Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #9 – Congress Plots New Space Legislation Amid Trump’s Tumultuous First Two Weeks

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

It’s still too early to say where the Trump Administration will take NASA, but there are a few hints. Congress is not waiting. Casey, Jason and Mat review a draft of the space agency’s authorization bill and a separate act that asks NASA to lay out its plans for humans to reach Mars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. It's Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, and this special podcast that comes to you every month, a little bit later than intended this month, normally the first Friday of each month, but we really had technical difficulties. Those appear to have been solved, and so we are glad to get to you just a few days later. And when I say we, I mean my colleagues Jason Callahan and Casey Dreyer. Jason Callahan,

how are you? I'm doing very well, Matt. Good to hear your voice again. Jason, our space policy advisor residing there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. And Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy for the Planetary Society. Hi, Casey. Gentlemen, nice to be here again. Glad to have you both. We can jump into it right after the commercial, well, the promo, the public service announcement. We are the Planetary Society.

That's what we're doing this for. This is all a part of the mission of that organization, and that's who we work for. If you enjoy listening to these special monthly in-depth broadcasts, there really is nothing else like them anywhere talking about space and space exploration and space development. If you're enjoying this, then please consider becoming part of it, part of the organization, that is. If you join up, and you can do that at planetary.org slash membership, then you are standing directly behind this podcast, behind the weekly edition of Planetary Radio,

behind all of the great work that the Planetary Society is doing, including the terrific work that Jason and Casey are doing on behalf of all of us space enthusiasts there in Washington. Again, it's planetary.org slash membership. And if you guys want to add anything. It's only four bucks a month starting a membership. That's pretty good. Just saying. What a deal.

So much of the money that it takes to run the society comes from the membership. Far and away the majority of what goes into our budget, right, Casey? That's true. We literally depend on your membership. We would not be here without it. It really does make a difference if you choose to help us. And I'm going to mention as a sidelight that while we depend most heavily on our members, is a sidelight that while we depend most heavily on our members, we do have appeals now and then, and there is one underway to support our work on the search for, the characterization of, and learning how to get out of the way of near-Earth objects. And you can learn about that at planetary.org as well. Guys, let's get into it. It was a quiet month, right, January?

Yeah, I took a vacation. I assume I didn't miss anything. Let me know. Did anything important happen since January 1st? No, it's all been pretty quiet here in D.C. Okay. Short episode then, folks. No, of course. We have lots of change, right?

We have a new president. We have a new vice president. We don't yet have a new NASA administrator. We have a new acting NASA administrator because Charlie Bolden, Obama's appointment to run NASA, departed with President Obama, as did his deputy NASA administrator. So right now we are in a, I guess, the leadership vacuum stage of a presidential transition for space. We are following the situation closely. Once again, this is a very familiar story for

many of you listening to the show, but we just don't have very much information yet. We have not seen the new president talk about space beyond a nice mention in the inaugural address, which was welcome. Didn't give a lot of meat to the policy bones, however, but we're waiting for appointments. The transition team has wrapped up their work. a lot of meat to the policy bones, however, but we're waiting for appointments. The transition team has wrapped up their work. A lot of them moved on to other parts of the government, not NASA. A few people stayed. There's a couple of White House liaisons appointed to NASA at the moment.

But again, no permanent new staff representing the new president's political appointments. So we're just watching this one and keeping a close eye on it. Yeah. In addition to the administrator and deputy administrator moving on, we also saw the chief financial officer at NASA retired, leaving that position, which is also a Senate confirmable position open as we move forward into the budget season. So that will be interesting to keep an eye on as well. So Jason, when we talk about these people leaving, this isn't necessarily unprecedented, right? This is a kind of a normal turn.

How unusual is it actually for the CFO to leave in a transition like this? Typically what happens in a presidential transition is all of the political appointees throughout the federal government will turn in their resignation papers, and then it's up to the incoming administration as to whether or not to accept those resignations. So technically everybody quits and then is sort of rehired back on. It's not unprecedented to see all three of these politically appointed positions at NASA to leave at the same time. It's unusual that they would all go so early in the administration. Oftentimes what happens is an incoming administration will ask someone to stay on

for a while until they have their appointee going through the process of confirmation. As I say, it's not unprecedented, but it is a little unusual. It's interesting. It's a good reminder of how much work has yet to be done by the new Trump administration. There are literally thousands of political appointments they need to make throughout the entire federal government. Hundreds of those, if not thousands, are subject to Senate confirmation. For anyone following the now very tense relationship, particularly in the Democratic minority on the Senate, things are moving very slowly, even for top level cabinet nominations

