House. So it's certainly not an equivalent storyline, but it's an interesting comparison. That is such an interesting comparison looking back 35 years to that similar situation, which is one of the reasons I love talking to wonks like you guys.

Well, there's an even more, I think, closer to the heart connection here, which is it was 35 years ago in this situation where the Reagan administration was coming in. They were pretty much across the board cuts to a lot of federal agencies. This was known as the survival crisis of planetary science in the early 1980s, right when the Planetary Society was coming into being. It was our first big advocacy push. It did not work, but it helped galvanize our membership at those very early years. And it was because of these big cuts to NASA that planetary science ended up on the chopping block because they prioritized the space shuttle development at the time.

There was not a lot of money left over. Now, to be clear, I don't think that we're in a similar situation, a one-to-one situation here. I don't expect planetary science to disappear, particularly since we have some very strong supporters in Congress and the Republican side even. However, I would not be surprised if we saw, at least in this first year, the 2018 federal budget, an across-the-board cut to every federal

agency as a political statement. If NASA had a 10% cut, a 20% cut, if sequestration kicked back in, in addition to that, we're looking at a very difficult monetary situation. How do you continue NASA's existing program of record and try to keep making these new spacecraft, which are being built right now, and operate its existing spacecraft? The ISS, you can't really cut that too much because we're talking about human safety. You have to launch rockets to keep humans alive on the International Space Station. You have to have a certain amount of safety engineering, so forth, to make sure they're safe on the International Space Station. You have the SLS and Orion programs, which I will still argue are very, very strongly supported in Congress. And I don't anticipate those going away

anytime soon. That's half of NASA's budget. Where are those cuts going to be absorbed? And that's where I start to get a little nervous thinking about broad cuts in general. They may not be against planetary science specifically. They may not be against aeronautics specifically. But that may end up being the consequence of broad, untargeted cuts. And this is the thing to watch. Again, the appointment of this director to OMB, he's going to be the person to initiate this process and also control the flow of money after the fact, him and his other appointees and civil servants at OMB. So this is an important part to pay attention to, is important area to pay attention to. And again, this is

outside of Congress. Congress can ultimately add more money to some of these programs. But until Congress acts, and unless they act specifically to address program by program, the OMB basically holds the spending reins. I have to bring up this terrific quote that Jeff Faust included in his First Look newsletter. And I hope it was said by Paul Hertz, who is the director of NASA's astrophysics division, with recognition of the irony of it. He was speaking to a group of people in Texas, responding to an audience question about what the incoming Trump administration might do to NASA's astrophysics program. He said, they have priorities, but I don't know if they have priorities that affect NASA astrophysics. Certainly astrophysics was not an issue in the campaign.

Right. We had a lot of single-issue voters on NASA's astrophysics. A lot of them listening to us, maybe. And, you know, just space itself or space science, planetary science. We, of course, you folks out there, we're preaching to the choir here. But obviously, not everybody feels the same way about the importance of this stuff as we do. But I think this is also the point that Casey was making, right? So the fact that astrophysics or planetary science or science generally has not been a huge priority for this incoming administration, under normal circumstances, that would not be a problem.

If you didn't expect larger budget cuts, larger ideological issues to rear their head, then being ignored and receiving the same money you have been receiving, that's not a bad thing in the scheme of government. But when you're going to get caught in this tidal wave of other larger issues and you have no representation, no traction at all within this administration, that's a really dangerous and precarious place to find yourself. You know, if you don't have a champion to say, well, if we're taking 10 percent out of NASA's budget, don't take it out of my budget or don't take all of it out of my budget, then you start looking like a target. And that's what scares me. Yeah. So maybe keeping your head down is not a bad policy. Yeah. As Jason said, it's not the worst thing to not be controversial, right? And to just kind of hum along. Now, again, the interesting thing to me is, and I always bring this up, and we could

have a whole episode on this, and maybe we will in the future. But if you look at cutting discretionary budget, particularly the non-defense side of the discretionary budget, which accounts for half of all discretionary spending in this country, you're talking about a lot to you and me. I'd like to have $500 billion a year to spend. That would be great. That would be a lot of fun. However, we're talking about the deficit is on average. That's the yearly amount of money. The government spends more than it takes in're talking about the deficit is on average, that's the yearly amount of money

the government spends more than it takes in. That's the deficit. That's on average about the entire non-defense discretionary spending side. So if you cut that, you'd have to cut the entire government except for the military and its social programs. What's the old joke that the government's basically a military with an insurance agency or something like that? And so it's not, when you go after discretionary spending in the context of saving taxpayer money, it's really not the core place to look at for real savings. When you look at what the non-defense discretionary programs do, I mean, this is like land surveys, this is veterans health care, this is road construction, this is all sorts of things. Parks. NSF. Literally almost every research and development program

that's not military related comes out of non-defense discretionary. There's a lot of good stuff. It just gets more attention because Congress deals with it every year. And this is where you've seen, you know, the Republican Party has shown more signs to go after or to target the big social programs for cuts. But those tend to have very, very strong political support, even among Republicans. And so it'll be interesting to see how this goes out. Non-defense discretionary is kind of an easy target to go after. But when you're in control and when you're actually making those tough decisions and then Congress has to weigh in, a lot of these

appropriators don't want to lose money. They don't want to cut these. They know the value of these programs. So it's going to be an interesting year. Let's just put it that way. But it's just really important, I think, for people to understand that if you're really concerned about the budget, discretionary spending, non-defense discretionary is not necessarily where you look to find savings. And that non-defense discretionary does pretty much everything you think of government doing beyond military. Yeah, I think the only thing I would add is we'll get a little more information next month, but really we won't understand what the ramifications are of this administration's budget process until March when they release their budget request. Wow. Okay. Before we move on to our listener questions, which we will definitely do, we've got them all selected, we discussed going through what each of us thought was a highlight in 2016. going through what each of us thought was a highlight in 2016.

It's a tough decision. I had a great deal of difficulty even narrowing it beyond my rather selfish list of four things that took place. Selfish because I pretty heavily covered all of them with the regular edition of Planetary Radio. End of mission for Rosetta, that spectacular European success out at the comet. The arrival of Juno at Jupiter and the beginning of its actual science mission, now well underway in spite of the problems it's having trying to get into that closer orbit that they're hoping still to achieve in the coming year. An odd one, but one I'm crazy about, the Breakthrough Starshot Project, where we talked about this effort, which has got a whole

bunch of money behind it. The first real effort to begin the development of technology that could send human hardware, at least robotic hardware, to another star, which is still a very long ways off. But my winner, my choice, the announcement of the probable existence of Planet 9, or Planet 10 if you are Alan Stern, by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech. The announcement came out on January 9th. I had them on Planetary Radio less than a month later. And then we did it again with a live show, a Planetary Radio live show shortly after that. You can check those out at planetary.org. We had a lot of fun.

