Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: A Commercial Future for the Space Station?

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

After announcing it intends to divest from the International Space Station in 2025, NASA quietly released a new report on its transition plans, laying out a series of principles that will set the future of U.S. astronauts in low-Earth orbit. Can a private entity really take over the space station? Where did this idea come from anyway? Will there be new commercial space stations in the near future, and will they serve NASA's needs? Also, the confirmation of Jim Bridenstine as NASA Administrator. More resources to explore this month’s topics are at  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/space-policy-edition-25.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back to our monthly review of all the stuff that really makes space exploration and space development possible. This is Matt Kaplan. I am the host of the weekly Planetary Radio program and very happy to be joined once again by my colleagues, Casey Dreyer, who is the director of space policy for the Planetary Society. Casey, hello. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jason. And is this correct? Happy two years anniversary of the show? Absolutely correct. Happy second anniversary to you as well, Jason Callahan, Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society. Hey, guys. How you doing? I tell you, it doesn't feel like two years at all, does it? It really doesn't. A lot longer?

Not even close. Not even close. We have some great stuff to talk about this month, as we do every month. Thank you to all of you who have been writing to tell us how much you enjoy the Space Policy Edition. As you can tell, it comes to you the first Friday of each month over the last couple of years. We're going to keep it up. One of the ways to help us keep that up, keep this up, is to become a member of the Planetary Society at planetary.org slash membership. But there are other ways to support what we're doing. Casey, what's happening?

Well, there's two exciting things. First of all, this is our annual fundraising for this program. Actually, well, I should say the program that Jason and I work in, the Space Policy and Advocacy Program at the Planetary Society. We call ourselves an independent organization or an independent effort to represent you. And independent means that we depend on you, really, small donors around the world and who want to chip in and allow us to have salaries and pursue program efforts and go to conferences and really work to represent you create new policy, be there on the hill, really do everything that we do. So planetary.org slash advocacy is the magic URL to go to if you want to chip in a little bit.

If you want to see exactly what you would be supporting, you can go to the show page here or just on to planetary.org and check out our blog. I just posted a new quarterly update, which we put out every quarter, every three months, that really summarizes the highlights of what we do in this program. And I have to say, and Jason, maybe you felt this too, when you're reading through it, I was actually surprised how much we did just in the first quarter of 2018. Like I was, I had forgotten some things, honestly, like we did so much. Well, it's interesting because a lot of this was actually the result of work we did in the fourth quarter. So I remember walking all of those miles in the DC.C. heat and the D.C. cold. This is why you have that svelte trim athletic figure now because of all the work you're doing on the hill.

Guys, I can tell you that as an outsider, a semi-outsider, I was blown away. I am so impressed by what the two of you and Matt Renninger, with some help from others in the organization, like the science guy, were able to accomplish. And the work continues. It absolutely does. And it's just really a statement of our donors and members allowed us to grow in the last year. And we're really hitting that stride of what we're capable of doing. And I only see growth further. It's like, however much our members enable us to grow, we will put that to good

work and really creating something special. Jason, you were about to say something. Yeah, Matt, I just wanted to include we had a lot of contribution from our volunteer network as well. And our efforts wouldn't have been possible without all of that. Good call, Jason. I second that completely. So again, planetary.org, if you want to check out what we're doing and link to fundraising

right there. We're also doing a survey online if you want to tell us what we're doing and link to fundraising right there. We're also doing a survey online if you want to tell us some of the space policy priorities that you're interested in as we go forward here in the Planetary Society. But again, a really special thing. I may be a little biased about this, but this kind of contribution from our members allows us to do shows like this. It allows us to blog and write for you in the Planetary Report. And it allows us really, folks like Jason, folks like Matt, to be out there every day in D.C. working their asses off, really, on your behalf. So it's a really cool thing to support. So I hope you do it. Planetary.org.

You can get in on this campaign and be a part of the good work that Casey's been talking about and that the three of us will be talking about. And a piece of that good work, Casey, is another pretty terrific accomplishment that you have achieved. Tell us about Space Policy 101. Oh, yeah. I should have mentioned that. This is a brand new online course that we have. It allows you to really level up as a space advocate. I saw it as a survey course to get you in tune with a lot of the major pieces of things that are really helpful to know if you want to be a better space advocate. So understanding the role of the president's budget request, how to read it, how to understand what Congress does in response to the request, the structure of congressional appropriations every year. And then also a whole section on how to communicate effectively with your member of Congress, how to talk and how to write, what to think about, who you're talking to, really a lot of nuts and bolts stuff, right? Knowledge is power is the whole idea here. The more knowledge you have of this process as a space advocate, the more effective space advocate you can be. And we really

want to start training a new generation of engaged, empowered, and capable advocates who work with us here at the Planetary Society. As Jason said, we really depend on volunteers. And I would extend that to just our members who step up and go that extra mile. They don't just sign the petition, they make that phone call. They don't just make that phone call, they meet their member of Congress in person, and then they feed that back to us. We use that information and leverage their outreach and ability to make our message even stronger. And so this is the whole kind of fitting in of more educational outreach that we're doing here for our members. And again, that was directly a consequence of some additional fundraising that we did last year. So

really happy to put this out. It's at courses.planetary.org. You can check it out there. Link on our website. It's a pretty cool new thing that we have. I'm very proud of it. And what is the outrageous tuition fee that you're charging? So it's free to use. You just sign up, register. Anyone can take it, even non-members of the Planetary Society. We think it's so important and you'll learn so much and you'll be so happy with it that we put it out there for free. Space Policy 101. Gentlemen, I wonder, there is a guy who's new to NASA, a new boss there, who might be interested in a course like this. Shall we move on to talking about the new NASA administrator? Sure. But I think he knows some of the details of how to work in Congress. We have Jim Bridenstine, right? He was finally confirmed very close. Jason, correct? This was the closest vote for a NASA administrator in US history. That's true. 50 to 49. John McCain

