Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Destination…Mars? Contradictions and Principles

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

The Senate just held a hearing on NASA's efforts to send humans to...Mars? A week later, the same committee advanced legislation to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2030, six years beyond the current end-date and two years beyond the current hardware safety ratings. Does that extension undermine efforts to get to Mars? What about the Moon? Casey and Jason also introduce The Planetary Society's new principles for human spaceflight, which provide a framework by which the organization will evaluate plans for human exploration.  More resources to explore this month’s topics are http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/space-policy-edition-28.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It is August of 2018, time for the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back, all of you policy geeks out there. This is Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio for the Planetary Society, which is bringing you this monthly podcast, more about the society in just a moment. But first, I want to introduce, as always, my colleagues, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and his colleague, Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor in Washington, D.C.

Welcome back, guys. Happy to be here, as always. Hey, guys. How are you doing? Very well. And much more for us to talk about. We never have a shortage. And there have been some interesting happenings there in the nation's capital in the last,

even just in the last few days, which we'll be covering today. Before we get to that, though, planetary.org slash membership. If you enjoy this podcast, if you enjoy the weekly, the regular edition of Planetary Radio, if you've learned a little bit about the Planetary Society, and if you haven't, you can do so at planetary.org. But if you've learned about us and you like what we're doing, we would love to have you come on board. Join us as a member. The members of the Planetary Society are far and away the most important source of funding that allows us to do everything that we do, including LightSail and the Shoemaker-Neo grants and all of the great work that Casey and Jason are doing in Washington,

D.C. with Matt Renninger as their colleague there. So please, planetary.org slash membership. is their colleague there. So please, planetary.org slash membership. There are lots of levels you can come in at, and we would love to have you join our little space family. Guys, I don't know if you have anything to add to that, but we can go straight into it if you like. There was an interesting hearing last week. Yeah, the Senate has been busy. Usually this is not the time of year for the Senate to be busy. Usually the Senate takes a long summer break around August to go back to their districts, to go back and visit constituents. But the Republican majority in the Senate decided to hold the Senate in session through August as kind of a way to, I think, stick the needle in some of the more vulnerable Democratic senators

who would much rather be back campaigning right now. So the Senate kind of needs some stuff to do. And they've been focusing on Mars. And you know what, frankly, Mars has been on my mind, at least in the humans to Mars aspect of this. We had the hearing about last week, chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Space Subcommittee in the Senate, and we had a nice bipartisan showing, and they had some guests, hearing witnesses, coming to talk about NASA's current state of Mars exploration, which I just thought was kind of odd, frankly, because most people who listen to this show

have heard that we're going back to the moon right now. And so I thought it was kind of interesting that they said, oh, yeah, how are we doing on these Mars plans? And the Mars plans weren't exactly doing great, frankly, to begin with, before we redirected back to the moon. So that got me thinking. And then a few other actions kind of happened after that. But Jason, has Mars been on your mind from the human spaceflight side of things?

Has this been bubbling up, percolating up in the DC area policy circles lately? Well, that's a, that's a rough question for me to answer. I'm kind of disappointed that the calendar played out this way this month because the national academies is releasing the planetary science decadal midterm review next Tuesday. And instead we're here talking about my all time favorite policy topic,

moon versus Mars. Well, it's not. He's kidding, folks. Here's one, man. Get out of the side. That said, it really has not been that huge of a topic poking around DC. There have been a couple of discussions about what NASA's Mars plans will be, but those have been sort of on the periphery. Most of the stuff that's been happening in DC has really been surrounding either a couple of pieces of legislation having to do with commercial space that are working their ways through Congress or the stuff happening in the DOD. So moon versus Mars or destinations for human space flight really hasn't been a big deal in DC, to my notice of late. Yeah, that's what I thought it was so interesting that they held it. And to be fair to the Senate, it wasn't necessarily a versus discussion. It was, you know, the way that

space policy directive number one is written is that we go to the moon on the way to Mars, right? Administrator Bridenstine at NASA has gone to great lengths to say this isn't one or the other. This is both one after the other, which is fine. But again, I thought it was fascinating. So the Senate had this hearing, the witnesses. So the first thing I thought was fascinating is that the witnesses that they called to testify, none of them were actually current representatives of this administration. There's no one from NASA right now, and there was no one from the Office of Management and Budget

or the Office of Science and Technology Policy. No one actually responsible for implementing this plan now was called to the Senate. You know, not to diminish the experience and expertise of the people who were there, but why do you think that was? Why do you think that they didn't have anyone currently representing the administration? To be perfectly honest, I think it's because they knew what they were going to say. The previous administration had the hashtag journey to Mars as their sort of fundamental goal for human space

flight, which did in itself include going to the moon first, just not landing on the moon. The current administration's plans redirected efforts towards the moon in a larger way. But as you said, their plans are to use those efforts to get to Mars eventually. It's really just a matter of how long you want to spend at the moon. And that's the big difference between these two plans. But all of that said, those directives came from the White House through the National Space Council. So there's a lot of top, through OMB, there's a lot of top-down narrative going to NASA is what this administration wants them to focus on. So if you're interested in talking about going to Mars, well, you know what the administration's going to say. They've got their new marching orders and they really don't want to get outside of the messaging of this White House, because that's been shown to be disastrous and other other aspects of policy. So I don't think

you would have expected or I wouldn't have expected were I in Congress to hear anything new or enlightening from somebody from NASA on this particular topic at this time. Matt, you watch this, you know, what was your just kind of watching the hearing to you just jumping in on this, seeing where the Senate seemed to be? I got the idea that you had two ranking members and a chairman who are true enthusiasts. They want to see us doing more. They want to see us headed to Mars. But they certainly weren't getting into much detail. I mean, I heard Chairman Cruz use the same line he did when he came out and talked to us Mars geeks at the Humans to Mars Summit a couple of months ago. He said, let me be clear, we must remain vigilant.