This is this world, which certainly seems to exist. There's more and more evidence for it. Something like 20 times the mass of Earth and about 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune, mass of Earth and about 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune, which would put it 50 or 60 billion miles or about 100 billion kilometers out. And now there is this international race, which Mike Brown and Constantine are part of, to be the first to actually discover it, to actually see it and sense it, since all the evidence so far is indirect. But I don't know, guys, what do you think? I mean, I just put so much great stuff has happened this year, but look at the significance of the discovery of planets in the past history of astronomy and

science for our species. Well, first, Matt, I want to compliment you for choosing your highlight as something that happened early in 2016. You know, I mean, most people, when they put together their lists for the end of the year, they way overweight stuff that happened recently to them. So you're a pro, Matt. That's why all the Academy Award movies run in December. Yeah, exactly. I just, I don't have a ton to add to it. I think there's a really interesting thing here where, first, it's kind of just the epitome

of science. Like you couldn't find a better case of how science works, right? You make a bunch of observations and they saw something that they made a hypothesis about and it spurred a lot of additional studies and other people working on it and evidence is coming in or data is coming in that seems to support that hypothesis. But we still don't have a definitive detection. But so much has been kind of adding to it. It's a really fascinating, you're seeing like a textbook case of science to me happening right before our eyes.

And also this expansion of what does it mean to be a solar system? It's been 100 years since Pluto was discovered. But even before that, you know, it's just we have the Kuiper belt, we have the Oort cloud, we have all of this stuff. And it's just like, it's kind of the essence, again, of maybe more modern science, where we're losing this idea of a kind of a hard and fast sense of what's a solar system where it's maybe a solar system kind of diffuses out into the distance as we go along. There's no hard edge. It becomes hard to define like a single stopping point. And maybe there's all of these, you know, we have Maki Maki, we have all these other planetoids and dwarf planets and other things flying around there.

And then suddenly, whoa, we've actually missed a Neptune sized planet for the last 4000 years of human civilization. Well, let's go look for it. And we still can't find it. It's fascinating to see. And you just have to savor moments like this. When we have a new scientific hypothesis that's intuitively easy to understand and we can see the whole field work towards its solution or its negation.

And I think it's fascinating. Well said. Yeah. And from a policy standpoint, it's going to be very interesting to watch how various scientific communities in different areas, different countries come together to marshal resources for this effort, right? And in the United States, this will probably happen through the decadal survey process. There will be competing interests that will want access to resources that, you know, other than these guys. So it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out as well.

I'll say. Oh, and one more thing, Matt, you know, we had a lot of talk this year, particularly in the US about the elections being it's a fact free. Facts don't matter anymore in 2016. Well, here's a good example, an area where facts still matter. Sure, they're all astrophysicists and astronomers. They're trained for this. But there's either a planet there or there's not. You can't have an opinion about whether it's there or not as this data comes in. It's going to either be falsified or it's going to be supported. And it's a good reminder that science is the best way to represent and

model and find new information about the world in which we exist. I can't wait to see the new president's tweet when Planet Nine is actually imaged. They almost called Neptune Planet George, right? That's true. That's true. Maybe there's an opportunity there to do some science outreach. It seems like prime territory for a hotel, if you ask me. Okay, enough of that. Which of you guys wants to go next with your pick, your big hit for 2016? Casey, why don't you go? All right, I'll go. Usually we save the best for last, but I guess we'll go second. So I'm going to take a slightly more policy centric view. I mean, I think the election, we've talked about this a lot, so we don't have to talk about it more.

But all the implications of that for space and science and this really interesting transition period of NASA and what's going to happen now with this. Again, I think we're seeing with the transition the messy process of this administration formulated space policy, where it didn't really exist before. Is that going to swing towards commercial? Is that going to exist, continue with the existing aerospace contracting programs that we have? We don't know.

So that's a fascinating thing. That's, it's really, again, it's a really unusual time for NASA to go through a major presidential transition, like ideologically a major time for NASA to go through a major presidential transition, like ideologically a major transition in the midst of such a major transition itself as a space program. I think to me, the biggest story in terms of implications for the future and also just an insight into where we are as a civilization and how we approach space, was SpaceX's announcement of its intention to go it alone, basically, at Mars.

When have we ever in human history seen people sprint to the front seats of a conference room at an international astrophysical conference to hear plans about going to Mars, right? NASA, you don't get these at NASA briefings, right? You don't get people knocked out of the way. Let me just say, we actually saw this happen at last year's annual meeting of the IAC. And our director of communications was knocked down by

that flood of people who couldn't wait to hear Elon Musk speak. Beyond just the feasibility, which is, people can debate. But I always found the most important thing was the intention and the fact that you don't immediately laugh at them out of the room, right? SpaceX, you don't dismiss. You can be critical of SpaceX, you can be a huge fan of SpaceX, but you don't dismiss them because they have real talent, real money, ambition, and capability. They're a private company with its own independent access to space and the desired and organizing principle that transcends government and external funding. That's their organizing principle, right? To me, that announcement and the excitement that I saw from people, it really got beyond the normal space policy crowd, certainly, or even the space fans crowd. It got into the general public awareness.

I mean, SpaceX was in South Park multiple episodes about going to Mars, and South Park wasn't making fun of them. That's really impressive. And so, you know, I think that says a lot about people's excitement, the ambitions of this new and growing private industry. And also, I think it shows that there's still a deep desire among people to have us as a society or as individuals, as anything, have grand ambitions and try to achieve them. To me, it shows that Mars is really this destination that unites people in its excitement and motivation and people get it. And I think it also showed, if I could just talk one more minute about this, it showed the power of a narrative and a clear narrative for how to connect with people, right? A vision that is expressed in that narrative, yeah.

And it's more than just NASA has right now, it's journey to Mars, which may or may not last. But if you asked anyone about why is NASA going to Mars, what's the answer? I don't even know if I could give you a clear answer. I mean, it's for science, but why are you sending humans? Well, to push people further out.

There's a lot of good reasons, but I don't think there's a single easy reason to say why NASA's doing it. SpaceX, however, has a clear reason. It's go to Mars, colonize, save humanity. That's the story. That's so much easier to connect. It's so much more powerful of a narrative.

