Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Houston, We Have a Space Force (with Brian Weeden)

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Legislation signed by President Trump in December formally established the 6th branch of the U.S. armed services, the first such expansion in 72 years. What exactly will the new Space Force do? How big of a deal is this? What does this mean for the militarization of space? Dr. Brian Weeden from the Secure World Foundation joins the show to help us answer those questions. Learn more about this month’s topics through links on the episode page.  https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-45.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back, everyone, and welcome to a brand new year of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined again by the chief advocate of the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Casey, Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year, Matt. Happy to be with you for 2020. And technically, the end of the decade, though obviously most people will consider this the start of a new decade. Don't talk to me, you're zero people, I know. But the significant digit has changed. It's the 2020s now. So yeah, happy time to be talking with you about space. It's going to be an interesting decade ahead. So are you one of those who, like me, you get this little twinge

when people say this is the, we've just gone into a new decade when really it's a year away? Yeah, I know. I go back and forth. Conceptually, I know it. But also, it's way more convenient just to say, hey, the digit changed and let's year zero. That didn't happen. That was 2020 years ago. So for rounding sake, I'm a decade man. Well, however you feel about the calendar decade, we are now well into the fiscal year of 2020. And I know that's something that you want to talk about once we get through our initial housekeeping comments. You knew it was coming. We weren't going to let you escape from this, folks. It's time to consider becoming a member of the Planetary Society at planetary.org membership. Because if you are

enjoying Space Policy Edition, and thank you to all of you who write to us and tell us how much you enjoy this monthly portion of the show, but also everything that we do every week with Planetary Radio, well, for that matter, all the good work that you compliment us for that the Planetary Society does, why don't you become a part of it? You can stand behind all of this by going to planetary.org slash membership

and joining the tens of thousands of others around the world who are using that membership to stand behind everything Casey does, everything that the Society does. Yeah, if you can afford a cup of coffee a month at the store at a Starbucks, you can afford to be a member of the Planetary Society. So I think it's a pretty good deal. We got one other deal that's still underway, but this may be the last time that we can make this offer, at least on the Space Policy Edition. And Casey, that is, well, it's almost here now, your day of action. It is. The day of action is February 10th in Washington, D.C.

We have training on the 9th, and that's the day that members of the Planetary Society from around the United States come together, and we in groups meet with congressional representatives to talk about space exploration, why we need it, why it's important, and to advocate for further investment in NASA and space science and exploration. It's a really fun experience. We set up your meetings, we give you training, and then you go out and just share your passion for space. So we're over 100 members of the Planetary Society will already be there. We have many more who've signed up.

If you can't make it to Washington, D.C., we have a way to participate remotely, so you can sign up and pledge to take action on the same day with your fellow members online. It's a great experience and planetary.org slash day of action. If you want to check it out, register. We have a couple more days from when this is going to be posted that you can register early and save a few bucks. But you can register as late as February 3rd to participate with us. So I hope you consider joining us either in person or online for the Day of Action. For folks outside the United States, you can pledge to take action remotely. So you can go to the same website, planetary.org

slash Day of Action. There's a link there, pledge remotely. You can sign up and we'll give you actions to take to help our members in DC and to just help spread the word about the importance of investment in space. So anyone can take action with us. Again, February 10th, 2020. And I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here, but I got to see a prototype design for the Day of Action t-shirt, which is being put together by our colleague, Andrew. It's making me feel even worse that I don't think I'm going to be able to be there because it's such a cool t-shirt. And I guess that's part of the deal. If you were there in person, you do get a t-shirt as part of your registration. So Matt, you might be able to pull a few strings. Matt,

you might be able to get one. God, if only I knew someone. Well, you have to know them well and they have to like you, right? So that's the trick. We'll work on that. Two strikes. But yeah, no, it's part of the deal. It's a cool shirt. And every state that's represented there gets listed on the back. We have 27 states, members coming from 27 states in the United States. I'm looking forward to it. It's great. It's exhausting to put together, but it's one of the most important things we can do as an organization is to show up, occupy time and presence and share your passion as individuals. That's the power of the Planetary Society, right? We don't benefit directly from advocating for

space. We don't get extra money from the government. We don't get contracts. You as members of the Planetary Society, for the most part, are just regular people who love space. So the only thing that we get out of this effort is that joy of exploration, seeing the pictures come back, the satisfaction of seeing humanity do some of the best things that can possibly do, which is peacefully explore and work together to understand the cosmos at a deeper level. What better thing to go and share your passion for with members of Congress? Yeah, it's such a great opportunity. And you get to see the effectiveness of it as you talk to

people. And then read the news, read about budget developments that Casey will be talking about all year, of course, and know that your participation in the Day of Action actually had a hand in making good things happen for the NASA budget, for all of space exploration. It's exciting stuff. You know what we haven't done, Casey? What's that? Is tease your interview, the return of your previous guest, Brian Whedon. And I know you want to talk about the budget first, but we're going to talk about Space Force, right, with Brian.

Or you do. I've heard the conversation, and it's excellent. I learned a lot. Yeah, two important things happened in between this episode and our last episode in early December. One was the passing of the budget that we're just about to talk about. The other was the signing into law of Space Force. It happened. And I have to admit, I didn't expect it. So we go back to the national space defense expert, Brian Whedon, to talk about what actually happened in

that legislation. What does it mean for the future of militarization of space? And yeah, it's a really fascinating conversation. I also learned a lot. I mainly do civil space. So this is why we talked to experts like Dr. Whedon to give us that insight. I thought it was a really useful conversation. So stick around for that. Yeah, that's just minutes away. But now let's talk about the budget, because there was some pretty significant action, right, just at the end of last year. It's very characteristic of Congress in the modern age that it's kind of a forcing function of the government's going to shut down unless they get together and pass a budget. And they tend to do it within about 48 hours. For all of you who remember, we were on a continuing resolution, a temporary extension of 2019 spending levels that expired at midnight on December 20th, 2019.