was not there to vote. And so Marco Rubio, who had been the longstanding holdout, decided to no longer be so. He basically said because Robert Lightfoot, the current acting NASA administrator, had decided to retire because I think correctly he perceived that he would have served in that acting administrator position forever. And that's not really something he wanted to do. And so, yeah, by a vote of 50 to 49, we have a new administrator. You've had some interaction with the former congressman, now NASA administrator. I assume, first of all, you're just both of you happy to see finally a permanent boss in place. Yeah. NASA really needed leadership. They needed permanent Senate approved leadership in order to move forward on some very serious issues, one of which we're going to be talking about later in the show. The problem with having an acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot is an amazing individual and an incredibly competent man. I thought he did a tremendous job in the role, but without Senate confirmation, you simply don't have the ability to make large decisions that have the backing of the entire community. And that's what having a confirmed administrator finally provides NASA, which is, it's fantastic.

I mean, there are a lot of agencies that are still suffering from a lack of leadership. NASA has gone longer than it has ever gone historically without a leader to this point. So this is a tremendous move forward. And as you mentioned, we have worked with Jim Bridenstine's office off and on for about two years now. I have always found he and his staff to be a reasonable group of people. They've always given us a fair hearing on the issues that we've brought to them. And they've really worked with us to make the legislation that he proposed having to do with space a much better legislation. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I think he's a reasonable choice for the position. And as Casey has pointed out a number of times, this is somebody who actually wanted the job. That's

sort of a rarity in federal agencies, finding somebody who isn't sort of pushed into the position. This is somebody who actually wanted to be there. And so that brings an enthusiasm with it that I think is rare for this position. As we have discussed here and has been discussed elsewhere online, including our website, he was controversial in the sense that he came in with a lot of previous baggage, particularly on issues like climate. I think he's made progress on those. The society, again, didn't endorse or unendorse or not endorse. We just don't do that for NASA administrators because we are committed to working with whoever has the job. And as Jason

pointed out, I think that from our experience with him, he has shown a lot of willingness to engage. And we intend to fully engage as much as we can to really promote the values of our members and the values of the organization, which is pro-science organization, space science and exploration are key focus there. And I think there's a really great opportunity. And I think we will soon find out really where he's going to be able to take the agency. But again, I'd also say we've talked about this, I think just in the very last episode, Bridenstine is not the king of NASA in a sense. Congress will hold NASA and has continued to hold NASA on a pretty tight leash in the last few years. And so you won't see any, I don't think, massive whole scale changes at the agency. And even proposals that

have come out, they will have to go through this whole congressional process. And Congress has demonstrated again and again what it prioritizes, space launch system, Orion, earth science, and planetary science, honestly. And so I think you will continue to see those prioritized. And then we have all this interesting new stuff that really no one knows about, which will be the main topic of our show today, which is the future of the International Space Station and commercialization in low earth orbit. Yeah. And before we get to that, just one more question about Jim Bridenstine. Has he given any indication of his feelings about the formation of the Planetary Science Caucus in Congress? Well, in fact, he has not given us a specific statement on the formation,

but he will be in attendance at our caucus kickoff event next week here in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. As the administrator of NASA, his appearance at events demonstrates at least a recognition of the importance of the event. I don't know that I would call it an endorsement, but certainly he recognizes that this is a serious effort and worth his consideration. All right. Casey, you've already mentioned our major topic for today, and it is basically the future of the International Space Station. Where do we start with this? It comes out of a report that you shared with me just a few days ago. Yeah. So this has obviously been an issue for a while. But why are we talking about this now? Well, we just had NASA just release a congressionally mandated report on the ISS

transition going forward in the future, what NASA intends to do with that or how they're thinking about it. And also in the context of the 2019 president's budget request, which spelled out in no uncertain terms that they intend to remove NASA from the primary U.S. funding role of the International Space Station, at least as we conceive it now. And so the future of the ISS is very much open. I wanted to understand, honestly, and this is what I want to really talk about in this episode, is A, trying to understand where we can go with it, and also just the implications more broadly for humans in low Earth orbit, or LEO, as we are going to refer to it a lot.

more broadly for humans in low Earth orbit, or LEO, as we are going to refer to it a lot, and where this idea of commercial enterprise and privatization comes in, because that has been really been pitched as the answer. We're seeing NASA proposing, or technically the White House proposing, that NASA begin spending $150 million a year for low Earth orbit commercialization activities. We don't really have a sense for what exactly that means yet, but that's what they're beginning to do. The idea of turning the ISS over to private operations has been discussed very seriously. And obviously, we will discuss what the implications are for that. But really, why? Why is that the answer and where that came from?

I really want to go into this today. So why don't we jump back? Jason, you can come in and tell me where the idea of commercialization really begins. with the new President Reagan coming in with a broader philosophical or ideological sense of making the government do less and private industry do more just throughout the nation. Is that a good starting point to jump back to the early 80s? For space it is, but you have to understand it in a broader context even than that. Coming out of the 1960s and throughout the decade of the 1970s, the United States was other nations sort of rebuild after World War II and become a bit more competitive. You know, nations like Japan, you saw Europe starting to put itself back together. And as the global economy became more competitive

and the U.S. became more reliant on that global economy, you saw a shift in political discourse away from using national security to justify everything, which had been done throughout the Cold War, to this new posture of economic competitiveness. And that's really where you see a tremendous set of changes in the late 70s and early 1980s, driving the United States towards this new overarching national priority. And space was not immune to this at all. And so the things that you're talking about that were taking place in the early 1980s were part and parcel of this larger narrative. How much do you think this was in reaction to this external sense of this battle

