Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: JWST and the politics of mega-science (with Robert Smith)

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Robert Smith shares the story of how the astronomical community decided upon the JWST as the follow-up to the Hubble Space Telescope, the coalition politics required for mega-projects like Hubble and JWST, and how that dynamic shapes modern science. Dr. Smith holds a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. He  is a professor at the University of Alberta. His book, The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology, and Politics, was released in 1989. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/robert-smith-jwst-big-scienceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome once again to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. This being our February 2022 edition of the show, I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, welcoming back the co-host for the Space Policy Edition, our Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate, Casey Dreyer. Welcome again, Casey. Hey, Matt. Always happy to be here with you. We have a spectacular interview to play for people today. I think we were both, well, you were inspired to bring him on Space Policy Edition. I was simply inspired when I heard him in a recent event sponsored by the National Air and Space Museum with our friend Tiesel Muir Harmony. Am I right about that? Is that what made you think,

or were you already thinking, boy, he'd be a great guest? A mix of both, but always a good reminder to look at basically the political history of the JWST and how it fits into larger trends of what he defines as mega science projects, projects that span decades, span continents, and span thousands of different people working together in these broad political coalitions for these massive efforts to understand the natural world around us better. JWST is very likely the most expensive single science mission at the time of launch ever made, and absolutely fits into that history. And again, as a historian of that project and of the broader trend of space telescopes, just a perfect person to have on the show.

I've heard it, of course, because I was supporting the recording of this conversation that we're about to share with everybody. I think it is at least as valuable because of the more general discussion of what you've already said, big science. I mean, the super colliding superconductor, that fiasco is mentioned, that kind of tragic fiasco. This is going to happen again, and we need to be prepared to properly support ambitious projects like this. Yeah. And the super colliding superconductor, for those of us who weren't alive then, and us being not me, I was alive. I was was an aborted. Yeah, it was an aborted large collider being made in Texas that was canceled in the early 90s. During a wave of budget cutting, this is the same period in which the space station narrowly avoided the same fate in 1993.

And eventually, you know, that decision shifted the balance of investment and expertise in large particle colliders to Europe with CERN and the Large Hadron Collider that they ended up going through in a much broader process. So these large projects can be risky to do. You put all your eggs in one basket. You hope for the best. And again, as we record this, and one of the reasons we waited a month, and JWST is now at L2, it's fully deployed, its instruments are turned on, it is aligning its mirrors right now, everything seems to be going well. And so we talk about some of the lessons learned from previous attempts, for example, the Hubble

Space Telescope, in terms of how they put together and work to support a mission like JWST that really does, politically speaking, have to succeed. I would recommend that people check out the just previous episode of the weekly show, Planetary Radio, and my conversation with John Mather, the senior project scientist for JWST, who was there from the start. And he addresses some of these same issues. who was there from the start. And he addresses some of these same issues. For any of you to whom the superconducting collider is brand new, look it up. You will be blown away by the cavernous

tunnels that were already being dug when this project was canceled basically by Congress. We have a lot that we have underway that we certainly hope will never be canceled because we are working to make sure the projects like this, like the JWST, get their opportunity to reveal the universe. A lot of that will be taking place, a lot of that work will be taking place at the Day of Action, which Casey, I guess is going well so far. A lot of people signed up. Yeah, we've had great response this year to our Virtual Day of Action, which is again happening March 8th, 2022. So if you're listening to this prior to that date, sometime in February, ideally, there's still time to register at planetary.org slash day of action. There's also options there

for ways to pledge to take virtual action. That's a lower lift. It doesn't cost any money to register. You can find ways to participate and support your fellow members of the Planetary Society who will be spending their days meeting with members of Congress, again, virtually on March 8th. we do for advocacy here at the Planetary Society, putting a lot of work into it, a lot of support, always exciting and inspiring to see the efforts and commitment by our members here at the organization to really step up and make a difference with space exploration and that personal direct advocacy that makes a huge difference. So that's at planetary.org slash day of action. You can learn all about it and register if you'd like, or again, pledge to take action for free. That pledging to take action, that's somebody that anybody around the world can do, right? Because day of action, you know, sadly, but understandably, going to DC or actually be virtually visiting in these congressional offices is limited to US citizens. Yeah, the particular nature of the U.S. system makes it

very straightforward to directly engage with the people who make the funding and political decisions for the National Space Program. And of course, that's where we tend to focus most of our efforts. But yes, if you live outside the U.S., we do have options for you to provide that assist, to reach out to people in your sphere of influence, and to learn and commit to practicing advocacy and bringing it to your local community. So that's also at planetary.org slash day of action. We have something for everyone. And of course, our monthly plea to become a member of the Planetary Society. You'll be supporting efforts like the Day of Action and everything else we do, including the show you're listening to right now.

That's planetary.org slash join. Casey, we'll start playing back that terrific conversation you had in moments. But before that, anything quick that you want to mention? Well, the main thing that we're looking at for the next month that we will hopefully be able to talk about in March is the fiscal year 2022 US budget and NASA budget there that we've been working on for over almost a year now, actually. And it's been delayed months and months. There is some hope that the US Congress will be able to reach a compromise and fund critical programs and particularly for major issues like planetary defense and the Neo Surveyor mission really need to get this budget passed to really start moving those

projects forward. Again, we are in a broad, very busy period of the political system here in the US. There's midterm elections coming up later this year. There's a half a dozen major bills, all kind of backlogged and somewhat divisive process. And now, of course, we have an opening in the US Supreme Court, which will bog down the political process a bit more. So a lot of stuff juggling NASA again, as almost always, not the driving force behind whether or not the US Congress will pass a budget, but unfortunately, highly dependent on the larger political process to support them

for fiscal year 2022. So we'll be continuing to push for that internally and through my colleague Brendan in Washington, DC. And we will hopefully have something to say and hopefully something positive to say in March the next time we have a space policy edition. That's Brendan Curry, of course, the chief of Washington operations for the Planetary Society, who joined us on the show last month, and we'll probably hear from him again before too long. Okay, set us up for this conversation. Well, Robert Smith, Dr. Robert Smith is on the faculty. He's a professor in the History, Classics, and Religion Department at the University of Alberta. He had previously worked at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian as a historian there, and has specialized in his career on the history of mega science, and particularly

the space telescopes. He has a wonderful book that he published in 1989, actually before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, that really dives into the political history, the ups and downs about how the coalition formed to sustain this first really major astronomical space telescope, and how that then is very relevant to this discussion we're going to have for JWST. That book is called The Space Telescope, A Study of NASA Science, Technology, and Politics, 1989.