here. So we are looking at a period of potentially a long time before, even if they nominate people, to get around to a Senate confirmation through all of the roadblocks and issues because of the larger political divides, that this could take a while, even if the nomination is politically uncontroversial. Yeah, just to put some numbers behind that. It's been a while since I looked at this. This is off the top of my head. But my recollection is that it's something on the order of 4000 political appointees in the federal government and about 1200 of those are Senate confirmed positions. And as of this recording, the Senate has confirmed four people. Wow. And it's not even that. There haven't

even been nominations for those 4,000 people yet. The administration's behind on even putting names out there as well. So it's going to be a long period of time. Who knows where NASA is going to fall in that priority. It's one of the struggles of every new presidential administration is getting their people in place. And then once they're in place, figuring out what the hell is going on and how to run this new job that they're dropped into. So watchful waiting on the administration side. But it hasn't been the same level of inactivity with Congress, has there? I mean, there is this new authorization act.

Tell us about this and where it comes from. There's some history here. Well, we talked about this a couple episodes ago, everyone, right? Everyone, of course, remembers their favorite episode of 2016, looking at the Senate looks at the Mars issue. It's called the NASA Transition Authorization Act. It is an authorization bill. It doesn't actually give money. It sets policy.

The last time we had one of these was back in 2010. It created the Space Launch System. It continued Orion. It set Commercial Crew as a goal of NASA. It did a lot of stuff. It expired in 2013, and we have not had a new authorization bill since. They tried to pass this last year. It actually ended up passing the Senate on a unanimous consent vote. However, the House never took it up. So now that we have a new Congress, we're in the 115th Congress now, they have to reintroduce all this old legislation if it didn't pass the first time. And we're at a position where, from our understanding, we're at a position where, from our understanding, the bill itself has not yet been introduced, but it will be soon. And it's relatively similar to last year's bill. And it was a bipartisan bill. As I said, it passed the Senate in unanimous consent. And it's very likely that that would be the case again, unless the larger political situation now is such that the Democrats start to just block everything out of political principle, which is not out of the question.

However, NASA generally, as we've talked about, still enjoys a modicum of nonpartisanship or bipartisan support. So we're looking at this new legislation, very similar to last year's, will be introduced soon. Hopefully we'll fly through, and it's a one-year authorization. And basically what it says is, stay the course, guys. Well, it is 104 pages, this Authorization Act. There is an awful lot in here. We're not going to get to all of this, but there are some certain key provisions, even though most of it is right in step with that last act that you saw. Go into some of the distinction between this Authorization Act, which you said we haven't

really had one passed since 2010, and the budget, what actually gives NASA the money to do what they need to do. The difference between authorization and appropriation in Congress is that the authorization for a federal agency provides the policy guidance. It basically tells the agency what Congress wants them to do. The appropriation then funds them. Now, in practice, you find a little bit of funding language occasionally in the authorization. The authorization generally tries to just allocate top-level funding numbers. It doesn't really get down into the weeds, though you sometimes see that happen.

And the appropriation occasionally deals with policy. It's not simply a list of how much money each part of the agencies should get. But generally speaking, that's supposed to be the separation between these two processes. Yeah. And it's fascinating because Congress works by committee, right? You have these topic-focused committees, transportation or healthcare or defense. There's a science committee and one of its purviews is giving NASA direction through these authorization bills. But that is a totally different group of people and a totally different committee from the appropriations

committee, which then has to fund NASA based on the authorization and things that the appropriators want to do. So it's a good example of, A, why things are so confusing sometimes about how legislation works regarding NASA. But also, it's another point where NASA can be given basically an unfunded mandate in a policy prescription, but then have the appropriators give it no money. And there's no guarantee that just because NASA is told to do something, that the money will show up to allow them to do it. And this is, again, this is one of the joys of representative democracy here. But that's just how NASA works. And that's not even counting what the White House wants NASA to do, which does not have to align up with either of those other committees ideas. And this is the this is the part of building that consensus in order when when those are all firing on the same pace and all in phase with each longer, then NASA itself is kind of hampered by that. So it's one of those things where there's real power in being united around a common goal,

but without that, NASA can be told to do a lot of different things without necessarily funding to allow it to do them. Yeah, and even more than that, even when the stars do align and all of the policy and funding apparatus is in agreement, which we saw like with the Constellation program, that doesn't mean that that alignment will hold over a long period of time. If programs go over budget or if Congress doesn't supply the funding that they had originally said that they would supply for NASA's endeavors, then those priorities can change very quickly, which is exactly what happened with Constellation. And we're in such an interesting period now where that could theoretically happen again, right? I mean, Constellation ended with the Obama administration coming in. They didn't

like the program. They had a lot of research saying it was over budget, behind schedule. And then after they proposed to cancel it, Congress then came out with an authorization bill that undid parts of that motivation. Now, I think we're seeing kind of the opposite, where Congress is kind of coming out ahead of the administration with this bill. And they're saying, we hope you like space. But by the way, use the space launch system at Orion, because this is what we're writing into law for this time.