against communism in Cold War still going on? Like national security was one aspect of that, but it seems like embracing, in a sense, a very pro capitalist market approach would be just a philosophy that you would want to emphasize in contrast to a state run economy. I think that was certainly there because it fit very well with the narrative of the Cold Warriors that were generally still around in the 1980s in the government. But I think more than that, it was a sense of the recognition of what was happening economically, both globally and internally. We were seeing productivity in the United States crater at the same time that you were seeing interest rates rising. You were seeing lots of economic indicators that were not painting a rosy

picture of the future for the United States. And I think that Congress and a number of administrations were reacting to those forces even more so than they were the threat of communism. Yeah, there seems to be so many interesting kind of parallels in a way, not necessarily in the broader global context, that so much as the philosophical ideology of kind of an outsider coming into the White House with a big agenda to privatize or, you know, this philosophical concept of markets are good. And we're going to impose that on how the US government operates in order to prioritize that basically as a function of government. Because you had Reagan come in, really, and you had some pretty aggressive moves, particularly at the beginning, in terms of cutting budgets,

trying to cut the size of government. You had, what was it, like the busting the union of the National Airline, not the pilots, but the flight controllers. It really kind of has echoes, I guess, of where we find ourselves today. And so it seems to be no surprise to me that you had this declaration, I think for the first time, that NASA should pursue or enable

commercial activities in what it was doing. Sure. And a lot of those activities that you saw Reagan pursuing were actually just heightened versions of the same thing you'd seen under the Nixon administration. It's just that Nixon was involved in the Vietnam War. And during periods of large mobilization like that for the United States, it's just that Nixon was involved in the Vietnam War. And during periods of large mobilization like that for the United States, it's a lot harder to cut costs and shrink government. Reagan came in at a time when we were not engaged in a hot war to any significant degree. So he had a bit more latitude in his governing philosophy, I guess. Yeah. And as we say, NASA was not immune to any of this. You

saw it across the federal government, but there were a lot of initiatives happening in the early 80s at NASA that were different than what NASA had encountered before. Yeah. And how critical was the space shuttle coming online to this idea? Because it seems, I mean, this is before, I mean, the first flight was 81, but they weren't flying a lot, then they were still kind of testing it out by the time this national space policy came out. And you had this like, oh, we're going to be going into space all the time now. And it's going to be routine, and really cheap, at least so was the hope. Was that a critical aspect of this idea of commercialization is having the shuttle?

Again, you kind of have to roll that back to the Nixon administration who first approved the shuttle program. And then it went through about 10 or 15 years worth of development. And during that time period, a whole bunch of policies at NASA shifted to support this this major program. you saw planetary science almost collapse because of the weight of the expenditures of not just the shuttle program, but also the Hubble Space Telescope and some other projects. But the other aspect of the shuttle program that really had an impact on the space science community was this was supposed to be the only launch vehicle for the entire United States. It was built for the military to use. It was built for commercial providers to use. It was built for the military to use. It was built for commercial providers to use. It was built for the civil space program to use. So every mission had to be launched from the space shuttle.

Well, for some missions, that works really well. For planetary science missions, that's a terrible launch platform. And it had tremendous impacts on the planetary science portfolio going forward. And the ramifications of that rolled all the way through the 1980s, particularly after the Challenger disaster. Yeah, well, let's put a pin in the Challenger aspect of it yet, because I'm still really interested in beginning in 82, this idea of an industrial space facility, what seems to be at least kind of the first serious attempt to talk about a private space station in low Earth orbit. And again, this was before space station freedom had even been endorsed by the Reagan administration. And the shuttle was just getting going. And here you get some ex-shuttle

engineers coming up and saying, we can do a private space station that can do microgravity research that will leverage a bunch of, you know, in space construction and processing can be tended by humans, and we can do it cheaper. That seems like such an interesting time to propose that because again, it seems to be latching on to the new commercial prioritization in terms of government, the philosophical alignment of government, but also in a sense, I wonder if that was a reaction to what had been perceived as the kind of NASA's failures in the 1970s or inability to really move on with the shuttle program with anything else. I guess humans hadn't flown in space, what, for about six years between

Apollo-Soyuz and the first shuttle launch in 81. Yeah, a gap that seems really short these days. Well, they're still flying, right? Just not on a raster. But this idea, do you think it was in reaction to already seeing the perceived failures of government-financed space exploration or space activity? So I think with any major project like that, any big science project or big industrial project that's federally funded, you have to have a confluence of constituents, right? And, you know, the space shuttle as a vehicle to then build an orbital space platform that had been discussed back in the Von Braun days, actually, you know, you could argue that the plan even prior to NASA, right?

Right. These ideas had been around for a very long time. But what you had was a president who was very interested in the space program, particularly in demonstrating American technological superiority to the Russians. You had a space agency that was coming off the development of its large rocket program that theoretically might free up money for the next big project. And you had an internal culture at NASA that really thought that that was the next step for human spaceflight. With all of that, and then, you know, you add into the competitiveness agenda within Congress. You add into that the fact that the shuttle was being shopped to meet military needs and national security needs as well, particularly intelligence needs. And you build this wide base of constituency at exactly the time when the finances were talking about a space station as being really they were describing it the same way people talk about a cislunar station now, that this was going to be the important step for reaching deeper into space, particularly with humans.