About four days before that, the House released this massive compromise spending bill for the entire federal government. I think the entire bill was in the thousands of pages. It voted on it very quickly. It moved over to the Senate. The Senate voted on it and passed it about two days later. And then the president waited until the evening of the 20th, hours before the deadline to sign it into law. But it kept the government open, and it is now funded, including NASA, through the fiscal year. So we finally have this budget. This process began in February of 2019. It wrapped up in December of 2019. So it took about 10 months to get there. But we have a budget now. And so we can actually talk about what NASA got and what it has to work with, what types

of funding it has to pursue its Artemis program and its scientific efforts. And overall, I'd say it's pretty good. So I just want to plug, I have a new post up today that explores and highlights and kind of takes an analysis of the final budget process. And we'll highlight some of that here. And you want to find that, of course, at planetary.org. Oh, yeah. I should say, yeah, I generally post on Planetary Society's website. That's on planetary.org. So Matt, you just want me to hit some of the highlights and we'll go from there?

Absolutely. Yeah, take us through that. Yeah. I'll start with the good news. And it's actually mostly good news, which ironically or not, in itself is good news. NASA's budget grew by 5.3% from 2019 to 2020. So NASA's budget is $22.63 billion for this fiscal year. Pretty much everything went up. So if you remember, the original budget request had a bunch of cancellations for a variety of science programs and earth science. It canceled W first, the follow on to James Webb Space Telescope. And it also got rid of NASA's or proposed, I should say, to get rid of NASA's education outreach division as well. Congress, once again, rejected all of those.

So no major programs at NASA were canceled this year. They were all funded by Congress and at very reasonable levels. WFIRST got $511 million. The director of the NASA astrophysics program said that's enough to keep it on track for a mid-2020s launch. launch. The education outreach, the renamed, I think, STEM division of NASA actually got a boost ultimately from Congress, which is kind of funny. Every time you want to increase funding for NASA education, try to cancel it because Congress has been coming back and boosting it by about 10% each time. $120 million for that. So it's an increase of $10 million from the year before. That funds a lot of outreach efforts. It funds a lot of student... It funds Space Grant, which is NASA's state-by-state level grant-making program for students and teachers in every individual state, very popular with Congress. Science grew to $7.1 billion. I think it's largest amount, I think, ever in terms of just real dollars. Planetary science stayed at the

request, $2.7 billion. Very, very good. Just a spectacular number. Earth science is relatively flat, but has maintained its $1.97 billion level. That's, again, maintaining roughly record levels for earth science. Astrophysics stayed pretty good level. They added some extra money for James Webb to cover the new overrun. And even heliophysics grew by a couple million dollars. So in the science side, NASA is just doing extraordinarily well. And these amounts are going to enable NASA to pursue the beginning of the Mars sample return efforts, which is now officially codified within NASA. That's a huge deal, as we talked about last

time, that now that ESA has come in as a partner, NASA has now begun planning for the sample retrieval mission, which should launch hopefully as early as 2026. We have missions moving through in earth science. We have the next generation space telescope progressing in astrophysics. It's great news. It's just just I'm not used to having so many good things to say, particularly about planetary science. Europa Clipper is moving forward. We have a new planetary defense mission we'll see more information about. Congress gave them about $30 million just to continue pre-planning on that for the NEO surveillance mission. Just great numbers for science. The exploration is more interesting. For all of our listeners who remember that we had

two budget requests this year for NASA, the strange, unprecedented, somewhat chaotic process, policy by surprise, as Marsha Smith called it. The original budget request said nothing about landing on the moon in 2024. It proposed to actually reduce funding for the big space launch system rocket, basically canceling development of its Block 2 efforts to focus on just the original block, what's called Block 1A, being able to launch an Orion to the lunar orbit. It was almost seen as somewhat of a punitive slap on the wrist to the SLS program for being so delayed and over budget. And then about a couple months later, of course, we had Vice President Pence announced that we're going to go to the moon, do it in 2024. They released the supplemental request, and it requested about $2.6 billion. That's where this extra money came from. It added some money back to SLS, and it requested $1 billion for a human qualified lunar

lander system, right, to put those bootsteps on the moon. Congress had kind of a long, somewhat divisive, the House now run by the Democratic Party was somewhat hostile, or at least skeptical, I think it's fair to say about this accelerated program. The Senate was open to it, but surprisingly lukewarm, I would say, given that that's run by members of the same party as the president. And then, of course, the fact that they only requested a 5% boost to NASA to land on the moon in five years, not the strongest start to what should be a $20 to $30 billion program to do this. But, you know, so we look at the final numbers here. It kind of really reflects, I think, the political dynamics of how strongly Congress ultimately controls programmatic focus of NASA.

It really just illustrates this aspect of the distribution of NASA centers and who pays attention and what programs are where. Finally, where we are with SLS, for example, even though the year started out with SLS getting a slap on the wrist for being over budget and behind schedule, it now comes out at literally its highest program budget ever, at about $2.6 billion, or $2.7, depending on how you round it. And $300 million set aside for the block two, specifically the exploration upper stage. This is a program that has incredible support in Congress. It basically grew from the request by almost a billion dollars over the request. They love that big rocket.

They've built a very strong coalition. We'll put it that way. So that's a really fascinating lesson about the difference between a presidential request and final congressional action, right? So this is where we have to really pay attention to where the power structures are and how that power is distributed between executive and legislative branch, and who has, if nothing else, the most incentivized level of action. You know, Congress, particularly the members of Congress who control NASA's budget, have much more incentive to protect that program because it's in their districts than the White House does to cancel it. That's one of many things the White House is trying to do. This is one of the most important things for those members of Congress to protect.