Mars is the focal point. Basically saying, yeah, we're going to go to the moon, but it's really just because that's what's going to help us get back to Mars. You also heard them talking about, particularly the Democrats, bemoaning the fact that there is still no roadmap, no human exploration roadmap, step-by-step plan for getting us to Mars. There was some other stuff that was just plain puzzling, which I think we're going to get into about like the International Space Station and this growing support for extending its life in orbit based on not much. Yeah, let's get to that. I want to get to that.

You brought up something that reminded me of this. And this is the weird sometimes aspect of being space advocate here. I want them to have hearings like this. I'm happy that they're interested, right? We should just, you know, much better to be on this side of things than to have a very hostile Senate for this idea, right? Fundamentally, the fact that their hearts are in the right place is a really good thing to have. But at the same time, I expected just a slightly more critical discussion than what we saw. For those, the very points that you've brought up,

Matt, that, you know, we don't have anything even resembling a mission to Mars, much less a timeline or a set of milestones, right? If anything, Mars has receded further off into the distance with their focus on the moon. And even then, I hoped that the discussion would be, okay, if the Gateway is the next interim step, exactly how does the Gateway feed into getting to Mars? What is being done to design the Gateway in a sense that will advance the engineering needs, advance the psychological and physiological experiments and demonstrations necessary to sustain human life? How are we going to operate in deep space? None of those things even came up. And that's just what received half a billion dollars in appropriations going through both

the Senate and the House this year. And it just it seemed like there was almost a parallel universe where Mars was still somehow this broad goal of the administration. And the moon was kind of a side thought versus the reality, which is the complete opposite of that. Fundamentally, to me, it feels like a lot of that discussion focused on some of the technological needs to get to Mars, which is good. That's important. But there wasn't a discussion of the political needs, right? Getting to Mars is a technological

and political problem. And the political problem in some ways is actually more difficult. Like the technological ones, theoretically, we know how to solve those, right? If we just put our time and effort and great engineering on that, the political ones don't have clear answers. And that's what needs to be grappled with right now. I heard a lot of remarkable optimism about the technical challenges, a recognition that there are tremendous challenges we need to overcome if we're going to put people on Mars. But a lot of optimism from the experts who are generally people who know what they're talking about. But you're right, so little about the political side and almost no mention at all of that deep space gateway. Here's the problem with the optimism though, is that all of that optimism about the technology

is about the fact that we will be able to develop the technology. But as we've talked about many, many times on this show, the most expensive thing you can do in space endeavors is develop new technology. It's really difficult to predict how much that's going to cost. And cost is really the driving factor here. And it's why you didn't hear a lot of discussions of timeframes or specific pathways, because every time you start putting details to a plan, you can put costs to that plan. And the costs, depending on how you do it, can be a lot more than I think Congress has perhaps the appetite to invest at the moment. But if you're planning to get there in the 2030s, you're going to have to invest that money now. I've talked to a lot of people who've been at NASA for their entire careers, 40, 30 and 40 years.

And people always talk about the fact that Mars is always 20 years away. You know, to paraphrase the old Coen Brothers movie, Brother, Where Art Thou? It's a real geographical oddity. It's always 20 years away. Well, that's and that's such a good point. And you saw a little bit of that. So our good friend Chris Carberry, the CEO of Explore Mars, brought up the point that we need to be investing in these technologies now in order to have a hope of getting to Mars in 2030s. David Newman, the previous deputy administrator of NASA the last couple of years for the Obama administration,

she had some nice prescriptive elements, particularly saying we need to create a Mars program office, an internal bureaucratic structure responsible inside of NASA for going to Mars and having a budgetary control over its own destiny. I didn't see any follow-ups with that. And I don't even think that's in any way a serious discussion right now because the current proposal from the administration, who again was not there, was to reorganize NASA focused on deep space exploration to the moon and then ISS or low Earth orbit. The whole Mars thing, again, just seemed so far away as a consequence. To me, it had the maybe unintended outcome of feeling very far from where we want to be in terms of the Mars goal. That question of timelines, this always gets back to me. This is

the political problem. If you can't realistically talk about a timeline because you're worried about how much it'll cost, then you need to start dealing with that. Because at some point, if you need something to adhere to, to send something to Mars, you need to be able to accept if you don't think the costs are acceptable, that is a political problem, right? Then you need to address that political problem and denying it exists will not get you there. Yeah. Casey, you and I have had this discussion for years that fundamentally the problem with going to the moon or to Mars is that NASA only talks about this in terms of internal NASA goals or in terms of sort of ephemeric details like inspiration, right? We don't have good long-term national reasons to go to either Mars or the moon that are well defined. I think those reasons exist, but NASA has done a very poor job of trying to explain that to

people who are not necessarily space fanatics. And I think until you can give a really rational, coherent message about why it's necessary to go to the moon or to Mars right now, I don't think you're going to find that overarching political support to actually provide the resources that would be necessary. I mean, we saw this in the Pew poll about public attitudes about space that just came out a month or two ago, where going to the moon was ranked the least important goal for NASA by the public, second only to Mars. Mars was like 8% support, the moon was like 5% support. I've actually been having multiple conversations with a variety of reporters in the last few weeks. And they'll ask me, you know, why are we going to the moon? Why are we

going to Mars? I don't have a, I mean, I have my answers to those, but I have not seen NASA or the administration clarify what their goal is beyond kind of a tautological, so we can be there kind of a goal. And as you point out, we all look back to Apollo and say, why did we go to Apollo? You had basically proxy battle, Cold War, national security, very high priority. As soon as they achieved that, they undermined the reason for their own support, effectively. And not coincidentally, the funding disappeared. And ever since then, you've never had that kind of clear singular directive. And not coincidentally, the funding disappeared. And ever since then, you've never had that kind of clear singular directive. And we've talked about this before.