This is where we were going to learn how to do it all. Yeah, that always runs straight into the face of the difference between development and operations, right? It costs a lot of money to develop these systems, but once they're up there, then they, speaking of constituencies, you gain this huge group of people who have a vested interest in keeping the thing going. And this was an attempt at the end of the Apollo era to continue production of the Saturn V rocket because a lot of people made money off of it. It didn't work. You saw with the shuttle, the shuttle program went on for, I would argue, a lot longer than it probably should have because people knew how to do it. It was a known quantity. It was a funding stream to an awful lot of people. I'm not saying that that was the exclusive reason

to have shuttle, but it certainly helped it in its longevity. And you're seeing the same thing now with the International Space Station, as we will discuss later on. Yeah. Just going back to this idea of the industrial space facility, again, I would say, as accurate to say, the first private space station proposal that was really taken seriously, it really bounced around throughout the entire era of the Reagan presidency and a little bit beyond, where originally they were proposing that it would be funded exclusively by private partners who would be buying services on it for research. And all NASA needed to do was give it a free ride

up to space and maybe a couple servicing trips. And then it evolved to say, the government, NASA would become an anchor tenant within it. And then that would allow them to raise the rest of the money. But they never raised them. The private money never materialized. You had then, of course, the Challenger disaster in 86. And subsequently, they completely rethought, it seems, what the role of the space shuttle should be

in terms of what its responsibilities were. And they really severely limited the commercial activities that you could do with shuttle because they realized it wasn't worth risking human life for. And so the whole point of the commercial program was suddenly reevaluated because of the loss of life thing, which really, I don't know, how did that not come into play beforehand? Well, so there are two different dynamics happening at the same time here. First of all, you're right about the idea of a commercial space station and just not finding the money available within the private sector to set it up. It wasn't clear at all how a

private space station in the 1980s was going to be profitable. And I would argue that's still a bit of an issue today. At the same time that that was happening, NASA was also conducting a ton of studies looking at privatizing the space shuttle. NASA would continue to develop their own assets as needed, but there was serious talk about allowing Boeing to go and either build its own shuttles and sell rides to commercial parties or to build shuttles to sell to other people, sort of the airline model. But again, those studies were conducted for years and years. And my understanding, it's been a long time since I looked at this, but my understanding was basically there wasn't a really good business model. People weren't going to invest a couple billion dollars in a shuttle.

And nobody really needed commercial services to low Earth orbit outside of the government to any significant degree. Right. And we should say commercial services that involve humans. Correct. Because there actually is a really vibrant low Earth orbit commercial marketplace. That's true. Right? That is true. And the shuttle actually was taking advantage of that to some degree prior to the

Challenger accident, although it was not to the degree that NASA had anticipated. I don't think they ever turned a profit on offering commercial services using the shuttle. They did use the shuttle for a number of military payloads or military slash intelligence payloads over the years, but that make that point really clear. So you had this, I'd say, burst of optimism about private space in the early 80s. NASA had established an office of commercial programs. You had these centers for commercial development around the country. And it kind of just seemed to fizzle out, particularly after Challenger. The flight rate of the shuttle obviously never materialized as what they had originally projected. And the costs of the shuttle were very high. And again, all the commercial needs that were really clearly needs that people were willing to put private money into were addressed by having commercial communication

satellites. We'll kind of gloss over the space station then happens. Freedom becomes the International Space Station, the Soviet Union collapses. It aligns nicely with the national priorities to engage the post-Soviet Russian Federation. You spend roughly, let's say, give or take a couple tens, $100 billion building this International Space Station, with ideally some component of it being devoted to doing microgravity research for a variety of needs. component of it being devoted to doing microgravity research for a variety of needs. And now we are here in 2018, 36 years after this first industrial space facility, private space station was proposed. And we're looking at almost kind of the same exact questions, which is we have a space station that costs roughly just for, $1.1 billion a year, another $2

billion a year to supply it with just rocket launches and crew, and then another $400 million in terms of research, which is basically underwriting a lot of those launches and experiments. So we're spending about $3.4 billion a year on the space station. And NASA doesn't want to spend that money, or at least the White House doesn't spend the money on that anymore. So we can use it for deep space exploration. So now we're back to this original step. Can we do it cheaper? And is there a marketplace for it? And so we have this new transition report. And Jason, tell me your first impressions after reading this report from NASA on the International Space Station transition going forward to 2025.

Well, quite frankly, it's not much of a report. It doesn't say a whole lot. It's sort of an encapsulation of a lot of the discussion that's been happening around DC for the past couple of years, but there's not a lot of new information in it. Yeah, I had a hard time honestly understanding what the transition plan was. It's called a transition report, and it lays out a series of principles, the transition principles. But they're hard to parse in a sense because, again, I'm trying not to be too critical unnecessarily in this, but it's hard to understand what the point. I mean, they're transition principles, continuity among NASA's access to low-Earth orbit and deep space. That's just a principle that we need continuity.

We want to expand human spaceflight leadership in low-Earth orbit. That's a principle. Spurring vibrant commercial activity in LEO, again, clearly with a human side. And then continuing to do everything they're already doing. Those are all their principles. I don't really understand what the strategy seems to be. We will evaluate our strategies in light of these principles, but we don't really know what that is yet. No, that's exactly right. But they want to complete it all by 2025. By 2025. Yeah. And 2025 is the date by which, I mean, NASA has, I think all the partners have signed on now. 2024 is like

we've officially made the commitment. Congress is enshrined that in legislation. 2025 is when that commitment technically runs out. But the station itself is capable of going longer. But, you know, is it worth it? Yeah, well, and that's another interesting thing in this document. It's sort of sparse on numbers, which is fine because this is the first step of a process, and I get that.

But they talk about the station being structurally capable of lasting into the 2020s and the later parts of it lasting into the 2030s. But they don't give a specific date on that or what it would take to refurbish the parts that will not be structurally viable past the mid-2020s. And also, it's not the structure that's really the concern. It's all the ancillary stuff inside of the station, the life support systems, the cryo

coolers, all of that kind of stuff that tends to be far more high maintenance and is far more expensive and likely to fail than the structure is. Right. Yeah. All of that said, I think what this report is supposed to be is sort of the guidelines by which any future plans will be evaluated. So they talk about an implementation plan that they'll be presenting to the National Space Council sometime in the fall. I would expect more detail to be there, but any detail has to align with the requirements that they've laid out in this report.