So there's a disparity between the level of intensity of the support and the level of intensity of the skepticism that came from the White House. Also that we saw, which I thought was very surprising and not a good sign for the Artemis effort for landing in 2024, was that ultimately Congress allocated $600 million for the lunar lander development for this first year. Out of the gate, Congress is underfunding that request by 40%. Not a great start. $600 million, again, it's a lot of money to you and me, but to put that in context, that is less than NASA spends on its heliophysics program. It's less than NASA spends on any other major human spaceflight effort right now by a significant amount, except for, I guess, Lunar Gateway kind of came out about half a billion dollars, but that's a very different type of system than landing on the moon,

which no one has done, as we all know, since 1972. So an auspicious beginning to this. We're really going to see the rubber hit the road here come February when the White House releases its next fiscal year request for NASA, which should include a five-year projection for the total cost of its Artemis program. The five-year projection that is always included as part of NASA's budget request from the White House, that will cover the entire 2024 landing deadline. So that money should be in there. And we will see what the White House wants to ask for. And we will see how serious they are about making this happen. If we don't see, I'd say,

$4 to $5 billion increase of NASA every single year above its current baseline, then I don't think we can take Artemis seriously. So this is going to be a really fascinating opportunity to see where the administration is on this lunar landing effort. of this underfunding of the human lander, the NASA administrator may be going to contractors and saying, we need you to put up more of your own money. I just wonder if that's a realistic request. We're going to find out. I mean, as people like Eric Berger at Ars Technica have pointed out, it's very bizarre in some ways that NASA is pursuing a fixed price, public-private partnership kind of pathway for developing a lunar lander, which again, is functionally kind of restarting from scratch this very complex, very difficult project, right, to be able to safely place humans on the ground and then bring them back up into lunar orbit. But we're using this cost plus classic government style open contract for building the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, two things that we quote unquote, know how to do right building rockets

building capsules. We don't know if a public private partnership is the right pathway for something that's so critical to NASA's plans to land on the surface of the moon, not just in terms of safety, but just in, you know, it's the core aspect of you can't land on the moon without a lander. No, this is complicated by the fact that there's no existing economy on the lunar surface that would help these companies say, well, we can put an upfront investment knowing we're going to get a payoff in the future. And particularly with an election coming up this year, that the future of the Artemis program,

at least the 2024 deadline for certain, will be very up in the air. So they can't even count on long-term contracts with NASA to give them lunar access to help backfill that upfront investment. So I will also be very curious to see how these companies respond to this idea that they should put in more skin in the game. Ideally, it'd be great.

It sounds like a wonderful thing, but the companies themselves are going to have to look at their own financial interests, and they can't just float hundreds of millions of look at their own financial interests. And they can't just float hundreds of millions of dollars on their own and necessarily remain a viable company on the promise of these amorphous potential future payoffs, particularly when you don't have an economy already waiting for a marketplace already waiting for you at the surface of the moon. It does make me wonder if we had been working with these so-called fixed price contracts back in the 1960s, would Neil and Buzz have been able to walk on the moon with

companies looking to, okay, but how are we going to make money off of this eventually? It's such an interesting question. And I would suggest that listeners who have not heard your previous discussions with guests about fixed price versus cost plus in previous Space Policy Edition episodes, check those out for a lot of excellent background on this. We just talked about actually in the last episode, right, with Marsha Smith. our fixed-priced public-private partnership contracts, are they going to succeed in these new domains beyond low Earth orbit, which, as a reminder, has a pre-existing marketplace thanks to things like Earth observation and satellite communications. There is an existing marketplace to go into to make money from. You don't have to hope one manifests itself once you go there. Well, let's hope that in addition to finding water to make rocket fuel and air to breathe, that there's a big field of diamonds at the poles of one of the poles on the moon.

I'm crossing my fingers, Matt, or unobtainium, I think, was Avatar's answer for this. Unobtainium, isn't that the other name for helium-3? Yeah. Ooh, snap. On helium-3. Ooh, snap. On Helium 3. Yeah, Helium 3, great marketplace. First, all you have to do is invent commercial-grade fusion that uses Helium 3, and then Helium 3 becomes very valuable. So, yes, like we talked about before, maybe don't bet your future retirement on that particular option.

And again, all of this serves to illustrate, we're trending a little bit on the negative side now. And I just want to bring us back, to the overall big picture here, which is this year marks, I think, the sixth year in a row that NASA's budget has grown. And we can't take that for granted. I remember when I first began working at the Planetary Society, when NASA was dropping year to year, when planetary science was facing an existential crisis of funding cuts, and how hard it was to turn this around. And so the fact that, you know, since 2014, Congress has added more money than the president requested every single year. We're

seeing again, the White House again, requesting a 5% growth. And that was actually just matched by Congress. Technically, Congress added 10 million above it, but functionally what the request was. This is a period of seeing NASA start to have some of the resources it really needs to do the job that we're asking it to do. Again, this is all very good. And I think we should really savor and appreciate the good times in terms of NASA budgeting, being able to start missions, being able to have a chance. And even to debate whether the fact that we're debating whether or not NASA can land on the moon in 2024 because it's been directed to do so by the president, that's a great debate to have. I'm glad we're having that debate and not asking,

well, how do we keep the doors open at NASA? This is a good problem to have. Let's hope that in two years, five years, we aren't looking back on this as that golden age of NASA funding for science. That is certainly a possibility because these things do tend to come in cycles, as we all know. Absolutely. And if you actually look at the inflation adjusted levels for NASA, this year, we're basically finally back at parity to where NASA was in 2010. So even though we have seen this growth, we're basically crawling out of a hole of those cuts on top of inflation. It shows you how hard it is to maintain this. And again, as you point out, this could completely change, particularly because again, we are facing an election year,

presidential election year in 2020. A new president in 21 could have a completely and will likely have a completely different policy for NASA than the Trump administration has right now. And that's something we're going to be trying to work to understand better as the year goes forward and we understand who the Democratic nominees are for president. Let's savor the good times. I think another thing, just in case we were feeling too good about ourselves, something else I just wanted to mention. Just in case we were feeling too good about ourselves. Something else I just wanted to mention. I said every year since 2014, Congress has added funding above the presidential request to NASA. That is technically true this year.

