Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: How NASA Came to Be

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

Happy 60th, NASA. In celebration of the space agency’s birthday, we do the audio equivalent of pulling out NASA’s baby book and explore its origin story. Though legislation creating the space agency developed in the wake of Sputnik, it was built upon a rapidly changing relationship of the government to fundamental research and development in the decade before. We follow the threads of what makes NASA NASA, as well as how, in its early years, NASA looked quite different than the agency we know today.  We also discuss the current bill that partially funds the U.S. government and provides temporary funding for NASA and other agencies through December of 2018. More resources to explore this month’s topics are http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/space-policy-edition-30.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy 60th birthday, NASA. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, each week from Planetary.org, the Planetary Society. Very happy to once again welcome back for one of these first Friday events. My colleagues, Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Society. Hello, guys, and happy anniversary. I was just thinking about this. How many federal agencies do we celebrate the birthday of?

Have we done this with Health and Human Services recently? I don't think so. Maybe the parks. Maybe the parks. Yeah. It is something we're celebrating, and it is our major topic for this week's show, talking about how NASA came to be. I'm very glad that we have Jason. I think it's safe to call you an expert in this area. I don't know if I go that far, but yeah, very interested tourist, I suppose. I've been certainly looking at this stuff for a very,

very long time. I'll give you that. Passionately interested. And I only regret that we will have only the time that we usually spend, generous as it may seem, to talk about this one. I'm sure that we could divide this discussion up into little subcategories and you could spend an hour on each one. I actually think that's a really limiting factor of time there. I could go on for days on this topic, I think. Matt, what you're describing is, I believe, a course, like a college, is on this topic, I think. Yeah.

Matt, what you're describing is, I believe, a course, like a college, a collegiate level course, which we could, and there are about this topic. Make a note of that, since you have a course that has forged a path for the Planetary Society here. Maybe we can talk about that in a moment after I make our usual opening pitch for membership in the Planetary Society. Are you a member? If so, thank you so much. We are extremely grateful because you are making this program possible. You are making possible everything that the Planetary Society does. If you are not a member, as we approach the end of

the year and the beginning of our fiscal year, Happy New Year, guys, we would love to have you join us by going to planetary.org slash membership and check out all the different levels at which you can become a direct participant in and a supporter of the Planetary Society. There is nothing better

that you can do for us. We depend on our members to enable us to do everything that we do. Please take a look at planetary.org slash membership and please join us. Become part of this family of people who practice the passion, beauty and joy of space exploration and enjoy looking back at the history of space as well. I'm just choked up with how well you made that message. Beautiful, beautiful sentiment.

Well, it's what they pay me for. And I would do it if they didn't pay me. Just don't tell them that, guys. Speaking of your course, Casey, I assume that it is still underway. Absolutely. It's an online course. You can take it at your own leisure or pleasure. And it's just courses.planetary.org. It's free and it is up there. Yeah, we just had a big signup push for the fall. So you can join thousands of other members and supporters of the Planetary Society and level up your knowledge of space policy and advocacy. And prepare yourself to join the fight for funding and support for space exploration. Hey, let's plug that real quick too, because we are open and we will just mention this every month until it happens. Registration is open for our Congressional Visits Day in March 3rd and 4th, 2019 at planetary.org slash space advocate.

As a link, you can sign up. Early bird pricing goes until January 1st. We've already had dozens of members sign up to flyer from across the country to join us in DC. You should join them. It's really fun. It's a pretty exciting thing to do and advocate on behalf of space. It truly is an exciting way to become directly involved and become a part of governance of space exploration. You will have more influence than you may suspect. It's just fun, regardless of any other consideration. Let's go ahead and get into some content here before we talk about the 60th anniversary of the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency,

Space Administration. Excuse me. No, I was going to say, Matt, come on. Wow. We can even discuss the distinctions between an agency and an administration if you really want to get wonky. Ooh, yeah. Yes, we will do this. Let's dangle that. Before we go there, Casey, you've got a bill that just passed that you wanted to bring up for a few moments. Well, yes, a bill, appropriations, money, funding. We're in the new fiscal year, as you said. So happy fiscal year 2019, everybody. It's very exciting time to be October 1st. All of your accountants are going to be pretty wiped out this morning and other days from celebrating on the New Year's Eve. two doors open, as did most of the federal government. Usually the process, you're supposed to have 12 bills for the 12 different subcommittees in Congress who fund the 12 different areas, you know, many different federal agencies under their jurisdiction to keep the lights on,

to have the authority to continue spending money in the new fiscal year. We got maybe half of the way through that. Ultimately, we had a new bill just signed by the president that funds the Department of Defense. I think military, construction, veterans affairs, health and human services, they all got funded for 2019. Every other federal agency, including NASA, is on a short-term two-month stopgap, as we have been pretty much predicting for the last few months, that will take it through the November elections. And so Congress will not have to figure out how to fund NASA and these other agencies until the end of the year, right before Christmas. Casey, I was just going to say, you started off that entire paragraph with the statement, usually you're supposed to fund.

Interestingly, I just wanted to note that Congress changed the budget procedure to the current process in 1976. And since that time, we've gone through what's known as regular order an entire four times and not once since 1995. So the usually part, I think, is actually out the window. I should have said ideally. The ideal case has rarely happened. Yes, yes. So this isn't rare. Let me put it this way, right? And we've been through this. We've talked about this. Listeners know that this is a very similar situation we found ourselves in in the past. It's annoying.

Two months, basically, it's a period where NASA cannot end or begin any new major projects because they don't have the authority to do so from Congress. And so I have a new post up that Jason and I worked on talking about some of these particular areas that will be affected by this delay. And Jason, is there one that really jumps out to you as a concerning area for you that two months could do real damage in? The issue I think that's really damaging is actually in planetary defense, which is an issue that we've been focusing on in our organization for the past year or so. I think both of the main flight projects in planetary defense, NEOCAM and DART, are seriously threatened by disruptions in funding streams due to a continuing resolution. I think that's the real danger. There are certainly many others, but that's the one i'm really sort of concerned with yeah let's talk about dart because that's a good example of how bad timing like this can just screw up a mission so dart is a double asteroid redirect test slam basically is a big heavy piece of metal into a small asteroidal moon around the asteroid didymos and you have celestial mechanics

kind of dictating when you want to launch. I think it's 2021 they're looking at. It just got approved by the White House to go into full development, right? So can you just talk about why that's important, why this is bad timing for a delay now before it goes into phase C, before it goes into formulation? Part of the issue was that when the project was under formulation, it was under that development process for a fairly long time. That meant that they kept pushing the schedule to the right, and it was harder and harder and harder to meet the optimal launch date.