You and I just submitted a paper to COSPAR about this that our president Jim Bell reported on at this space conference, space science and research conference in Pasadena, that without a singular, clear narrative driving this, you have many reasons, but there's no one good reason. And that makes it very hard to tell a compelling story. You know, what is it? The National Research Council identified seven reasons for humans to go into space. And they said not one of these are good enough to be the only one reason. Yeah.

I was surprised and a little disappointed to hear how many times there were references during the hearing to Matt Damon. Why? Because, well, he's from Massachusetts, Senator Markey's home state, but also because, of course, he was the unseen participant in this hearing because there was almost this feeling of, well, it happened in The Martian. And Senator Bill Nelson of Florida talked about the VASIMIR engines that were in that fictional spacecraft that took people to Mars twice in the movie The Martian. Almost as if people talking about Star Trek and saying, well, we don't have to worry because warp drive is going to be invented in about 100 years. It really just seemed out of touch in some ways. Well, I think it's that dual nature or the dual effect of science fiction or just pop culture that can help and also undermine our expectations for space flight. I mean, we can very clearly see in polling data across time

that the public is very fungible on its approval or disapproval of particularly space projects. You can make good arguments that major pop culture, particularly movies, are able to push the needle of public opinion towards fondness for space. I think Apollo 13 is a great example of that. I think you're seeing it now with the trifecta of the Martian interstellar and gravity all kind of coming out in a few year span. But at the same time, just what you were saying, the expectation then, if you if it becomes too internalized,

you almost take it as a given that it's going to happen. And you forget that it takes a lot of hard work to actually make it a reality. We're not investing in these types of fundamental technologies. In fact, the Obama administration made a real effort at the beginning of its term to put a billion dollars a year in space technology in its own mission directorate. And every single year, the Congress cut funding, cut or funded that less than the proposal, stuck a bunch of money for other things within that mission directorate. And now the administration is proposing to completely take away the independence of the space technology mission directorate. Just shows you like even that half step to try to invest in technology development was very difficult to succeed in because things just pull into it into major spaceflight projects that need the money now.

projects, if you're starting at a technology readiness level one, which is the lowest, basically, you're just trying to figure out what the principles of the science are and build a technology out of that. Well, that process can take 20, 30 years. Even if you are at a TRL four or five, that can still be an eight to 10 year project. And it's usually difficult to determine how long it'll take, even with a pretty high funding stream. It's not sexy for politicians. It's not the kind of thing that they can put their stamp on and go back to their constituents and say, for the rest of my term, I will continue to invest in this technology that you won't see for a decade. Yeah, no one gets elected on that. The International Space Station was raised a number of times during the hearing.

was raised a number of times during the hearing. What about the extension of the station and whether it does more to help or hurt getting humans to Mars? It's something we've talked about in the past. Yeah, we just had that great, I thought it was a great episode that we did a couple months ago on the ISS transition report, right? Because the Trump administration has proposed to somehow divest NASA from its role in this International Space Station by the end of 2024. So they had this transition report that says, we'll figure it out. I'm not quite sure how we'll do this. But then this very same Senate subcommittee, a week after it had this Mars hearing, released a legislation draft called the Space Frontier Act. And it's primarily focused on regulatory reforms for launch services and for commercial space and

a variety of other things we won't go into today since we've talked about a lot of these in the past. But then at the end of it, of that same legislation, there is a section that says, oh, yeah, and we're going to extend the space station through 2030. That made me do a double take because I'd only ever really seen the station talked about of extending from 2024 to 2028. And the station has been rated. There's been a bunch of analysis that has been done by Boeing, its prime contractor, saying, you know, which parts of the station are rated and safe and acceptable risk through 2028. The Senate's now proposing 2030. And I just thought that was such a strange contrast to the hearing just the week before this Mars hearing, because in every report that has come out from, particularly from the National Research Council,

did this in their pathways to exploration. We have talked about this in our humans orbiting Mars report and many others that have said right now nasa cannot afford two space programs human spaceflight programs but we're doing two human spaceflight programs we're doing the iss and we're trying to do something in deep space in order for nasa to have a chance at succeeding in the deep space stuff it has to let go of the iss or you have to add billions of more dollars to NASA's budget, which so far have not shown up and don't appear to be showing up. Trump administration is proposing a flat budget for NASA going the next five years.

But here you have the same Senate committee, after talking about humans to Mars and how excited they are to go to see it happen, extend or at least propose extending the station for another six years at a cost of four to five billion dollars a year, likely, because you need the partners to either extend or we have to take on the cost of operations that our partners currently shoulder. And so it just seemed like, why are we doing this? And to what end do we need to extend the station? How is that serving the Mars goal, if that is indeed the goal? How is it serving the Cislunar space goal, if that is indeed the goal? And how does extending

station to 2030, does that mean that the Senate is also going to be proposing to add the equivalent of $4 to $5 billion a year to NASA's budget for human spaceflight on top of everything else? I can give you the answer to the last one. Yes. Please say yes, Jason. Make me feel better. And just yesterday, NASA's own inspector general said for at least the second time, I'll paraphrase here, that the potential for ISS to pay for itself through commercial use is, if you think that's possible, you're basically dreaming. I think the technical term was a snowball's chance in hell. Well, I haven't gone through and searched the entire document, but I do seem to recall