I said it's only 10 million. But functionally, this is the smallest amount or the first time that Congress has basically met the request as opposed to providing a significant chunk above it. So you can see these trend lines. Actually, I have this on our website. We'll link to this on the show notes on my NASA's FY 2020 budget page. I have two lines. I have the presidential request line, and I have the ultimate line funded by Congress. Congress line has always been above the request line for years, and this is the first year since 2014 that they've converged. So that's also a little troubling to me, too, that for the first time in years,

Congress hasn't been able to muster support to go above and beyond. So that may tell us something, too. And we need to keep an eye on that. And that's exactly why we do things like going to Congress ourselves and saying, like, look, this is great to have this growth, but we have to keep this going. We have to grow NASA above the level of inflation and we have to give them the resources to succeed in the mandates we're giving them to do. And if we can't do that, then there's going to be trouble down the line. If you are not listening to us at planetary.org, and most of you aren't, of course, if you go to planetary.org slash radio, you will find the episode page that goes with what you're listening to right now and all of these helpful links that Casey will be providing to give you even more of a perspective on our topics. And it is this historical perspective that I think is one of the most valuable things that we get out of

the Space Policy Edition and the other work that you do, Casey, to share all of this with people. As we speak, he segued, history is being made because, as you said, we now have a space force in the United States, and we even have resources being transferred to it. Yeah. About the same time as NASA's budget was signed into law, the president did a signing ceremony for the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020 legislation that passed both houses of Congress, obviously. And within that legislation, they established a space force. Now, space force is one of those topics, I think, that that brings up a lot of opinions and fear for a lot of people on energy. And I think that the reality of it tends to be different than the rhetoric around it. And that's why I reached out to Brian Whedon.

He actually joined us back in 2018 to first talk about Space Force. He's the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in public policy, particularly focused on national defense issues in space. And even before that, Brian Whedon is one of those people whose biography is pretty humbling to read as most regular people. Before he got his PhD, he was actually an officer in the U.S. Air Force working in the U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Space Operations Center. And so he has a very deep and intimate understanding with the national defense side of the space equation. And that's why we reached out to him to talk us through exactly what happened with this legislation. What does it mean that we have a space force?

What did it do? What it didn't do? And then also trying to see, you know, what are the implications now going forward? But fundamentally, yes, there's a sixth branch of the military now called space force, but it's not what probably a lot of people think. And so Brian will be joining us basically right now, I guess, to talk us through this. And let me let everybody know that you will immediately notice that the audio quality from Brian is not up to our usual standard, but I think you will agree when you hear this conversation that the content more than makes up for any technical lack.

Casey and I will see you on the other side of his conversation with Brian Whedon. Here it is. So Brian Whedon, welcome back to Space Policy Edition to talk about what else? The Space Force, which has actually happened technically now with the signing of the 2020 Defense Authorization Act. Before we go into what has happened with Space Force, I want to jump back. And for those of us listening who haven't or didn't hear our first conversation about this a few years ago, I want to just touch on what were the motivations for creating a new branch or a focused area for not the militarization of space, but actually a

military service focused on space? Why are we even talking about a Space Force now? What were the motivations and where did this come from? Well, thanks. I'm glad to be back and talk about this topic with you and your listeners. There's been a long running debate focused on how best to organize national security space activities. And by national security space, we mean the activities of the military and the intelligence community in space. Like most of your listeners are familiar with what NASA has been doing in space, which is sort of the civil side of the U.S. government space programs. But since the very beginning of the space age, in fact, before NASA was even around, there were both military and intelligence activities going on in space. It really started in late 2000, early 2001, with the release of

something called the Rumsell Commission Report, where they sort of highlighted that the existing way we organized those military and intelligence capability space probably is not ideal for some of the challenges we'd face in the future. And since that report came out over the last 20 years or so, there's a long-running debate within the community about what we should do. The way things were up until a month or so ago was that the U.S. Air Force was primarily responsible for most of the military space activities. Air Force Space Command operated most of the military space activities. Air Force Space Command operated most of the military satellites, and the Air Force was sort of the executive lead to coordinate across all the different branches and services, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, who kind of all

had some of their own space acquisitions, purchasing programs. And then on the intelligence community side, you have the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, that is mainly the lead for developing a lot of the intelligent satellites and operating them, and leading on what we talk about as the operate, train, equip mission, where they're responsible for recruiting people, training them, buying stuff, and then operating that. And then U.S. Strategic Command, which was responsible for what we call the warfighting mission in space, which is actually using all those military satellites and services to go off and do stuff. So that's sort of where we were.

Several years ago, Congress, led by Representative Mike Rogers in Alabama, started focusing on this issue again, mainly driven by sort of the rise of threats in space, renewed Russian anti-satellite programs, new Chinese-developed anti-satellite programs, sort of a more contested, congested, competitive space environment, and sort of driving this issue that maybe the Air Force is not the best place to have all the space stuff going forward. So that was around 15, 16, 17 timeframe. And some of the major problems people had with what the Air Force was doing was partly cultural, that a service based around air fighting and the air domain operations

may not have the right mindset for space domain and space operations, because they're very different environments. There was a lot of concerns raised and problems, long-running problems with the way the Air Force was running some of the major space acquisitions programs, satellite programs that were years behind schedule, billions of dollars over budget, or there wasn't coordination between something the Air Force was doing or something the Army was doing or something the NRO was doing. something the Air Force was doing or something the Army was doing or something the NRO was doing. And then there was just this question of how do we better respond to some of the threats that are out there.