So the issue is if you launch in 2021, the asteroid that they're targeting, or the asteroid system that they're targeting, will be much closer to the Earth. So you can use a lot of Earth-based imaging and Earth-based radar systems to get a lot better, a lot more fidelity in your data as to the consequences of the impact. You can move the launch data out further, but that means that the asteroid cluster will be farther by the time the spacecraft intercepts it, and you won't have that same fidelity of data because you won't be able to use all of those Earth-based resources. The real issue is trying to hit a very immovable launch date to get the best data return. The more uncertainty in your budget or the less money that you have coming into your budget.

So the old adage is from an engineering standpoint, you can do things fast, you can do them cheap, or you can do them well. If what you're choosing to do is cheap and well, it means that you aren't going to do it fast, which means that you put your launch date at risk. The real risk to this project is that we spend a lot of money on a really cool project and we get less data than we should get because we have to launch it late. It would be late because we're in a two-month effective delay right now that they're not getting the money they need to ramp up into actual implementation and development of bending metal

for the spacecraft. Right. And it's important to note too that it's not just that they need the money, it's that they have been planning on this money and they were promised this money by the funding institutions, by NASA. That's what confirmation means. It says when you sign a confirmation document at KDPC for a project, you're stating we will accomplish goals X, Y, and Z by date X and for a cost of Y. If you don't receive the money that you were expecting that everyone had agreed upon, it's sort of like a contract, then you can't meet those goals. I think the Gateway is another good example on the human spaceflight side.

Discovery is doing okay because that's already pre-approved of a mission. But you have also commercial low Earth orbit investment and also this new planetary lunar commercial investment that the money will not show up on the timeline that they were hoping for either. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And if you look at a number of the commercial providers who seem to be the most obvious candidates for partnering with NASA on the lunar stuff, these companies are generally not big.

They're doing very well for small startup companies at the moment, but these kinds of disruptions can be incredibly impactful on small organizations. What about everybody's favorite, hugely delayed project, the James Webb Space Telescope? Oh, they're screwed. No, I'm just kidding. Oh my. No, that's a project that is late enough in its development cycle and has enough money tied up in contracts and tied up in pre-approved funding. It's also a major priority for NASA. I don't think that a CR will have a huge impact on that project. next. Projects like WFIRST, which interestingly, the administration proposed canceling, the initial formulation money will actually continue to flow to WFIRST in a CR, but it's not enough to really move forward to any significant degree on that project. And I suspect that whenever a final budget comes about, WFIRST will suffer because of the JWST overruns. I think that money will also come from other projects in

the astrophysics budget line, the explorers budget line, the research and analysis budget line, the technology budget line, and astrophysics. I think we'll all take a hit because of the cost overruns on JWST. Have you seen any weakening guys in the pretty strong support within Congress, both the House and the Senate, for space exploration in general. I don't think so. NASA is not funded, not because members of Congress have anything against it or even the increases that Congress had scheduled for it in both the House and the Senate. NASA is not getting funded because of larger political stuff going on in the Justice Department and the Census and other areas where there are political

battles. And NASA is grouped with those, has the unfortunate situation to be grouped with those other departments in terms of its funding jurisdiction under the subcommittee in Congress. And it just became victim of the larger political battle, which happens. Yeah. Casey, you made an interesting point the other day that NASA is now in the CJS, the Commerce, Justice, and Science budget line, but that's a relatively recent change. It was previously in the budget line that covered housing and education. That budget actually just passed. So had that move not been done, NASA would actually, in this budget cycle, would have been in better shape. Yeah. There's the weird implications from these structural changes of how Congress manages itself that has real inadvertent long-term impact

on the ability to explore space. So who knew? I guess next time we'll make sure that's always with very benign, you know, this is what you should put NASA in the like military construction and veterans affairs bucket. And it's funny you bring that up because I suspect that that will be a major topic that we discuss here in a few minutes when we talk about the formation of NASA. Yeah, it just should have been part of the DOD, I guess, right? Right. Which is completely counter to why it was formed in the first place, but yes. All right.

So let's move on then to our major topic for this month's program, which is that 60th anniversary of what I think is safe to call the world's foremost space agency. Why and when did it become apparent that the United States needed something like NASA? So this is where Jason, I think, begins to talk for 45 minutes, right, Jason? This is the simple question to answer. Well, it's probably easiest to start with the story that I think most people know, which is the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth in 1957. Congress and the White House

became very concerned about that technological capability. It was in a Cold War context. There was a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for the alliance of the rest of the nations in the world, and the United States wanted to be seen as foremost in technology. So they decided to form a national space agency to ramp up the capabilities to compete with the Soviet Union. Now, all of those are facts. All that was just said is true, but it misses a huge part of the story. The formation of NASA actually begins probably 20 or 30 years earlier in military research and development labs, looking at technologies as diverse as radar and radio, launch vehicle and propulsion technologies, ionospheric research. All of these had military

implications, but they also had really interesting civil and commercial implications, but they weren't being funded by civilian companies to any significant degree. It really required government level funding. And so these researchers who often were actually civilian researchers at military institutions started working with some of the stuff that was coming out of World War II. Not only the radar technologies and the radio technologies, but also some of the stuff that we'd sort of acquired at the end of World War II. The V2 rocket from Germany, which was sort of the first rocket that was capable of getting to the outer atmosphere or out of the atmosphere. I don't think the V2 ever actually orbited. No.