Right. Which almost seem impossible. Right. Which almost seem impossible. Right. I mean, in a sense, like, because, I mean, if you look at the principles, they're putting in essentially a requirement that we must maintain continuity. That is that they must have consistent access to low Earth orbit for humans in some ongoing way and deep space at the same time, at the same time, which is the whole point of the original idea of saying we can't do the station anymore is that we can't afford station and deep space exploration. Ultimately, you're going to have to choose one or significantly increase the budget to accommodate both. Well, and not necessarily. I think what that alludes to is the idea that perhaps some private company would put up an asset that they paid for entirely themselves that NASA could then rent

space on to continue the microgravity research in continuity. But again, you know, later in the report, we see market studies that indicate that that's not necessarily an easily attainable goal. Right. Yeah. And I want to get to those market studies in a minute, but I just want to finish kind of looking at these principles in this transition, which is, so yeah, so regardless of how they move forward, whether it's with ISS or a private station, they're saying we have to maintain continuity. We have to have access to low-Earth orbit for humans. And then at the same time, we want to expand U.S. leadership in LEO and maintain all of the critical spaceflight knowledge and expertise within government, and continue to do government-sponsored research, and continue to have commercial research facilities,

and continue to reduce the government's long-term costs. It sounds like we'd like to have cake and eat it too. Casey, there's a line in this, Casey and Jason, that confuses me, consistent with the ISS transition principles, this does not mean NASA is commercializing the ISS. They say this multiple times. And clearly that's touching some nerve when they see this reported as we're going to commercialize the ISS. But there's one key word phrase before that will add some context to this, Matt, which is that the actual transition strategy, what they say they do want to do is, and this is quoting here, begin a stepwise transition of LEO human spaceflight operations from a government-directed activity to a model where private industry is responsible for how to meet and execute NASA's requirements. And I have no

idea what that means. I literally have a hard time understanding exactly what that means. Because maybe we should mention this, Jason, there is a private company already executing NASA's requirements for operating the space station, right? The Boeing company. Yeah, Boeing built and helps to operate the station to the tune of a fair chunk of change every year. They have a definite interest in keeping it going, which is part of the issue that you have with trying to determine what to do with station is it has this large aerospace corporation with deep pockets and deep interests, and they'll go and talk to Congress unless they see some reason to not continue station. Their default position is likely to be, well, let's

keep this thing going as long as we can. So Matt, then it says it does not mean that NASA is going to commercialize the ISS. We're just going to hand over all activity to private industry. Then it says NASA is going to maintain leadership and governing responsibilities and will continue to maintain the essential elements of human spaceflight, such as astronaut safety and high-risk exploration systems. Jason, what does this actually mean? Is it just changing the contract responsibilities where NASA is just like holistically hands over all operations and it has just a more opaque oversight function? I have a hard time parsing this sentence.

And I think that the reason is the sentence is intended to cover a broad panoply of scenarios. If you're talking about the International Space Station, it seems fairly clear to me that NASA is not interested in handing the keys over to somebody else, that they want to retain the operational capability that they've had for a lot of years. They're not interested in saying, okay, company X, you run everything and we'll pay you a flat rate every month to have two astronauts stay on board. They intend to continue all of the oversight, all of the management aspects, or at least an internal capability that if a private company were to take that over, the company would be operating under a contract to very specific NASA standards. However, if another company were to put up a space platform that they themselves developed and built, and it met all of

NASA's requirements, then NASA might have a very different view of how much oversight they really wanted over that space station. However, the rub is the NASA requirements are going to be so onerous that there's really not a lot of cost savings to be had. That's the point of government regulation is to meet goals other than profitability. That's a good point. Yeah, the government's not super profitable. All of this stuff basically says to me that maybe the most positive interpretation of this is that they want to increase the skill set among multiple companies who can then apply it to a future private station. Jason, would you agree?

Is that maybe really what they're trying to say here is that more responsibility kind of in total to some other company, then they will learn how to operate a station in space and keep it safe? Yeah, I think that's exactly what they're talking about when they're discussing this like iterative approach to companies taking over low Earth orbit operations. The problem is the timeline. This is all supposed to happen by 2025. And you just can't convince me that some new corporation is going to walk in and learn how to do space operations in six years. That doesn't pass the lab test.

Six years and then apply it to their own station. Or let's talk about potential cost savings here. All of station costs roughly three and a half billion a year. Only 1.1 billion of that is operations. All the cargo and crew transport to the station runs about 1.8 to 2 billion a year. I don't see how you can get significant cost savings on that based on the needs. We've already seen the cost savings. I mean, those costs cover the commercial orbital transport system, and they're in the process of covering the transition to commercial crew. And if you look at the budget, it comes down by a couple hundred

million dollars over the next two years as the commercial crew program transitions into operations. Right. And so maybe you save a couple hundred million on that. Let's say somehow private industry squeezes out an astonishing 30% efficiency based on that contract for operations, you're still spending $700 million a year on operations. If I was on the board of directors of a company looking at this, I would want to have a hard talk with my CEO. Well, that's the thing. There's a reason why this has not happened. I think as the listeners may be reaching this conclusion, there a reason why this has not happened. I think as the kind of listeners

may be reaching this conclusion, there's a reason this has not happened. And this is a good time to talk about this other study that was kind of included. The executive summary of a separate study was included in this transition report. Do you want to summarize this study real quick? Sure. The study that we've been talking about that NASA wrote was in reaction to legislation from Congress. It was in the most recent Authorization Act. It mandated that NASA would put this study together. The Office of Science and Technology Policy within the White House about a year ago asked a nonprofit organization called the Space and Technology Policy Institute to look at what kind of market opportunities existed for a private company to

come in and do something in low Earth orbit from a space station capability. The NASA report references the STPI study and summarizes its account. Their methodology was interesting. They went through and they looked at what all of the possible revenues were for a commercial station in space. And then they looked at what all of the associated costs would be to run a station in space. And they looked at a large swath of possibilities. You kind of had the four chart. You've got the high cost, low profitability in one corner. And then in the diagonal opposite corner, you've got the low cost, high profitability

model. And in three of those four boxes, what they found was that your profitability will never outpace your costs under the assumptions that they were using. Basically, only under the rosiest of scenarios would any company make a profit off of running an independent space station. Which there's no history in space light of being overly optimistic about budget and cost, right? There's also no history whatsoever of those optimistic assumptions being incorrect. Exactly. That's what I found really fascinating. And again,

this report is meant to give bounds to the discussion. Very optimistic to more negative scenarios. What are your best case and kind of low-end cases of making money? And it's not meant to be totally perfect because there is no marketplace for this in low earth orbit yet. So it obviously makes a lot of assumptions. But still, I think it is helpful to see that really your rosiest scenario is insanely rosy, even within the bounds that they give us their low and high revenue options and low and high operational costs. They make a baseline set of assumptions, which I can't describe, but for any other term as being insane optimistic. I mean, what they do is they assume that a cost to launch to Earth orbit by this period is going to cost