Highly recommended. Really enjoyed reading that. of NASA Science, Technology, and Politics, 1989. Highly recommended. Really enjoyed reading that. And he has been a historian of the JWST since its initial discussions in the 1990s. And really, as he'll point out in the discussion, going all the way back to the 80s,

people were starting to plan for this next step. Very well connected on this issue, very insightful. And we talk about not just the telescopes themselves, but how they fit into this broader conception of mega science, post-war governmental investment into these large efforts to understand the cosmos. Here is the conversation that Casey had online with Robert Smith just a few days ago, and we'll catch you on the other side. Robert, welcome to the Space Policy Edition. Thanks for being here today. My pleasure.

So I'd like to open big picture. If you had to choose one or two ways to define how the process of science has changed in the last 100 years, what would you define those as? One thing I think is that you have a lot more what you might call grassroots efforts in terms of deciding what kinds of large-scale projects are going to get done. We can see a big shift, say, with American astronomy. If we're looking really pre-World War II, it tends to be a few people that you can call elite leaders of astronomy who make the decisions. And after World War II, particularly by the time we're getting into the 1970s, then the political culture of the United States shifts and we have much more kind of grassroots

efforts. And so what it means to be, say, an astronomer, a planetary scientist or whatever, shifts in that there is a new set of roles for people in terms of a more kind of political aspect to what it means to be a scientist, not just, as I say, amongst the elite who have to go off and seek patronage for their great new plans at, say, the Mount Wilson Observatory or something like this, but it's much more the case that people need to move outside their labs, their research stations, and so on, if they want large scale efforts to proceed. And I think also, again, with the very largest scales, we see the scale continually increasing. What was large scale, say, in the 1890s is not particularly large scale by the 2020s. And so I think scale and also just what it means to be a scientist is a kind of

almost what you might call a reconstitution of the scientific community and the nature of the scientific community and its decision making. Do you think that's a direct result of this post-war Do you think that's a direct result of this post-war reassessment of the role of public funding in scientific advancement and research? I think that's very largely the driver in that you have this new form of patronage. Anybody who's done research in the 1930s and looking at, say, the development of astronomical observatories where you've got very large scale ones like, say, the Matt Wilson Observatory. They're amply funded. But for lots of people, you get excited if you can buy a new box of pencils. Whereas post-World War II, there's this opening up of science. And you might say that what we have is almost a democratization of science, I think, in that you have many more people who are engaged in the science-making process,

the making of science policy, deciding what kinds of projects will get done until you have the situation today where we have the decadal surveys and you have hundreds of people involved in those tens of committees and so on. And so it's a very different way of proceeding because you have fundamentally this, compared to the standards, say, of the 1930s, this remarkable influx of funding into science. It strikes me as almost a reflection of the institutional structure of the primary funding source, right? If the resources are available to you through, in the US case, a democratic representative institution,

the scientific community almost had to reconstitute itself in a democratic fashion, to your point of what you were just saying, to build a coalition of broad scale support to succeed in resourcing some of these ambitions. Is that unique to US or Western democratic institutions, or do you think that's reflected more broadly in big science projects in other nations as well, in other political systems? I think if we look outside the United States, then you have far more, at least in what you can call, say, the Cold War period, far more efforts to collaborate, because it's the fundamental way of doing business. And so if you look at the development, say, of the European Space Agency or accelerator building at CERN, you have a number of nations invariably involved in these really large scale efforts.

And it's different to the United States, if that the United States can very often go it alone, and in the Cold War chooses often to go it alone, as a means of demonstrating US scientific and technical prowess. And an example of that would be, for example, the superconducting supercollider, which very much operates on a Cold War model, in that maybe if people want to collaborate with us, that's fine. But we're the leaders and, you know, your junior partners, we would like your money, please. But it's not what you might call a genuine kind of collaboration, I think. And so it's more, I think, in this, certainly in this Cold War period and

up until we're talking about the early 1990s, it's far more the case that the United States is prepared to go it alone. Whereas in Europe, you need to have international collaboration just because you don't have the resources available for very large-scale projects in one nation. A lesson that you get from reading your work over the years, your books and your publications following projects like the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, and as you mentioned just now, is this increasing responsibility of the scientific community to become its own advocates and to organize itself in a political fashion beyond this kind of platonic ideal of doing science, right, of this kind of peer research mode where they publish, raise your head up every now and

then and publish a paper. Ultimately, this process is a, to strike me as kind of the social organization function. Does you think it, in a sense, the access to potential revenues, huge amounts of resources through public policy, do you think that creates ultimately a more social and engaged scientific community, that it prevents it from becoming too isolated? Or do you think there is a consequence of this that they're not really scientists anymore? That this is becoming a function of creating this administrator class of resource-seeking institutionalists, I guess, to put it in a more pejorative fashion? Is there a downside to this as you go through into this big science era of scientific progress? I think you see the emergence of a kind of

division of labor that is quite different, again, to what we were seeing before World War II, in that you would have these elite leaders of science who will be doing all the politicking, who will be doing all the politicking, and you have pretty much everybody else. Whereas after World War II, we have a different kind of division of labour, in that we have projects that can last for a very long time, and it takes a long time to actually get them off the ground. So we see at times some people spending a period doing the advocacy kind of relationships in Washington and so on, and then they may drop back. for what becomes called the Hubble Space Telescope. So they were pretty much full time on the Hubble Space Telescope for two or three years in order to win support for it. So you can see people moving out and then in into these different kinds of roles.

