Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Divining Biden's Space Policy with Jeff Foust

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

A month before the U.S. election Joe Biden's campaign has yet to state its goals for space and NASA. We asked Jeff Foust, one of the best space reporters in the business, to help us piece together a working model of a potential Biden Administration space policy. We comb through the available evidence, combining insights from Biden's history in the Senate, his 8 years as vice president, and current activities in the Democratic House of Representatives and party platform to create a prediction of what might be the same, and what might differ from the Trump Administration's approach to NASA. Explore more here.  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/1002-2020-spe-jeff-foustSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the October 2020 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We are so glad to have you back. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Doesn't seem like it's been long, does it, Casey? Because it hasn't. I mean, after delaying the last one, we're back in fairly short order. How lucky that we just get to talk more soon than we would have otherwise. We get to have this conversation as the voting is already underway in the United States to pick the next president and everything else that's happening at the federal level. Welcome, Casey.

Thanks, Matt. As always, I'm happy to be on the show with you. That, of course, is Casey Dreyer, our senior space policy advisor at the Planetary Society and our chief advocate. We will be meeting his guest. It is perfectly timed. Casey, you have invited Jeff Faust, who is one of my heroes in our business. Yeah, Jeff Faust is a prolific, I think it's fair to say, writer on Space News, literally, and for the magazine Space News, and also covered space politics for a long time on his old website, News, and also covered space politics for a long time on his old website, spacepolitics.com.

He writes the First Up newsletter for Space News. That's a daily summary of all the things happening in space. And I asked him on the show to help me kind of divine and suss out Joe Biden's space policy, should he be elected for the next four years, just to kind of compile all the various bits and pieces of information we have, because the campaign has, at the time of this recording, not put out a formal statement on what its space policy will be. So this is an attempt to try to combine what we know and lay that out for our listeners in advance of the election.

It is another terrific conversation, Casey. I, of course, we've already got it in the can, as we say, and so I got to monitor it as you were talking with Jeff. And as I've said before on the show, I start every workday with First Up that Jeff Faust puts together for all of us in this business. And you can subscribe too. It's put up by Space News and I highly recommend it. Let us also recommend to those of you who are not yet members of the Planetary Society, come on, you knew this was coming, that you go to planetary.org membership, check us out, look at the different levels at which you can come in, look at all the

things we will do for you as a member, and that primary among those is representing you in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere around the world and making space the place for all of us through tools like this, the Space Policy Edition and Planetary Radio and our website and Facebook and everything else that we are up to. Please take a look and join this merry band at planetary.org slash membership. Matt, you should also say that we are in the midst of a membership drive at the Planetary Society. Trying to find 400 new members of the society. That's nothing. You can become one of those.

I mean, I think we ought to be going for 4,000 new members, and we are. But in this current drive, it's true. Giant leaps, Casey. Yes, there you go. Why not help us reach this current goal? This is a very short campaign. I'm hoping, I'm certainly expecting that we will make this goal of 400. Help us exceed the goal.

Help us get way beyond and really demonstrate that you are one of those who believes in what the Planetary Society is doing in the best way that you can do that, which is by becoming one of us, becoming part of our society. Casey, let's go back to, well, a little bit of what you'll be talking with Jeff today, actually a lot of that, but it also brought back to me your great conversation with Scott Pace, the Executive Secretary of the National Space Council. That was the September Space Policy Edition, of course. You've continued to write about this.

You've written about the positions of the candidates. And I think this is something you wanted to say a little bit more about. Yeah, well, obviously, this election is a pretty intense time for the country. And talking a little bit about why we're really focusing today on Joe Biden's space policy as his campaign, there's two reasons for that. One, I think the space policy of the Trump administration is quite clear. We've been living through it for the last four years, and really kind of succinctly summarized by what Scott Pace discussed in our last episode. So if you really want to drive down into the details of that, I recommend listening to that episode, that interview with Scott Pace. And to really just summarize it, they're taking again, you know, from focusing on the civil space side here, a whole of government approach to integrating space.

So it's a relatively high priority within the administration. It's a personal interest of Vice President Mike Pence. And you see that being reflected in the administration, that there is an awareness up and down the administration, whether it's in NASA or outside of NASA, that space is an important issue. You've seen a reasonable request go out this year for budget increases to NASA, about 12%, to support the Artemis program that came after a few years of flat to small cuts being proposed to NASA, but relatively, again, a high priority for the administration. High priority in terms of human spaceflight, a very symbolic approach to returning humans to the moon. And you're seeing that, again, kind of reflected in the rhetoric

of President Trump and the administration more broadly. And so I think, again, we kind of know what the president's space policy would be going forward. They have the 2024 goal for returning humans to the moon, which, again, would be the last year of a second Trump term if he wins reelection. Today, I really wanted to look at kind of the flip side of that. Joe Biden, who is the Democratic nominee, hasn't really said much about space. There's no formal campaign document about space. And I'll emphasize here that we did contact the Biden campaign press office asking for details and someone to actually come on the show to discuss this with us. And we never heard back from them. So as a service to the community and to our listeners and to our members here at the