Although it probably wasn't a far cry from something that could have achieved orbit. But along with the rockets, of course, came all those important brains led by Wernher von Braun. That's actually a later part of the story in NASA's development. The ascendance of von Braun in the human spaceflight side of NASA actually comes much later than most people recognize. We'll get into this in a few minutes. So NASA's formed in 1958, but people often forget that John F. Kennedy's speech about getting a man to the moon in a decade and returning him, that doesn't come until 62, excuse me, 61. And if you read through the NASA Space Act, the legislation that actually forms

the Civil Space Agency, there's shockingly little discussion of human spaceflight in that document. And we will get into that in a little bit. Yeah, let's actually jump back for a moment, Jason, because this is an important point that I want us to dwell on for a bit. And let me maybe phrase this as a question to you. Do you feel that the fundamental relation between government and investment in research and development changed with World War II? And basically from my realizing that there is a massive and ongoing national security reason to have significant development of technology? Oh, I think that's pretty unambiguous. I mean, any assessment of the data from the pre-war times to the post-war times completely bears that argument out. The United States prior to World War II really didn't have a tremendous

amount of investment in research and development. And after World War II, the federal government basically takes over that role in industry and academia in all facets for a period of time. That role of the federal government in investing in research and development diminishes by the 60s or 70s, although NASA is clearly a huge influx of federally funded R&D. It's interesting looking at those trends from World War II up to the present. It's interesting looking at those trends from World War II up to the present. I think what you see is a shift in research and development that's actually moving us back towards the model prior to World War II. And I think you can make arguments pro and con. I tend to lean towards the con myself.

I'm not a huge fan of the robber baron era. Unless you're a robber baron. Right, right. And unfortunately, as the old adage goes, you know, I work in the space industry. And the one way to make a small fortune in space is to start with a large one. So yeah, World War Two changes because peacetime, the idea of peacetime is no longer the same. demobilization can never really happen when you have the development of missiles, the V2, and nuclear

weapons, right? And so you have to have, there's no defense against those in a sense. So you start to have this huge amount of technological or impetus for the government to invest in science and technology. That really starts to kick up, I would say, in the 50s, as you see a broad investment and deployment maybe of technology, both at the consumer and higher end national defense level in the context of this broader geopolitical standoff. That's certainly true. I think one thing that people tend to gloss over, we tend to think of World War II as the impetus for this sudden belief in federally funded research and development. But in fact, the real investment doesn't come directly after World War II. In fact,

the federal government starts to ramp down its R&D expenditures after World War II. There was a big recession, right, after World War II. That's right. It's not until the Korean War that the United States really ramps up its investment in R&D. And that's primarily through the military, through weapon systems. That expands over time. But that's the initial impetus.

So thank you, Cold War. Yeah. All we needed is a potential self-destruction of all of humanity to really get the government to invest in science and technology. We moved through the 50s, right? So we're kind of starting to trace some of this background of the basic story that you told that I think most people are familiar with. But you point out that you're starting to have these kind of pseudo-civilian slash military research centers cropping up around the country. Would you put NACA in that context? Or would you put this, I mean, this is happening in the actual army and naval institutions, right? Even before space really became a big issue. Well, after all the things that we just discussed, NACA actually doesn't fit that

model particularly well. Let's put NACA off to the side for a second. Let's just talk about the military aspect that you were mentioning. Sure. So I think that you started to see, particularly because of the nuclear weapons program, you started to see an interest in being able to put nuclear capabilities on top of missiles. That's where you see a lot of federal investment into launch vehicles. That aspect of the civilian side of space is actually still true. We still launch civilian spacecraft predominantly on military launch vehicles or launch vehicles that are paid for in some capacity through a military capability.

Where you start to see the difference is things like ionospheric research, atmospheric research, those things started off at military labs, but it was clear that the military need for that research was somewhat limited. And these researchers were starting to understand that there was a lot to be learned from these various aspects of research that didn't necessarily have military applications. And more than that, the science was necessarily global in nature. If you were only studying things directly above the United States, you weren't going to understand how things worked in a holistic system. So you needed international collaboration. And that was far more difficult through a military apparatus, A, because the

military wasn't necessarily interested in doing this research, and B, other organizations around the world, if they viewed it as coming through a military lens from the United States, there were many reasons that they might be less inclined to participate. Sort of a sea change in all of this stuff happens in 1957, actually, even before Sputnik is launched with the formation of the International Geophysical Year, which actually lasted two years just to confuse everyone. The IGY was this massive international collaboration of research about the Earth. It involved over 40 countries. It involved military and civilian researchers from all walks. It was coordinated in the United States through the National Academy of Sciences. And this was the

first time that military researchers really started working in space on civilian issues wholly without any military imprimatur to begin with. And this was a really important sea change. It produced both the Vanguard program in the United States and the Sputnik program in the Soviet Union. But more than that, it produced a cadre of researchers interested in space issues that were looking for funding that wasn't necessarily tied to military issues. And that's really critical to the story going forward. Okay. so we have a situation where I feel like we have a like a bubbling cauldron of opportunity. You have the IGY happening, you have this growing

investment capability, and also, I think, shift in attitudes about the responsibilities of government to fund basic research and development. The idea of satellites had been around for a while. I mean, you had the RAND study about an earth circling satellite, I think from 46. You had other studies in the 50s. And you actually had Eisenhower approve a satellite program for the IGY, right? I mean, that was the Vanguard that you're talking about, but not through NASA running it. Was it the Naval Research Laboratory running that one? Or was it the National Science? Well, they didn't have a National Science Foundation then, did they? No, that comes about roughly the same time as NASA,

although the NSF or what became the NSF was under discussion dating all the way back to World War II. So there were two satellite programs in the United States. One was the Vanguard program based at the Naval Research Laboratory, which is here in DC. And the other program was the Vanguard program based at the Naval Research Laboratory, which is here in DC. And the other program was the Explorer program or what became the Explorer program, which was sort of a combination of efforts at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in California. Both of those were parts of the Army. Sort of. So JPL is actually part of Caltech, but it was under contract with the Army at the time. Actually, the switch of that contract from being an Army federally funded research and development center from the military to the civilian world was also part of the formation of NASA. When JPL moves to NASA, that was a huge shift. The other partner in this that had moved by this time to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville? Yeah, yeah, that's true. So Operation Paperclip, a story I assume most people are familiar with

that moved all of the German V2 scientists from Europe following World War II to Huntsville, Alabama. Yeah, they were all part of the Explorer group. But the interesting thing was the Explorer group was mostly interested in the launch vehicle. They actually proposed, their proposal to launch during the IGY was actually just to put like a bag of sand on top of the rocket. They were not interested in the scientific instruments. They were like, yeah, we can put them up there if you want, but that's not what our focus is. The Vanguard program, by contrast, was mostly focused on the science return. The launch vehicle was just the necessary aspect of getting the instruments into the outer atmosphere, which is part of the reason that Eisenhower actually selected that program over the ABMA JPL program initially.