It shows, I think, the advantage of something. You know, this is the advantage of a private company with a privately held company, right? They don't answer to shareholders, they answer to Elon Musk. That ability to create that powerful narrative, whether or not they achieve it, is a real reminder to the core of any successful enterprise in space, particularly these big ones, that you need something that people can latch on to. And so I thought that was a really interesting and just really unique moment in space history.

And it's going to be really, really interesting to see how they make that progress. I guess we should say that SpaceX is going to be returning to flight in about a week. Hopefully everything goes fine. Hopefully SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launches this year. And hopefully we'll see next year the launch of their first Red Dragon to Mars. And that'll be, I think, a good measure of what kind of progress they're making. You make a good case. So buy a Tesla, send humans to Mars.

Jason, it's up to you to put the exclamation point on 2016. The things I wanted to highlight looking back on this year actually are related to planetary science, which is sort of our mission, our general focus. I want to mention some highlights of this year in an effort to show what we can expect moving forward. to show what we can expect moving forward. So in July of this year, the Mars 2020 rover completed its KDPC test, which means that the project went into confirmation. And this all sounds very, very technical. But basically what it means is that NASA has said, we agree with all the design that this team has come up with. We think that their cost estimates are good. We think that their schedule estimates are good. And we are going to sign a paper telling Congress that we will send this mission to accomplish these scientific goals for the money that Congress is for this much money that Congress agrees to provide us. That's a huge milestone for any project.

And once you have hit confirmation, it's a really good sign that you're going to you're going to fly that mission. So that was really good to see. But keep in mind that this project has been in formulation now since 2011, 2012. So it's not a new project. It's not like somebody brought these plans to the table and passed this test in a couple of weeks. This took a lot of effort to get to that point. And hundreds of millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions of dollars. And this spacecraft still won't launch until 2020. So we've got years left of building it, testing it, integrating it with the launch craft, getting the teams ready to go so they can conduct the science once it reaches Mars. There's a lot of effort left, but this project is on a really good

trajectory. The next milestone that I wanted to highlight was the launch of the Osiris Rex mission, which I was fortunate enough to be in attendance. That was a great launch down at Kennedy. But this was a mission. It's a New Frontiers mission, which is a medium class mission in planetary science that was first accepted through a competition. It was first chosen in a competition in 2011. So 2011 to 2016, we went through the second stage of formulation, the development of this project, the integration, the testing, the launch, and now it's on its way. It'll do a rendezvous around Earth in about a year and then head out to the asteroid Bennu. This has been a highly successful project. The team did a great job, but it's also

a reminder of how much effort goes into launching one of these things. So the third milestone that I wanted to highlight this year actually takes place today. And unfortunately, we're recording this program at about two o'clock in the afternoon on the East Coast. And the announcement of the next discovery mission or missions selected will take place at about 4 o'clock on the Eastern. On Wednesday, January 4th. Yeah, it's my only regret that we're recording a day early this time. Yeah, so we don't know as we're recording this what the selection or selections will be in this process. But this is the beginning.

A number of teams, I think they had something on the order of 30 proposals come in for this announcement of opportunity. These teams came up with their designs. They went through a competition. Five of those missions were selected for the second phase of competition. And now we're in the last phase of selection and we're going to see either one or two of these missions selected. It will then be a process of probably three years, hopefully, maybe as long as five before we see the first one launch. The second one will be developed after that. It's a reminder of how long it takes for these missions to actually fly. And if you look at the missions that are currently in our portfolio, currently under development, there aren't that many. We have been really, really happy with the rate of mission launches up to this point. We've been living through a really important time with a large number of missions launched over the past decade. And we're about to enter a period where we're going to see that cadence of mission launches slow down. And that's a bit disappointing. And the only way that we're going to see that corrected is if we start developing new missions now, because it's going to take three, five, eight years for these missions to be built and launched. I keep thinking of the absolute heartbreak that is hours away for three of these teams that have worked for years to put together an outstanding mission concept that would have delivered terrific science back to all of us here on Earth. And all they can do is hope that they can get into another round and try again. And for some

of them, that simply is not going to happen. It's a damn shame. So guys, I actually have some interesting news. It looks like through NASA literally just announced as we're recording this, through NASA literally just announced as we're recording this, they selected two missions, which is fantastic. We were hoping for two new selections. And the two ones are Lucy and Psyche are the two missions that are going to be pursued by NASA here in the next five years, five to seven years. Lucy is a mission to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, Trojan asteroids that follow Jupiter's orbital pathway out there. And Psyche, to me, is a really cool one. It's going to go to a metal core of an asteroid. And this is like a solid iron asteroid core, which had never been imaged close up before. Let's see. Wow. Lucy would get to its first main belt asteroid in 2025, and its mission would extend from

2027 to 2033. Wow. Wow. Jason, exactly to your point about the timelines we're talking about here. And then Psyche is going to, let's see, it would launch in October of 2023, arriving at its asteroid in 2030. Right. After a gravity assist of Earth in 2024 and a Mars flyby in 2025. So they've just made a decision now in 2016 that is going to pay off scientifically in 15 years.

Right. So congratulations, of course, to those two teams. But back to my point. Venus, 800-degree Venus, is left out in the cold. Two missions proposed to that fascinating world. Oh, man, poor Venus. I mean, this is a, again, this is another episode we could do. Looking at the consequences of not exploring a planet to the field of Venus science. I mean, the last mission NASA has sent to Venus was Magellan in the early 1990s.

Yeah, I've got some data on that at some point. We should definitely discuss that at length. But more to Matt's point, you know, there are three teams now that were not selected. And those three teams have been working for many, many, many years on their proposals. And the average, you know, having talked to a number of PIs over the years, the average time that a PI spends putting a mission together before it's selected is between 15 and 20 years to get the mission selected. So that doesn't include the pre-phase A activities, the formulation activities, all during which NASA might cancel the mission as well. We're talking about an entire career, usually, to put together and fly your own mission.

I can only think of one thing worse, and that's if your spacecraft fails in space. I think of Mars polar lander and examples like that. But this was a human decision. And one made for mostly economic reasons. But, boy, there goes a lot of great science. But we should say, though, congratulations to the teams of Lucy and Psyche. Of course. Of course.