Planetary Society, I thought it would be an important and useful thing to do to try to explore what we can piece together to really dive into. Can we find public statements about Biden himself and what he said about NASA over the years to look at previous behavior under the Obama administration when he was vice president? And to look at current activities done by the Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives for space, and again, try to compile all these together and say, here's what we can maybe predict based on this. But again, acknowledging that there is no clear space policy being set forward so that these are, in a sense, broad ideas and I'd say informed speculation, perhaps, of a potential Biden administration space policy. We get questions now and then about why, with all of our activity in DC, the Planetary Society doesn't endorse candidates. And I think that's explained by our status as a

nonprofit, but even more to it than that. There are two answers to this. And the first is just a legal one. The Planetary Society is what's called a 501c3 nonprofit. And that's a line in the U.S. tax code that says for our nonprofit status to be like, if you want to donate to us, you can, you know, people can deduct donations to us as a tax write off. In order to be that status, we cannot take active positions in electoral politics. So the key is electoral. So we can't endorse candidates. We can't help certain candidates get elected over others. And there's a legal reason we do that. We can talk about issues. Obviously, we do talk about issues. But in terms of candidates themselves, we're not allowed to, and so we cannot endorse any president. And then the second part of that answer is to our DNA, I'd say as an organization, we talk about space being for everybody.

Electoral politics has a way of being somewhat divisive, particularly right now, but also we're committed as an organization to working with whoever is in power. We do not take a position of preferring one party or one candidate over another because we are committed to making good progress and sharing and expanding our space exploration, space science endeavors with them. We want to be an open and inclusive organization, and that includes politically. Even if we could endorse a candidate, I would predict that we would not in order to preserve our, you know, again, this open door of saying what space is about what unites us, right? No matter your political persuasion, if you think space is a wonderful, beautiful,

exciting thing, if you're moved by the concept of exploring the unknown, if you want to search and seek out what is out there, you have a place here at the Planetary Society. And so that's, again, one of the reasons we don't dive into politics. And that's, again, why I want to just be careful when we are talking about this kind of episode, that this is not an endorsement of either candidate, what we're doing here. This is purely trying to provide information from what we know from as dispassionate position as we're capable of being. That's why I invited Jeff Faust onto the show today, because Jeff, I think, is one of his superpowers, in addition to being incredibly prolific, is that he has a very wonderful journalistic neutrality that he brings with him, a very clear analytical mind without injecting his own passions into it.

And I thought that would be a useful, neutral perspective to bring to this. So he's not an advocate for the Biden campaign. He's not an advocate for the Trump campaign. He's a journalist for Space News who's been in the business for a long time. I have seen how hard we and our colleagues at the society work at maintaining that position of neutrality for all the reasons that you've talked about. I think it's extremely important. And I guess I could take some pride in that every now and then I'm either called a mouthpiece for the left or an apologist for the right. And if I get those in roughly equal number, I figure, well, I guess I'm probably doing okay with the radio show. I'm very impressed by the society's performance. I'm biased, perhaps. But we're going to continue to strive for exactly that because we do want this to be the place where we can all come together. Space is the place, as the boss says. Yeah, couldn't agree more, Matt. So, again, this is our attempt to suss out and define and give you, in a sense, the tools for putting together what we know about the Biden campaign and a potential Biden administration.

And that is information for you as you go forward in the next month. But maybe I'll just add on top of that, space should not be your single issue vote in general. Citizens should have a broad number of things you use to evaluate who you vote for. I'm a space advocate. I do it professionally, right? And I am not a single issue voter for space. I take a broad number of inputs. So this is an input into your process for choosing how to vote. And again, we hope it's a useful service that we provide for you. All right. Here is Casey's terrific conversation with Jeff Faust of Space News, creator of the First

Up column, newsletter, I should say. We will be back at the other end of this conversation to wrap up. Jeff, thanks again for being here today on the Space Policy Edition. Thanks for the invitation, Casey. It's great to be on. We just had a presidential debate last night by the time that we're recording this. Maybe people noticed that space did not come up as one of the prime topics that Chris Wallace asked both Biden and Trump. This is something that we, I think, deal with every four years or so about space policy and presidential campaigns. I want to take a big picture of how we approach this, both as space advocates in mind and

journalists on your end. Is this something that we're used to seeing, that space policy is generally in the background here? Yeah, 2020 is an outlier for many reasons, but the lack of attention to space policy is not one of them. Space is a very low-level issue traditionally for presidential campaigns among both Republicans and Democrats. There are simply just so many bigger issues from the economy to foreign policy to social issues to this year, the pandemic that affect far more people than space exploration or NASA in general do. It's just not something that attracts a lot of votes. It doesn't sway that many voters. So it just simply doesn't get a lot of attention. I think that's always good to remember. It's not a visceral issue, I think, for a lot of people. And it doesn't change our day-to-day life, or I'd say just in general voters' day-to-day life much.