But certainly you have the emergence of people who are going to be what you might call science managers. They're not at the workbench or the telescope anymore because they've kind of gone beyond that in their career structure. that are going to last or say take a decade to get approval, maybe longer, then they will last 10, 15 years or whatever it might be, then sometimes you've just got to have people in those sorts of roles and positions to provide a continuity. So it makes it very hard to kind of drop back. So I think we have seen this emergence of science managers who are quite different from anybody we can find in the pre-World War II period. It strikes me again, reading your work that we're talking about big science or mega projects that are kind of used interchangeably, I think, in this discussion. But to me, it's really defined by this increasing organizational complexity, to your point, right, that you need, the hierarchy begins to form and coalitions need to be built. And then you need to start engaging with all sorts of layers in the political process. And it seems to be adding a social complexity to the scientific community that didn't necessarily exist before in terms of self-organization and

hierarchy within their social structures. I think that's right. And one thing that I would say is we've moved into what might be called an era, I think, of mega science. Obviously, not all projects are mega science and lots of terrific science gets done with small groups, science and lots of terrific science gets done with small groups. But we have moved, I think, beyond even what you might call big science, which was a term that came into use in the 1960s. We've moved to this age with the very biggest projects of mega science representing, I think, another shift in scale. So I see the James Webb Space Telescope as this kind of scale beyond the Hubble Space Telescope. And Hubble was certainly going beyond anything that had come before, at least in terms of space astronomy, I think. And so we see this shifting sense of scale, and you need new kinds of relationships, new kinds of roles have

to be fulfilled when you have that drive to these new scales, I think. And so the kind of organization that would have worked for, say, a ground-based observatory in the 1950s is simply not going to work for, say, the Hubble Space Telescope. And clearly, the way that Hubble is being managed has influenced how the James Webb Space Telescope will be done. But I see distinct differences between the two of them, again, in terms of social relationships, management, advocacy. And then if we look at the recommendations, say, of ASTRO 2020, they're being now quite upfront about these generational projects here. And so the successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, they're talking about the 2040s, for example. No more we can finish this in a decade or in the case of Hubble,

Hubble was going to take five or six years initially from the start of construction to launch. It took a bit longer. Webb from serious work in the late 1990s to 2021, you know, that's a very substantial period. And again, now we're looking at the 2040s. So there's a recognition, I think, that the time to get these kinds of projects up and going is to be counted in terms of generations now. I was reminded of a proposal moving through in the heliophysics division in NASA, the idea of an interstellar probe. That's talking on the scale of a century almost or 50 years, a good portion of a century. Right. So you're talking about you're thinking of this kind of pharaonic commitment to your starting or a cathedral like you're starting a project.

You won't see the end of it. You carry on a successive generation. I want to start talking a little bit about the history of Hubble, though, because I think it's very germane to our discussion of James Webb. To this broader points that we're talking about in terms of this development of mega science and the shifting needs of the scientific community to work within this, reading your book on the history of Hubble, I was struck by this idea that before they could even really start selling what was to be called the Large Space Telescope or Large Orbital Telescope at the time, starting in the 1960s or 70s, they had to first convince the other astronomers that this was worth doing. And you realize, again, what a paradigm shift had to happen in order for the

community even to begin agreeing on this. Can you talk a little about what was the coalition building that needed to happen to even start talking about big science in space for astronomy? Well, I think there was something of a divide in the 1960s between those astronomers who were enthusiastic about space and those astronomers who thought that these enthusiasts about space astronomy, well, they would live to learn their lesson. Because there had been this earlier history of space astronomy efforts involving rockets, and often they'd ended up with no scientific data from these kinds of rocket flights. It had been quite challenging and it was not seen by many ground-based astronomers, certainly not all, but many ground-based astronomers as a diversion of monies because

these kinds of activities will be so much more costly than ground-based astronomy. And so that was always one of the objections in the 60s and 70s to doing large scale space astronomy, the sheer cost of it. Think of what you could do with graph-based astronomy for the cost even of the launch vehicle, for example. What I think happens with Hubble is there has to be a lot of groundwork done to persuade the ground-based astronomers that space astronomy is actually a very attractive option, and it can provide capabilities that we cannot achieve any other way. And so there's a definite effort to bring on board some of the leading ground-based astronomers. So a key figure, for example, was someone who died a few years ago, Alan Sandage, who was an extremely extremely prominent figure. He was invited to meetings involving the planning for what

eventually becomes called Hubble. And so it's a definite effort to establish a broad base of support. And it takes time. And so that's kind of just almost your first step, because it's going to be a really big project. You need lots of astronomers to be involved. So if you can't have an enthusiastic community, then you're just not going to be able to build it in the end, because you're not going to have enough astronomers involved. You can't just get one prominent astronomer to secure billions of dollars in two decades worth of commitment from the public funds. You need some broader, you need to have the conception of a broader value of the scientific community behind this large project. And that coalition building, I think, is one of your key themes, right?

Is that how do you build, or maybe the pressure, the selection pressure then comes with, how do you have a project that creates, in itself, the coalition needed to support it? A broad enough swath of the astronomical community sees this as valuable. And that seemed to be something that really drove the technical and observational capabilities of the Hubble was something that was able to address large swaths of the community. That's right. And I think we see a prime example of that in just the sizing of the primary mirror for Hubble, because it starts off and people are looking at three meters. There are money problems, political problems in the mid-1970s, and an obvious way to cut your costs to make the project more attractive politically is reduce the size of the primary mirror. But if you drop down too far, you lose so much scientific capability.

Lots of people will say, well well it's just not worth our while goodbye and so you've got to do this kind of balancing act where the scientific capability has to be attractive enough to keep people within the coalition but you've still got to look to figure where can we make some cuts here? What is the size that people will accept? And so at one point, there were three options that were closely studied, three meters, 2.4 meters, 1.8, you know, and as good bureaucrats, you end up with 2.4 in the middle, right? And so that was still keeping people on board. And the key scientific program that people would often discuss in that connection was, okay, we can see Cepheid variables

in the Virgo cluster if the mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter. And so that was this connection between scientific capability and support. Now, if we look at a more recent example, say the superconducting supercollider, at one point there was an option to reduce the energy of the collider from the plan 40 TEV down to 35 TEV, and it would have saved $2 billion. And it would have made the superconducting supercollider more attractive politically because we've reduced the cost. But the high-energy physicists decided that they weren't going to do that, and they were going to stick to the 40 TeV. And I think you could reasonably say that was one of the contributing factors

to why the project got cancelled. This interesting interplay again of every big science project then is the maximum technological capability that the political system will bear almost. They kind of converge at this solution if it happens and so in a way you're you're both kind of you have these two different institutional interests that are both at odds with each other and then they kind of seek out eventually this kind of point of agreement in

terms of what people will pay how it's going to be made and also then the capabilities you know the scientists always want more capability right and And then the institutions always want to pay as little as possible. And so at some point they're discovering where that exact match is through the process of, it's not just you sit down and agree, it's almost through this process of political back and forth over time. There has to be, I think, a negotiation. It's not, okay, we've got this wonderful project. Here's how much it's going to cost. Here's the capability. Please give us the money. That isn't how it works. You have these negotiations and they can be quite extended. Now, obviously, you have other people involved who might say, oh, look,