That's fantastic. I mean, let's not, I mean, again, we'll have a whole episode, I think, on Discovery Program in the future. But this is, we got to savor when we get two missions selected and committed to by the Space Agency. I was just about to say. Jason, talk about the discovery rate that we've been dealing with, the problem here. Absolutely. So before that, let me also just add congratulations certainly to the teams, but also congratulations to NASA for finding a way to choose two missions rather than one, which was really sort of expected. Yeah, because we had the insight mission, which is a discovery mission that's going to eat up 180 million, 160 million of the discovery program budget over the next two years. But they still got two missions.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, kudos to everyone involved in that. That was really great work. So to Casey's point about the discovery program, though, this program was initiated in the early 90s with the goal of launching missions at a very, very inexpensive rate comparatively. So currently they're capped at 450 million. But the other main goal was to launch them at a much greater cadence. They were originally scheduled to launch every two years. That was very quickly adjusted to every three years. But in fact, we've been launching Discovery missions at a much slower rate, every five to seven years.

The impact that that has on the scientific community is that with fewer flight rates or with a slower flight rate, there are fewer opportunities for scientists to get their instruments on a mission. That generally impacts early career scientists far more than others. And it has a huge impact on whether or not scientists who work in academia to support graduate students and to support their labs. The slow rate has a long-term effect on the health of the science community at large, and that's something that cannot be overlooked. I think we should just congratulate the Psyche and Lucy teams one more time. This is not the last time they'll be talked about on the Space Policy Edition. And I also have already let the NASA folks know that I look forward to getting the principal investigators for both of those missions on the regular edition of the show, as we have done when these things have been awarded in the past.

And so you can expect to hear that in the coming weeks on Planetary Radio. With that, gentlemen, let's move on to the promised segment as we respond to just a few of the questions that we have received from listeners. Most of you know that we still have solicited these, especially in last month's show, asking you guys to chime in and suggest what we should talk about. And we got a wonderful response from many, many of you. Obviously, we're not going to be able to cover all of them. I wish we could because I didn't see a bad question. We have sort of collectively picked out four of these that we think we're going to respond to, beginning with one that came actually from several people.

There was a lot of interest in space programs all over the world, South America, Japan, Canada, and a couple of inquiries about China's plans. We got one from Katie Fritcher, a regular listener, but it was a question from Andrew Jones in Finland, who is also a faithful listener to Planetary Radio, but is more than that, because he has begun contributing to blog posts to the Planetary Society website, planetary.org. In fact, he posted a report after he put this question to us. He posted something on December 27th at planetary.org about a Chinese white paper. So you can read Andrew's summary of this, but Andrew asked us,

well, first he said thanks for this excellent, highly informative monthly policy show. To have the mechanics and issues of U.S. space policy laid out is not only fascinating and helps people understand what is possible for space and why, but will surely also help advocacy efforts. Well, we hope so, Andrew. Thank you. He says he mentions the Chinese white paper, and he asks that we talk a little bit about it. So let's do that, guys. China has laid out a pretty ambitious program. Yeah, it's a five-year white paper for the next five years. And it's funny, you chose Andrew's question, because I was actually

going to direct people to read Andrew's blog that he posted on planetary.org. It'll be in the show notes. He has a good breakdown of it. I don't have a ton of insight. I think reading through the paper, there wasn't a lot of surprises from what we generally know about China's space ambitions. I think they're taking this slow and steady approach, gaining, building a lot of basic capability, independent capability that they emphasize in their paper. They're outlining robotic missions to the moon. We'll follow up on the Chang'e lander this year with Chang'e 5. They're going to launch a new backup mission that was supposed to be a backup to Chang'e 3

to the far side of the moon in a few years. You have discussion of continuing work to build their small space station. They're going to launch a robotic mission to Mars in 2020 with its own orbiter and a lander and a rover. That's the ambition. It's ambitious. Which would be their first independent mission to Mars. Really interesting to me, though, was the discussion of it and of why, you know, since why are they doing these investments? I've just mentioned a few of the space science stuff, but really you look at it and its investments into launch capability,

technology development into a heavy lift rocket, which would be a Saturn V class launching in maybe 15 years. That's the Long March 9. Yep. You also have, but two new rockets came online this year. You have, they're making their own equivalent to the global positioning system. But a lot of just basic, you know, I would say kind of the more boring but really important stuff, space communications. You have space data relays. You have ground tracking systems, data relay, data centers across the country. They're building an infrastructure, a long-term infrastructure. Interesting to see, talking about how they're freeing up industrial capacity to support the

space program. You don't usually see that in NASA documents because it's not a government-owned economy for the most part, right? But they're saying we're providing and prioritizing different resources, materials, industrial capabilities to space, building new spaceports. It's a good reminder at the same time of China's playing catch up to where the U.S. and even I would say the European Space Agency is in terms of its capabilities. very steady progress and have these long-term plans that are really, I was kind of struck by how similar in essence they are to NASA's general plans. They talked about cislunar space, probes to the moon, Mars, outer planets, and much later, 10, 15 years down the line, and also just building up their fundamental infrastructure and launch capability, heavy launch capability.

So it's a fascinating kind of insight into their plans. And also just building up their fundamental infrastructure and launch capability, heavy launch capability. So it's a fascinating kind of insight into their plans. And it'll be interesting to see how this affects or not U.S. policy if there be perceived as a threat or a race or anything like that, which, Jason, I'd be interested to hear your views on. Sure. To begin with, the Chinese white paper being on a five-year timeline, that's indicative of all Chinese government. They basically, since the revolution, their government is planned on a five-year cycle. And this is the second white paper that the Civil Space Agency in China has issued. The first one covered from 2011 to 2016. What's important to understand, though, is that the Chinese space agency, this national space agency, sits within the Ministry

of Defense. So it is ostensibly a civil space agency. But as you read through this document, you'll see that this agency is instructed to pursue all of its goals through the lens of integrating with larger national priorities, larger national goals. As a result, as Casey was alluding to, you're building this space infrastructure and space communications and remote sensing capabilities and communication networks, and remote sensing capabilities and communication networks, the BIDO GPS system, all of these things are dual use, right? You can use them not just for space, but for commercial applications, for military applications, for other aspects of space. Again, with the heavy lift capacity, you know, if you can build a big rocket, you can build a big missile. So these things have lots of other capabilities as

well. And it makes it a little harder to discern what their goals are because of where this agency sits within their government structure. This is not to say that NASA is completely divorced from the national security infrastructure in the United States at all, but the lines are cleaner and a little more transparent. So that's one thing that I think you'll see a lot of analysts in the US looking at when they look at this white paper is what are the overlaps? What are the other considerations? How does this play into military or economic factors in China? That said, I also found it really interesting that the main thrust of what I saw here was the heavy lift rocket and infrastructure capabilities that seem more predicated on a human spaceflight capability

necessarily than on space science. A lot of the discussion that they have on science is about doing studies for future missions and looking into new technology developments. Well, as we know, as budgets get tight, those tend to be the things that go first. And it's not clear yet how much money the Chinese are really allocating to this effort. So that'll be really interesting to see going forward. Yeah, that's a really good point about the science missions, because those tend to get a lot of press because they're interesting and cool, but there's really not that many of them. You've got your Chang'e missions to the moon, you got this one to Mars, and you have a couple. And you have an astrophysics mission coming up.