And so it tends to be treated as such. But I was kind of wondering if the Biden campaign in particular is providing less than even usual, or maybe we'll just say that less kind of judgmentally. Is there a difference in how you're seeing the two campaigns talk about space this time compared to your experience with past campaigns? I remember going back to the Democratic primary season, way back last year when there were 20 or more candidates running. Around this time last year, I tried to reach out to as many of the candidates as I could, including the Biden campaign, to ask them just a few very basic space policy issues, including what they thought about NASA's plans to return to the moon.

You probably won't be surprised that none of the campaigns actually provided any sort of substantial policy on it. In fact, very few even provided any sort of response at all, other than the occasional PR person saying, any sort of response at all, other than the occasional PR person saying, I don't know, I'll look into it, and then not hearing from that campaign again before that candidate dropped out. So it was a very low-level issue, and this was back before the pandemic. And certainly now with the pandemic occupying so much of our attention regarding the response to it and the economic fallout from it, space is even a much lower priority issue. The Trump campaign can point to what the Trump administration has done in the last four years on space. If they want to, they can point to a lot of the space policies they've

done. They can bring up Space Force, of course, as the president often does on the campaign trail. But the Biden campaign just doesn't really talk much about space at all. Because again, when Biden is is out giving campaign speeches or talking with people, there are a lot of other bigger issues on people's minds than whether we're going to return to the moon by 2024 or not. We talked a little about the primaries, you know, which kind of makes sense to me, I think in the time that I've been observing space politics and policy, it makes sense that during the primary stage, there's not a lot of highly developed policy for these broader topics beyond like the really big issues that the candidates are kind of identifying themselves with by choice. But by the

time you get to maybe the month before the election, generally, I've seen, you know, in places like Space News, that there is some at least written statement from campaigns outlying just some broad approaches to space. And I usually associate that with the campaigns themselves kind of staffing up, anticipating a potential transition. But I haven't seen that yet. Are you anticipating any further clarification from the Biden campaigners or any other kind of information that you've been able to hear from those from that campaign representatives themselves on any kind of issues of space? We certainly haven't heard anything. I would certainly love to hear more from the Biden

campaign about what they would do on space. They just really haven't said a lot. And I think that just gets back to the overwhelming crush of other issues taking place right now and the focus that are on those issues. We look back to May, around the time of the Demo 2 commercial crew launch. The Biden campaign actually did arrange a brief media event with a couple of their campaign surrogates, Bill Nelson, the former senator from Florida, and Charlie Bolden, the former NASA administrator. They were really just talking about commercial crew and mentioning Biden when he was vice president, playing a role behind the scenes to try and win congressional support for the program back in the 2010 time period when the Obama administration

was trying to make its own stamp on space policy. They were a little reticent, though, to commit much to what a Biden administration would do when it comes to space. And after the successful Demo 2 launch, the Biden campaign actually put out a statement expressing their congratulations to NASA for the successful launch, noting that the Commercial Crew Program dated back to the Obama administration, or the Obama-Biden administration, as they would put it, and their support for that program. But there really hasn't been too much then. The Democratic Party platform that came out around the time of the virtual Democratic Party convention this summer does include one paragraph about space policy, specifically NASA, came out around the time of the virtual Democratic Party convention this summer,

does include one paragraph about space policy, specifically NASA. It suggests really a sort of continuity of policy in that it's not calling for any major changes. It expresses support for what it terms NASA's work to return Americans to the moon and go beyond to Mars. It doesn't explicitly support a 2024 human return to the moon that the Trump administration is seeking, but it does support human space exploration beyond Earth orbit. It specifically calls out support for Earth observation missions, which is something the Trump administration has tried to cut unsuccessfully in its budget proposals over its first term. And it also calls for continuing the ISS, which is something that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have long expressed support for. So just by reading that one paragraph of a roughly 90-page document, you get a little bit of an indication of what a Biden administration might

do in space. And that is to first order, pretty much stay the course with maybe taking the foot off the gas when it comes towards returning humans to the moon, but not swerving off into a completely different direction. Yeah, I thought that was interesting seeing this. I think the Democratic Party platform, and we'll include a link to this in the show notes for our listeners, is, to my knowledge, the most, I think, explicit statement on space policy, not just of the campaign, but just in a Democratic Party platform in recent years. It seems like a beefier statement, even though it's, again, it's a platform statement. So it's kind of broad. But that did give some some context. I would say again, to emphasize this in terms of how we as observers or fans of space policy are trying to stitch together what little information we have, we're kind of trying to