So this is the that's why they call it the Transition Authorization Act. They explicitly want it to have a steady, smooth transition without major programmatic upsets. They want these programs to continue. A lot of people are looking at whether this new administration is going to really dive down into this commercial opportunities, right? With SpaceX and whoever else, right? And maybe go to the moon and blah, blah, blah.

Well, ideologically that fits with a lot of the people's perceptions of the Trump administration. However, you look at people like Jeff Sessions, who's the attorney general, but he's from Alabama, Senator from Alabama. He loves the space launch system.

Richard Shelby is the chair of the Appropriations Committee on the Senate for NASA, also from Alabama, loves space launch system. You have the head of the House Authorization Committee for NASA, loves the space launch system. You've got Ted Cruz, Senate Authorization Committee for NASA, loves the space launch system. I may sound like I'm getting repetitive here, but I feel like I can't say this enough sometimes. Congress loves the space launch system, and that is enshrined in this legislative vehicle that we're seeing right now. Again, it's very similar to what we had last year, and to write that off is very premature, in my opinion, even if commercial stuff on paper sounds like it matches ideologically better with

this new Trump administration. And we could talk about that because Elon Musk is certainly making a play for this new administration. Yeah, he has been spending a good deal of time at the White House. Jason? I wanted to highlight something that Casey mentioned here. When Constellation was canceled by the Obama administration, it was not really codified into law at the time. by the Obama administration, it was not really codified into law at the time. And so with the 2010, the NASA Authorization Act, Congress came back through and said, here are the parts of Constellation that we want, and we're now putting it into law. And they did it very specifically, right? I mean, the legislation really spells out what the space launch system would look like to a sort of unprecedented degree. But to unravel that now for the Trump administration to come in

and try and cancel NASA's current plans for the journey to Mars, it's far more difficult than Constellation was because there is actual legal framework that you would have to do. It would literally take an act of Congress to stop this at this point. That's such a great point. And again, you look at that 2010 NASA Authorization Act, it does say NASA must make a rocket capable of lifting 130 metric tons into low Earth orbit. And it must use, to the maximum extent that it can, existing contracts from the space shuttle and Constellation. That is law. And this is why it's a very entrenched program, even for an administration that particularly, too, who's talking about creating jobs in manufacturing. What's the space launch system in Orion, if not tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, California, Washington, Florida, you know, just spread around.

You don't get that in a sense with commercial providers like SpaceX. They're smaller and leaner. So therefore fewer jobs that they're making, right, by definition. And they tend to be concentrated in California with now kind of tendrils snaking out into Florida and Texas. However, Elon Musk is making a play for this new administration. As Matt said, he's part of the Business Advisory Council to the Trump administration. He is coming out and saying some nice things about Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State.

He is working to play a mitigating factor or a messenger to the Trump administration with their new clampdown on Muslim countries and refugees. And you see this because I think he really wants this commitment to Mars and he wants to be using his Falcon rockets to get us there. And he can't do that on his own, right? We saw Wall Street Journal leaked their internal revenue numbers. Half of SpaceX's revenue comes from NASA right now. And that's without a long term exploration program. SpaceX, as it currently exists, cannot itself mount an independent Mars program. It needs either its own satellite launching business to grow, or it needs to

develop its space-based internet service providing system to generate revenue, or NASA needs to buy its services to go to Mars. I think you see this competition for the hearts and minds of this new administration. You saw the transition team initially was stacked with old school constellation veterans. But at the very last minute, they added a bunch new, a couple new members who were focused on commercial aspects of space. So I wouldn't say this is a done new, a couple new members who were focused on commercial aspects of space. So I wouldn't say this is a done deal. But it's kind of fascinating to watch this competition within this new administration that probably hasn't honestly thought about this problem too deeply yet. And so it's ripe territory. And you see this not just Elon Musk, but this, you know,