That's what I think is really interesting about Eisenhower as president at this point, of that he was very skeptical, generalized, very skeptical of just government in general, beyond national defense. Beware of the military-industrial complex. But also, he wanted very much of a science-driven program, and separate from kind of a military program, just by, almost kind of by his demeanor in general demeanor and attitude towards the world and it's you read some of his speeches at the time right around when nasa was being created and after the sputnik went up and it's almost striking to see how he refers

to science as the one of the primary goals and in ways to enrich human experience and to pursue, you know, the curiosity and knowledge, all of this stuff that really was lost in the following decades, in a sense, about the priorities of NASA. Absolutely. And for a guy who came into the presidency based on his experiences in World War II as the head of the Allied forces, this is very much a military man. So to have somebody come in and be wary of military capabilities is a really interesting development. It's also important to remember that all of these decisions were being made in a Cold War context in which you had an ongoing nuclear arms race.

So he's looking at all of these things also with, I would say, an eye towards, but in fact, I think his major preoccupation was with the concept of the arms race and space was sort of a secondary concern. He was thinking in terms of ballistic missiles, in terms of being able to verify the opponent's capability, which was likely to be a space-based concern as well, being able to spy on your adversary or the implications of having your adversary be able to spy on you from space the implications of having your adversary be able to spy on you from space. These were all really driving concerns within the White House. And part of the appeal, I think, to Eisenhower about starting a civilian space agency was that you

could sort of diffuse some of those tensions and still be able to do development in space, do science in space without having it completely mired within this military industrial complex. It wouldn't be seen as a threatening act or an aggressive act necessarily if you could prioritize a scientific launch capability rather than going right out with a spying one or having no other cover reason to discuss it. You mentioned something I think that's really important context here, Jason, which is particularly Eisenhower administration's desire to validate or verify their knowledge of what was happening in the Soviet Union.

And the fact that the Soviet Union was so secretive, just getting information was one of their driving desires here, one of their highly motivating desires, which led to the U-2 spy plane and trying to get this information about what is happening in this other country. And that leads, that lack of information, right, kind of leads to the ability to spin actions like launching Sputnik in a much more frightening way to the general public than top secret understanding of where the Soviets actually were in terms of their missile capability. Totally agree. I was laughing there a minute ago because in that capacity, that's a trope that runs all the way through the Cold War, all the way up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and

the inclusion of Russia on the International Space Station. A lot of that decision had to do with the ability to gain information from an opaque adversary. We were able to go in and finally understand how the aerospace industry in the former Soviet Union worked through the International Space Station program. And that's an aspect of that program that I think gets overlooked quite frequently. But I digress. Fascinating observation though. So you have these very competitive arms of the military, each of which the Navy, the Army wanted to take the the weekly Planetary Radio series, I didn't realize that among the voices arguing for a civilian agency, which apparently, as you've said, Eisenhower was pretty open to anyway, was none other than Richard Nixon. Yeah, that's actually very surprising given what Nixon's presidential administration did with the

space agency later. And how. Yeah. But it's also interesting to note that the vice president's role in presidential administrations having to do with space dates back to the very beginning. Vice presidents have generally taken the space agency on as one of their priorities since the formation of NASA. And it's sort of interesting to think about why that's true. It's partially because the vice president, excuse me, has more bandwidth to deal with that kind of stuff. It's a nice way to put it. Than the president might. But it also means that if something goes wrong,

the president isn't the guy holding the bag. That's a rarely discussed attribute, but it's absolutely true. that part of the reason that presidents tend to push vice presidents onto the space stuff is it's a high risk area and it's a highly visible area and it's plausible deniability for a president. And they can just ignore them if they don't like what they say, right? That's right. So again, I think we're to this point with Sputnik now. We have this context of IGY is happening. We have our own

satellite programs. We have developing missiles. We don't understand the adversary in the Cold War. They're secretive. Sputnik happened. Well, it doesn't just happen. There's a lot, obviously, that drives it to happen. But maybe just to even frame it this way, would we have a civilian space agency today if Sputnik hadn't happened and surprised the country in the way it did? Do you think that was an inevitability that we'd ultimately have a space agency or would have been wrapped up in something like a National Science Foundation? Yeah, I don't at all believe that it was an inevitability. I'm not a huge fan of counterfactual history, but I think that what is most likely to have happened is that space science would have either ended up as a division of the National Science Foundation, or you would have formed a NASA of some sort that would have been

far smaller than it actually is, a budget of less than half. Maybe more like a European Space Agency kind of setup? Correct. And I don't know that that would have been sustainable past the 60s or early 70s. past the 60s or early 70s. Was it always clear that NASA would take over for NACA, which we should say it was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had been formed many years before in 1915 as a sort of recognition that the US was behind in aeronautics? Yeah. So I don't think it was inevitable that NASA would be formed on the backbone of NACA.

But I think what you found with NACA, as we alluded to earlier, it was sort of this odd organization that had been formed to do research in aeronautics for industry and the military. And it was a basic research institute. So if you look at what NASA was originally formed for, which was space science, taking that culture, which was somewhat of an academic-based culture, committee-based culture, that seemed like a relatively natural fit to take that organizational structure and move it into the new space agency. And what happened was after the launch of Sputnik and then later the launch of Gagarin, the mission of NASA changed fairly drastically. And you started seeing and understanding that if you were going to ramp

up the US capabilities in space very quickly, you were going to have to grab the expertise from where it existed, which was at places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Naval Research Lab and various military launch facilities as well. So the NACA arrangement at the beginning, I think, made sense for the context of what the Civilian Space Agency was originally supposed to be, but it didn't make sense as that- Yeah, and that's kind of an interesting, just the historical accident in a sense of, you look at where NASA centers are distributed around the country. And you see places like Ohio and Langley in Virginia and, of course, Ames Research Center. And you realize those just happened to be there

because that's where NACA was. How has that driven the politics? Obviously, the senators in those states, the need to continue maintaining and investing in the infrastructure at these places just happened to be there because of decisions probably made in the 1920s about where NACA was going to invest in some of its flight research. And that's a really interesting point because I think a lot of people think of NASA distributing its centers around the nation for very political means. The fact of the matter

is a lot of these centers were just absorbed from other organizations who had placed them there decades earlier, usually for fairly practical means. Glenn in Ohio was there because of the Air Force Base, and you've got Ames out in Silicon Valley because that's where the aerospace industry was at the time. You've got Kennedy Space Center in Florida, not because it's a crucial swing vote. It's there because it's close to the equator, and that's the best place to launch rockets from. And it's also like NASA, again, just looking at the actual, we'll link to this in the show notes and for the 1958 space NASA act that created NASA. I mean, it created NASA, a far smaller NASA than we know today.