connect these dots, right? I thought it was at least helpful last night during the debate that Biden clarified, he stated, I have this this quote here, he says, the platform of the Democratic Party is what I approved of, right? He clarified, like, this is something that I personally signed off on. And that implies then a certain level of, you could tie it maybe more clearly to what a potential administration would then look at. Yeah, that's correct. He's really taking ownership of this document and saying this policy platform, this party platform, is his blueprint for what he would try to do in broad strokes in a Biden administration. So you can look at that and then look at that one paragraph on NASA and conclude that he would not immediately make a lot of changes to what NASA is doing. And to some degree, that makes perfect sense. If he takes office in January, there are going to be a lot of other things to deal with. He's not going to have a lot of bandwidth to deal with NASA and making a lot

of changes. So as long as he doesn't see anything that needs to be seriously changed at the space agency, I would expect a lot of NASA programs would continue pretty much as they are now, but perhaps at some cases, like a human return to the moon at a slower speed. Right. Let's talk about kind of how you as a journalist, and I would say just me too, as a policy analytical perspective, how we try to build this out. Like what, how are we trying to integrate this information that we have? Because the fundamental problem is we don't have a clear statement from the Biden campaign. For our listeners, if we want to encourage them, how can they themselves try to use these tools to analyze what a potential policy would look like? Where do you look? So you've looked here, you've

stated for, you know, Democratic Party platform, you reference kind of the history of Joe Biden in the Obama administration. How else do you try to integrate limited data to create some kind of coherent analysis for how to interpret this? You know, you look at what's available publicly. And besides his time in the White House, you know, Biden doesn't have a space policy track record. He spent decades in the Senate, but he wasn't involved with any of the major committees that deal with either authorizing or appropriating funds for NASA. Delaware is not a space state in the same way that Florida or Texas is. So it's not really a front of mind issue for him. So he's not really involved in space policy during his time in the Senate. So you look at what we do have available, you know, you sort of put feelers out behind the scenes to people who do know what's going on, who may have contacts with the campaign. They may not know much more than what's publicly available, but you at least sort of try and open those additional avenues of discussion and insight into what the campaign is thinking about and what they might be thinking about looking ahead to an administration. kind of a frustration, which I think is an on-purpose function of the Senate, is that a lot of relatively non-controversial legislation gets passed by either voice vote or what's called

unanimous consent. And when they do that, there's not what's called a roll call vote that actually puts a yay or nay vote to a particular senator. So going back the last 25 years or so, 30 years of NASA authorization votes, there's not a ton of NASA legislation that's really focused on NASA. There's so little actual roll call votes. You can't tie it one way or another to Joe Biden or really any other particular senator. So you can say that he unanimously consented. He didn't dissent off of many NASA authorizations. But as you point out, just his role in the Senate didn't naturally intersect with space issues. And maybe to really state what a basic takeaway is, maybe space is in a sense,

kind of an idiosyncratic interest of an individual politician in that case, right? So if Delaware is not a space state in a broad sense, like Texas or Florida, then to have an opinion on NASA while serving as the representative of that state, you would actually have to have a personal interest, almost. Maybe the lesson that we can learn from this is that despite, you know, what he's, you know, the kind of this lack of information states that there's maybe not a strong personal interest in space, but that doesn't necessarily drive policy outcomes. That just means he hasn't gone out of his way to engage on the issue. Yeah, I think that that's a that's a pretty fair assessment. I think you've seen over the years in Congress, the real champions for for the space

agency or specific programs of the space agency have been individual members that either have a stake because of what's going on in their state or district, or simply because for one reason or another, they really like it. You know, like John Culberson, the former congressman from Texas, was, you know, a big supporter of the Europa Clipper mission and ensured that mission got funding well beyond what NASA and the administration would ask for over the years, simply because he thought it was a really interesting and important mission to find out whether Europa might be potentially habitable. That may be sort of an extreme example, but I think that's a point that for an issue

like space, which also isn't particularly partisan, you see a lot of working across the aisle between Democrats and Republicans on space issues. Traditionally, the divisions tend to be more parochial than partisan over the years. You don't see that sort of obvious in a presidential campaign as much. It reflects, in a sense, that more parochial, non-ideological, in a sense, almost by definition, if it was a major issue, if there was a big Trump policy and a big Biden policy, that would almost imply that there's an ideological component that would then be defining it. So perhaps we should be grateful that there's no big space issues being discussed at the campaign level in a presidential campaign. Yeah, I mean, that, you know, certainly avoids a sort of ideological partisan tug of war, but it also sort of ensures space keeps a lower profile, because it is not something that's going

to drive one particular party over another on a particular issue and drive, say, votes on an issue. It is a much lower level issue. It is something where you see a lot more cooperation behind the scenes, particularly on Capitol Hill, on space issues. It really comes down to, as you mentioned earlier, sort of individual interest. And, you know, we've seen that in this administration where the vice president, Mike Pence, has taken a personal interest in space and he has chaired all these meetings of the National Space Council, in fact, reconstituting the National Space Council, which had been dormant for a quarter century, pushing out a series of space policies on various issues, including a human return to the moon. But you didn't see that with, you know, when Biden was vice president, or for that matter, when Dick Cheney was vice president, you know, in the George