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, all these other industries are also, I'm sure, spending quite a bit of time engaging the new administration as well. talks about that. It doesn't go into maybe as much detail as it might, but it certainly seems like the sense of Congress is that our eventual goal is to get humans either on or near Mars. That does seem to be the sense of the bill, and that has repeatedly shown up in legislation throughout the Obama administration. It's also stated as the long-term goal in the national space policy. It was the recommendation of the national academies when they released their pathways report. So there's a lot of consensus on that. The real question though, is in the details, right? Do you go directly to Mars by spending a little time in cislunar space near the moon, but not really landing on the moon,

or is Mars a really long-term goal and you're actually going to be at the moon for a long time or some variation in between, right? So there's still a lot of wiggle room in this language. I'll just throw in there that our colleague Jason Davis, the Planetary Society's digital editor, has written a great piece on sort of this moon versus Mars debate that is continuing that people can find at planetary.org. And in fact, I talked to Jason about it on this week's edition of Planetary Radio, the regular weekly show. Casey? A lot of people have this argument, and I've come out strongly and said on this very show that to me, this is the least interesting argument in space is to send humans to the

moon or Mars, because there's no answer to it, right? They're both good answers. However, Jason's article was good in demonstrating that it is not a simple decision. There are downsides of each option. And anyone who talks up Mars or the moon and just completely dismisses the other is not necessarily being fully honest with the complexities of what they're committing to do. Lunar surface operations, you're in darkness for weeks at a time. Where's your power source going to come from? Well, plutonium-238, but we don't have enough of that to keep people alive or things warm that long.

And we're not even have a production capability that can scale to that point for a decade. More moon dust, right, is very bad for you. And what's long-term exposure going to do? And how does that impact your gears? Same with Mars. Jason's article raised some of those issues. And again, I think everyone should always keep their skeptical triggers on

when you see someone constantly walking in saying, oh, we'll just have a fully functioning lunar base that is commercially viable within 10 years and it'll cost 20 bucks versus same with Mars. Oh, we'll just get there in 10 years and we'll have a big Mars hab with a bunch of vegetables growing and we can do it for. There's real complexities to this. And so we need to think about that. And ultimately, to me, and I think what's somewhat included in this legislation, Mars is the clear, natural goal for human spaceflight. There's a lot of good scientific

reasons that I like about it. If you want to go to the moon, fine, but make sure you're doing that in a smart way that feeds into that. And if you're going to go to the moon, just say that you're going to go to the moon. You don't say you do it to get to Mars. Just do it smartly and just be honest about it. Because if you go to the moon, we're not going to Mars for decades more, no matter how you try to spin the numbers, the complexities, the focus. I think the F-35 program would be a really good example of what happens when you try to design hardware to do everything, as opposed to one specific thing. You end up costing a lot more money in the long run. And that, of course, is that new fighter that is supposed to work for

all arms of the services, all of the services. So Casey, you mentioned the plutonium-238 issue. I had a journalist friend who had a red baseball cap made up that said, make plutonium-238 again. I thought that was very cool. Very clever. And I will throw in at this point that, in fact, this authorization act, the draft, does address the need for plutonium-238 for those radioisotope thermal generators, and even mentions the more advanced technology based on using plutonium-238, which, Casey, is something you and I have talked about for some years. Oh, I loves me some plutonium-238, which, Casey, is something you and I have talked about for some years. Oh, I loves me some plutonium-238. You know that, Matt. It's one of my favorite topics and one of the rare, I would say, clear policy successes in a technocratic sense.

It's happening a little more slowly than I think we would all like, but fortunately, I suppose, the budget for planetary science was slashed so roughly back a few years ago that there's fewer missions coming down the pipeline that'll use it than they had originally predicted. So our stockpiles are fine. We made our first 50 grams of plutonium-238 by this new process last year, and they're starting to ramp up to full production here by the end of the decade. So it's making steady progress. It's a pretty amazing story to see. And we should also mention the engineering cleverness and brilliance of some of the NASA engineers and some of the industry engineers that have been able to provide solar panels for Juno and now the Europa mission

that have really reduced some of the pressure on the plutonium program. It's fantastic that they were able to do that. But of course, those solar cells are not going to be an answer for other kinds of missions that you can only fly specific kinds of missions using solar panels. Yeah, no matter how efficient your solar panels are, they don't work in the dark. Yeah, right. They need to work on that. Maybe something that runs on dark energy.