So mixed into all of those was sort of this need to develop a better, do a better job of developing a cadre of military space professionals that really understand what's going on and are sort of allowed to develop their own doctrine and their own policies and sort of the way they're going to approach things. So those were the major problems people had with the way things was that eventually led to this Space Force debate. The salient point here in terms of the near history of this is back in 20s at 15 and 16, you started to see movement within Congress and probably on the committees in Congress that deal with national defense issues. Is that fair to say that's kind of where the concept for a Space Force came from? Correct. It was within the House Armed Services Committee and specifically the Strategic Forces Subcommittee

that Representative Rogers chaired. And he had support here. This is a bipartisan effort. There were a couple of Democratic congressmen that were heavily involved in this as well. They held some hearings. And that culminated in a push from the House to create what we call the Space Corps. So very much like the Marine Corps, which is a separate military service that's housed within the Department of the Navy. It has its own independent culture and uniforms and sort of doctrine, a way of doing things from the Navy, but relies on the Navy for a lot of the overhead. Representative Rogers and the House, I think it was in the FY18 NDAA, passed legislation that would create a space core. But that did not pass the Senate. The Senate essentially was, you know, not convinced it was necessary. They had concerns about the cost. And so

basically, that was directed to have a study. group of people within the defense community on the issues of particular to space, the warfighting domain of space and procurement and how to prepare for potential conflict in space? Is that an accurate way to summarize the core of what this is supposed to address? So yes, we have the Air Force, which is primarily focused on a task with the air domain. We have the Army that is focused on land warfare and combat and the Navy, which is primarily focused on a task with the air domain. You have the Army that is focused on land warfare and combat, and the Navy, which is focused on maritime. And there's really no service that is dedicated to space.

As space becomes more of a contested domain and potential future warfighting that may include space, that was sort of the big need, that there was needed to be an organization, the military dedicated to that. So you started to see this motion from Congress, from the House Armed Services Committee. And as you said, it was a bipartisan interest in this. And then, of course, we enter into the story of President Trump, who seems to latch on to this idea of not just a space core, but a space force. And as he called it a few years ago, a separate but equal branch, sixth branch of the US military. Once the president became interested in this, it seemed to

kind of take on a much bigger sense of awareness. And the White House was starting to push this through. And I think that when we spoke back in 2018, the White House had signed a directive telling the Pentagon to begin preparing for a Space Force. But there was a lot left to do. The White House couldn't just create a whole armed service out of thin air, Congress had to take action. whole armed service out of thin air, Congress had to take action. So over the course of the last, I'd say 18 months, two important developments have happened. One is what sparked this conversation just last month was the signing of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which defined or created the Space Force, but also the establishment of a Space Command. Could we just address both of those,

maybe starting with the Space Command, and then let's dive into what actually happened with Space Force? Sure. I mentioned the push within Congress through the NDA and FY18 NDA to create a Space Force. There was also a push to bring back the U.S. Space Command. Now, there's a distinction here. We talked about in the previous episode, and I reiterate this again, and this is a little confusing. But within the military, there are two separate organizational structures. There's a set of organizations that have this, we call the Operate, Train, Equip mission,

i.e. they recruit people, bring people in, they train them how to do things, they procure and purchase equipment and capabilities, and then match up those people's capabilities. That's what the services do, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. There's a whole other set of commands and military structures out there that do what we call the warfighting mission. And those are what we call the combatant commands. For example, when the United States decided to go into Afghanistan, that falls under the combatant command known as U.S. Central Command. And so the U.S. Central Command commander put together a plan for the invasion of Afghanistan and said, I need the following tanks and planes and ships and marine units and airborne whatever. And the services sent all of those over, sent comms and used them to fight the war.

And then when they got done, they returned back to the services. When it comes to space, we traditionally had Air Force Space Command doing the operatory and equipped. And for the last 10 years or so, we've had U.S. Strategic Command doing the warfighting mission. So what happened sort of in parallel to the Space Corps or Space Force discussion is we had Congress also authorizing in the FY19 legislation to bring back U.S. Space Command as a dedicated combatant command focused on space. That was passed in legislation that was not really controversial, had fairly strong bipartisan support. And then President Trump signed an executive order several months ago actually implementing that legislation passed by Congress. So that was U.S. Space Command, which now is the entity

responsible for the military operations in space. And to be clear on that point, that could happen without, it didn't require the establishment of a Space Force in order to have the Space Command. Is that correct? That is absolutely correct. You still could have had Air Force Space Command doing the operate, train, equip mission, along with Army Space Command and the naval space people, all doing their own independent operation, equip missions, and then providing forces to U.S. Space Command, which goes off and does the missions. The two pieces, the warfighting piece and the opportunity to equip, can be done independently. And so the U.S. Space Command was a change to the warfighting combatant command piece. Okay, so we established Space Command relatively, as you said, uncontroversial and actually going back, and this is something we had before in the United States

up until the early part of the 21st century. Let's move forward now. It's December. Congress ended up passing the NDAA. President signed it on December 20th. The president says to the essence of this, it's a big moment. This is a big moment. We're all here for it. Space is a lot of things are going to be happening in space. With my signature today, you will witness the birth of the Space Force, and that will be now officially the sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces. That is something really incredible. It's a big moment. That's a big moment, and we're all here for it.