W. Bush administration. It was Pence's personal interests that became a driving force for space policy in this administration. And, you know, I don't think we can expect Kamala Harris to have that same sort of interest because she also has not been very public out there about space policy in one way or another during her limited time in the Senate so far. Yeah, why don't we expand on that from the Senator Harris's perspective? She's from California, right, which, you know, can be argued as a somewhat of a space state, even though the just the size, the economic footprint of California is so massive that having three NASA centers and a bunch of aerospace contractors is a relatively, you a relatively minor contribution to it. So what do we know about Kamala Harris's

background and engagement with space? Her background in space has also been very limited. She has not been involved in a lot of the policy debates in Congress on these issues so far. And again, as you mentioned, there's a lot of things going on in space in California between the NASA centers and the space companies, large and small in the state, but that tends to get dwarfed by the much bigger issues that are going on, you know, in the much bigger industries going on. So it's, again, it's not something that she has shown much of a particular personal interest in. And it's not something that's really come up in a lot of her committee activities. So we'll have to wait and see if she becomes Vice President Harris, if she will take any sort of role in space policy that has in from time to time in the past been something that has been a vice presidential responsibility. Casey and his guest, Jeff Faust of Space News. We'll be back after this short break.

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Thank you. Before you worked at Space News, you ran a number of very interesting websites. One of those was spacepolitics.com, something I used to read every day. How long did you run spacepolitics.com, something I used to read every day. How long did you run spacepolitics.com, just briefly? Yeah, I started spacepolitics.com in 2004. I put it on hiatus when I joined Space News in 2014. So I ran it about 10 years, probably a little over 10 years to be exact. So seeing a lot of ups and downs in space policy during the Bush and

Obama administrations during that decade. I kind of chuckled when I was doing some research for this podcast, again, looking through this history of what can we find about Biden, just any statements with NASA. The most relevant pieces I found were actually archived on spacepolitics.com back in 2008. Do you remember those? This is the Biden on space post that you had from that. Right. Yeah, this was back when he was trying to make it, you know, that he was involved with the Obama campaign back then. Yeah, that was a long time ago. And that's about the most relevant we have. But it was interesting. Reading through that, Yeah. And that's about the most relevant we have. But it was interesting. Reading through that,

it was reacting at that point to the planned end of the space shuttle and the economic and particularly job impact that it would have in Florida and a number of other key states. And that actually kind of raised this idea with me of this idea, what we were saying earlier, is like, is space that doesn't really move many votes? That may be true. I can see that from a national perspective. But do you think that's actually true like for a state like Florida, or a state like Texas? Texas isn't so much of a, maybe it's becoming more purplish, but Florida is known classically as a swing state. So you would think at some level, by the number of jobs and the kind of the preeminence of space in Florida, that that would actually play into electoral politics at some point. So is that surprising that we don't see that in these recent cycles? Yeah, and I think part of that is that we call Florida a space

state, but most of that space activity is limited to one very small part of the state, the space coast around Cape Canaveral, Brevard County and environs. That's where the part of the state, the Space Coast around Cape Canaveral, Brevard County and environs. That's where the concentration of the space activities and the space employment is. And that tends to be actually has been increasingly become a Republican area, even though, you know, it's part of what's considered the I-4 corridor, which is the swing area of the swing state between the more Republican northern part of Florida and the more Democratic southern part of Florida.

But if you're trying to swing that corridor, you're much more likely to spend time in places like Orlando and the Tampa Bay area, which are much larger, have much greater populations, but have less involvement in space. So the idea that space can be a swing issue, I don't think is nearly as strong. I don't know if it's necessarily that strong in 2008. I think it's even less strong now simply because of the shifts in voting patterns in the state. that space is this big swing issue in a big swing state has really never come to fruition. And I think it's going to be even less true this year simply because people are going to be much more concerned about much bigger issues regarding the pandemic and the economic impacts of it than a space program that seems to be doing pretty good at this point in which neither party is talking about making major changes one way or the other in space policy in the next four years.