Another factor that is addressed in this act, all of these are so interconnected, is the International Space Station, which we have also talked about on this program. Is it going to continue beyond 2024? And what does that mean for getting to Mars? Wow, that's a big time. It's kind of my opinion that the space station will continue as long as it can. It's a good example of bureaucratic inertia, of programmatic inertia. It's a lot harder to change something than it is to keep something the same, just in government, just in general. You have a lot of people committed to the contractors and staff and NASA's image and just internally of having the space station. It's a program that's been around for almost 30 years at this point

in one fashion or another. It's going to be very hard to ever end, even practically, because of how big the space station is. You have to dissemble it in orbit, which would be a very expensive thing to do. And it's kind of the cornerstone of commercial crew and commercial cargo, which in absence of having a space station, NASA doesn't invest in any of those companies, really, at least not to the same extent. And as we talked about, that's half of SpaceX's business right now. What do they do without a space station? So,

I mean, this is an issue that's actually going to be becoming more and more relevant here. They're going to have to really think about extending the station commitment again here in just a few years. They're going to have to really think about extending the station commitment again here in just a few years. NASA just finally finished last year getting the official sign-offs from, I think, every member nation. Is that right, Jason? For extending the space station to 2024. And that took a couple of years to get those guarantees. And we already saw that ESA had to sacrifice one of their science missions in order to maintain their financial commitment to running the space station that long. So that could be an interesting problem in the long run,

but I just assume the U.S. commitment is going to be there for about as long as it could possibly go. So there are two other issues having to do with the ISS. The first is you hear a lot of talk nowadays about NASA handing off the space station to a commercial partner at some point. It's really difficult to understand how that would work because I've not seen a whole lot of evidence that there is enough of a profit incentive for a commercial provider to run the space station outside of massive investment by NASA. So I'm not sure how that saves NASA money. Beyond that, de-orbiting the station, as Casey mentioned, is a sort of a thorny problem because the station was built without the ability

to deorbit itself. So in order for us to bring it back to Earth, you would have to launch a mission that would carry a deorbiting rocket of some kind up to the ISS. And the mission portfolios I've seen for that are not cheap, right? That's still going to cost a lot of money just to turn the program off. But I agree with Casey. There's just such a coalition in support of the ISS. It's difficult to imagine that we would intentionally turn the program off, but it's not a young spacecraft and it's hard to keep things operating in space for a long time. Most satellites, their lifespans now are somewhere between 15 and 18 years. And as Casey said, there have been parts of this space station up there for almost 30

years now. I suspect that it will take care of itself eventually. For good or ill, right? That's a very nice way to put that sort of outcome, I suppose. Yeah, let's hope that when that happens, there's plenty of time to get to those Soyuz escape capsules or whatever they've got by that time. Well, again, those NASA engineers are really bright. I suspect that that won't be an issue. Yeah, they'll figure it out. There's so much else in this act. As I said, we won't be able to get to all of it, but we sure should talk about

science. And if we can start and focus primarily on planetary science, not much change from the last proposal? Yeah, it gives a couple shout outs to big ticket items in planetary science. And there's nothing really binding in this. It's just more of a sense of Congress that these two missions are awesome and NASA should do them. It is paraphrasing Mars 2020 and the Europa mission are the two big, you know, and it's not no accident really that the flagship missions get the specific call outs because they're big enough missions to raise to that level of awareness for most people in Congress. So sure, I love having the language in there. It's not binding language by any means.

There's some good language about maintaining the cadence of missions that's recommended in the decadal survey process. Love seeing that. But again, it's not binding. It just says to the maximum extent, you know, practicable, which gives these NASA administrators some leeway on that. But again, I'll take the language. Overall, science is not, I would say, the point of this legislation. There's a few mentions of it. There's some good language in there, but it's really focused on human spaceflight. And for their authorizing caps, they recommend $100 million less for science than it got last year. And that's a bit of an improvement, actually, from some of the earlier drafts. There's some more money there than there was, but there's a lot more money authorized for the Space Launch System. It's the classic thing with science.

Science is so, I'd say, successful, but the missions are so much smaller than in human spaceflight. It's harder to build the broader coalitions that you need to really get that strong political support. Again, this is why the F-35 program is untouchable, even though it's a trillion-dollar program. It's because it's spending a trillion dollars all over the country and everyone loves that money. If you're a discovery class mission and you're half a billion dollars over five years, people will dig it, but they're not going to, for the most part, go to the mat for it because

you don't have that same kind of impact as clear of an impact with such a quote unquote, small amount of money being spent. Just to put that into some context, the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, went over budget by about $700 million to a billion dollars and was nearly canceled. The James Webb Space Telescope went over budget by about $3.5 billion and was very nearly canceled. The F-35 program is somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 billion over budget, which is twice the annual budget of NASA. And there was never any serious talk of shutting this program down. God, for one weapon system, a very powerful one, apparently. But yes,