And you've got their cool kind of space quantum entanglement studies. You're talking about fewer than 10, I would say, pure science missions. And you have a lot of Earth-observing satellites going up that are far more practical in terms of weather, remote sensing, all that kind of stuff that why we do this for commercial reasons and understanding agricultural patterns, all that kind of stuff. But just pure science, far fewer. I mean, you look at NASA's science division, we're talking about 30 missions total, like in space roughly right now with heliophysics, astrophysics, planetary science, and earth science.

A lot of people, they don't state this in the paper, but a lot of observers feel like the clear intention for the human spaceflight program in China is lunar. Right now, in the median term, you're going to be looking at small space station, and they really highlight a lot of their outreach to other space agencies and international collaboration. Yes, inviting participation from around the world. Which again, shows you, I always find this just from a big picture perspective, when people say, why do we have a space program? You know, why are we throwing money away or whatever when we need to be doing X, Y, and Z here? It's like, well, why does every other country seem to want the space program? There must be some inherent value if not everyone is being fooling themselves

into having a space program. There's a lot of benefits wrapped into doing this, right? And you see this basically summarized in this paper. International outreach, soft power, industrial capability, independent access to space, and to protect their own investments and commitments in the world. Where does China see itself? You have to have its own commitment to space access for defense, for communications, for, you know, in an interconnected world.

So you have tons of value from space and you see that reflected in this paper. And for the human side, I think, again, that's really, you still don't have that clear, just like with the problem with every human space exploration program there's no single reason why you have that but it's a statement about your country's capability and industrial capability you can put humans up in space and i think you saw it was interesting though just as a a good reminder of where they are we had china launched two astronauts into taikonauts into space this year that was the first time they had launched taikonauts into space this year. That was the first time they'd launched taikonauts since, what, 2013?

So three year gap between those two. Some people may characterize this as a race, but I don't think that's really accurate because, again, if you really want to compare,

you look at NASA's had continuously occupied space station for 15 years in addition to doing all these other things. I think China has its own ambitions to characterize it, or even some people, I think, hope that there'll be a race again, that you'll get money dumped into NASA. And I just don't see that happening with this current

kind of slow and steady pace that China's working on. Jason, you agree? I totally agree. I don't see this as a race at all. And if you just look at the schedule that's laid out by this five-year plan, they're talking about maybe starting to build the space station by the end of this fifth year. They're looking at a 15-year process before they have heavy lift capability, and then they're talking about going to cislunar space before they land on the moon. This does not seem like a crash program to beat somebody in their capabilities. This seems like a very methodical development of internal capabilities for internal reasons. And I think that's borne out by the list of reasons that Casey just mentioned that they have in this document for doing space exploration or space

activities. And these are primarily innovation, internal abilities to do these things, industrial buildup, industrial benefits, national security benefits. And to be short, you know, the United States has these same types of things written into, you know, the Space Act, and ESA has these same things written into its charter. You know, ESA lays out very specifically that, you know, any activities in space will benefit the industry of its member nations. United States lays out very specifically that international collaboration is part of NASA's goal. These activities don't take place, for lack of a better term, in a vacuum, in a political vacuum anyways. There are good reasons to do these things and other nations see them. So I think Casey is absolutely correct. This is not

about proving that they are better than other correct. This is not about proving that they are better than other nations. This is about doing things that developed nations do because they provide other benefits to your own nation. Guys, we better move on. But first, thanks once again to Andrew Jones, who both submitted this question and then later wrote that blog post on December 27th that you can find at planetary.org. And sorry, you should just read Andrew Jones on Twitter. And he wrote on GB Times. He really covers this stuff and is one of the few very reliable sources on the Chinese space program. So I'm sure he'll have all sorts of comments based on our comments that we'll be hearing about.

And I look forward to them. And now for something completely different. Vicky Knorr out of Kentucky, who happened to win the trivia contest last week on the regular edition of the show. She says, I absolutely adore the podcast, both the regular and policy editions. She was planning to go back to school for astrophysics soon. And I know because I was in touch with her last week, she submitted this quite a while ago, she's actually starting her studies again, I think this week. And it gave her an idea for the podcast. She doesn't know how topical it is, she says, but we like the question, what kinds of jobs are available in space, space exploration, space development, that aren't research or teaching? You know, she's heard examples, designing, creating mirrors, observational equipment, science communication, working with images.

She's wondering what she's forgetting here and what these jobs require. Bachelors, masters, Ph.D., backgrounds in specific areas, computer science, engineering. And are any of them particularly easy or difficult to get into? I can tell you, as I responded to Vicki when I got this question from her, I said, Vicki, it makes me think of the time we went to where the James Webb Space Telescope was being put together, and I saw this room full of women in a clean room sewing, stitching. They were putting together, they were sewing together the heat shields,

the fabric heat shields that will protect the telescope because it has to operate in the cryogenic temperature range. Here was a skill I did not expect to see that is going to contribute to the next great space telescope. So I guess the answer is, what do you want to do? There's use for it someplace in space. Looking at the stitching example there, I remember hearing stories about the Kennedy Space Center.

It was the same thing with the parachutes that would bring the solid rocket boosters back from the shuttle. These were enormous parachutes, but the women who sewed them together were described to me as sort of an old grandmother's knitting circle. Like this was, they had these giant industrial sewing machines, but these were women who knew each other, were local to the economy and had this skill set that you don't really

need a college degree for. And they were putting together these things that were completely integral to one of the most technologically complex systems ever invented. I hope they were incredibly proud of what they were doing, as I hoped for the JWST women as well. Having worked at NASA headquarters, it's interesting. NASA headquarters is one of the few facilities at NASA that doesn't really require a scientist or an engineer necessarily to conduct these activities. I worked in the budget office. There were a lot of people who did accounting and a lot of people who did legal work. For every NASA center, there are large HR facilities that require human resources capabilities. NASA is all about public outreach and communications.