seeing the words highly unlikely repeated many, many times. It was a very rough Inspector General report, frankly, which was good because we need to have an honest discussion about this, right? We need to have an honest discussion about the station. It's benefits and costs. There may be a path forward, but we need to take a serious look at what are we trying to do. And that's what it comes down to for me. The other big question that follows directly on that is, what is it that we need to do that station is the only answer for? That seems to be a fairly small number of very specific tests as you read through that OIG report. More than that, what the OIG report was basically looking at was

the administration's plans to end major funding for ISS by 2025, which would mean that you would need to finish your entire program, whatever it may be, by 2024 for NASA at the rate that they're currently spending. Right. Which is not enough, they kind of point out, right? It's being underfunded for that kind of research. Well, it's understaffed. It's underfunded. The assets to get more astronauts up to the ISS have not appeared on the timeline that we expected them to, particularly through the commercial crew program. The Russians have continued to raise costs for seats on a Soyuz. We've bought another two seats through the end of 2019 so that we can actually increase the

number of astronauts up there to four in an effort to try and increase the science that we're doing up there. But even then, the OIG report states uncategorically that there is zero margin in these schedules to complete all of the things that NASA needs to do to claim that it's completed its program of human studies on the ISS. That's never a good place to be. Yeah. Well, and I wanted to ask too, is it true that ISS is the only way to advance some of these particularly? So they had a whole list in this report. We'll link to this report in the show notes. There's human health, there's astronaut health, things that they're trying to understand. I think the ocular degeneration, the stuff that's happening to the astronauts' eyes was a big one, ongoing radiation mitigation.

And then there were things like crew member, basically, can people not want to kill each other by the end of us being in a tin can together after two years? Some of them actually color code. Must happen. The ISS can happen somewhere else. But they act as if the gateway at the moon is not a reality. if the Gateway at the moon is not a reality? Couldn't you actually transfer some of these things, particularly with your technology needs for your ECLSS systems, your life support systems, your communication and things? Couldn't you make that part of your demonstration at the lunar space station as opposed to the ISS?

We had a presentation from the Gateway team a number of months back, and I was sort of surprised at the lack of life support technology that will be on Gateway. Gateway is not intended to be a constantly tended space station. Basically, it's a room that people can go and stay in for a period of about two or three weeks, and then people leave, and the station basically shuts down. There won't be life support on it during the time periods that they're not there. So it's not like a constantly functioning station in the way that ISS is, unless they want to redesign that, which would be significantly more expensive. And I think part of the reason that they're designing Gateway the way that they are is because they're trying to work within the budget confines of, as you said, running two,

trying to work within the budget confines of, as you said, running two, arguably three human spaceflight programs at the same time, unless some other dynamic changes, I don't see them redesigning Gateway. And I don't see them, Gateway being as useful a platform for testing that kind of stuff as Station is. So that begs the question, why are we building Gateway if it's not feeding into, because isn't Gateway supposed to get us to Mars at some level? So if we're not designing Gateway for long-term or closed-loop life support or for long-term human habitation, why are we doing it? So here's my theory on that, and it's sort of depressing. We're just full of sunshine today, aren't we?

Yeah, well, it's human spaceflight, man, and there are never good answers for this stuff. The issue is that you've got this commercial crew program that you've stood up now, right? It looks very likely that you're going to have these commercial crew capabilities, but there doesn't seem to be a commercial market outside of NASA for humans going into low Earth orbit or beyond. At least the sustainable one, right, that can stand out. At least the sustainable one, correct. So if ISS goes away and you don't have another destination for these rockets to go to, then you basically have invested all of this money for nothing and that capability goes away. If, on the other hand, you have this smaller, cheaper station

that can still be supplied by commercial capabilities and ostensibly at some point commercial crew, well, then you don't need station quite as much to keep those capabilities around. a platform to go to Mars, but since they're sort of cost constrained and they've got this sort of timeline issue now about whether or not you can keep the commercial crew program afloat, Gateway is sort of a bad, it's the worst of bad solutions because you definitely don't have the money to get to the surface of the moon, as we've discussed many times about the cost of a lander, and you don't have the money to get to Mars. So this is sort of a stopgap until we figure out what we're doing with station. In the midst of all of this, this relatively small but deeply involved nonprofit called the Planetary Society, with leadership from you guys and our board and Bill Nye have put together what seems, at least the beginnings of what seems to be lacking from Washington. And that is this new document that is at the core of

planning for the future of human spaceflight. And guys, I'm hoping we can go into this in some detail. Yeah, these are the principles that we just released a couple days ago. I'll just even kind of step back and say why, what this is and what it's meant to be. You hear us talking right now about these sometimes frustrating human spaceflight projects, that the intent is not to diminish human spaceflight, but we're critiquing the implementation of what's happening. The Planetary Society has, since its foundation, been supportive of human spaceflight for exploration, particularly to Mars. This time, as the administration came in, the new administration,

and once again changed the direction of human spaceflight policy in the United States, people were asking, how does the Planetary Society think about this? What's your view on this new plan? And instead of just having to do constantly reactionary statements to changing plans, I thought it would be more helpful to our members and to people outside the organization and to our policy goals to state what our actual principles are for human spaceflight, that those will be our bedrock. This is how we will evaluate. This is the framework by which we will evaluate human spaceflight proposals. And we intend to do principles more from other areas as well. We have some coming out regarding Mars sample return

really soon. We did these relatively carefully. We took in a lot of feedback. We did a member survey earlier this year. We took a lot of feedback from our members. We worked closely with our board of directors and here on the policy team kind of crafting some of these things and basically saying, what does the Planetary Society as an organization believe in with human spaceflight? And then we can use this every year to say, how is NASA adhering to these principles or not? And you heard us already kind of alluding to some of them.