JWST is also specifically mentioned, along with the 2020 rover and the Europa mission, along with WFIRST, the next big space telescope. The only other mission I can think of that is specifically mentioned is one that you guys have been warning us we may have to kiss goodbye to, and that is the ARM mission, Asteroid Redirect Mission. Guys, is it getting closer to the end? I'd say it's got about a boulder's chance in hell to show up around the

moon anytime soon. Yeah, it doesn't look good. You know, NASA delayed awarding several contracts that were due in January and December. These contracts would have been for someone to build the main bus of the spacecraft and to do some of the additional science instruments on it. They delayed them by six months. That's not a good sign. That's most likely coming from the transition team asking NASA to hold off on this until the new administration can weigh in on it. You had the House appropriators

suggest to give it no money this year. You had the House, in this very legislation itself, which was, again, unchanged from last year. It has very skeptical language about ARM. It doesn't outright end it, but it says Congress basically does not believe this is worth your time and money to do this, NASA. We want more information about why you're doing this. So, again, and it's so tied to the Obama administration. So tied to the Obama administration, I think when they kill it, it's going to be kind of a symbolic move to show that they're moving in a new direction while maintaining most of the other major programs.

So I don't see a promising path forward for it. Yeah, I agree. The contract delays were sort of telling. Generally speaking, federal agencies during a transition will continue with business as usual unless they are told otherwise. transition will continue with business as usual unless they are told otherwise. So that really does sound like something that the transition team came in and said, we don't want you to award these contracts until we figure out what the plan is going forward. I think that you will see the real writing on the wall when the budget comes out. They were scheduling it to come out in April. It may still come out in late April. I've heard perhaps May as well. When that comes out, if you see reduced or no funding in that budget for ARM, they're up against the schedule, right? I mean, if you're going to get a boulder in cislunar space for EFT2 to meet, you kind of have to be launching that mission pretty soon. There hasn't been enough money to really even get the formulation process

underway to any significant degree, certainly not very much in the way of development. So it's hard to see how you get from here to there at this point on that mission. Yeah, we should say, I mean, a good counterexample would be in the last episode we did, we were talking about the two new Discovery mission selections. And those are commitments through the 2020s, right, that NASA just made to choose two new missions. And that was fine to do in the midst of a transition. But ARM did not do that. And we don't know exactly why they didn't.

But we can infer that it was most likely some skepticism from the transition and from the new administration. And Casey, you said that the act does call for continuing the cadence of science missions, as well as the small, medium, and large. And the Discovery is an example of those medium-sized missions, right? Certainly. Discovery is the small mission program. Yeah. Yeah. It's New Frontiers is the medium case. Ah, I got it backwards. I shouldn't have done that. Bad mistake. The other thing about science here is what's not there. No mention of heliophysics, no mention of astrophysics,

other than the telescopes that do a lot of the work on astrophysics, and especially no mention of earth science. Why? Bipartisan support for the bill. I think that's the gentleman and women's agreement to not talk about our science. It's the equivalent of not talking politics at Thanksgiving in legislation. Okay. With the astrophysics budget, I think everybody's just waiting. James Webb Space Telescope is sort of the goat that the snake ate. And until it launches, it's sort of taking up all of the budget and all of the planning for astrophysics. And heliophysics,

quite frankly, is small enough that nobody pays that much attention. They just keep bumping along. Although I'm really looking forward to the Solar Probe Plus mission that'll launch next year. I think that'll be really interesting and get them some attention. Have you guys realized that literally everything

is happening next year in 2018? It seems like there's so many things. There's very relatively little happening this year, it seems like. And then everything is, let's say, scheduled to happen in 2018, right? SLS first flight, commercial crew test, Solar Probe Plus, InSight, James Webb Space Telescope. What else? I don't know.

There's probably a million. There's probably some ISAT-2, I think. Is there an Earth science mission coming? You know, a big one being launched. Everything seems to be happening next year. Potentially light sail. Potentially light sail. That's where we go this year, but maybe next year.

Falcon Heavy. On that second Falcon Heavy flight, yeah, the figure's crossed. What else would you guys like to call out from this act? I only have one other thing, but I'm going to save that till the very end. And then there is yet another bill being considered by Congress that we need to talk about. So the thing that I'm happiest with, and we sort of mentioned this already, is the continued support for the decadal survey process. I think that that's really, really critical to a healthy science program. And as long as Congress and the White House

continue to state this as the guiding document for NASA science programs, I think that's a really powerful tool. Now all we need is for Congress and the White House to adhere to it as well. I think it's fantastic that that language continues to remain in the authorization. Casey? You really hit on the big things. I think, again, the real takeaway from this is the broader statement it's making that Congress is saying to this new administration, these are the programs that are important to us. And that's the Space Launch System and Orion. So I think this is a message that they're sending. It's a statement of support. And to really think about that in context of where you see the Trump administration

being able to take NASA in the next four to eight years. So guys, right at the end of this 104-page draft is something about protecting the Apollo landing sites on the moon, which Congress apparently cares about. Are we going to see six new national monuments declared on Earth's natural satellite? Are we going to see six new national monuments declared on Earth's natural satellite? That's really sort of a huge problem for us because the United States is one of the signatories of the outer space treaties in the United Nations. And one of the provisions of the outer space treaties is that nations shall not claim ownership of property outside of the Earth. Right. So you can't claim property on the moon. You can't claim an asteroid. And this provision is sort of a shot across the bow of our participation in this treaty.