So there's a huge need for people with those skills. The real problem with space is that it's such a fascinating field. And as you said, you know, the people who work in it are really proud with space is that it's such a fascinating field. And as you said, you know, the people who work in it are really proud to work there. It's incredibly competitive to get into. It's really about your desire and drive to work in that field and looking for any opportunity and, you know, acquiring as many skills as you can that would be applicable to whatever area you would be interested in working in, it is absolutely not limited to scientists, engineers, and educators. Just as an aside, there was a really good book put out last year

by a guy named Scott Sacknoth, who is the publisher of Quest magazine, the space history magazine, and Leonard David, who is an eminent space journalist, who's, I think, his most recent project, he wrote the companion book to the National Geographic Mars series that Casey was a commenter on he sure did a great book by the way yeah yeah great show uh yes with that one really handsome guy i i agree with you regarding the documentary portion but that's also something yes you have a good post about that anyhow these two authors authors put out a book last year called Space Careers that basically is just sort of a list of resources that you can go through and find

different kinds of jobs, different ways to get in touch with people who can give you information about the jobs, different websites that you can look at. It's available on Amazon. I think we could probably post a link to that. We will do that. That's a really good resource for people who are interested. Just personally, my wife is a space scientist and I met her right before she entered graduate school. So I saw kind of the entire progress of what it's like to be a graduate student in astronomy on the job market. And a lot of our friends kind of went through the same process. She ended up being an educator, a professor. A lot of our friends have gone on to that and on to other fields. So I guess something that's really might want to consider when you go into graduate school for astrophysics, you're in effect being trained to be a researcher. And that's what

you are. That's what they are training you to do. That's what you are expected to do as a graduate student. And if you have ideas to do something else, you should probably think very carefully about this upfront investment in time that you're going to do because you are going to be trained as an educator and researcher, primarily as a researcher. That doesn't lock you into that necessarily. But if you don't plan to do that, you need to take kind of active steps on your own. You can't expect your advisor to necessarily guide you into a career outside their career in graduate school. So you have to take some active steps.

I would recommend having as strong of a background as possible in computer science because that is such an applicable field of study. There's always going to be jobs, at least in the next 15 years until AI creates itself and takes over. But there's going to be a strong need for computer science, even in the sciences. That's probably the most important extra skill you can teach yourself. There is opportunities in outreach and reporting, but those are very few. And there are schools of journalism that teach you how to be a science reporter. But I don't know if you've noticed, but the field of journalism is not necessarily a big paying field these days.

I would also say, think about ways in which you can participate in the field. There's scholarships and funding available for scientists who have PhDs to become policy experts. They have policy fellowships. You can work for a congressional office for a year. You can maybe even get hired then by that congressional office or others and make those connections. I think one of the most important things you can do if you are interested in policy and don't necessarily want to do research for your life is to become involved in government as a person who has a rigorous background in science. That is an underserved community, Congress, in terms of scientists. We've met these people, Jason and I, when we go in to

talk to congressional offices. Some of them will have a PhD person in a scientific field working as their liaison or responsible for the scientific portfolio of that congressperson. From there, you could theoretically, there are options to get hired onto the scientific committees in Congress, either on the budget side or authorization and policy side. committees in Congress, either on the budget side or authorization and policy side. You have NASA itself will hire occasionally for science policy experts, space policy experts. You can become program directors of NASA science programs, and they will very likely expect you to have a PhD in a relevant field. As Jason pointed out, there's not a ton of jobs. But also, I would argue that the pool of people interested in those jobs who are very qualified isn't necessarily huge either. Because again, most scientists will go into research.

So you want to think about what you want to do. I've also known people who have been working as space scientists who get hired by Google, by some of the big Silicon Valley companies, because they have applicable, mainly computing experience for large data sets, for highly reliable software that doesn't break down, all that kind of stuff. But again, that's what I would say, take active steps if you're in graduate school to prepare yourself for fields that your graduate advisor is not familiar with, because that's just they can't help you with that. Then look into the policy side of government and science, because that again, that's going to be a critical field going forward into the future. And Lord knows we need more people with strong

scientific backgrounds working in Congress. So that's that would be my advice to that. Don't go into radio because that job's already taken. Don't go into radio because that job's already taken. Superb advice, guys. Thank you very much. And Vicki, we congratulate you and wish you all the best in your studies and look forward to hearing or reading your papers. And maybe you'll be a guest on Planetary Radio someday because of that. We had an anonymous listener who asked a fairly simple question. What would it take to get NASA's budget back to Apollo levels?

I'm thinking blackmail. On a very, very large scale. It's difficult to imagine the circumstances in which that would happen. You've got to join the Freemasons. Trilateral commission. You learn the secret handshakes in the Illuminati, maybe. You have to have a cousin or a nephew in the Illuminati. You know, man, I'd love to say that there's a pathway to that.

Okay, here's a non-flippant answer to it, honestly, which I would say we would need to be in a similar geopolitical situation that our entire national livelihood was perceived to be under threat by the advances in space of another nation. If national security gets wrapped up again in the progress of human spaceflight, then you would see, I think, a lot more money flowing through NASA. Right. But it's difficult to imagine those circumstances repeating because the space flight program was also wrapped up in trying to develop lift capabilities for nuclear weapons and a nuclear deterrent and a race for capabilities in integrated circuits. And the investment in the space program was actually not just the space program. It was spread throughout the national economy for very specific purposes. And it's almost impossible for me to imagine a set of circumstances that would result in space achieving that same dynamic with that wide a constituency again. Right. And we almost don't want to be in that situation because while we

were working on the space program, we were on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I mean, literally. It's a downside, isn't it? And it's only one of them. The other downside is that it was a crash program, right? It was a space race. It was sustained for about six or eight years before the budget started coming down. And that was the end of it. What we were lucky to receive was we didn't end up with the dissolution of NASA. So we ended up with a budget of roughly 15 to $20 billion a year in today's dollars for the past 40 years. That was not predetermined either. It could have easily just ended with the end of the moon program rather than pining for the days of higher budgets. I would suggest that maybe we look at it and say,

you know, we're actually kind of lucky that we've got what we have. What is the best use of this? Yeah, and there are ways I think we can work to increase the budget. Everyone's kind of favorite model is what the budget of the National Institute of Health did back in the 1990s, it effectively doubled over the course of five to six years by just kind of regular percentage jump increases. Jason's... It was a little longer timeframe. But again, if you look at that budget, it increased in the late 80s to early 2000s, but then it leveled off again in 2001. And it's been bumping along at about the same level. And you saw the same thing with the Department of Energy in the 1970s. So there is this precedent for national priorities taking over a particular area of science and technology, then the budgets come back down to a sustainable level and sort of continue along in that trajectory. I said $15 to $20 billion in today's budget. I agree with you,

Casey. I think it's plausible that we could get the budget up to something like $25 billion in today's dollars with a lot of work. But it's really difficult for me to imagine doubling NASA's budget in the next 10 years or 20 years. I have a suggestion if you want to send things in the right direction, and that is support the advocacy efforts of the Planetary Society. The work being done right now by Jason and Casey, who have met with a good deal of success, at least on the space science side. Well, thanks for plugging us, Matt, after we just kind of said we'll never double the budget.