$20 million per seat. That is just not true. Yeah, it's less than half of what it currently is. It's like a quarter. I mean, right now we pay something like 80-ish million for Soyuz seats. The initial round of contracts for commercial crew are in line with that, 70 to 80 million. So you would have to achieve a fourfold decrease in costs, which implies a larger market for those which won't exist. Because the station can only hold so many people. You'd have to greatly, this is part of the problem of why this is hard. The other thing that they assume is that your cost to access low earth orbits for mass, for cargo is going to be $20,000 per kilogram, I think is roughly what they assumed with that. Yeah, that was the assumption. Yeah.

And I just actually double checked this right before our recording today. And what NASA has achieved in terms of its costs for what they're paying right now for SpaceX and Orbital ATK for supplying the space station is about $60,000 per kilogram. And they anticipate it'll actually increase. So a good thing, it's interesting to remember, the NASA Inspector General just came out saying, oh, you know, NASA's second round of contracts with its commercial suppliers, actually NASA paid more money for less cargo. And this is important, maybe salient fact for how NASA can stimulate a successful marketplace in the future. In the next round, they'll pay $70,000 or so per kilogram. You're already, your baseline assumptions that are unchanged between your high and low revenue streams. You're assuming four to five fold

improvements in the cost of just basic cargo and human access to space. It's a very, very rosy scenario. And even given those insane optimistic projections, you almost are certain to lose money on a private space station because of this. Now, it was interesting at the end of the report summary, there were some stipulations that the STPI included talking about what would happen if the government subsidized launch costs or actually paid for launch costs for these companies to start these businesses. And this was under the concept that this would be NASA stimulating a new market. But in fact, what that is, is NASA taking on all of the risk so that these companies can achieve a financial reward. And I'm not entirely certain that that counts as a market,

right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. A market with only one buyer. I mean, that's part of this whole problem. And again, this is why it hasn't happened and why you're seeing NASA already discussing about how they can take a very heavy hand in subsidizing this. This isn't necessarily impossible or the wrong thing to do. It's just we have to think about what is the purpose of the space program? Is this the purpose? a small set of individuals to make money in a new market based on public investment, and maybe then grant access to a sliver of 1% who wants to pay for that access for themselves. Or this is why, again, science and other benefits to humanity has always been kind of talked about as the role of the space program, right? Not enriching a select few. Yeah. And it's interesting at the very beginning of this report, they actually make very clear that this idea of NASA helping to stimulate a new market in the low earth orbit is a new thing. This is not in NASA's mandate. This is not what NASA has done historically. This is something new and generated from within

either the organization or the White House. This isn't part of NASA's overarching goal. Yeah, it's not part of the NASA Act of 1958, right? And it's not necessarily that it can't or shouldn't be, but we need, I think, maybe a broader discussion of that and really try to understand what the point of this is. So that's another stipulation in the report that NASA tacitly admits that the organization, because it's not part of their mandate, they don't really have the skillset in-house to figure out how best to do this. So when they're talking about the implementation report that's coming out in the fall, going to the National Space Council that I mentioned earlier, they're talking about doing that report in tandem with the Department of

Transportation, the Department of Commerce, the Department of State, organizations that are far better suited to looking at those kinds of activities. Right. Let's just cap this off on this part of the report. This study, again, shows me that it's almost a stake through the heart in the idea of a private company coming in, almost like a saving the day on horseback, you know, and hurrah, we've made our private space station. We don't need to spend all this money on ISS anymore. It really seems to me that is almost impossible to do with private money. And anything that they would do would have to, would require a significant public subsidy in some way or another, whether that's NASA paying for all transport costs, which they become likely barely profitable. But again, it makes all

assumptions on markets that don't exist. And I thought an interesting comment was that, oh, maybe assembling communication satellites in orbit would be an aspect of it. But that seems to me to be the opposite of where the communication satellite market is going, which is these distributed small sat constellations that don't require people.

It really made me think about, there's this great book robots in space by, I think it's McCurdy and Lanius. And they, they, they really trace this idea of the idea of humans in space has such this, a historical kind of romantic cultural aspect of it. And was really defined by people like von Braun back in the day that they

just, they had no idea how capable computers would become and how incredible leaps of technology would happen so they just extrapolated the role of humans in the industrial society then into the future so that be humans in every step of the way doing stuff in space but what we've actually found is that humans are a really big pain in the butt to have in space and it's way cheaper and more efficient just to design spacecraft to do most of your things in space, right? So like military observations or any Earth observation satellites, really, communication satellites. You're not having people like pointing the communication relays for you.