Obviously, you have other people involved who might say, oh, look, that's far too big. You can't build a 100-meter mirror for the James Webb Space Telescope or something absurd like that. But it's fundamentally a set of negotiations that are going on, I think. With Hubble, we have this effort over an extended period to find what you might also call a sweet spot. You had this wonderful word that I'd never, I wish, this is a great word, adhocracy for Hubble, you said over the years, because people were kind of making it up as they went along as the implication of like, what can we do to just keep the coalition together in order to build this big space telescope? I think there's this interest that there can be

frustrations or like, why don't we just do the right thing the first time or why don't we just build the ideal case? But again, you're not working in this ideal rational system, you're working in a fundamentally as your point, when you're doing a big science project, you're working in a political system. At the end of the day, when you're engaging with public funds, with public oversight, you have the role of politics, whether you want it or not, and you have to then adapt to the realities of that and compromise sometimes the ideal and the politics in any easy fashion just But you also need, ideally, to keep that coalition in place, because for big projects, you were invariably run into problems, including big political problems. And so Hubble established its coalition right at the very start. So when there were difficulties, you have these groups and people and institutions you can call on to go advocate yet again to keep the project moving. With the James Webb Space Telescope, there's a near-death experience in 2011 when a congressional committee zeroes James Webb out of the budget, there was not really at that

point a very clear coalition, I think. So it was kind of putting together a coalition on the fly, which is a dangerous way to do it, I think. Well, I think one of the points you made in one of your talks was you have to advocate for the project over and over and over and over again. You can never stop advocating for a big project when it takes decades to build. And it's so visible and it's consuming so much money. It is not going to be something that can be left alone as it were. Okay, now we've got approval. That's good.

Let's come back and get the scientific results in 10 years or 15 years or whatever it's going to take to actually build it. I want to wrap up a few things with the Hubble and then move on to James Webb. Just to kind of finish this quick story of Hubble, you had to convince the scientific community that, A, you know, it was even worth it. You had to convince NASA, they hadn't built, they'd been building a few smaller scale 36 inch or so space telescopes throughout the 60s and 70s. They start building the Hubble, but through the implication of your book, it sounds like it didn't necessarily get the attention and institutional support it really needed until

the 1980s. Did they have to kind of sell the concept itself, even had to work its way through the institutional systems of NASA to be relevant and to deserve that kind of commitment? When did it really become, would you define it as the megaproject it came out to be? I think the scale of the project was not really, at least widely grasped until I think the operations begin in the 1990s. So construction of Hubble begins in 1978, and that was with a planned launch to come in 1984. So it was going to be six years from start to launch. It takes clearly much longer. But one of the key things for Hubble was to have a very interested NASA center for whom building Hubble was really a central commitment. Marshall Space Flight Center, who were looking for business in the 1970s because Apollo had

wound down. What kind of roles, what kinds of activities was the Marshall Space Flight Center being involved with? Now, they had some experience from the high-energy astrophysical observatories, the X-ray observatories, but they were very enthusiastic about taking on Hubble because it was new business. The Goddard Space Flight Center, which had much more background in space astronomy, wasn't really as involved as might have been expected.

They still had a major role in terms of the building of scientific instruments, but the main center for Hubble was the Marshall Space Flight Center. So these institutional factors play in to how a project gets shaped and then how it proceeds. Because if Marshall had said, no, we're not interested, I'm not quite sure what the institutional arrangement that would have been workable would have been. So Hubble launches obviously in 80 or 90 after a delay from the Challenger explosion. And your book came out in 89. Interesting history of the project itself. Something I noticed from that book was that in order to save money, they had started to assume assume more risk that they had built fewer test proof of concept engineering devices or test devices. And you can see this trade off of saving money in the short term, but then having this almost catastrophic

public relations disaster with the initial launch of Hubble and its spherical aberration throwing off the optical design. At the same time, you highlight, and I think it was 89, that scientists start to really seriously think about the next space telescope, the successor to the Hubble, before it launched and went through its initial problems. What did that spherical aberration, how did that change the scientific community's approach to a successor and also the NASA institutional approach to building a follow-up mission? Was that a huge impact or was that something they worked through and just kind of moved on from? start of the construction of Hubble, the very first meetings, the message was, this is a low-cost, success-oriented program. So that was the fundamental message. That means we're going to be assuming risk, fundamentally, because how do you keep it low-cost, success-oriented?

You know, you're building risk. Now, you could say, okay, well, you've got the shuttle. So it's a different situation with Hubble from, say, James Webb, where you're sending it 1.5 million kilometers away. But what ends up happening is that with Spheric Collaboration, which was discovered just a couple of months after the launch of Hubble in 1990, with sphero collaboration, you have a really quite catastrophic event in terms of the public relations, because now Hubble becomes, in one cartoon, a flying lemon, for example. It becomes the butt of jokes on late night comedy shows. It leads the evening news or major congressional hearings, packed congressional hearings where the Nasser administrator is hauled over the coals. Other things are going wrong with the shuttle at that point. So really what drives Hubble off the front pages is the invasion of Kuwait. And so the Hubble story

was going on for quite a period because it became almost, for the United States, a national inkblot test where you look at this inkblot and you see all sorts of things in it. And so there are lots of commentators looking at Hubble and reading all sorts of messages about the state of the United States from this seeming failure of Hubble. And so the planning for Hubble's successor, which had actually begun in the 1980s, as you said, the planning still moves, but it's not to get very far at that point because you cannot proceed with the successor until the original is actually shown to work and to work well. And so there's almost, you could say, a few years break before the planning really picks up again for the James Webb Space Telescope or at least planning that people are going to take seriously. And so one of

the things you see again just thinking of another megaproject, the cancelled superconducting supercollider, the failure of that has meant in many respects decades of failure to get anything remotely like the superconducting supercollider for American high-energy physics and so the American high-energy physics community is still feeling very much the failure of the SSC in 1993 but with Hubble what you have is the repair mission to Hubble by the shuttle in December 1993, new instruments added, other changes are made to Hubble. And so instead of becoming this symbol of national failure, because Hubble is working, and is seen to be working, it becomes a symbol of