Space. There's going to be a lot of things happening in space, because space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough, but very shortly we'll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate

high ground. The White House signs this as established Space Force and is talking up as a very big moment. So let's talk about this. What does the Space Force, what has actually happened with this establishment of a new Space Force? What did Congress agree to? And what did the White House get out of this deal? The way I would put it simply is, we are much closer to the end of the beginning of the Space Force than the actual end of the whole discussion. Trump is partly right. It is a big deal in that this legislation created a new military service that has not been done in quite a long time, and it's very rare for that to happen. But we still have yet to see what the details are about what it is

the Space Force is going to look like and what it's going to do, let alone whether or not it's going to answer or solve any of the problems and challenges we talked about that sort of drove this whole debate. Let me unpack that a little bit. The legislation creates a new service called the U.S. Space Force, which is housed within the Department of Defense, sorry, within the Department of the Air Force. which is housed within the Department of Defense, sorry, within the Department of the Air Force. So it's effectively doing the space core that Representative Rogers tried to push through a couple of years ago. They're calling it a force. That's because they have to, because Trump demanded it. But it's not really, it's still within the Air Force. It's not a separate department, a separate or equal department that he originally called for. And this new department has the full Title X authorities for operate training

equipment. That's pretty important because that gives them the opportunity to be pretty independent of other services going forward. But in the interim, right off the start, they basically have rebranded Air Force Space Command as the Space Force. So the roughly 26,000 people that existed in, that were serving as part of Air Force Space Command the day before Trump signed that, the day after, they're now part of the Space Force. That is the U.S. Space Force. That is the U.S. Space Force. So at the very beginning, the people that are in the Space Force and the mission of the Space Force and the satellites it has are exactly the same as what the Air Force had up until December. So it just carved out that chunk that the Space Corps would have. It's Space Corps by another name. Is that an accurate way to describe it at this point? That's a very accurate way to put it.

And also, the legislation was very specific that for the time being, it only includes the Air Force, Air Force Space Command. Yes, it was surprising because, as we talked about, one of the big drivers here was the need to better integrate the efforts from the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. And for right now, it doesn't do this because the legislation says it includes only the Air Force.

Now, it left a window open that down the road, we can start pulling in elements of the other services into the Space Force. But I think Congress was really concerned about overhead. They were concerned about this becoming too big too quickly, and having a lot of bureaucratic bloat. I think that's why they had really focused to begin with. Yeah, I was reading through some of the legislation itself that established the Space Force. And it makes very clear that this is not an authorization. I think the, is it military billets? I don't know how to pronounce it exactly, since I'm not a specialist. Can't hire new people, basically. You're reassigning existing people. Very specific about that. Yeah, that is actually correct. It says that it does not authorize any new billet. And billet is legislative language for a person. You know, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines are all authorized to have a certain number of people in them.

And that dictates how much they can recruit and retain and all that kind of stuff. What this says is when they transfer all those Air Force space people over to the Space Force, the Air Force is not allowed to create any new billets. So the overall size of the Department of the Air Force stays exactly the same. They're just moving people from one part over to the Space Force. What's the practical difference then between the Space Force as implemented and what it was as a subpart of the Department of the Air Force six months ago. There's one difference that happens right away. And that is the commander of Air Force Space Command got some new powers and authorities. And I kind of that that's General Raymond right now.

So General Raymond is now the chief of space operations, which is the name for the new head of the Space Force, and now gets a seat on the Joint Chiefs. That's important because that now means that space has an independent voice on the Joint Chiefs, which are the leaders of all the military services that advise the president on military matters. That's fairly important because that gives space, again, that independent voice. It also gives General Raymond full Title X authorities, operative and equipped. That's a lot of power. And that's a change in authority that happens now, although the implementation of that is going to take a while. I think in general, if you want to see what has happened, I say is that there has been a change in authorities and a change in structure that could

lead to big differences down the road. But we're talking a year, a couple of years, maybe even five years before we probably start to see a lot of of the really meaningful changes that's why i said we're closer to the beginning of the end than the actual end yeah i saw and i forget it may have been general raymond quoted as you know we're going to take our time to establish our own culture now in the space force because in in a sense, they have, it's almost like, I think, from my perspective, you know, when you isolate populations, you start to have divergent evolution. In a sense, you're kind of, even though you're carving out of the Air Force right now, the same group of people, now that they have their own, in a sense, the control and self

determination to a degree, because they have their own, you know, they're going to have their own kind of special designation, right? And name and chain of command. Is that correct? Internally within them that they're able to and have the insignia and you can create a culture now that you're isolated away from the rest of the Air Force. And that happens more over time. You'll diverge even though you had a shared point of origin. And so it seemed like they're looking to this as the start of like a long term

establishment of who and what the Space Force is going to be, despite the fact that they still are housed within the Air Force. That's absolutely correct. And that's part of the uncertainty here. One of the big questions they're going to have to answer really early on is how different do we want that Space Force culture to be from the Air Force culture? And that leads to questions like, do we use the same Air Force rank structure? Do we have a whole new rank structure? Do we have whole new uniforms? Do we have new flags and new symbols and new slogans? That whole debate is centered around that cultural.

So, for example, when the Air Force separated from the Army, they kept all the same rank in insignia. So if you look at the Air Force, they have lieutenants and captains and majors and colonels and generals, which is exactly the same thing as the Army had. But if you look at the Navy and the Marine Corps, they have a different rank in insignia because the Marines started to have a very unique thing, and they sort of did a hybrid of naval and Army rank structure.

And, of course, the more change you want to do in that culture sense, the longer it's going to take to have effect. Again, this is one of the big unknowns we have, is just how big of a cultural change they're going to shoot for, and thus, how long it's going to take to start to have an effect. Again, what the actual, their jobs are going to be are functionally, for the time being, going to remain the same, right? They're inheriting, they're just redesignating existing spacecraft and operational responsive. And I think the procurement aspect is the interesting thing,

right, of what they are going to advocate to build and budget for and the infrastructure to create for the needs of US Space Command. Again, this isn't about creating essentially an offensive human-based flying around Star Wars style in space. This is if you join the Space Command or the Space Force right now, you're operating GPS satellites probably. Correct. Correct. And to reinforce your point, there was just an announcement last day or so that the 45th Space Wing has conducted the first space launch for the Space Force. Because they're now a Space Force asset. But it's the same people, same mission. The space launch had been planned long before the Space Force transition ever happened.