This discussion of private space stations really fits into that continuity of this previous idea of, of course, we have to have humans doing something in space, but they keep searching for reasons to have them be a marketable aspect of it. They keep flailing and, to me, keep searching for reasons that haven't manifested themselves. And perhaps that says something about what we should be really thinking about with humans in space. Maybe it shouldn't be a pure profit motive to have humans in space. Maybe there's just always going to be a government cost because that's what it requires. Seeing this aspect of it over and over again, this is the same type of problem they literally had back in the 80s with this industrial space facility. They ultimately could not line up private money because there was just no perceived market. And now NASA is saying, we'll put in some money, but we have no idea if it's enough or what exactly they plan to do with

it. Right. And the goal of NASA is to put in some money now so that they can spend less money in the future. Well, if there's no market, they're just putting in good money after bad, right? So that's the risk. And there are multiple companies, I're just putting in good money after bad, right? So that's the risk. And there are multiple companies, I should say, that have proposed private space stations. I'd say maybe the most serious would be Axiom Aerospace or Axiom Space and Bigelow with Bigelow doing the inflatable. I think Bigelow is probably maybe the most important driver of this discussion. But again, very questionable. I was actually going back and looking at some studies that Bigelow was going to have their own free flying space stations up by 2017. And obviously that didn't happen. And they have their module on the station, on International Space Station. They may be able to add more to the International Space Station, but NASA provides them in a sense with free electronics. They do all the air processing. They depend on a heavy government subsidy to even just attach to the station and draw its resources, much less do a free floating one. I have not seen significant private money flow into these

companies yet. I am glad though that you brought up Bigelow because that was where I wanted to go. You kind of touched on this tangentially. What if someone like Robert Bigelow decided that he could make money off of a hotel in space and he cut some kind of terrific deal with, I don't know, Blue Origin or somebody to get people there and back, maybe Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser? the implications of this report and NASA's attitude toward all this, if he just wanted to put his inflatable hotel near the ISS, next door, because it's convenient to have neighbors, it makes you feel a little bit safer as a neighborhood watch. Does this report have anything to say about that, ignoring whether that is something you could turn a profit at? Again, the purpose of the report was looking at NASA specifically. So as long as that module being near the space station didn't impinge on any of the requirements that NASA puts forth in this report, I suspect that there's probably some

leeway there to have a discussion about that. But just from an operations management standpoint, the potential penalty, the potential risk of having two spacecraft operating in close proximity to each other is always going to dwarf any of the benefit. So it's hard to imagine that that would necessarily happen. And really, Matt, the point is, from what I can understand from this study and others is that there has not yet been an actual business case in which people make money by having like a hotel in space, unless you have significant public subsidies to enable that to exist.

And then again, the question is, why are you doing it? Is it NASA's role to enable Bigelow to make money by having rich patrons go up into and float around in their space hotel? I mean, maybe you could have NASA have some kind of curated research facilities on that same station, but you probably then very rapidly run into conflicts of interest in terms of how you design the station and how well you can do those types of experiments if you have a bunch

of tourists floating around. I mean, there's just a significant number of problems. What this report tells me is that there is not yet answers. It's interesting to maybe explore some of these, but I think we have to be really honest with ourselves. In the 2019 budget, I'm going to quote from it here. It says that we're proposing to end direct U.S. financial support for the ISS in 2025. That's what the budget says. Like that is even, that is far more direct than this transition would, report would even suggest. And I think you've already seen pushback from members of, and particularly the Senate, I think Ted Cruz called them numbskulls at the Office of Management and Budget for putting this in the budget request. But looking at this report and seeing the just financial inability for this business case to close,

it makes you really wonder about what we have to be very careful. And this is actually bringing this back to Jim Brineside. This is going to be a big challenge for him is to understand how he can use the public money well and do it in something that actually is useful. Because again, the goal of this isn't at the end to still have the station and then be subsidizing a private so-called station to a tune of $500 million a year. On top of that, it doesn't make much sense to me. It's no accident to me that this report has this very negative analysis of private space stations. It goes into,

by the way, the station is rated until 2028 and could likely go longer. And it says we'll even keep the costs flat for the indefinite future. I wonder if this report is really kind of actually meant to put in people's minds, because this is delivered to members of Congress. This is for members of Congress. See how impossible this is? By the way, the station's right there. We can just keep doing it. It's no accident to me that I think it ended with that, and also a long list of all the great science that it's doing.

That was like how the report ended. What is the international angle on this? Of course, you know, the U.S. is in the lead. The report even says that the international community is looking to NASA and the US for leadership, but we're not alone up there. No, and that's interesting. That was actually the next point I was going to bring up. There's been a lot of discussion around DC about this idea that maybe it's not the United States who needs to subsidize a private space station. Maybe it could be some other country who doesn't currently have a human spaceflight program or one that has a very nascent human spaceflight program, but doesn't have the ability yet to build a space station.

The problem is going back to what Casey was talking about. When you, when you start thinking about what the point of human spaceflight is all about, you know, why are, why are these nations engaging in this activity? One of the major points is national prestige, right? And if you're just buying off the shelf equipment and renting astronauts, there's really not a lot of prestige to be had there. So it's difficult to see that market coming to fruition either. As for other nations maybe getting together with NASA and co-subsidizing something, basically having a timeshare in space. It's an interesting concept, but I've never seen international relations make something less complex. The fact that

we can't figure it out in the country using the systems that we all know pretty well, the idea that you would add more systems to that and make this an easier process is difficult to imagine. Wow. So where do you see this going, guys, with this picture that you've painted? We're coming off very negative, which is an accurate representation of my feeling about this. And it's hard to be negative sometimes with space because you want it. You don't know it won't work, right? That's the inherent optimism bias that we have with space. But it seems I don't want to let this problem just be stated. Like to me, what we're seeing right now is that we are seeing an assertion that this is the answer.