So Matt, do you want to, should we just read through each one of them and kind of discuss them briefly here? And we can even say a little bit of context about how NASA is doing in each one. Absolutely, yeah. I think that's the best approach. So I don't know.

Do you want to read them in your sonorous, very impressive voice first, and then I can give them the heft of legitimacy. I will try to do this in my best Thomas Jefferson impression. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. These are important. NASA should send humans beyond low Earth orbit with the ultimate goal of landing humans on Mars. There is no more important immediate goal for humans in space than extending their presence beyond Earth orbit and doing so in a sustainable manner. While Mars is the ultimate goal of human spaceflight efforts, there is no getting to Mars without first succeeding in deep space. spaceflight efforts, there is no getting to Mars without first succeeding in deep space. Just like any child must learn to stand up before they walk and to walk before they can run,

so too must humanity prioritize the effort to extend its presence beyond low Earth orbit for ever-increasing durations. That's nicely done. It gives me chills. Well, they're your words, so thanks for the script. And fundamentally, accepting the Mars goal, accepting humans on the surface of the Mars goal. I mean, the way that we really see this is that Mars, that, that Mars goal should be feeding us the constraints and the focus for the human space flight program. But the most immediate step is to just get out of low earth orbit. And that's what I think for the society, you know, this can be if you want to go to the moon, you can do it in a smart way to incorporate the moon to that plan. If you want to have other reasons to do that, that is fine.

But we need to start pushing further out into space with humans. This is where I think we can find a lot of common cause and avoid that thing that Jason and I talked about at the beginning, that versus mentality, right? That the Mars versus moon. The Mars goal should inform these interim steps. But I think we can all agree that we just need to start extending this presence further out. How is NASA or how is NASA not following this first principle as we've just read it? Well, at the moment, we've got a number of things that NASA is doing in order to try and get beyond low Earth orbit. The primary project, of course, is the Space Launch System and Orion Crew Capsule. That is scheduled to launch with no astronauts aboard in 2021. That schedule has slipped a number of times. It was originally supposed to be 2018, then 2019, now 2021. That schedule has slipped a number of times. It was originally supposed to be 2018, then 2019, now 2021. The first time I believe EFT2 is supposed to launch

with astronauts in 2025 at the moment. Oh, is it 23 or 24? Yeah. As the aspirational. Yeah, it's questionable. But yes, so sometime in there, let's say early to mid 2020s might be a good encompassing thing. Right. So that's NASA's approach to get people beyond low Earth orbit. There have been a couple of companies working on the commercial crew program that have discussed plans to build rockets large enough to actually get beyond low Earth orbit. build rockets large enough to actually get beyond low Earth orbit. SpaceX has got the Falcon Heavy, which would be capable of launching something with the same mass as the Orion crew capsule or some other crew capsule. They've got their Dragon capsule that they've been working on that they're going to try and human rate as well. It's plausible that that could get us past low Earth orbit. NASA could basically buy rides on that.

Boeing has also got the, is it the CST-100 in partnership with a number of other companies. It's plausible that that would also get us beyond low Earth orbit. So there are a number of avenues to get us there, but all of them have faced a lot of technical difficulties and funding constraints over the past decade. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. All right. I'll go on to the second of these principles for human spaceflight from the Society. And I will leave the detailed text for our listeners to research on their own because, Casey, I think you're making this available online. Yes, absolutely. It's online and we will link to it in the show notes. Excellent.

All right, here we go. Engage the scientific community from the earliest stages of planning to ensure significant scientific return from its human spaceflight program. This sounds kind of obvious, but it actually needs to be said. This is an important thing, particularly for us here at the Planetary Society. And Jason and I actually worked on an abstract that we submitted to the COSPAR, the Comedian Space Research Conference, this year in Pasadena.

Jim Bell, our president, presented this. We basically argue that over the history of human spaceflight, the scientific return has been mixed. Apollo had incredible scientific return. But Apollo is kind of an exception in literally every way. Like you can't really draw a lot of extrapolations from Apollo, but you can do amazing science because they brought stuff back all basically everything we know about the age dates of the moon has come from Apollo, more mixed on things like Skylab, more mixed on things like the International Space

Station, where you had much grander, you know, because human spaceflight programs tend to need big coalitions of people to support them getting going. And then as going gets tough, they tend to strip down or at least de-scope some of the opportunities that they offer to the scientific community. And then you have kind of a questionable outcome. So particularly for something at the moon or going to Mars, having the scientific community engaged from the very beginning, and having a commitment to science, and also, frankly, skin in the game from the scientific community, putting that science return from humanity, from human space exploration in the context of the overall scientific needs, I think would be very informative. And so this is something they need to be early types of discussions.

And NASA has actually taken pretty good steps with this. They're making progress. I don't say they're essentially there yet. And Jason, you have actually seen more of these early presentations about the gateway. Do you see the scientific community being engaged in the Gateway? Yes and no. I'm seeing more engagement from an institutional level than I think you saw in previous early iterations of human spaceflight programs. You've got people embedded in the Science Mission Directorate from the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and vice versa. I think that's new. I don't think that's ever really been done before. But the real issue is not so much, are they involving scientists? The issue is, are scientists involving themselves?