I mean, let's not forget just talking about NASA centers. It began with those three NACA centers, right? And probably offices in Washington, DC, but they didn't add Marshall until 1960. They didn't add, obviously, Johnson Space Center or the Manned Space Flight Center at the time didn't come in until Apollo. A lot of the infrastructure that we know actually came from Apollo and the NASA of 1958 didn't look anything like the NASA of 10 years later. No, that's absolutely true. So the Explorer program and the Vanguard program were wrapped into NASA relatively, like very close to the beginning. Goddard Space Flight

Center started off as a Naval Research Laboratory facility, and a number of researchers from NRL were actually moved to Goddard fairly early. The Jet Propulsion Lab, as we were discussing earlier, the contract was switched from the Army to NASA relatively early. Marshall Jet Propulsion Lab, as we were discussing earlier, the contract was switched from the Army to NASA relatively early. Marshall didn't become a NASA center, and that was hugely contentious. The Army fought really hard to keep that within a military purview for a long time. And of all the facilities that we were just talking about and how they were located for non-political reasons, Johnson Space Flight Center was very purposefully located in Texas because of Lyndon B. Johnson. Kind of like Stennis, I think, too, in Mississippi. I think

who was the senator was the chair of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate at the time. Interesting to note that to this day, the Marshall Space Flight Center is this island within the Redstone Arsenal, still very much an army facility. And the same is true of Kennedy. I mean, you've got Kennedy Space Center, but it's right next to a military launch facility as well. In fact, basically surrounded by a military launch facility. Yeah, Cape Canaveral. I mean, NASA only has two launch pads, basically, in Kennedy Space Center. And everything else launches from Cape Canaveral, which is the Air Force's launch center. We think of these, they merge together in our

minds, but there really is a distinctive history and background. Yeah. And that's true of the launch facilities out in California as well. Casey, I'm really glad that you brought up that 1958 Space Act, because I wanted to ask about the role of Congress during these formative years, because we've mostly so far talked about the executive branch. Yeah. And I think it's really important to note the decisions made in the White House had to be signed off on by Congress. Congress had their own say in all of this process as well. And all of these decisions were actually formed by the researchers and the heads of organizations and military and civilian alike. All of the decisions were formed by these other groups over decades. And it's not until you get to the moment

where the bill is being signed that you realize there are four or five choices and they pick from one, but those choices had been basically culled from dozens or hundreds of possibilities over a long period of time to figure out what the best options were that these decision makers had to choose on. So the role of Congress is clearly important because the White House can say, hey, we're going to form a new agency or administration, but without any money, it doesn't make any difference. And White House has no control over whether or not they can spend the money. I saw some interesting discussion saying how this NASA Act of 1958 was inspired by a large part of the Atomic Energy Commission's creation and the legislation going into other modern technological civilian-ish federal agencies that were cropping up around this time?

Yeah. So you definitely see phases throughout US history where various congresses sort of take an overarching approach to solve many different kinds of problems. And I think that this period where NASA was formed shortly after the AEC and the NSF and a lot of other sort of institutions that we think of in terms of research and development in the federal government, this was a time where Congress was clearly interested in these issues. And it makes sense that they would sort of use many of the same techniques or many of the same thought processes in establishing these various organizations. So I think there's some truth to that, but the differences between the organizations

are very, very noticeable. So I don't think that's, I wouldn't go too far down that path. We now have this relatively small civilian space agency. What starts its progress toward becoming an agency that by you know, by the early 1960s would have a substantial piece of the federal budget? So before we get to that point, I think it's important to understand that there were conversations about what a space agency would look like. There were many hearings in Congress and you had tons of witnesses come to these hearings and talk about all of the various possibilities.

But it was very clear early on that they sort of whittled, you know, you had sort of outliers in the community that were talking about all kinds of crazy stuff, but it really sort of came down to two or three viewpoints from the scientific community, from the military community, from academia, from the experts that were thinking about these things, you sort of had the NACA model where you would have a research and development organization that was sort of focused on development. And this was sort of the Von Braun paradigm, where they just wanted to build big rockets and have the government pay for them. And then we'll figure out what happens next. Maybe it'll be the next airline. Maybe the government just pays us to send people to other planets, whatever it is. We just need to build the rockets. And the other paradigm was the science paradigm, which was we need to better understand what's

happening in the outer atmosphere, in outer space. We need to better understand how to do weather modeling, how to do environmental modeling, how to do understanding the effects of the sun on the Earth's atmosphere. In that scenario, it's the science that really takes precedence. And what's really interesting is in that debate, the science argument won out. And that's why you ended up with the initial NASA. If you look at the Space Act, section 101 gives you the name, section 102 is where you start talking about what the organization is supposed to do. Well, there's a list of eight different things that the organization is supposed to do. The number one priority for the agency is the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in

the atmosphere and space. It's not human spaceflight. In fact, human spaceflight is barely mentioned in any of the eight priorities. So it's very clear what the intent of Congress was, what the intent of the White House was at the outset of NASA. And that's very interesting because I think that gets overlooked in discussions of NASA's history. I want to just emphasize this, the point that Jason's making, and this is what's so fascinating, again, about reading exactly what he's saying. It was such a more modest approach, even in context of Sputniks. multiple Sputniks have been blown by this point. The lack of this all-out crash program that we now associate generally in our historical kind of consciousness with NASA just did not appear until the Kennedy administration. And the domination of

NASA by human spaceflight did not appear. I mean, the Mercury program, as approved by Eisenhower, was a very limited program just basically to see what happens to people in space. Like that was about the, will they die? Will they float? You know, how will they do it? And he wouldn't even approve subsequent programs before he left the White House. He was very limited for Mercury. kilograms before he left the White House. He was very limited for Mercury. And you have some really astonishing studies done by his, was it Killian, his science advisor at the time?

Yeah. You read these studies and they say there is literally no scientific reason to launch people into space. So we don't think it's important. And that's who Eisenhower was listening to. It's just such a different attitude. Absolutely. I think it's important to note as well as we're going forward here, I'm not trying to pile on the human spaceflight program at NASA. I'm very glad that it exists, and NASA would not look anything like it does without that program. But I do think it's important to understand that that was not the original intent of NASA.