Yeah, I guess we can ask Bill Nelson how his connection to space helped him on his reelection attempt back in 2018 in Florida. Rick Scott unseated him. And Rick Scott was never a strong space advocate the way that Bill Nelson had, right? Hard to compete, though, with Bill Nelson for being. Yeah, you know, Bill Nelson is a whole other tier when it comes to space advocacy, you know, in part because he got to go to space himself, in part, because he was in Congress at the time back in the 1980s. Although, as governor, Rick Scott did do some work to help lure space companies to Florida, especially as the Space Coast region was recovering from the 2008 recession and the end of the shuttle program. So he did play a role in that. He actually does today in the Senate,

sit on the Senate Commerce Committee, the same committee that Nelson was once the top Democrat on. Again, we've kind of discussed a couple of ways of evidence that we can use to kind of create a likely predictive model, let's say, or a reasonable predictive model for a possible Joe Biden administration on space policy. Where do you see the recent activity in the House of Representatives, which swung back to the Democrats in 2018, they released their NASA authorization bill, which had a number of changes compared to the Trump proposal for NASA, particularly with human spaceflight returning to the moon. Where do you see that legislative activity fitting into in terms of influencing a potential Biden administration? Well, it's interesting that early this year, that got the House version of a

NASA authorization bill, which had co-sponsorship by both the top Republicans and the top Democrats on the House Science Committee. It got a lot of attention because it was taking a very different direction towards that return to the moon, which for NASA is relying on a similar public-private partnership that the agency used for commercial cargo and commercial crew. The House wanted something that was a little bit more of a traditional procurement program that would be government-led with the government owning and operating the landers. They were also looking for a lander that could launch as a single piece on the space launch system rather than allowing companies to come up with solutions where landers are launched in modules on commercial rockets and then assembled in lunar orbiter at the gateway for lunar missions. That got a lot of attention in January and into February.

And then the pandemic hit and all that discussion really shut down. And it's notable that we haven't seen any public activity on that authorization bill since early this year. It was supposed to at one point go before the full House Science Committee for what they call a markup, an approval, and send it up to the full House House in March, that got put on hold by the pandemic. And, you know, there really hasn't been any action on that bill since then. So it's an open question whether that would have much of an influence on a Biden administration when it comes towards reshaping a Artemis program for human return to the moon. By the time that Biden takes office, if he wins election in November and is inaugurated on January 20th, NASA will be very close to making

a decision on which of the three companies that selected for the human landing system program in April, the one team led by Blue Origin, the one led by Dynetics, and then SpaceX, which one of those they want to continue into development. And part of that decision is going to depend on what sort of funding NASA gets for fiscal year 2021, if that decision is in fact made by February, you know, and obviously the progress the companies have made on the proposals. It would start to get a little bit more difficult to change direction significantly in that approach, although if you're not rushing to get back to the moon by 2024, you might be able to step back and slow down on that for a while. Certainly, we've got that House bill, but I don't necessarily see that as an obvious template for what a Biden administration would do for a human return to the moon, you know, if they take office next year? Yeah, I've been trying to kind of compare those

two things. The question is, basically, to what degree is the House bill, a reflection of kind of a group of, again, maybe potentially idiosyncratic House Democrats who are writing it primarily versus what would fit best with a potential Biden administration. Just kind of unify a couple of these themes that we've been discussing, right? So again, let's just say, should the election swing towards Biden and he comes in in January of next year, I see a lot of echoes back to 2009, where Obama came in during a pretty tumultuous time for the country economically. So there's going to be economic issues, you're going to be taking in the presidency in the

context of the virus. And as you pointed out, space is going to be very low on the list of immediate priorities. And then kind of working into that with Biden's general lack of personal interest in space, that's not going to kind of help bump it up at all. In that context, it strikes me as it almost works towards consistency for particularly the human spaceflight program, because you won't, as you kind of point out, you're probably not going to see any major reshuffling, because that would create a political battle where you don't really want one. If you need all of your political chips being put down for virus or economic response, you don't want NASA to be taking up much energy.

Is that something that seems like a good way to kind of think of this? Yeah, I think that that's a good assessment. I think the big difference between 2009 and what a Biden administration might see in 2021 is that the Obama administration in 2009 was effectively on the clock. The shuttle was in its final couple of years of operations. It was down to a final handful of missions. There was pressure to see whether NASA's current approach to the future of human spaceflight, the Constellation Program, was the right approach or not. They had been underway for a few years.