There are a number of reasons for this. The first reason I think really has to do with the uptick in commercial entities that are interested in going out and mining asteroids. There's not a whole lot of reason to go and mine an asteroid if you can't own the things that you mine, bring them back and sell them. As the Outer Space Treaty currently reads, you could go out and you could mine that asteroid and you could bring it back, but you could not profit off of that. That's something that I think the US is very interested in addressing. And I think that this is the beginning of that conversation. The second reason that this exists is I think that there's a lot of concern now that there are so many new players in space and some of them with serious interests in going to the moon. I think that

there's a fear that the Chinese ambassador may show up on our doorstep at some point with the Apollo 11 flag and say, oh, by the way, you left this up there, you know. So I think that there's some concern as to protecting U.S. history in that regard. So I think that that's part of what that language was attempting to address. Casey, introduce us to this other bill by another member of Congress who is a big, big fan of space exploration. Yeah, so this is a much simpler bill. It's a much shorter bill. And this one has been introduced already. It was introduced in Congress on the 24th of January as a sponsor in the House by John Culberson, our good friend from Texas who loves Europa and planetary science, and John Cornyn, the senator of Texas. He introduced this in the Senate. It's a bill basically, well, let me read it first,

because this is a great example of congressional acronym legislative titling, which you always have to kind of give a shout out, a tip of the hat to, I think, when you see a good one. Here, I'll read the title. This is the, ready for it, mapping a new and innovative focus on our exploration strategy for Human Spaceflight Act of 2017. Also known as, of course, the Manifest for Human Space Flight Act of 2017. Very nicely done. Almost as good as a Cyrus Rex for acronym. Or Messenger. Messenger, yes. Bravo, bravo. And of course, makes you think immediately of Manifest Destiny.

Oh, what a coincidence. Yeah. And so yeah, it's a very simple bill. It doesn't have anything to do with money. It doesn't have anything to do even with setting a new direction. It basically tells NASA, tell us what you're going to do for human spaceflight. Give us the strategy. Show us your plans and develop this exploration strategy, how you're going to do it, when you're going to do it. Because right now, again, as we've talked about, NASA says it's on a journey to Mars, but we have no means to evaluate NASA's progress to that goal, right? They say they're doing it, but we don't have a timeline to compare it to. We don't have funding needs that they have to have to support it. We just don't know anything. This bill would basically force NASA to prepare a strategy for this and to really commit to what they're going to do in the next decade.

I think everyone can kind of get behind that. That's literally what we asked NASA to do in our humans orbiting Mars workshop report. That was one of our recommendations. But it kind of gives some good overall senses of Congress that Congress thinks Mars is the ultimate goal for human spaceflight, that NASA should be pushing to extend human presence beyond low Earth orbit. I'd say it's a nice companion bill. I'd love to see NASA to really put out an exploration strategy, and this is one way to try to force their hand on doing that.

And I should note, interesting that this comes out before the new NASA administrator comes in and before the White House reconvenes its National Space Council for making a new U.S. space strategy. So again, I think Congress is really starting to take the lead beyond this new White House to try to grab this opportunity of this transition to keep NASA focused on its current program of pushing a human presence further out using these big programs? Yeah, I think you see a lot of willingness in Congress at the moment to support a human spaceflight program. But I think that this bill is an indication of the frustration with not being able to determine what exactly the plan is to the degree that you need to plan

from a budgetary standpoint. Even though Congress has been very, very careful to hold their budget authority to annual budgets, they have the right, should they so decide, to give NASA a five-year budget or a 10-year budget, but they choose not to do that. It's interesting to see them asking for NASA for plans for five, 10, 15 years out, but it does give them an indication of what kind of budget NASA will need. And it gives them milestones that they can measure NASA's progress to determine if they need more or less money. At least I get the sense that that's the thinking in Congress and that's what's driving this bill, I believe. In this bill, they specifically call out that NASA must define the strategy and identify opportunities for collaboration with international partners.

And that is where we want to finish today's podcast, because it's in both of these bills. A lot of talk about international collaboration, and it is maybe the number one request that we've gotten from listeners to this podcast. Let's talk about other space programs and the United States' ongoing ability and interest in collaborating on space exploration with nations around the world. Does that look like something, you guys, that Congress is really behind, or is this just lip service? I think that they're really interested in international collaboration, but I think that the reason for that differs from congressperson to congressperson. You hear a lot of discussion in Washington these days about things like public-private partnerships and also the concept of international collaboration.