We've seen sort of preliminary discussions. We've seen a little bit of information come out from the previous decadal survey talking about the kind of science that could be done in human spaceflight. But the real issue is the science community isn't saying this is the kind of science that should be done on human spaceflight. So the prioritization from the science side is, you know, if you guys are going to fly it anyway, we can put some science on there. But if you're just giving out the money, we'd rather do something else with it. And I think until the scientific community says, you know what, we really want to do something on that mission. And we're willing to put some funding behind it. And we're really willing to get community support behind it. I don't think science is ever going to be the lead

on any of this. Right. It's turning science from an opportunity into a priority, fundamentally, is what we talked about. So that's something to really consider. All right. The third of these principles from the Planetary Society for Human Spaceflight, one that has been important to the society right from the start as well, work with international and private sector partners to build a broad coalition of support for these efforts. No brainer. NASA's already doing a decent job with this. I think the interesting thing that we kind of mentioned in the explanatory text beyond this is that private companies obviously have always been involved in NASA's efforts in space. But the difference now with kind of this emergent commercial sector is that the companies themselves are not just a contractor relationship, but they could be seen in a partner relationship, more independent, more ambitious. They have their own goals, and we can share that common desire and outcome,

and we can leverage that ambition in the companies to add that as a partner to create a longer, more sustaining coalition. So I think they're doing a pretty decent job at this, or at least approaching it from this perspective. Jason, do you agree? I think the jury's still out on that one. I want to see what the details are of these arrangements, because I still think that there's a fundamental difference of opinion between the government and these private companies about what exactly these relationships are going to look like. I think government is seeing this as a way to divest some of the costs onto private industry. And I think private industry is just saying, hey,

if you guys want to pay for it, we are more than capable of doing this better than we used to be able to do. And I think that that's still a fundamental issue. Where do you think they are with international outreach for their deep space? On international, I think, yeah, I think NASA has always been really good at that. And I think they're actually getting to the point where they're more comfortable. It used to be that NASA had to be the lead and had to have everything on the critical path under their control. And international partners were allowed to come and play to a certain degree. But the main core mission was always entirely NASA. And I think you're seeing a real change of approach in that now, where you're talking about Europe, and you're talking about JAXA, and you're talking about other nations actually having a vital role in these missions in a way that I don't think that they have necessarily previously. And I think that's a really positive thing. It's an indication that, A, these other countries are now at a technological level where they can compete at that level. But more than that, it's a trust that NASA now has in these other agencies and their

competencies that they're willing to bring them on. And if you're ever going to share costs, that's the only way you're going to be able to do it to a significant degree. So we'll see again how that plays out. But I think I'm much more optimistic about that approach than the commercial stuff necessarily. And just as a rhetorical question, I wonder when or if we will ever see China joining into these international coalitions. They certainly are outside of the US. I would absolutely expect us to engage with China on a robotic mission long before there's

anything happening with human spaceflight. Until you start having a better understanding of how their space organization works, until there's more transparency, there's more trust between the two organizations, there's not much room for collaboration in human spaceflight. On to the fourth of these principles, plan for an orderly transition away from its funding and management responsibilities of the International Space Station by the mid-2020s unless adequate budget increases are provided to support deep space exploration efforts. And Jason, you've already told us that snowball in hell is about how much chance we have of seeing enough money to run two or maybe three human spaceflight programs. Well, as we said, as the OIG said, it's not snowball in hell. It's highly unlikely.

You're saying there's a chance. So we just kind of talked about the difficulty of this one. And this one is, frankly, the most difficult point to communicate it will be controversial but at the same time it comes from prioritizing deep space exploration if you truly prioritize it you have to either give it the funding it needs or be willing to deprioritize low earth orbit because we believe so strongly in that humanity needs to be pushing out beyond low Earth orbit, this is something we need to deal with. We obviously are riding this with some wiggle room. We should explore alternative ways. But at the same time, again,

we need to have an honest discussion. If we really want to pursue deep space exploration, the resources need to be there to support that. Principle number five, utilize low Earth orbit primarily for training and technology development that enables deep space exploration, which is a little puzzling to me because doesn't that imply you need to keep using the ISS as the platform for this training and development? No, not at all. And this was the part of the discussion that's been happening, and actually a response to some of this discussion that's been happening with the idea of commercializing or at least turning over.

And you'll see this is actually related to a secondary point that you'll be reading next. Not every astronaut can go right into deep space for the first time, right? And NASA has talked about this in the reports that they've been doing. You need to be able to have some access to low Earth orbit to validate new technologies, to train crews, to have ability to come back quickly if something goes wrong, right? You did this in Apollo's, what, like some of the early Apollo missions, you did low Earth orbit training, you didn't try to go to the moon first. To the extent that NASA retains access, and that's not necessarily a constant presence, it doesn't mean to say that we have to have the ISS or a constantly crewed space station. But you if you're going to have

access to low Earth orbit, use it in ways that will feed directly into, again, the technology development or training necessary to be successful in deep space. exists only to test technologies to get us to Mars, that was never what the purpose of ISS was when it was designed. So it's entirely plausible that you could design systems that were far more efficient testing the things that you now want to test. We were talking a moment ago about the commercial partnerships. A group like Bigelow Aerospace seems sort of ready-made to enter into some kind of an agreement with NASA to do something that accomplishes the same goals at a far lower cost than ISS. But again, I'd need to see what the details look like. Is NASA paying entirely for that and Bigelow is just basically a contractor or is Bigelow going to put something up and NASA just rents a little bit of space on this while Bigelow, you know, I don't know, has space tourists aboard as well or whatever it is that that they want to do. Those details really matter. And it has a huge impact on what NASA is going to