Yeah. And they've amended this NASA act over the years, of course, many times. Well, here's a question I guess I was going to ask you kind of related to this, Jason, which is, do you feel that, particularly in the first 20 or so years, that US space policy is purely reactive? I mean, is the fact that they don't talk about human spaceflight because the Soviets hadn't launched Gagarin right away, and if they had, you'd see big portions on human spaceflight in the NASA act. I think that that's true, but I think there's another factor that was driving a lot of this stuff as well. And that was the technological capabilities. Determining what you were going to launch in the early years at NASA wasn't based necessarily on what instruments you wanted in

space. It was what instruments you could get into space. You were really limited by the capability of not just the launch vehicles, but also the tracking system, communication. People often forget that you can launch rockets all day, but if you can't talk to them, it doesn't matter. You're just putting mass into space. Right. I remember that as I think it was Explorer 3 was the first US satellite to have a tape recorder so it could relay data when it passed over a ground station and not just as it was live relaying it down. The first US satellites, you only got data where the ground station happened to be. Right. And another interesting thing to keep in mind about that is the rate of technology development was really slow. And it was actually happening as much in the military as it was in the civilian side. So you had projects like Corona, where they had something like, I don't know,

nine, 10 or 14 launch failures before they got a satellite actually up and working. But then they also had the data return issue. The early satellites- Data return being an analog data return. Exactly. They would take photographs on film and bring them back through the atmosphere and capture them, you know, either out of the sea or, you know, parachuting and, you know, pick them up with an airplane kind of a thing.

That was true for 10 or 15, you know, the Corona program ran until the late 70s, early 80s. Long, long time. And I guess, you know, I'm glad the military has come up again because they did have these ambitious plans and their plans did include humans, didn't they? Because there was a lot of thinking that you needed humans up there because the machines, computers just weren't up to it. Yeah, this has been an ongoing thing for many, many years. just weren't up to it. Yeah, this has been an ongoing thing for many, many years. Part of the fights over what became Marshall Space Flight Center, that was about the military wanting to retain that capability, not just because of the boosters, but because they viewed the possibility

that space would become a contested battlefield where soldiers would fight. And you had programs mirroring Apollo. You had the manned orbiting laboratory, which was a military base station, basically. There were going to be two astronauts up there. And the early designs for this space station actually involved a gun. There was a weapon on this space station. And a giant telescope. And a giant telescope. That's right. Looking downward. Yes. Yeah. And this has been true for a very long time. There was the Blue Shuttle program proposed in the early 80s that was going to be an Air Force space shuttle, basically.

So the military has been interested in this for a long time. They're somewhat constrained by international agreements like the Space Treaty. They're also somewhat constrained by the fact that with science and with military capabilities, a lot of the things that you want to do in space are just easier with robots than they are with people. People make things really difficult and really expensive. Yeah. Robots are designed for space and humans are certainly not. Space is trying to kill you. Something else I just want to mention here before we move on too far from the NASA Act itself, Something else I just want to mention here before we move on too far from the NASA Act itself, was that I was reminded when I was prepping for this, that Congress itself had to suddenly

restructure itself. They had to suddenly create committees out of nothing to deal with space. They had to create select committees in the reaction to Sputnik. So I mean, just now we take it for granted, I suppose, that we have a science committee with a space subcommittee as part of these standing committees in the House and the Senate. But previously, I mean, they were also, Congress in this process was also finding ways to, or had to organize itself at the same time it was designing the legislation for the space agency. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's not like they had people on staff that knew a lot about space issues. They were completely reliant on the community itself for information about what they were supposed to

do, and then relied on internal structures of how you form committees to figure out the best way forward to determine what information was important and figure out how to turn that into funding and into legislation. Yeah, it was extremely complex and it happened in a very short period of time. Yeah, we're talking seven months or so. Let's see, they passed the legislation in Congress by voice vote, which means it was not controversial, July 16th. So that would have been about nine months or so after Sputnik was launched and then signed into law on the 29th by Eisenhower. And then you have what, like a frantic three-month scramble to get NASA up and running by October 1st, which probably was a lot of work. And another really interesting aspect of all of this that I

think people tend to overlook, there's a perception, I believe, that Sputnik happens and the public freaks out, and they drive Congress to do something. Oh my God, the Soviets have... We're under a Soviet spy satellite. Next thing you know, every night we'll be bathing in the light of a red moon. Yes. A number of researchers, including Roger Lanius, who's a former NASA historian, A number of researchers, including Roger Lanius, who's a former NASA historian, have done a bunch of research to demonstrate that, in fact, the public was pretty nonplussed initially by Sputnik. Congress was terrified. The military was very terrified.

But those actions actually drove the narrative on this. It was Congress and the White House who pushed out this narrative to the press, who then got the public on board with the fact that this was actually important. It was not self-evident initially. There was also a political motivation for at least the Democrats in Congress to really amp up the paranoia on this too. I mean, they were coming up to elections in 1960, and they were big on the defense angle, trying to position themselves as the party that was going to take care of the country and be the safety, you know, for the national security for the country, compared to Eisenhower, who totally didn't get it. You know, they were talking about the missile gap, and here comes the Soviets, of course, now demonstrating total technical superiority. And so you had Lyndon Johnson,

who was in the Senate at the time, before he was vice president, really taking the lead on this. And I forget exactly when he said this, but that phrase, to that very point, those who control space controls the world or something like that. It wasn't just Congress freaking out. There was some strong political motivations of the upcoming presidential race and midterm races that they were playing off of. I don't know if people who haven't lived through it or studied it realize the level of tension that arose in this country by the time of, let's say, John F. Kennedy's inauguration, the era of radiation shelters. We had a place that sold them right down the street from where I lived when I was a little kid. And the missile gap that you mentioned, which was a huge, huge issue, which turned out to be, there really was no there there. Yeah. What's really interesting is there's been a lot of historical research done on that

issue. And it seems to have been a very savvy political move by Lyndon Johnson in that he knew that there was no missile gap. He knew that the Eisenhower administration knew that there was no missile gap. But the only way that you could prove that was by using data from sources that were top secret that would give away your information gathering capability to the Soviets. So the Eisenhower administration was basically handcuffed. They couldn't prove that there was no missile gap without giving away state secrets. Lyndon Johnson used that very much to his advantage. Yes. Yes. But Johnson was kind of a cynical politician.