Well, I mean, there's always the problem, right, of trying to walk this line between realism and optimism, right? We never sell ourselves short. We're not giving up an opportunity here because when you talk to, I mean, again, if you really look down into the numbers, first on the OMB side, there's how they kind of aggregate and fund everything out of these different pots. And then also the same on the congressional side. So there are a lot of structural impediments to significant increases in budgets that require basically a very large coalition of politicians and bureaucrats to agree on what, that this should be a priority. So say you want to increase NASA's budget by $5 billion. Well, if Congress needs to do it, each congressional committee on the House and Senate side, the

Commerce Justice Science Committee that we've talked about, CJS, they get an allocation from the budget committee of their respective side of Congress, right? So you carve up a trillion dollars of total discretionary spending, each committee gets a chunk of that pre approved, and CJS gets about on the order of $56 billion. And that's what they then have to then they can take that amount of money allocated to all of their different programs. But CJS, you go up against FBI, go up against Justice Department, Commerce Department, NASA, NSF, NOAA. So unless their allocation grows, they can't just give an extra $5 billion to NASA, because then they would have

to raid all these other programs to do the same thing. So you'd have to get the budget committees to give you the extra money. The OMB would have to do the same thing on their side. So it's a big, it's a hard problem to do. This is why you can kind of do it stepwise. And we should always ask for more than we're getting. And we do. Often there's even debate inside the community of even how much more we should ask before we get laughed out of the room. And that's where we try to find this strategic number and a goal. I think right now we're saying, what if you do a 5 over 5?

5% a year for five years. That gets us up to $25 billion. And it's a much more easy reach every year than saying double the budget or let's add $6 billion next year. That's much more of a strategic political way to do it. Yeah, you don't get laughed out of the office if you say that. If you walk in, you say, look, 5 over five. And here, here are the, the reasons that we're proposing that these are the programs that we think need to be increased. Here are the, the sand charts that demonstrate why we think that money would be used at NASA and how it could be

used effectively at NASA and why this is a good investment of the nation's money. You have to bring all of these arguments to the table. You can't just walk in and say, we think NASA's budget should be doubled because NASA will do great things with it. You know, everybody says, well, who wouldn't do great things with that much money? You know, so you, you, you have to bring a lot more to the table than just a desire to see an increased budget and some hope that good will come of that. Well, we'll keep fighting the good fight. Uh, thank you anonymous listener for, uh, for that question. Uh. We've got time for one more, and this is from Benton Backey. Oh, man, we've got all the time in the world. Don't

forget. Everyone loves the show, so all the time in the world. We'll do all the time. Anyway, Benton says, I just wanted to say that I have very much enjoyed the Space Policy Editions. I would be pleased to have Space Policy Edition be its own weekly podcast. There you go, Casey. Depending, of course, upon availability of yourself and your fine guests. Things that I would enjoy having covered on SPE would be the work of Vector Space Systems. Interesting little company we might talk about sometime that has, among its principals, people who helped the LightSail project, the Nuclear Thermal Rocket Program in the 1960s, which has come up, nuclear reactors in space, Bob Zubrin, why not?

Asteroid mining, space habitats. And here's the one that I think we'll talk about. Anything that NASA or other agencies might be doing that would enable self-sufficiency for colonies in space. Pretty far out there in more ways than one. What do we do, guys? First of all, do we need to have colonies in space? I know our friends at the National Space Society, you would say you bet and put big solar power stations out there next to the colony. Well, and SpaceX, too.

That's their stated goal. I don't know, Jason, if you want to talk about that. I don't see NASA putting a lot of money into this at the moment. Actually, NASA, I don't know if they even talk about colonization. They really think of their Mars plans now as kind of equivalent to our Antarctic base station, where it's a rotating crew, semi-permanent structures, but really just going for these short missions and coming back. And I will, before you jump in, Jason, I was thinking that maybe Bentham was only talking about actual space colonies in space,

not on other planets, but I could very well be wrong. So let's move ahead with that. You know, the one place where at least Elon Musk and others are talking about doing this kind of thing and putting some money behind it. To Casey's point, I think the first question is, why do you want to do that? And I don't know that there's necessarily a great answer at the moment. I mean, somebody like SpaceX makes a more compelling argument or, you know, somebody like Bigelow that, you know, they want to rent the space to paying customers or Elon

Musk wants to live on one of these himself. So that makes sense. From a taxpayer standpoint, it's a little more difficult to understand how a space colony necessarily addresses an immediate political problem. It's hard to see how NASA would engage on this issue to begin with. And that's just from the policy side. From the technical side, we've had the International Space Station up, or at least in bits and pieces now, for 30 years. And we've had difficulty keeping anybody there for more than a year from a physical standpoint. And the space station requires constant refurbishment, right? NASA is working at the very cutting edge of its capabilities to try and reduce the amount of back and forth

activity required to keep a station operational to the point where you can have something that is 100% sustainable for a small group of astronauts who basically exist to keep the station operating. The idea that in the next five years, we're going to come up with the technologies that allow hundreds or thousands of people to live on a craft in orbit or in deep space or on mars it's just it's not technically plausible we we are at the very cutting edge of what we can do now and even throwing money at this problem is not going to speed it up significantly i think nasa is doing a tremendous amount to enable colonization just not not soon. Yeah. That's a good point, Jason, because I think this goes to

the heart of a lot of attention in the space business, or at least on the NASA side of implementing space plans. And then a lot of folks in the public who would love to see more progress, and I include myself on this, but there's just the space is really hard, right? And they keep saying that, but it's really true. And it's full of irritating problems that sci-fi just doesn't acknowledge, right? And I always think this is a really interesting tension. doesn't acknowledge, right? And I think that I always think this is a really interesting tension. I think that's actually enabled by the popularity of sci-fi, that we have these expectations that are created by pop culture, or science fiction culture, or speculative fiction, that assume that we have anti-gravity or small fusion reactors or whatever, right?