national success and a kind of can-do attitude. We can solve these problems. And that is where I think, for example, the images like the famous pillars of creation play an absolutely fundamental role in remaking the relationship between Hubble, policymakers, and the general public. There are other events like bits of Comet Shoemaker-Levy smashing into Jupiter and Hubble being involved in observing Jupiter at that point as well. So there's this very public remaking of Hubble, and Hubble becomes a success story. Now there is political space to proceed with a successor that had not been there before. Yeah, I think you can almost see that epitomized in these committee report one is the decadal survey from early 90s the bacall committee report yes that did not recommend going for a next generation space telescope initially despite

calling for infrared being kind of the main area of study for the 90s but then you have this mid decade report uh is it the dressler committee report in 96 after the Hubble had been repaired then going and say let's do this next generation space telescope a four meter IR I think is what they recommended so you almost like bounded on either end of that failure and success is the formal recommendations of the scientific committee feeling the confidence to propose even moving forward with the next big project. That's right. So Hubble's kind of return from the dead, as it were, doesn't determine that you're going to get a successor. But what it does do is open the door to getting a successor, whereas previously with Hubble seemed to have failed, at least in the eyes of many policymakers, then the door is shut. Now,

at least the door is open, but you've still got to figure out how you're going to get through. Interesting to compare the two projects for what ultimately became JWST is that at least the second time around, really, if you're talking about this level of space telescope, it seems like they don't have to convince the scientific community anymore that this is a good idea. That's almost baked in. That was almost a one-time paradigm shift that had to happen in the 60s and 70s to convince astronomers that space-based astronomy was worth that kind of investment. Is that accurate? Would you agree that that was sold by that point? They didn't have to reconvince people to do that in the 90s? I think that's right. And the nature of being an astronomer has shifted

because if you look, say, at the early 60s, you have people who are optical astronomers, people who are radio astronomers, and you have emerging groups that you can start to call X-ray astronomers or gamma ray astronomers. Things that can only happen in space, basically. Right. Or the radio astronomers are starting to work with the optical astronomers. But by the 1990s, people are moving a bit more and the system is a bit freer in that you can have people making observations in different wavelength regions and they're not always pegged down to one particular wavelength region. And so again, this kind of democratization of astronomy that had happened where astronomers can get access to these kinds

of facilities which give them opportunities in different wavelength ranges means that what it is to be an astronomer has shifted a bit from what it had been in the 1960s where you were very much you are a radio astronomer or you are an optical astronomer, now things are somewhat more fluid by the time we're looking at the 1990s, because anybody can apply for time on the Hubble Space Telescope, for example. Casey and his guest, Dr. Robert Smith, will continue their conversation in moments. First, though, I've got a favor to ask. Our Planetary Radio Listener Survey wasn't yet open when we brought you the January Space Policy Edition. We've extended it so that you SPE listeners can tell us how we're doing.

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and Facebook. Make sure you like and subscribe so you never miss the next exciting update from the world of planetary science. Something else I feel like there was an advantage this time around in the early late 80s, early 90s, as they began thinking about the successor was they had an institutional, there was institutions that existed that didn't exist when the Hubble was first proposed, particularly the Space Telescope Science Institute and Aura, its managing partner, institutional bureaucracies within NASA that build space telescopes. They had these groups of people, administrative class, bureaucratic classes, that want to continue to persist, that then also align with the continued existence of large

space-based telescopes. And that all had to be created for Hubble that didn't exist then, that then they could leverage for institutional support going forward through James Webb. And I think also the Goddard Space Flight Center was very enthusiastic about a successor to Hubble. The Goddard Space Flight Center is very close to the Space Telescope Science Institute. Also a key factor, and again, there are these, what you might call these broad structural factors, but there's a kind of contingency in that you have as a Maryland senator, Senator Barbara Mikulski, who was extremely influential in the Senate. And she has a very strong interest in,

or had a very strong interest in science. She retired a few years ago, but she had a very strong interest in science, was really keen on Hubble. I mean, she famously called Hubble a techno turkey in 1990, but then really went out to bat for it. You know, so she's beating them up in public, but really working her socks off in private to keep support going for Hubble. And she's enthusiastic about the successor to Hubble. But also connected to those institutions being in her home state of

Maryland, right? So there's this... Exactly. The institutions and the people exist there to be protected as well, to just honestly enthusiastic. But yeah, there's a political reason that matches up, aligns with that well. to just honestly enthusiastic, but yeah, there's a political reason that matches up, aligns with that well. Exactly. Whereas if we were looking at the mid-70s in terms of Hubble, then some of the key figures at that point, the battles were mainly fought in the House of Representatives, but some of the key figures were actually directly opposed to Hubble, whereas in the mid-90s and then later, you don't have anybody standing up and banging on their desk saying, we should never proceed with the James Webb Space Telescope. And so the political landscape, you can say, is somewhat different from what it had been

in the 1970s. To your metaphor, the door was open. Politically, Mikulski helps open that door a bit wider, perhaps for more ambitious. But also, I was surprised to see Dan Golden, the administrator of NASA, open that door or kind of kick it open even a bit wider in 96, when he addressed the American Astronautical Society in response to this Dressler committee report saying, let's do a four-meter infrared telescope, he said, maybe think bigger. Yes. And so that's a key moment. He gives his speech to the American Astronomical Society.

He gets a standing ovation. I'm not sure that's that common for NASA administrators. I don't think so. Yeah. And already by the time he's giving his speech, there's a study contract set up for this successor to Hubble. And it's being led at the Goddard Space Flight Center by John Mather, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. And, you know, he's still the project scientist for the project. So things were starting to move as a result of the Dressler Committee report, which had shifted the planning from what had been, okay, we're going to

build a successor to Hubble, so we'll build basically a lot bigger Hubble. But it's going to be infrared, but optical UV as well. So a much wider spectrum of wavelengths to detect is the original conception. That's right. When you have a conference, for example, in 1989 at the Space Telescope Science Institute called the Next Generation Space Telescope, and that's even before Hubble was launched, there'd been efforts at the Institute in the 1980s, actually looking at what might be feasible in terms of a successor to Hubble. The difficulty with that conception is it just seems so extraordinarily expensive. How can we possibly do this? And if you look at some of the power laws that astronomers were using at that point

to predict the cost based on the diameter of the primary mirror, you end up with literally astronomical numbers, which were just not going to work. Because also, I think an important context for us is we're in this post-Cold War era. The 1990s turns out to be a very difficult decade because the Cold War has ended. What happens to science funding now? And so it's very challenging for NASA in the 1990s in many respects. So there's this decision, and this is driven, I think, by the Dressler Committee to focus on an