But they just sort of changed the logo and the branding of what they're doing. For now. And you're right. There is not a discussion right now about armed Marines on the moon or crewed space dogfighters or any of that kind of sci-fi stuff, or even really all that new offensive weapons in space. That may come, but we really haven't even gotten to that discussion yet. Because that is all part of how different is the future of the Space Force going to be from the way things have been for the last 10 years or so. And again, it just strikes me looking at this implementation, it seems like maybe the

most small C conservative step that they could take that would still meet the step that they could take that would still meet the demands of the White House here, which was just carving out one department's activities. Frankly, again, I know there must be... I think that's a good assessment. Yeah, I think that's a good assessment. What is this trying to solve then if it's not integrating Navy, even Navy and Army? And again, I saw in the legislation and also the appropriations legislation

for the Department of Defense, specifically forbidding it to touch anything in the national intelligence side of the House. So you're still not unifying the intelligence gathering space assets with what the defense side of things are doing. Absolutely correct. If I'm putting on my domestic politics hat, what this solved is President Trump's demand

that he have a space force so that he can boast about it on the campaign trail. It was really, it was kind of shocking the amount of pressure, political pressure from the White House on Republicans in Congress to go along with this, particularly in the Senate. And if you look at what they gave up, because the trade for this was 12 weeks of paid family leave for federal workers. That was the trade that the Democrats got in exchange for the Democrats supporting the creation of the Space Force. I can't envision another domestic political scenario where Republicans are ever really in favor of that sort of thing. But they were in order to

get the Space Force because they've been under such pressure from President Trump to get it done. So that was the political calculus in my mind that actually forced the whole thing through. If you look at the long term, again, you're exactly right. You mentioned acquisitions. force the whole thing through. If you look at the long term, again, you're exactly right. You mentioned acquisitions. We have no idea how or even if the Space Force is going to improve the acquisition side of it. Because today, we actually have more acquisition entities involved in space than before we had the whole Space Force discussion because of the Space Development Agency that was created a year or two ago as part of this whole discussion. And now in the legislation, the Pentagon is required to give a report to Congress, I think in March,

that outlines how the Space Force is going to basically bring together all these different space acquisition stuff in a coherent manner. One unique thing in the legislation is it creates a new Space Force Acquisitions Council. This is a very interesting beast because it's sort of the Congress's vision for how to synchronize and harmonize the acquisitions between the intelligence community and all the different parts of the military. But it's not going to be established for quite a while. And once it gets established, you're talking about this council of senior leaders that are then supposed to get together and talk, and somehow then all their individual organizations are going to work better together. We've tried that in the past with not great results, something called the Defense Space Council that existed for several years up until a few years ago. So this gets back to your point, acquisitions is one of the big,

big drivers behind this. And we have no clue how Space Force is going to make that better, or if it ever will. Do you see this as a potential, again, we're talking about this, the long term aspects of this now, which again, are hard to predict, but it sounds like there could be a lot of potential consequences down the line because of this initial, even relatively small step. And something that I was thinking about, often in history, you look at a small policy development that then gets expanded over time. Do you think you see something like Space Force now, which is just the Air Force reconfigured into a Space Force activities? Will it become more and more pressure maybe over a decade or more

that as it establishes itself, members of Congress will ask, why do we have a separate activities within the Navy? Why do we have separate activities within Army? And it'll become more natural just to fold them in over time into a growing Space Force versus trying to do this all at once. Do you think that's part of the long game that these folks are playing here that this is? It could be. I think now that we have a separate space force, a separate service for space, I think it's going to persist. It's extraordinarily rare public administration to get rid

of anything. I think it's going to persist. Whether or not a poll's in everything, I actually think it's probably not. I looked at the history of the Air Force for that. We created the Air Force to kind of be the main entity looking after the air domain and warfighting, and the Air Force does that. But the Army has its own aviation corps. The Navy has naval aviation.

The Marines have their own aviation. So it's not like once we created the Air Force, everything related to aviation aircraft went over there. They started doing their own thing. And then the other services said, well, that's great, but we still rely on air power and we want to control that so we can trust it. So we're going to retain our own separate air power stuff. And then, of course, you run into the huge problem, how do you coordinate all that? So nowadays, we have all these joint doctrine and joint interagency stuff to help coordinate the aircraft used by the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, and the Army, so they can all work together in the same airspace. I think that's the way space is probably going to go,

in that you're going to have the Space Force off doing space stuff, but it's probably doing it for its own reasons. And it may not always be doing it to support what the Army needs from space or what the Navy needs from space or the Marines. And then you have those other organizations then developing their own space stuff to support what they need, partly because they may not, in a bureaucratic sense, trust the Space Force, partly because maybe the Space Force isn't answering their needs. That's sort of the future I kind of see us heading down, but we still don't know a lot. We'll know more six months to a

year from now about what direction the Space Force is going than we know now. The last time we spoke in 2018, you said that you were against the concept of the Space Force because it was basically created a bunch of bureaucratic problems to solve as opposed to solving the fundamental problems you outlined at the beginning of this conversation and the last conversation. Now that it has been established, and you see some of the details that we do have, what are your opinions about what has been created? Did they address any of those issues? Or do we have the same fundamental problem of just a bureaucratic reshuffling and focus versus fundamental problem solving here?