But it's often couched in terms of we need our partners to step up and do more. So it's often used as sort of a strategy to reduce U.S. investment in space while not reducing the global capability in space. The problem with that is, as you look around at our international partners, it's not as though everybody else is awash in money either. So it's difficult to understand how the strategy will play out. will play out. That said, I have heard from a number of folks around town who are familiar with thinking at groups like the European Space Agency that they see a potential for the United States to sort of draw back a bit on space, and that gives them the incentive to push their governments to step up. It's interesting to see whether or not it will be a push or a pull factor. That said, it's not all negative.

I think that there are a lot of people who genuinely view space and NASA's involvement in the international community as a really strong, powerful outreach tool in international relations for the United States. So I don't think that it's all a cynical maneuver to try and get other people to pay more money. This is actually something where Congress may be trying to get out ahead of this new administration, too, particularly with international relationships. And this is what's so striking about this new administration that we're starting to see within these first few weeks.

You're seeing, if not an outright retrenchment policy developing in the White House, at least a significant coalition of White House, high level White House staffers who believe that the U.S. should take what they're, you know, this America first policy to reject the last 70 years of this kind of global internationalist order and really focus on these bilateral agreements that extract as much benefit for the United States as possible to zero-sum thinking of international relationships. This is very different than the type of international engagement that people tend to talk about and Congress tends to talk about with NASA, right? You have NASA seen as this opportunity to extend U.S. soft power and to bring in all these smaller member nations to U.S. sphere of influence, but also get them working on high technology in a peaceful manner.

You know, again, the space station is a perfect example of this. That there may be monetary benefits, but there's certainly global political benefits to having strong relationships with the European Space Agency, with the UK Space Agency, so forth. That is now apparently at odds with the White House's foreign policy talk. And again, we're so early yet in this new administration that we don't know what's ultimately going to dominate the White House policy talk. And again, we're so early yet in this new administration that we don't know what's ultimately going to dominate the White House policy here. But it seems to me, at least so far, that this White House is looking at the world in a very different way than NASA has fit into that equation in the past. Congress here may also be trying to get out ahead of the White House and say, no, no, no, we still are really supportive of international collaboration for all of these good reasons and to try to enshrine that before maybe it falls into the awareness of this new president.

So it's fascinating. I don't know the final answer to this, but this is the first time I think we've really had a question as if the White House is going to really pursue international relationships for space anymore. Historically, I mean, we've done we've had dozens of missions involving collaboration in human spaceflight with other countries. We've literally had thousands of scientific missions. Nearly every NASA scientific mission has an international component. And that's really important to understand. And not only that, but U.S. scientists participate on European and Asian missions consistently. Casey is absolutely

correct. This could represent a complete shift in our policy. And I think you're right. I think Congress is trying to make sure that that doesn't happen. We live in the most interesting of times, guys. Thank you for helping us thread our way through the maze. It's going to be a very interesting year, and as you said, lead into yet another in 2018. Hey, Matt, you're welcome. And to everyone listening, thank you as always. You will be hearing more from us here in the next few months as some of our activities ramp up and we start to engage this new administration and Congress. And as Jason mentioned, there is a new budget coming down the pipeline for 2018. And we have to finish up the budget for 2017, which has got about six more

months to go. So it'll be interesting times for sure, Matt. Casey, I dare say that there may be opportunities for some of our listeners even to get involved in whatever takes place over the next few months. I dare say you may be right, Matt. So pay attention. You will be getting emails, and our social feeds will let you know as the opportunities arise. Well, you will certainly be getting those if you are a member of the Planetary Society. There are other ways to find out about what we're up to, but the most important one to us is to become a member,

to become part of this organization that, as we said, has brought you this podcast, brings you all of Planetary Radio, and is making sure that Casey and Jason are able to stay there in the capital within the Beltway fighting for space exploration

and then coming back and telling us about that fight and where we stand. Guys, I'll just say it again. Thank you so much, Jason and Casey. Thank you, Matt. Good to talk to you again. This is fun as always. Thank you, gentlemen.

So that was Jason Callahan you heard first there. He is our space policy advisor within the Beltway in DC and the composer of the theme that you're listening to now or will be in seconds, and Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy for the Planetary Society.

I'm Matt Kaplan, the producer and host of Planetary Radio. Hope you'll join us for the weekly program, and we will be back in March, the first Friday in March, with another Space Policy Edition. Thanks for listening.