infrared telescope. And there'd also been a lot of work in Europe, a group, in particular, at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, who were looking at different ways to do infrared astronomy, and in particular, a notion called passive cooling, where you don't really need to put your telescope inside a spacecraft full of cryogens, but you let the spacecraft cool down in a passive manner, which is effectively what Webb is doing. Just much less complex and much less weight involved, much simpler to do, basically, more enabling in terms of technology is what passive cooling would allow you to do for infrared. And you can have much bigger mirrors, plus you have primary mirror because you haven't got to put your telescope inside this enormous kind of doer in effect. That is also a very

important moment. And so you have that coming together with the realization that, look, if we try and do what would later be called a kind of Louvois sort of telescope, where you've got optical, ultraviolet, and infrared, that is just going to be prohibitively expensive for us. And so the planning settles on an infrared telescope. it's being strongly supported within NASA. But again, you still have concerns about costs just because we're into this Cold War context. Right. NASA's budget stepped down starting in the mid-90s every year for many years at that point. And this was the era of better, faster, cheaper, right? Specifically reformulating NASA to do smaller missions more frequently that have higher risk. And if you lose one, faster, cheaper, right? Specifically reformulating NASA to do smaller missions more frequently that have higher risk.

And if you lose one, you know, that's tough, but you can continue. It's not the big black eye that Hubble was, for example. Something I just wanted to just make sure we hit on, I think this is a really interesting classic, this intersection of new technology with the scientific capability or interest, right? So you had this Bacall committee saying infrared is going to be this big era of the 90s.

This is an era, area of astronomy that needs more attention and can reveal all these things we just cannot literally see without these specific types of detectors paired with advances in infrared detectors, right? And advances in passive cooling. And so the technology also opens this door up. There had to be this kind of separate technological evolution that could be paired with this in order to make it fit within this politically willing area of funding or resources available for it, it seems like. Right. And I think that the Bacall Committee

doesn't, as far as I remember, actually talk about passive cooling, but it certainly refers to the decade. Yeah, setting up like the scientific context, which then justifies it by saying it helps close, or it seems to help bound the potentials of what you were saying in terms of we build another Hubble that's just bigger. No, it actually seems to be scientifically more another Hubble that's just bigger. No, it actually seems to be scientifically more compelling to focus on this range of infrared wavelengths because of perhaps of what the call committee set out prior to that in terms of what the decade's interest is going to be. Right. And so you've got these exciting developments with infrared detectors, which have been, a lot of money have been spent on infrared detectors for the Star Wars program, for example.

And so if you have an infrared satellite looking down at the Earth and you want to find where the signatures of ballistic missiles in the infrared, well, they're between one and five microns. And so I don't think it's a great surprise that initially the idea is that Webb, or what becomes called Webb, is going to operate between one and five microns because you've got these terrific detectors much better than other regions of the infrared. So that is also playing a factor, I think. This really goes to your point of this coalition building process, right? Of how are you assembling a big enough community to pursue something as ambitious as this next generation space telescope? You're using these Bacall committees saying infrared is important. You're using the technological capability to show costs, but also engage that area of this new astronomy opening up. And also to your point, astronomers themselves are becoming much more flexible within their wavelengths about what they can study and not. So there's these multiple threads coming together to build a large enough coalition to say

this should be the path forward. I don't know if I've ever in my, that I'm aware of, seen a NASA administrator say that the scientific astronomy is thinking too small, right? And this is unique, this really kind of amazing moment, again, by Dan Golden, which we already talked about, but it's worth dwelling on a bit. It's so interesting to me because he was doing precisely the opposite. It strikes me every other place in NASA with better, faster, cheaper. Why would he go out and say, let's make it bigger and obviously more expensive and complicated that will slow things down? It's like the opposite of his philosophy.

Why was he was it in the spur of the moment? Was he just excited about space telescopes? Do you have any insight into what prompted him to do that? Because the scientific community took him seriously and upped the size of Webb as a consequence. That's right. I think he was still urging them to be bold, ambitious, throw away the concept of Hubble, which he saw as basically a ground-based telescope sent into space. This large slab of glass, I think he refers to, you don't have to do that. You can lightweight the mirrors and so on. And it's also worth remembering Golding's background, which was formerly he'd been a manager at TRW, and he knew a lot about what

sorts of things they've been sending into space. And it's worthwhile remembering that initially, who's going to manufacture the great bulk of James Webb? It's TRW before it gets taken over by Northrop Grumman. And so there's a kind of institutional memory, I think, in play for Goldin about the sorts of things he'd seen. And he'd also, there was a mirror at TRW that was a kind of deployable example. And so he was aware of things to do with large mirrors in space, I think, or large deployable elements of spacecraft that TRW had been involved with earlier. And so I think he's wanting them to reduce costs by thinking less conservatively. So he's still urging them to keep the cost down. He's not saying, oh, you can have five billion.

That's great. You know, go away. He's saying you've got to bring the cost down. But one way to bring the cost down is to think more ambitiously. You know, you lightweight the mirrors. Don't have these big slabs of glass. Maybe you can do it in segments, those kinds of things. So I don't think he's being contradictory in that sense. But what I think

is important is that faster, better, cheaper then sets the context for James Webb. And so you can, I think, reasonably say, okay, well, it frames how James Webb is going to be approached, which will end up pushing the costs much higher initially and and they get into a lot of trouble now in terms of how the cost estimates have increased over time for web but it was really seemed to be conceived as this anti-hubble in terms of how they would pursue it how much it would cost they had these somewhat artificial self-understood cost limits of like 800 million initially or 1.2 billion, these very low numbers that they felt was politically feasible, they being folks in

the scientific community defining this project, that ultimately, obviously, were completely unrealistic. Those weren't necessarily nefarious or Machiavellian structurings of these things. They were definitely reacting to the Hubble, right? What were they trying to learn from the Hubble at this point and apply to this next generation space telescope that they wanted to avoid specifically? Well, for example, the use of the shuttle, I mean, that was clearly immensely beneficial to Hubble because it would have been pretty much an embarrassing flop if it had been launched in 1990 and there was no way to tackle the problem of sphere collaboration.