There are questions, not surprisingly, about costs and schedule overruns. That prompted the Augustine Committee in 2009 to bring together a blue ribbon panel to look at it and make its recommendations. And that prompted the changes that the Obama administration made, or least tried to make in 2010 regarding human spaceflight. The difference now is that there is no real urgency. The space station is going to be operating, barring any sort of unfortunate incident, probably through most of the 2020s. So there's no sort of short-term deadline to deal with the ISS there. You've got a plan to return humans to the moon, but if you don't get to the moon by 2024, it's not like the program falls apart. If you get there in 2026 or 2028, that might actually be a bit more technically reasonable approach, maybe a more fiscally reasonable approach, depending on how things work. So you don't have the same level of urgency that the Obama administration faced, which I think would bolster the argument that you're making for a greater degree of continuity, that instead of making wholesale changes to NASA's programs,

you look at refining some of those. And maybe that means refining the human landing system program and how the landers are procured. Maybe that means moving away from a 2024 goal. Maybe we get something closer to what actually NASA was pursuing a couple of years back when it was talking about setting up the gateway first and then landing humans on the moon around 2028 until Vice President Pence's speech in March of last year that moved up the deadline to 2024 and shook up that policy. So you might see changes like that,

but you would not see sort of the wholesale disruption otherwise. And I guess to add to that list of differences from the Obama transition to a potential Biden transition, the SLS and Orion are far further along programmatically than the constellation hardware was at that point. So in a sense, it'd be much more disruptive, I would think, to attempt to say, you know, there's always the ongoing issues with SLS and large contingents of the space advocacy world that says to cancel the SLS or so forth and so on. But I always considered a pretty stable program. And particularly, again, during a transition here, it'll have been going on for 10 years at that point. So that seems like it'd be much harder

to pull off than what they tried to do with Constellation. Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment in that there are a lot of criticisms of the SLS in particular in parts of the space community, but Congress still funds it, whether it's Democrats or Republicans in charge. You know, the House actually added money to the SLS program in its fiscal year 21 spending bill, that with a Democrat-controlled House, because there were members, particularly some of the Republican leadership of the Republican leadership of the Appropriations Committee pushing for that money. It was very easy to say, we'll go ahead and we'll add that money to that.

We'll just add money for Earth science as well. So you don't have any obvious sign that a Biden administration would come in and say, we're just going to shut down the SLS on the eve of its first launch. That doesn't seem to be a likely outcome simply because it's not going to be a priority for them. And to try and make a move like that would prompt a lot of opposition, probably among members of both parties, depending on where they represent in their roles in the program, if they try to do something like that. We've talked a lot about implicitly here, human spaceflight side of NASA, which tends to be

the shorthand for when people talk about what a president wants to do with space exploration. But your background, I should note, is in planetary science. In addition to being a great journalist on space, you just picked up your doctorate in that area too. But let's talk about on the robotic side and the science side of NASA. What are ways that a Biden administration would approach this, if any way, differently than what we're seeing now under the Trump administration? Yeah. I don't see any signs that they would make major changes to robotic exploration, the science program. You know, as noted, the platform specifically calls out continued, in fact, increased support for earth science, which has been a part of NASA,

that the Trump administration, its various budget proposals has tried to cut. And Congress has opposed those cuts and basically kept the Earth science program pretty well funded, despite those efforts to, in particular, kill some of the Earth science missions. We've seen the same thing in astrophysics. The WFIRST, now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has been on the chopping block for a couple of years in NASA budgets, and Congress has continued to provide funding for that mission. There are signs that that will continue to be the case as the FY21 appropriations continues to work its way through Congress. So, you know, I don't see any signs that the Biden administration would try and do anything like that. that the Biden administration would try and do anything like that.

But again, that's a sort of a lower level issue than even the human spaceflight program, which, as we previously discussed, is not a particularly high priority issue likely for a Biden administration in general. It'll be interesting to see how much they commit to, as Administrator Bridenstine often does, to say, well, we're going to follow the decadal, whatever the recommendations of the decadal are, we'll continue to follow them, you know, and certainly that's going to be important as the Astro 2020 decadal survey wraps up and gets published early next year, as the Planetary Science Decadal Survey starts to ramp up right about now for publication publication in 2022 in terms of what priorities it sets for future astrophysics and planetary science missions and the funding requirements. But I expect to see a fair amount of continuity in that, as well as some of the big flagship

missions like Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return and programs like that, that, you know, take years to execute and billions of dollars and require some degree of policy stability in order to successfully execute. Yeah. And that's where I think the really the value of having those decadal surveys. I mean, that's the advantage in a sense of the science side of NASA, where you have these 10 year agreed upon priority documents documents that help design specifically for these types of transitions. And of course, human spaceflight doesn't have that, doesn't have that kind of same process by which to forge that kind of broad policy agreement. And so you just tend to see less, I would say, and maybe it's more kind of what you were saying there, a matter of degree