be able to do in the future. Right. And it's so it's difficult to evaluate this one right now. And even as Jason pointed out on the station, we have a multi-use idea for the station, we being particularly the United States, because it's designated as a national laboratory for microgravity research. Microgravity research has interesting research applications, but it's definitely not required to get into deep space. Again, this needs to be part of that consideration. What is the priority? What are we trying to do? And if we have that clarity, we should try to do it and not do everything because we don't have the money. Yeah. And just as sort of an example of that point, the space station is wonderful for testing the effects of microgravity on the human body. So the ocular degeneration that Casey mentioned

earlier, you can definitely test that on the ISS. But the radiation issue that Casey mentioned, the ISS is not a great place to test that because it's still somewhat in Earth's atmosphere. So it's not indicative of what the deep space atmosphere is actually like. Yeah, you're inside the Van Allen belts, which are that nice protective wall that makes it a much nicer place to be than true deep space. Right. And I mean, the Van Allen belts bring on their own issues, but it's a different type of shielding or a different type of environment that you're encountering. So, yeah. I guess I shouldn't have said the Van Allen belt. It's the magnetic field that protects us and doesn't protect Mars. Principle number six, create a pathway for the U.S. private sector to take on activities previously led by NASA in low Earth orbit. Is this somewhat addressed by this new Space Frontier Act that we talked about

at the outset of our conversation today, which certainly looks like if it makes it into law, it's going to make it a lot easier for companies to both launch and to operate Earth observation satellites. Yeah, you have regulatory reforms to make it easier for companies to get up there. But also, we're really looking at this in terms of the needs of the human spaceflight program, and also microgravity research. And I would say this is not replicating, we say a pathway, right? We don't have to guarantee replication. If there's no actual business sector to move into, If there's no actual business sector to move into or marketplace, then we shouldn't artificially support one. But we can experiment.

And this is what's going to be kind of interesting about the next few years of putting in some money for low Earth orbit commercialization. It doesn't have to replace the station's capability. But there are aspects of it, as Jason brought up with Bigelow, that might be worth exploring and see if we can have something beyond my new favorite word, a monopsony, which is a single buyer market, which is what NASA is right now in low Earth orbit with humans. Yeah. And by the way, the legislation that we talked about at the beginning, at the top of the show, it actually doesn't change regulations. It changes the regulatory structure and then instructs people to go and look at the regulations. So it's still left to be seen whether or not this legislation does make it easier for commercial entities to get into space. It'll depend on what the final product is. Right, because regulatory reforms have to be done through an internal process in the administrative branch, right?

Executive branch. That's correct. It does make a lot of calls for reports to be delivered within 90 or 120 days or whatever. in the administrative branch, right? Executive branch. That's correct. Does make a lot of calls for reports to be delivered within 90 or 120 days or whatever. Principle seven, plan its human spaceflight program in such a way that it makes significant, measurable steps towards sending humans to Mars and publicize a timeline and budget by which external parties and Congress can measure NASA's progress to this end. Well, as we heard from some of those senators, this is notably lacking, even though it's been asked for. Timelines, timelines, just give us a timeline.

You can't do it, don't do it. This is what it comes down to me. If you can't make a timeline in a realistic budget, then you need to reevaluate what you're saying about what we're capable of and what our expectations are for human spaceflight. It can at least have rough milestones, right, if nothing else. The value of having a timeline is that it makes it. That's the whole point to me, particularly as a nonprofit organization here. me, particularly as a nonprofit organization here, how are they doing along these goals? Can we evaluate how they're doing without being an expert in space policy? I remember very vividly a couple years ago talking to a reporter who was actually heartbroken when she learned that NASA actually didn't have a real plan to get people to Mars because they'd been talking about the journey to Mars hashtag for so long.

Because there was no timeline, there was no easy way for people to evaluate the progress. It doesn't have to be a crash course timeline, but if you're unable to give any sort of external metric by which to evaluate your progress, you're probably not doing very good along that progress. You're probably not making great progress towards your goal. And that's a problem. There is a corollary to that as well, though. And this is where Congress has to step up and take at least a little bit of responsibility

for all of this. And that is every time that NASA puts a date and a price on a project, it immediately becomes a target. And on something as vast and complex as getting to Mars, you're going to run into hiccups. You're going to have issues that you had not anticipated. You can do as much planning as you want over a 20-year project, but you're going to run into stuff. If you're developing technology you've never used before, if you're doing something that's never been done before, you're going to run into those unknown unknowns, right? If Congress demands that NASA embark on a project

with that many unknown unknowns and set a very specific timeline and date for it, and then just beat them about the head and neck every time that that date has to move to the right or that cost goes up, I totally understand why NASA would not want to commit. Now, that said, there does need to be oversight. I'm totally fine with the oversight. And there do need to be hard questions asked about the progress on something this large and this complex. But there are reasonable ways to do that without political grandstanding, without changing budget strategies year after year on something that requires a fairly stable budget. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one, is all I'm trying to say.

I should emphasize that the political aspect of this, and this is kind of what I was alluding to earlier in the show, about the political problem, and that, in a sense, Congress needs to be willing to deal with that. And that, in a sense, Congress needs to be willing to deal with that. If they're not happy with the timelines or if NASA missing timelines, then it ultimately falls to them for not providing the resources necessary to accommodate them. All the way back to Apollo, exceptional situation where you actually had, what were the budget reserves for Apollo, like 100%? Oh, there were never official budget reserves. I mean, the way that they

calculated those reserves was absolutely insane. They would figure out what they needed and basically triple it and go ask for it. It's in biographies of James Webb. I mean, he readily discussed the fact that there was no real scientific principle behind it because they were doing something. We can do cost evaluations today because we have a lot of historical data. They didn't have that back then. So there wasn't any way to do it. So you really were just pulling numbers out of a hat. Yeah. And just added more, right? I mean, and having the, but if you needed that extra buffer, because when things inevitably go wrong, you either push the timeline back or you have the resources available to tackle the problem. And it helps you keep the timeline.