My opinions largely did the same. Originally, I was skeptical to against this, because I saw it as spending thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hours making a change in the hope that you could then address some of these problems instead of just spending all that time and effort addressing the problem. And I think that has been validated to a certain degree because, as I said, think of, you know, if you talk to anybody that's in the Pentagon or anybody in the White House or in Congress on this, the Space Force debate has just sucked all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to dealing with these underlying problems. And so all this time and effort was spent on creating the thing called a space force. And as I said, we still have no idea how or even if it will answer any of those

underlying problems. Now it might, 10 years from now, we might look back and say, yeah, that actually led to a bunch of changes that improved the acquisitions process and look how much better we've become. But we're not going to know that for quite a while. Then, of course, you also have the question of, well, would we have gotten to that same endpoint faster if we just spent all that time and effort on making the changes? Again, you can't ever do counterfactuals in public policy and public administration, so we're never going to know that. But I still think this was a lot of time spent on something that may or may not have an actual impact. I hope it does.

I think there's still a lot of agreement that these are some serious challenges that needed to be addressed, and I hope the Space Force eventually does. I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll get there or get there in a reasonable time frame. What has the international response been to this process and to the establishment of the Space Force? Do we know enough yet to see what the consequences will be in that domain? I think it's been mixed. We certainly, you know, certainly there's been sort of an international public response that is more reaction or response to Trump himself and your feelings about Trump than the specifics of it. And some of that just had to deal with

just how the administration messaged on this topic. There were some excellent fact sheets that were put out by the Pentagon that actually talked about some of the serious issues, but nobody ever read those. What they saw was Trump at a rally or Trump on TV or one of his surrogates really making hyperbolic statements. And so that influenced quite a bit of sort of the international public response, which I would say has been pretty negative, although it's based on not really knowing what's actually going on. sort of a diplomatic stick to further their argument that America is the bad guy in space and we're the ones that are making space worse. And if only the world just signed on to the Russian

and Chinese treaties, banning weapons in space, everything would be great. When it comes to sort of all the countries in the middle of the road, you know, it's been interesting. We have seen several other countries sort of inching towards or actually making some of their own reforms. France comes to mind. They have had sort of a fledgling base core for a while, fairly small, a couple hundred people. Just over the past this last summer, they had made a big announcement. They were upgrading that to a French space command. So sort of elevating that a level. And they released a new French space strategy and space doctrine. We've seen a few other countries talking about something similar. So diplomatically, I would say we've taken a little bit of a beating from the Russians, the Chinese, but that was sort of the expected. So far, U.S. allies, they're not against the Space Force. Some of them are a bit confused about it.

They don't really know what's going on. But in general, they agree with sort of the underlying challenges about space becoming more contested and more competitive. And so that they certainly agree with. What do you think this means very broadly for space just in a cultural or U.S. political awareness or public awareness. Do you think it has any kind of larger meaning, the fact that there is now an established space force, the reestablishment of the U.S. Space Command? Does that say that space itself is becoming more important in a way that it hasn't before, merely by the acknowledgement and kind of bureaucratic reshuffling to focus on that specifically as a domain? Is there a big picture here beyond just the military aspect? I think Trump's engagement on this and focus on this has absolutely elevated within the public.

The wonks have been debating these issues for 20 years, but nobody ever noticed, right? It's like a bunch of academic scholars fighting about some nuance off in the corner. Now, whenever I go somewhere, a taxi driver, an Uber driver, a member of the public hears I'm talking about space, they're like, so what about the Space Force? And there's far more public awareness of the space force and that there's something security related going on in space. Now, the problem, as I said, is the factual part is that it's not been there because, again, people are seeing the president's rhetoric and not the actual facts and details.

There's still quite a big job to be done in actually educating them that, no, it's not about Marines on the moon. It's not about the US military going to Mars. This is about how do we better protect our satellites? How do we better integrate satellites and services into military operations here on Earth? That message has not really gotten through. operations here on Earth. That message has not really gotten through. So I don't know, I guess it's a mixed bag. There's certainly more awareness, but not necessarily more facts. Dr. Brian Whedon, I want to thank you again for joining us on the show to help explain this whole process. And on the national security side of space, it's a whole other world, I guess. So I very much appreciate your expertise on this

and hope to have you back in the future as we learn more about this new implementation and we see what happens. It was my pleasure, and I look forward to coming back at some point in the future. That's the chief advocate of the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, talking with his guest, Brian Whedon.

I said it before you got into it, and I've now been reminded, Casey, excellent conversation. I now know much more about Space Force than I knew, or that I bet anybody, or at least most Americans and others around the world who haven't heard this conversation, know about what has just been created in the American military. I'm one of those people. That's why I love this show. I get to talk to people who are much smarter than me and to help me learn about some of this stuff too. It's a lot of fun. And so I really thank Brian for his time. He was actually talking to us right before a major

snowstorm hit Washington, DC. So again, he was very generous with his time. And it's probably, let's blame the snowstorm on the poor connection quality. We'll try to do better in the future. Well, that's another great example of what we try to bring you with the Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition. And for that matter, the weekly version of Planetary Radio, which I hope you will tune into each week as we pick up other mostly non-policy related aspects of space science and space exploration. But Casey, it has been, as always, a delight to talk with you on this monthly basis for the Space Policy Edition. We'll do it again in February. I want to remind people before then that that deadline is fast approaching. It will be passed by the next time we talk for the Space Policy Edition for the Day of Action. What is that link again for people to learn more?

That's planetary.org slash dayofaction. It's pretty straightforward. And again, as a reminder, if you can't join us in D.C., you can pledge to take action from the comfort of your own home on the same day to help all the members who are in D.C. with me. Very similar URL to planetary.org slash membership, which is where I hope you will go to become part of this organization that is responsible for space policy edition. And perhaps more importantly,

all of the great work that Casey and his colleagues do on our behalf to make sure good things keep happening in Washington, D.C. on behalf of space science and space exploration. Casey, always a delight. I look forward to the next conversation, probably, almost certainly, on the first Friday in February. I look forward to it, Matt, as always. That is Casey Dreyer, the Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Do hope that you'll join us for the weekly edition of the show. We've got some great topics and great interviews

coming up. Until then, wish you all the best. Ad Astra. you