I want my warp drive. Yeah, sure. Me too, right? But, you know, we don't, they don't worry about how are we not getting bombarded by cosmic rays and die, right? Or how do we make sure this, that there's not mold growing on the inside of our spacecraft, because humans sweat, right? And release vapor, you know, just off of our skin, and are full of bacteria colonies inside of us, right? And how do we balance that out in long-duration space missions? I mean, the practical problems of keeping a bubble of Earth atmosphere around, what is it, Futurama, us dirty meatbags in space, it's difficult.

As Jason said, NASA does put a lot of money into this. And the space station, what, costs about $4 billion, $4.5 billion a year to maintain crew and to keep supplied with cargo. And maybe you can get that a little cheaper, but I couldn't imagine you get it that much cheaper and still make it safe. Because space is just inherently, maybe, would you say space is the least safe space in the entire, in the sense of things? Well, the boss, Bill Nye, likes to say, he's referring specifically to Mars, but he said, you know, think of, as you guys mentioned, living in Antarctica, except it's a lot colder and there's no air. Right. Yeah.

That just ignores even the radiation or the dust, right? And the dirt will kill you, yes. Yeah, right. I love the dust problem. Like on the moon, the dust just caked them. It's electr or the dust, right? And the dirt will kill you, yes. Yeah, right. I love the dust problem. Like on the moon, the dust just caked them. It's electrostatically charged, right? So it sticks onto them. And razor sharp.

And it's razor sharp. And so it's like miner's lung, right? In just inhaling that stuff. What's the long-term consequences? Same on Mars. And so I don't want to dismiss this question because I'm with you on this question, right? And I feel the same desire.

And I think you could spend a lot more money and make more progress. But this is, and I think a lot of people these days would say, well, let private industry deal with it. Well, I'm happy to let them deal with it. I guess I mitigate my expectations for that because there are just these, there are physical problems that are not easy to solve in an extremely hostile environment that's expensive even to get to. This is why progress is slow.

I almost wonder sometimes if we need some sort of, some like pseudo-religious movement that enables multi-generational huge commitment, like basically the equivalent of building pyramids. Like that money and effort into – We're back to the Masons. You're right. This is where I'm going with this. But I mean, if you think about like could a culture evolve

or could a culture reach a point where the commitment to sending things into space is so deeply and fundamentally baked into the core of their self-identity that it effectively is an unquestioned commitment of that culture to spend the majority of its effort to send humans into space? Right now, there's definitely no culture that's doing that. But it's not out of the question in the scope of human civilizations that at some point, that would we would get to that point where a culture would just agree. So at such a deep level that there would just be this is what we do. Like universal education, right, was not a default of human culture until a couple hundred years ago.

Maybe not the best comparison, but that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on educating children for free, free, I guess, in terms of the individual cost, because it's a fundamental sense of who we are as a culture. And can we get to that point? I think that's what we would need really to really hit this colonization long-term commitment with lots of resources. I actually think that the public education thing is an interesting comparison because if that's the kind of effort that you need to take, let's look at public education

and see how society actually implements that. What you see is that it's really messy. It deals with all of the human foibles. Like greed and selfishness. And you're going to have that exact same thing. When you colonize space. You're not going to create a utopian space colony. That will be free of all of the evils of earth.

You're going to export all of that same stuff to earth. It won't look exactly the same. But it will all be based on the same dynamics because we're humans. And that's how that is. What you're seeing is just humanity play out. All of our efforts to get to the point where we can colonize space are also wrapped up in all of that. So it's not a question of what is NASA doing? NASA has to work against entrenched interests that don't want to spend money on these particular areas of exploration. It's up against really good competing ideas of humanity, of society.

And even internally at NASA, not everybody thinks we should be sending people into space. We shouldn't be spending money on the astronaut corps. Maybe we should be spending more on space science. All of these are arguments that are open to interpretation by individuals. And that's what makes space really difficult, aside from the fact that it's a really cold vacuum that wants to kill you at every second, right? So it's really important, I think, for people to understand that whenever you're talking about large expenditures of money, large efforts in technology, you're talking about having to negotiate large segments of people that have competing interests. And it's really hard to do that.

This is why we need a pharaonic god king to direct society. To create an Illuminati. direct society. But actually, it's an Illuminati. Yeah, well, well, here, Jason, actually, what's interesting about that, too, I think is, in particular, the context you're talking about is within a representative democracy. Sure. Where in order to spend money that you don't have to, people have to be convinced why that's a good idea for them. But the thing is, that's true of dictatorships as well. You know, you have this concept that, well, in China or in Russia, they can just say, we're going to go into space and they can allocate all of that money. That's not how that works. They have their own internal

politics. They have to build coalitions as well. They have to make other people happy as well. They still have, you know, the industrial concerns that we do. They still have to keep people working or they'll face a revolution. You know, the pressures are different, but they still exist. It's really hard to do very, very large, complex things like space. And that's just the nature of humanity. Benton, we are with you. We're not holding our breath, though that's a pretty good idea in space.

Maybe someday we all hope to meet you for lunch at the colony at L5. Gentlemen, this has been absolutely fascinating. And I think we ought to solicit more questions from listeners for one of our upcoming shows, maybe not next time, not the next episode, that we will do the first Friday in February of 2017. But we want to keep the conversation going. And it would be lovely to do one of these sometime where we interact live on some level with the many people out there who share these dreams of space with us but know that policy is essential to making it happen. For anyone listening, the secret I will give away to all of you, we keep a list of every suggestion that we've received.

Even if we don't do them right away, we are recording your suggestions. We're keeping them in the pipeline for future episodes. So if you have something you want to hear us talk about, don't hesitate. Shoot us an email, tweet us,

all that good stuff. We're definitely listening. We love to hear your feedback. And while you're at it, try going to planetary.org slash membership and join up. Become part of the family that wants to make all these things happening, that is working hard through people like Casey and Jason to make it happen. We need you. We want you. And I don't think you'll be sorry.

happen. We need you. We want you. And I don't think you'll be sorry. You certainly won't be sorry if you've enjoyed this conversation on this latest edition of Planetary Radio's Space Policy Edition. Gentlemen, it's been a blast. I look forward to talking to you next month. Hey, you know, welcome to 2017, Matt and Jason. It's going to be an interesting year. We'll have lots to talk about. Absolutely. I look forward to it, guys. Thanks a lot. An interesting year. We'll have lots to talk about. Absolutely. I look forward to it, guys. Thanks a lot. That's Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Society, and, need we add, the composer of that theme that you're listening to right now.

We'll see you again in February. Until then, every week, the regular edition of Planetary Radio. Thanks for listening, everyone. And Ad Astra. Clear skies.