That to me is the political problem. And having a milestone or rough timeline that does give you the caveats that Jason talked about, it pushes, I think, it pushes Congress to say, is the political support really there or are we just saying nice things when it's easy? Right, and that's instructive too. Because it's just like with Space Exploration Initiative back in 89,

clearly all of the nice things people said, there weren't enough of them. That's right. Right. Because Congress ultimately was unable to pony up for an ambitious purpose. And quite frankly, you saw the same thing with Constellation in 2004. But the other issue is NASA always gets beat about the head and neck about the overall cost of a project, but they never talk about that in terms of, well, yeah, it costs $30 billion, but that was over a 20 year period. What's the annual cost? And that's

actually what Congress cares about anyways. So those are the kinds of things that we should be talking about. The overall cost will be completely dependent on how stable the annual expenditures are. And if you have that reasonable annual expenditures necessary, right? That's what you need. That's right. And if you're not going to provide those, you can't be upset when they don't make their time. That's right. The cost is going to go up and the schedule is going to go to the right. And that's just the way that these things work. Oh, for the good old days when if you needed an extra hundred million, all you had to do was say, it'll help us beat the Soviets, get there a week earlier. Right. But keep in mind that only lasted until 1964, five years before we landed on the

moon. Budgets started coming down before we got there. So it's not a sustainable argument. Principle eight, prioritize human spaceflight technology development in areas that sustain human psychological and physical health for long-duration spaceflight. priority. And how much are you spending time on that versus the other research needs in low-Earth orbit on the station now, maybe on Gateway, or on any other kind of tended or access low-Earth orbit access for astronauts that they're going to be working on. And again, this gets down to the core of it. If you're going to be going into deep space, you need to know how to live there. And it seems like a good thing to try to figure out how to maintain human health. And psychological, I think, is one of those areas that we need to just be more open about because it can be hard on people to be in tin cans indefinitely or for months or years at a time. We need to learn

how to work around that. David Newman talked about this at the hearing last week, and she says there's some great research going on that looks very promising regarding radiation hardening for these deep space journeys. And so I hope she's right about that. But you're right, the psychological challenges. I mean, you see the shift in who gets to be an astronaut. It's something I've talked with people about, but I don't think I've ever mentioned as part of a show. From the early days of the Right Stuff guys, who were absolutely amazing, to now, when it seems like such an important part of becoming an astronaut is your ability to get along. It's a different group of humans, just as capable as the first group, largely men, of course. In fact, entirely up front.

But it does seem like, you know, here is something that is recognized by NASA as a very important factor. This is sort of outside of the conversation that we're having at the moment. But there's another aspect of that as well. I mean, you mentioned all those, you know, the Mercury 7 and the Apollo astronauts. And you're right. Those guys all, for the most part, came from the military. They were test pilots. They were really attuned to that type of a lifestyle.

But what they weren't ready for was what happened after. If you look at the lives afterwards, there was a lot of depression, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of divorces. So psychological health isn't just mission specific in this case, right? We've got to be able to figure out whether or not this is going to be really, really damaging to a human being when they get back, right? Yeah. Then that completes it. This is the document where the Planetary Society has laid out principles for human spaceflight. I guess now we see where this takes us.

spaceflight. I guess now we see where this takes us. Yeah, I mean, we want this to be the basis of how we're going to evaluate plans as they go forward, how we critique or compliment or support or don't. And of course, your feedback as a member is really important to us. So are we missing something? Are you really upset? Do you really like them? You can shoot me an email, let me know. This is something, again, we hope to do more of to just clarify the position of the organization, to lay out our cards on the table and say this is what we believe in. So I'd like to do more of this, and it's good to always have your feedback. Casey, how do you want people to reach you? I mean, they're welcome to write to planetaryradio at planetary.org.

Do you have another technique, another pathway? planetary.org. Do you have another technique, another pathway? So you can write your angry emails to Matt at Planetary Radio. And the good ones you can send to me, Casey, C-A-S-E-Y at planetary.org. That's always the best way to get ahold of me. All right. Gentlemen, I think that'll probably just about do it for today, unless Jason, you have some closing comments. No, I think I've depressed everybody enough today. I think my work here is done. Callahan strikes again. No, I mean, again, we have to have conversations like this.

If we're serious about human spaceflight, we need to be able to say when things do not make sense. And right now we're in a strange period of contradictions. Right now things are working okay, but it certainly portends for some uncertain times in the 2020s. If you accept the goal of just getting humans beyond the Earth orbit, we need to be able to prioritize that in order to be successful. And that's what we've got to start working on. Guys, these conversations we have on the first Friday of every month, they may sometimes be sobering, but I always have a good time talking to you. And I did again with

this one. Thank you very much. Oh, as always, Matt, it's a pleasure. Yeah, it's always fun. Thanks, guys. That was Jason Callahan, who you heard last there. He's the Space Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society, living very close to the Beltway in Washington, D.C., and, of course, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Society. They do terrific work. You can be part of it by going to planetary.org slash membership. Please consider joining us in this effort to very sensibly and logically and in a very inspiring way make sure that there is a viable future for humans in space

as we continue to learn about our solar system and beyond. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, and of course I will be back Wednesday of next week with the regular weekly version of this show. But we will return on the first Friday in September with another Space Policy Edition. Thanks very much for listening.