But the shuttle was extremely expensive, you know, a billion dollars a launch. And so if you go up and do upgrades, repair work on Hubble, even at one point, the idea was every so often the Hubble will be brought to the ground, refurbishment, relaunched. Well, that plan doesn't really last that long. So using the shuttle is seen as just too expensive an option. So we will get rid of the shuttle. Also, we're looking at thermal environment. If we have a large infrared telescope and you're orbiting the Earth, it's maybe not the best thing for it in terms of fluctuating temperatures. Let's go send it beyond the moon. Then looks a very attractive option. And it's been where infrared observatories like Herschel and Planck have also gone.

And so that makes a lot of sense. So it's going to have lightweight mirrors. It's not going to have this big slab of glass as Dan Golding would refer to it. We're going to do things very differently. I think you're quite right to refer it as initially as a kind of anti-Hubble because you're demonstrating you're going to cost a lot less than Hubble costs. We can save money compared to what was going on with Hubble because we're going to adopt these different kinds of measures here.

I mean, you followed the project very closely the last 20 years. What went wrong? How did that go wrong so fast, did it seem like? Was there a few key things that happened at the beginning that set them on this path to costing just as much, if not more, than the Hubble Space Telescope? I think it's always tricky to figure out those kinds of things in that what you might say is that the early numbers have a very big influence on the development of the project because if you start low, then the reserves you have available are going to be low.

And so on a big project where you're pushing the state of the art in lots of different areas, you would, I think, want to have very substantial reserves because you know you're going to have problems. However much work you've done in terms of technology development before you're seriously constructing stuff, that low initial cost then puts pressure on the reserves, which are just not adequate. And so if you can't do the work that you want to do in a kind of rational fashion, then work gets pushed into future years. And you end up, if you're not careful, and I think this has happened with JWST, you end up with what is called a bow wave, where you're kind of pushing stuff off into the future. But at some point, you're going to have a bit of a crash as a result of that. And the same thing happened with Hubble, right? Almost the same thing. They was under costed at the beginning. So they started pushing work off into the future. They were actually

putting some of their contractors on hold altogether. And then they had had this big crisis in 1983 of having to deal with the consequence of that, just like in similar ways, you know, to some degree that we had with JWST in 2010. And so ironically, it kind of started out as the anti-Hubble, then became the Hubble as a consequence of that approach. That's right. And I think also another structural issue is just how the budget is decided on this yearly basis. And again, what can happen, and I think this happened with James Webb, is if you have a big project that is getting a large amount of funding, it can become almost a bank for smaller projects which may have run into problems. So okay, how do you solve this set of problems with this smaller project? Okay, we will take it away from James Webb this year and you know at some future point

we'll try and fix that. But you take money away. And so that compounds the difficulties. Also, there's a preference with the Office of Management and Budget to give flat amounts of money over a certain period. Whereas the reality with a big aerospace project is you have a different kind of funding profile where your costs are going to rise and then hopefully fall in a fairly expeditious manner, but you have a cost rising and falling. But if you then flatten out the budget, you're not following that kind of a profile. So that puts extra pressure on. So if you are able to give the project manager the money the project manager needs each year, you would end up with a different kind of profile, I think.

But that also affects the overall cost. And so I think there are a number of factors, plus also some of the areas where there was effort to mitigate risk early. Some of that risk actually came back as it not being fully mitigated, you could say. So it's a range of different factors. But I would see certainly the low initial cost early on in the project. People are enthusiastic. Okay, we can do this for this amount of money, or at least some of them can believe that this is what we're going to aim at. And a low amount initially is going to build problems all the way through the program. How precarious of a situation was the project in in 2010, 2011 politically?

Were you personally thinking that they may not make it out of this alive, funding-wise? I think if, say, Barbara Mikulski had had a heart attack in 2011, and she couldn't return to the Senate for six months or something, it would have been extremely dangerous. I mean, as it was, it was dangerous. Anytime you get zeroed out by a committee in the Congress, it is dangerous. And so it required a lot of effort. And also the publicity that Webb got at that point was generally very negative. There's a famous story in Nature, the telescope that ate astronomy, for example. And once you get pegged in that fashion, get framed in that fashion, it is then very dangerous because it means you're

more vulnerable if something happens in the future. It also seems like you're vulnerable to the politics of the moment. That was the peak of the Tea Party, the initial peak of the Tea Party, taking over Congress, and which were defying themselves on cutting spending. And it reminded me also of when we were talking about the superconducting supercollider in early 90s. That was also an era of cutting spending. Big projects like that seem to be very – they're juicy targets in those moments. And if you can make it through those moments, it seems like a lot of these projects ultimately survive.

But sometimes if the politics turn against you, you can be quite vulnerable. And that seemed to be that for the Webb telescope at that point. That's right. And that seemed to be that for the Webb telescope at that point. That's right. And I think that, for example, the superconducting supercollider was very vulnerable because they had major cost overruns. And it's the period when you have Ross Perot banging on about the deficit, for example, again, a lot of concern about the deficit in the Congress.

Deficit, for example, gained a lot of concern about the deficit in the Congress. And here's a big visible project that you can demonstrate you're dealing with the deficit by killing it. And so it is very dangerous. But I think one of the things that was very positive for Webb is that the work on the technologies was going well. So it wasn't as if, oh, we don't know how to deal with this particular technical problem. It was, I think, more we're just behind rather than how the heck do we do this? No, this bit of the telescope, we really don't know what's going on. And so the reports on the technical progress were very positive. And so that was, I think, a key factor for Webb. It also seemed to be that after it survived that political crisis, it was that much stronger.

It felt like it was untouchable after it survived that near-death political moment. Because I remember during the across the board budget cuts of sequestration in 2013, Webb was spared those cuts, and they shifted it to other programs. And every year after that, Congress gave exactly what NASA asks for Webb, even when NASA came back and asked kind of hat in hand in 2018, 2019, and asked for another 800 million to finish the project. Is there a value sometimes? Does that forge that enduring coalition, those near-death political moments? Does that make them ultimately stronger and more enduring projects? Well, a crisis presents an opportunity. You can fix issues, you can get extra money, you can change the management structure. So Webb was

elevated within NASA, taken out of the astrophysics division, and was operating outside of the previous environment that it had been in. So that was, I think, a key move. Also, just the level of visibility, it in a way had become too big to fail at that point, I think. Whereas before, it was not really in that state. It had established a very strong coalition. The technical progress, again, was very significant. People were not complaining really about the technical progress, I think. It was these other factors which NASA then had this opportunity to fix in 2011, 2012. It also seems like NASA was really learning from the experience with the Hubble. I felt that when, again, they went back and asked for more money at the very end to finish it, where maybe if Hubble hadn't had that aberration at the