My wife refers to him as her favorite son of a bitch. Yeah. Yeah. But he would like that designation. Consummate politician, but yeah. Yeah. And again, that goes to that point we mentioned earlier of that, in order for this type of reaction to succeed, the Soviet Union had to be secretive. The fact that it wasn't easy to verify claims or at least have a public acknowledgement or understanding of the actual capabilities allowed the Soviets to use these space spectaculars and then say that they could extrapolate that back to their entire industrial economy, which is what they did on purpose.

But they really did not have anything close to the capability that the U.S. had at any, I don't think really at any point in the 1950s. No, I think that's true. So Jason Eisenhower finishes his eight years in the White House. Kennedy begins his sadly abbreviated term. What happens to NASA? I mean, we all remember a certain speech that was made. The Soviets took human spaceflight far more seriously than the United States did initially, largely because the Soviets were very good at building big launch capabilities,

whereas the United States had been focused on science. So it was much easier to figure out how to take basically a submarine. What are those? The bathyspheres, I think. You basically take one of those, you put it on top of a rocket, and you launch a person into space, which is essentially what they did. Can I just jump in real quick? So again, just another point here, which is just really fascinating to me, is that the Soviets had this incredible lift capability, as you were saying, right? The rockets could just loft up a huge amount.

They're so much more powerful than U.S. rockets because they didn't have the technological ability to make smaller nuclear weapons. And so the rockets, because they were ICBMs, had to carry these heavy nuclear payloads. And so almost as a definition, the argument of the mismatch of thrust that so dominated early space policy discussions, particularly in the US, was in and of itself an example of how the Soviets were not actually technically superior to the US

because they could not miniaturize their nuclear weapons at the time. But that was obviously lost that subtlety to it. It's actually an entire field of study that's very fascinating, the difference between engineering philosophy between the Soviet Union and the United States. Looking at space stations, looking at all of those space capabilities, robotics, the Soviets are very much of the opinion from a space station standpoint, you launch it and then you fix it when you're up there. And from a space station standpoint, you launch it and then you fix it when you're up there. And from a robotic standpoint, it's you program everything into the nth degree and you launch it and it runs completely autonomously. United States' engineering philosophy was always very, very different. You spend all the time on earth tinkering and getting

everything very, very perfect so that when you launch the space station, it just works and you have to do minimal amounts of maintenance. And with robots, you get them as good as you possibly can. You launch them, but you keep the ability to change things while they're in transit. You're able to talk to them and change the programming as they're in operation. It's just a fundamental cultural difference about how they do technology. And it played out from the earliest days of space exploration. The concept of the space race, I think, is another sort of misnomer. Matt, you were asking about the Kennedy administration. Johnson and Kennedy very much ramped up this idea of a competition with the Soviet Union in an effort to bolster support for the Apollo program,

to demonstrate the technological superiority of the United States, the Russians felt like they basically won. We got a human into space first, we're done here. It's not at all clear that the Soviet Union thought they were in a race at all until very late in the game. So that's another sort of American myth that is only tangentially based in fact, which is, it's fascinating. And again, because it was so hard to understand what was actually happening there. You could make the claim, you can kind of create the narrative and apply it. I mean, in a sense, you can look at each Soviet space launch as a series of discrete data points. You know, as most scientists know, you can draw a lot of different curves to fit a bunch of discrete points.

So you can kind of, the Americans could draw a lot of narratives that could fit the limited data that they have, but absent actual understanding of what was happening in the political system and on the ground, it was hard to say what was actually true. So it allowed people to create these narratives of the race, of the lunar exploration race, or the fact that the Soviets were going to soon land on the moon and take over, God knows whatever they were saying. And again, only because we didn't have that information. Absolutely. No. And interestingly, as a corollary to the story we were talking about a minute ago with the Johnson administration, or excuse me, the Johnson and Kennedy administration using the fact that Eisenhower couldn't make data public to sort of create their own narrative about the missile

gap. This was also true with the moon race. The Corona satellite program that we were talking about earlier and follow on reconnaissance satellites took pictures of what the Soviets were doing as far as a moon program, what type of a moon program that they had. That data is only now being declassified to any significant degree. Our friend Dwayne Day over at the Space Studies Board, he's on top of this stuff all the time. He's one of those guys who actually loves going to the National Archives every time that there's a declassification of any of this data and he combs through it, he doesn't really have a life. But what he's been able to demonstrate, I think pretty compellingly, is that we actually knew that the Soviets weren't really involved in a moon race until very late in the game.

And their capabilities weren't going to beat us, even if we'd given it another 10 years. But we didn't make that public, which is also a very interesting part of this story. Certainly, there was a lot of belief in this country that there was a space race. Certainly, by the time Yuri Gagarin became the first human to head into space. Where do you point to? I mean, was it that? Was it the speech by Kennedy that we will go to the moon? What started this vast expansion of NASA to the point where it took, what was it? I think over 4% of the federal budget?

Yeah, it was over 4%. And it was very much the technological capability argument in the context of the Cold War. There was a real belief in the federal government, particularly in the Kennedy administration, that the United States was not producing scientists and engineers in very specific areas at a level that was going to keep the United States competitive with the rest of the world or keep it as a technological leader. So you had this massive influx of money through NASA, but also through a lot of other programs. You had a huge amount of money flowing into what would become the Department of Energy through the nuclear arena. You had money flowing through academia for research in all kinds of

different areas, money flowing through the Department of Defense for lots of weapons research. It was just this incredible influx and it completely changed academia and for that matter, industry in the United States for a generation. But what's also interesting to remember is that all of this peaks by 1964. The Apollo budget start going down. The NASA's budget starts going down pretty fast, years before we actually land on the moon. They were down by half almost by the time they landed. Again, the shift that NASA went through between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations from a focused science-directed kind of modest program to this choice by Kennedy. And this is kind of where I'd

like to address just one more minute is the decision to position NASA, or I guess it comes from Kennedy's maybe just overall philosophy of competing with the Soviet Union on every possible front. I know in the Eisenhower administration, even under Kennedy, there's discussion, why choose space as a way, as a means to compete with the Soviets? Because that's what they're already good at, right? Like why compete on their terms, so to speak, when we can show other reasons that the United States is more technologically advanced. I guess that's where I don't necessarily, this is where I'd be curious, your perspective here, Jason, whether this was a philosophy of the Kennedy administration that was then the moonshot was then basically placed as an easy answer for that, or if they had to be convinced more broadly that this is something worth doing after Gagarin and there