And it fits in with an ideological, philosophical bent, which we have seen before back in the 80s. And it didn't work in the 80s. The same problems that plagued it then exist now. Creating a marketplace that solely exists because the government says that it will buy your services is not a marketplace. Literally by definition, that is not a marketplace. We need to be smart about how we spend public money. I think there's lots of interesting ideas that we can pursue in low Earth orbit, but we need to be very honest about it. And I don't think I've seen that honest of a conversation about the solution to what we do with the International Space Station. And what we don't want to see happen is

what Jason was implying there, which is that we spend a billion dollars to private company contracts who ultimately can't deliver or don't do anything or set up NASA to then be on the hook for billions of dollars more without really thinking about the implications of that. And then probably at the end of it still have the International Space Station because that is for the same reasons that the shuttle was hard to end. It will be the same for the International Space Station to end that. I want to be optimistic and I want ideas to be explored, but we must be open, have our

eyes open about it and not just assert that this is the solution. I have seen no strong arguments that this is better now than it was before and that this is the answer. At the end of the day, what you're looking at is NASA is planning on using this funding wedge from the International Space Station to pay for its exploration efforts further out past LEO. But all of their plans require at least a significant chunk of that wedge. Everything that I'm seeing proposed would amount to savings in the margins for NASA. You're not going to see a 50% cost reduction by privatizing the operations of the shuttle or of the station or of just buying

services from a private provider somehow. That's just not a reasonable way to look at this. So if you're talking about a very marginal cost savings, there are only three scenarios. Either you de-orbit station in 2024 or 2028, which will cost a lot of money because we don't have any ability to do that at the moment. You have a significant influx of money to NASA to basically cover the costs of station while also covering the cost of developing and implementing the new exploration plans, or you push those exploration plans out to the right, which is what I suspect will happen. And what other people have started to say, particularly about the idea of putting humans on Mars, that they just don't see it in the current situation. Well, there isn't really

a particularly great solution there, is there? Although, didn't Casey, the Planetary Society, talked about the end of funding of the space station and what that could mean for deeper space exploration? Yeah. I mean, in our report back in 2015, humans orbiting Mars, I mean, really, I think it comes down to if you really want the cost savings, you have to give up low-earth orbit. It's almost tautological in a sense, but it's really if you want to save the money, don't spend it on space stations in the north orbit. I mean, there's no real path to cost savings. Most ideal situation, let's say, in terms of cost savings would be deorbiting the station. And they claim in this report that you could do that at a flat ISS budget.

They just start directing all research funding and all commercial resupply crew stuff into launching deorbiting stuff. Who knows how accurate that projection is? They would deorbit it in 2025, and you'd have some closed down costs, and you'd start opening up, let's say, $3 billion or so per year to other things for deep space stuff. And maybe you can say NASA pays $700 million a year for a key component of some private space station that has managed to get up and meet NASA's needs and have the safety and health needs. And that NASA spends maybe half a billion a year on sending people to it. Who knows? Your cost savings is now down to like $1.5 billion a year.

That's not enough to get you to Mars. That's not enough to like significantly speed up your path to the surface of the moon. It's not nothing, but it's not this magic solution. So I don't have a happy ending to this. I think that's the whole point that we need to be really honest about this discussion. It's very difficult to do both and there's no magic bullet to it. Now, I will add one note of optimism and it's a very, very small bit of optimism. Oh, Jason from you. Thank you. Thank you.

If you look at historical NASA budgets, NASA's highest budget in recent memory was in the early 90s, and adjusted for inflation today, that budget was about $24 billion. The current budget is just below $20 billion. No, it's 20.7. Excuse me. Don't forget 2018. And I've heard serious people in Washington, DC who have the ability to influence this decision discuss trying to return NASA to its early 1990s budget levels. If that were to happen, that extra money basically covers all of the costs of station and still allows current expenditures on exploration. It's not implausible. It is unlikely. into landing on the moon.

We need to be honest about what NASA needs, and NASA needs to be honest about what it needs, and the White House needs to be honest about what NASA needs to do what they say it should do and maintain a balanced portfolio of having science and aeronautics and the other things that NASA is supposed to do. A happier note to end on here, these types of discussions are important,

and I think it is worth taking serious looks at doing things in a different way because we know how the current way of doing things works, right? We're seeing that with Space Launch System. We're seeing that with Orion. We're seeing that with the International Space Station. It can be successful and they can do amazing things, but they won't be cheap. We're seeing really interesting stuff come from commercial cargo and maybe commercial crew coming up, which is still cheaper than the kind of the alternative path that had been proposed. So it's worth looking at this stuff. And I think it's

worth entertaining the ideas. And we shouldn't begrudge NASA or the White House or OSTP for thinking about this. But we do need to then be honest about the conclusions and how that influence our choices that we make as a nation and as a space program. Guys, I've just been handed a news bulletin from the fake news agency. Genentech has invented a cure for all cancers. It can only be developed, though, in microgravity. in microgravity and they need a staff of six men and women to create it. And they expect profits in the trillions within five years. I still think you'd have trouble getting private investment, honestly. But maybe that's a good thing for government to invest in.

Gentlemen, I take it that this wraps up our discussion for today. And it's not an entirely negative one. It's just a thoughtful one, which is what I've come to expect from you guys. and support this program and support all the work that Jason and Matt and I and our volunteers are doing in Washington, D.C. We really depend on that. So I really hope you'll step up and give us a hand. And where do they do that again? Planetary.org slash advocacy or just go to planetary.org. It'll prompt you. And you can tell that's the emphasis this time around. But if you would like to become a card-carrying member of the Planetary Society

and stand behind this work, the space policy work done by the guys we've been talking to and Matt Renninger, the third person on that team, and all the other great work of the Society, please consider becoming a member,

planetary.org slash membership. Guys, I look forward to talking to you next month. Casey, Jason, have a great time there in D.C. as we speak next week. It's going to be a very busy week for you guys. I'm tired already just thinking about it. It's going to be good.

Casey Dreyer is the director of space policy for the Planetary Society. His colleague is Jason Callahan, the space policy advisor, Jason Callahan, who lives there within the Beltway, just like the third member of the team, Matt Renninger. And I am Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. We will be back with you on the first Friday in June to begin the third year of this special space policy edition. But I will be with you every week in the regular edition of Planetary Radio. Hope you will join us for all of that.

Thanks again, and we'll talk to you soon.