of support. What's the relative priority in terms of funding to pursue some of these various aspects of science? And I think just looking at Joe Biden's campaign literature in terms of how he talks about climate change, and of course, the relative prioritization of earth science under an Obama administration, back when we saw that, you would likely see, I would say, more funding directed towards earth science as a priority. And then kind of given the overall economic status, everything else would be kind of slotted in based on that. But that would seem to strike me as a priority based on these intersections with Biden campaign priorities. Yeah, I think that that's true. Like I said, you know, it's not a high

priority for them. But certainly he's Biden has talked about supporting what the scientists say, whether it comes to climate change, or developing responses to the pandemic, might as well keep supporting scientists when they come up with recommendations about planetary science and astrophysics and other missions. Right. You know, in a sense, I think we're both kind of circling around, in a sense, it's not very newsworthy in a way, right? That it seems like there'll be a lot of consistency. But what would you say, just to kind of really state it clearly here at the end of our discussion, the most likely areas of change or of disagreement, or let's say divergence between the two potential administrations in the next four years, where do you see that the most likely

deviations happening from the current path? I think the biggest deviation is going to be in the pace of human space exploration. We've got the policy to return humans to the moon by 2024. That is a very challenging goal. If you talk privately to people at NASA, they know it's going to be tough to achieve. But if you don't set that sort of audacious goal, you're not going to achieve it. But I would expect a Biden administration to come in and say, we can save money in the near term to push out that deadline, keep going with the Artemis program in general, SLS, Orion, develop human landers at a slower rate, do more robotic missions to the moon, work on the gateway, but push off the expense of the human landing system program, which is, if you look in the strategy that NASA put out

recently about its lunar exploration plans, you know, a big chunk of the money that it expects to spend on it over the next five years is on the human landing system program, simply because a lot of the other elements like SLS and Orion are nearing the end of their development. I could see a Biden administration coming in and say, let's slow down on that. We support returning humans to the moon, but it doesn't have to be done by 2024. It can be done at a slower pace. We may see, again, some of the things that NASA has been trying to do with low-Earth orbit commercialization get slowed down as well if the administration thinks that spending money on supporting commercial space stations could be funding better spent elsewhere in the agency or outside of the agency. Those

might be areas where we would see the biggest change. But I think, again, as I said, it's more sort of not veering off on a completely different course, but slowing down a little bit, taking the foot off the gas rather than taking a sharp turn at the next exit sort of approach to space policy. So I think those would be the most likely large changes that we would see in NASA. I don't see big changes in the science program or space technology or aeronautics. Space technology and aeronautics tend to be smaller programs anyway and don't get a lot of attention even in the best of times. So I wouldn't expect a lot of changes there. Where what I would expect to see changes are some of the big ticket exploration programs, particularly if the administration comes in and says, we've got a lot of other higher priorities to deal with the economy and the pandemic and so on, a human return to the moon can wait a couple of years.

All right. Jeff Faust is the senior staff writer at Space News. And he also writes the daily newsletter, which I strongly recommend. First up, you can subscribe at spacenews.com. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us today and helping us work through this. Well, thanks, Casey. It was a great discussion and I was glad to be on the show. Planetary Society Senior Space Policy Advisor Casey Dreyer talking with Jeff Faust of Space News and the First Up newsletter. And you can check that out, by the way. It's free from spacenews.com.

As I said, that's how I start my workday every day reading Jeff stuff. It's a, it's quite a comprehensive collection of everything that's going on above our heads and a lot of it down here on the ground. Casey, great job. Thanks, Matt. And again, just thanks to our guest, Jeff Faust for joining us today. Next month, I believe Matt, we will be recording after the election so we can discuss whether these predictions or analyses are going to be more or less relevant at that point. And hopefully there'll be some exciting. We'll be celebrating the launch of the first full commercial crew complement to the space station, which is now set for October 31st. So something inspiring to look forward to.

Very exciting. You know, if the first Friday in November weren't after the election, it's November 6th, I think we'd want to push the show back a week, but we don't have to. So we hope that you will all rejoin us again on the first Friday in November for the next Space Policy Edition. Of course, I'll be around weekly with the regular Planetary Radio and lots of great stuff coming up there. In course, I'll be around weekly with the regular Planetary Radio and lots of great stuff coming up there. In fact, I will mention our Poetry Space Poetry Spectacular coming up on October 14th. Join me and the editors of a terrific new collection of poetry about space and space exploration and a whole bunch of celebrity poem readers. One more plug.

Visit us at planetary.org slash membership. Please take a look. Look at all the great stuff that we have underway. Look at all the benefits for you as a member of the society and how inexpensive it is to become part of the society. Again, it's planetary.org slash membership. Casey, I look forward to our interacting over the next month and to joining you for the next Space Policy Edition. Me too, Matt. I always look forward to it. First Friday of the month.

To all of you, have a great month. Those of you who are in the United States, please vote if you haven't already. We will see you on the other side of the election. This is Matt Kaplan at Astor, everyone.