was some popular demand that NASA do this. My interpretation is that Kennedy was convinced by others. I don't think he had a great love for space ever. I think that's evidenced by the fact that his support for the lunar program was actually starting to weaken before he was killed. I think it was really driven by Lyndon Johnson, and I think it was driven by political considerations for the most part. That's not to say that there weren't true believers elsewhere in the government. You know, I think there were a lot of supporters in Congress initially. To this day, I think you see a lot of support for NASA in Congress. I think the public's appreciation for NASA has

always been very fickle. I think that the love for NASA tends to be a lagging indicator. When NASA does really cool stuff, I think the public approves and says, oh yeah, we love NASA. But in times when NASA is either in the process of doing development and there aren't a lot of public facing extravaganzas or in the face of disasters at NASA, public support tends to lag. I think that the reason you saw the budget going down in the early 60s had as much to do with a change in the culture generally. You were beginning the civil rights era. You were beginning the equal rights era. These things had massive impact on society's belief in American technological superiority or whether or not technology was actually making lives better. There was a huge pushback in the 60s looking at things like nuclear weapons in the space program and thinking to themselves, these are hugely expensive and actually are not wholly good. And so I think there was a shift. And I think we're sort of coming into a scenario now, if you look around at our culture, that it's not at all the same,

but it kind of rhymes. There's there's questioning of things that we've believed as a society for a very long time. And there are issues that are sort of pitting technology versus values once again. And it's totally unclear to me, you know, how how that will play out. I think it's a very interesting thing to study. And I think it's really informed by looking back at these other occurrences. That's a that's a whole podcast right there on that topic, I think it's really informed by looking back at these other occurrences. That's a whole podcast right there on that topic, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I would only add that I think you see also at that same period, the roots of the beginnings of mistrust in the federal government, that the federal government is not necessarily the best way to get things done and in fact, maybe holding us back, which is something we continue to deal with today.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the roots of that very much began, there were fringe groups that this stuff dates all the way back to the Great Depression, but I think it became more rooted in American consciousness during the 60s and certainly played out in the 70s and 80s. proceeded as maybe as best they might have been expected to in this kind of effort? Or was there an alternate path that might have served us better? I think there are always alternate paths, but it's impossible to know what they might have been. There were certainly lots of proposals as to what to do with NASA, ranging from getting rid of it to tripling its size and making this the major preoccupation

of research and development in the United States. Given all of the options and given all of the political realities, I think NASA has actually done very well, probably better than most would have predicted. But that said, in order to do the kinds of things that people think of NASA doing requires a lot more investment than we

currently are willing as a society to make in this kind of project. And I think it's unrealistic to expect that that investment is going to increase anytime in the near future, particularly as it is in competition with other priorities in the federal government and increasing priorities. I think the environment becomes a more and more demanding issue over time. I think that economic issues in the nation become a more and more demanding issue over time. I think health issues in the country become a larger, and I'm speaking sheerly in terms of economics. These are the kinds of things that NASA will have to be competing with in its desire to increase its revenue stream and

increase its resources. And that's a really tough place to be in a competitive environment. Unless you just borrow a trillion dollars a year, it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, I just I don't have much more to add beyond what Jason said, because it is hard to look at the alternative. Again, there are just few federal agencies that I am fond of the way that I'm fond of NASA. And I think a lot of people would share that. And I think that that says something. It's a special, odd, wonderful thing

that we have decided to do as a nation. And we have continued it with all of its attendant problems and critiques that we have for it. Like anything that we care for it. Like anything that we care for a lot, we'll always want to see it do better. But if you look at the amount of success that NASA has had just over its 60 years, it's just breathtaking. And so much of what we know about the world around us, the universe around us, pretty much literally everything beyond the most basic orbital inclinations and periods of the planets we know from NASA, right? It's just such a stunning

success. And I think maybe even the more interesting question would be the legacy that Apollo left on NASA. Was that ultimately for the best of the space agency or not? And that's obviously, that's a whole other podcast, if not multiple podcasts. But, you know, the sudden, having a sudden influx of money and having it just as suddenly disappear changes the fundamental structure and infrastructure of an organization like that, that we're still dealing with today, that adds a significant amount of overhead cost and, but also expectations. You know, there's lots of things to explore, but I think overall, this is, I would say this is one of the most successful federal agencies in doing what it was told to do, which was to advance our understanding of the cosmos and atmospheric phenomenon, aeronautical development, and developing craft to take people into space. It's just peerless.

Beautiful sentiment and a perfect way to end the podcast. But unfortunately, I have one more thing to add. And that's, we never answered the question, the difference between an agency and an administration. Oh, yes. And I think that this is actually a really good way to finish this off. The difference between an agency and an administration is that an administration is able to sign agreements with organizations from other nations. who sign agreements with organizations from other nations. An agency has to go through the state department exclusively to do that and can't sign an inter-agency agreement. It has to be with the state department. NASA, while they work with the state department in forming these kinds of things, can actually engage directly with international organizations.

Now, what that means is that NASA is not only a national organization building knowledge for America, it's also an international organization building knowledge for the entire world. And in that capacity, it's among a very small number of government organizations globally that contributes to the world as a whole. Maybe that also speaks of yet another benefit of NASA, one of its successes, in that it is one of the things that the United States does, which is admired by so many people around the world and really represents American leadership. And just to bring it back, it was baked into the original legislation in 1958 for NASA to pursue these types of international opportunities and partnerships.

Absolutely. So we will end as we began with a hearty happy anniversary to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And a wish, a hope for 60 or more great years of leadership as we head into the final frontier. Gentlemen, thank you so much. This has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for your expertise and your passion, which is enabled by the members of the Planetary Society. Please, if you haven't already done so as we've been talking,

go now to planetary.org membership and become part of this organization that has not been around for 60 years, but we've got a substantial portion of that tenure of NASA. And we're looking forward to a bright future of working with NASA and other agencies around the world to further space exploration and space science and space policy, which is what my colleagues, Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy does with the ABLE assistance and partnership of Jason Callahan, our space policy advisor within the Planetary Society. Thanks, guys. My pleasure. Fun as always.

This has been the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, and we will return on the first Friday of November of 2018. Thank you, everybody. Until then, we hope you'll tune in to the weekly portion of Planetary Radio. We will see you there and elsewhere at Astra.