beginning, they would have rolled the dice and taken the risk to say, we think we know what we're doing. We can take a slightly higher risk failure because we just can't stand the political hit. But really, it seemed like the political hit for a failed Hubble was way worse than any one reading about angry Congress, Congress people about additional preparations for for Hubble at the time, right. So the lesson was that the symbolic value of a failed mission is way more consequential in a negative sense to NASA than asking for another billion dollars, it seems to me. And I wonder if that drives this. NASA, because they're a national symbol, they cannot seem to be failing. So it's always going to be worth trying to take the smaller

political hit for the money to get that confidence level up to that 0.999% or whatever they can do that. Do you think that was a lesson that they pulled from Hubble? Does that come into play in your perspective here? I'm not sure if it's a lesson from Hubble, but certainly it is a sensible way to proceed if you're sitting in NASA headquarters. Because what are the options? Do you say, okay, we just live with this potential technical set of problems and we just launch and keep our fingers crossed. Now, it's one thing to do that with Hubble, because you've got the shuttle available. But with James Webb, by the time you've spent 8 billion,

does it make an awful lot of difference if you spend another $800 million? Clearly, it's an embarrassing ask, but it is not nearly as embarrassing as having a failed James Webb, which would have been, I think, catastrophic for the agency. that you published in 1989, you talk about the stresses of big science projects that are essentially pushing the limits of what society is able and willing to pay. You pose this question, should we be doing big science? Should it be allowed to grow at this expense of, you know, little science or smaller projects? That question I heard rephrased back to me four months ago when I published I was talking with some congressional staff about the cost of James Webb Space Telescope you know it's been more than 30 years do you think there's a clearer answer about this balance of of these big mega science projects versus small projects is there are we doing the right types of missions here? I think that there's more consciousness now, again, when we have, say, the Astro 2020 committee

talking about these generational efforts. Because, I mean, how do you keep a project going for that amount of time in order to get some sort of a launch in the in the 2040s what does that also say about graduate training how does that speak to scientific careers how does that speak to having people involved in the next project that might be a mega project with experience of doing these things because if it's going to be generational how many projects does somebody have in their bag as it were in their career and how many can they do I would say maybe it looks like one and a half seems to be the go seems to be the going rate at this point. How do you transfer the knowledge of how to do these

kinds of things? And so it raises all sorts of issues to think about the scale and how big do you really want to go? I mean, how complex do you want to go? How much risk do you want to take? Because I think one of the things I would say with these lines of development, when you've got really big projects, it is a, I would say, it is a kind of fragile line. Because it is not that hard to conceive of a really big flagship mission failing. We almost had that with Hubble, for example. And then what? Because it is politically devastating. Thankfully, JWST seems to be working, but that was a nail-biting couple of weeks during deployment,

right? And the costs, again, to even to make sure that you have that high mission assurance, as I was pointing out, just become very high. And so you have some lessons you've talked about in terms of megap mega projects i just wanted to touch on because this is broader than jwst right it looks like nasa may be willing to start on the next one uh this super hubble maybe we'll finally get that super hubble terrestrial kind of planet finding telescope for 2045 yes what are some of the key lessons do you think the scientific community and the space advocate community needs to keep in mind for pursuing these types of mega projects? And we can set aside this challenges of the fundamental issue of that they happen very infrequently,

and there's a lot of risk inherent in a single point of failure. But how do you sustain them? How do you design these to succeed from your experience? Well, I actually gave a talk to the people who were working on what was then the next generation space telescope in 1997 and talking about lessons from Hubble. And my first lesson is, you know, you've got to have a realistic cost when you start. Don't buy in. I think I have on my index card from that talk. And I think that is an absolutely

fundamental point that the project has to be initiated with a realistic budget. I think that is going to drive so much of what happens later on in the project. Now, that is clearly difficult if you're doing something so complex, so new, but it's clearly something, again, that the people working on the Astro 2020 recommendations were grappling with as well, because they are kind of bending over backwards to talk about technology development and those kinds of things in order to come up with a realistic sort of a number so that by the time you're really going ahead and building your planet finder, then you've got a number you can reasonably rely on and have adequate reserves

available for the things you're not aware of at the time. And so I would say initiating a project with an adequate budget is absolutely key. And then this process of coalition building I think is fundamental. You've got to establish a coalition which means convincing people of the worth of the scientific case. That is key. So there has to be a lot of groundwork done, I think, to establish that here is a really important project that is going to be worth expending money. It's worth it for the scientists involved to be expending lots of their career working on. And at the same time, if you can do that, I think it means you've got the potential for a better

balance and you don't end up with headlines like the telescope that ate astronomy. Well, hopefully they will listen to you the next time around on some of these key points. But I'm sure like me, you are grateful and excited to see this mission move forward and having followed it so closely over the years. So, Dr. Smith, I want to thank you so much for joining us today on the Space Policy Edition. And we will check in with you sometime after the first round of scientific images may be coming down from the Webb Space Telescope as we look towards the future. That's right. I mean, I'm an old Hubble hand. So, you know, I don't, I want to see the first scientific results before I get really excited. But it's, you know, it's temporary. That's good. Yeah, we'll protect ourselves

emotionally and make sure that we get those images down before we count our chickens. Thank you again, Dr. Smith. I appreciate you joining us today. My pleasure. Dr. and Professor Robert Smith talking with my colleague, Casey Dreyer, the Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society. A delightful conversation. And Casey, I will inject once again, I mean, I actually think of this conversation that you've had as sort of a book ending the conversation that I had with John Mather, which is on the weekly Planetary Radio this week. I mean, really between the two of them, absolutely fascinating material on this topic of the James Webb Space Telescope and more broadly, big science.

Absolutely. Yeah, it was a delight to speak with him. And again, we're just waiting now for the full commissioning of the space telescope. And as many people have reminded us, it ain't a telescope yet until we get those first clear images down as the many harsh lessons we've learned over the years.

Everything seems to be going good so far, so we will continue to patiently wait. And I cannot wait to see the first light pictures coming down sometime in the middle of the year. Casey, we will need to wait a month before you and I talk again on the Space Policy Edition. Of course, I look forward to you coming on the weekly show if something comes up that we need to talk about. Thanks for the great work and good luck with the day of action. Thank you, Matt. Looking forward to it.

Once again, that's Casey Dreyer, Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. As always, I hope that you will join us every week and on the first Friday in March for the next Space Policy Edition at Astro.