Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Lessons From the Moonshot That Never Was-With Mark Albrecht

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Thirty years ago, Dr. Mark Albrecht led the National Space Council when President George H.W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, an ambitious effort to send humans to the Moon and then on to Mars. Political divisions and a budget-busting cost estimate grounded the effort before it ever got off the ground. A new NSC is attempting to implement a new lunar plan from the Trump Administration. Can the lessons of a failed moonshot help today's lunar ambitions succeed? More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-37.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the May Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, and I am sitting on a couch next to a lot of coffee at the Planetary Defense Conference. Casey Dreyer is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Welcome, Casey. How's the coffee? It's free. The best kind. And plentiful. Matt, I have to say, this is the first time I think we've ever done this show literally physically next to each other, as opposed to distance, but connected through the internet. I think you're right. And what a place to do it in, as well, as we're on location. the internet. I think you're right. And what a place to do it in as well as we're on location.

We're at the hotel at the University of Maryland, which is the headquarters for the Planetary Defense Conference. And there won't be a break for a while. So hopefully we won't hear a lot of coffee cups clanking. But if you do hear some noise in the background, we are literally in the break area for the Planetary Defense Conference. Speaking of planetary defense, Casey, we probably could start there in a moment or two, but first, our usual pitch. Do you want to start? Matt, you do it so well, I can never compete beyond the point that I think everyone knows what's coming at this point. Well, I feel strongly about this. We were with, oh, I don't know, 500 or 600 people last night doing Planetary Radio Live, which you will hear in the next episode of the regular show, the weekly show. That'll be the May 8 episode.

And you will hear Bill Nye and Bruce Betts and me and Jim Green, the NASA chief scientist, and some other terrific scientists, five from the hundreds that are attending the Planetary Defense Conference. We were talking to folks there about planetary defense and, as Bill says, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. That's what we do at the Planetary Society. We had a lot of members in the audience. We would love to have you as a member, whether you're in one of our audiences or just enjoying and feeling proud to be contributing to this effort

that has been so successful in terms of advocacy. And you can do that by going to planetary.org slash membership. Check out all the different levels and all the different benefits of membership. But, of course, the number one benefit is just knowing that you are part of our mission to create, to educate, and to advocate, which is what we'll be talking to Casey about again. Well done, Matt. That sounds great. I'll sign up. I'll sign up again. I am nothing if not passionate about my membership in the Planetary Society. I am a member as well as an employee. Same, same. I'm also a member. So interesting thing too,

I think what's really relevant is that in addition to the advocacy that we do for planetary exploration, we take the bold stance at the Planetary Society that we don't want civilization to be destroyed by an asteroid. That's something we believe in also very strongly. I don't know. I'm kind of mild about it.

Some people may be relieved at the possibility. But overall, I think it's good to not get hit by an asteroid. And one of the major efforts that we're ramping up at the Planetary Society is focusing more on planetary defense as a policy problem and putting more of my time and Brendan Currie's time at our DC, in support of increased detection capabilities for planetary objects or near-Earth objects, and also increased policy awareness at the government and intergovernmental level of potential asteroid threats. So this is something that needs to happen and has been improving over the years, and that's why I'm here at the Planetary Defense Conference this year. Speaking of planetary defense, there have been some policy developments as part of the overall approach by the federal government to all of this. And I guess

at least as far as planetary defense goes, there's pretty good news. Yeah, I'll give some context here. 10 years ago, or let me even go back further, 15 years ago, roughly, the Congress passed a bill, authorization bill for NASA, and it said that NASA must find all asteroids 140 meters or larger by 2020. So about 15 years they gave them to do this. 140 meter diameter asteroids is about enough to what, destroy a state? Yeah, certainly wipe out a big metropolitan area. Pretty sizable impact, so to speak. And those are hard to find. Those are relatively small in the scale of the solar system. So after giving NASA this mandate, Congress followed up by giving NASA no money to do it. And so, as you might imagine, you can't just conjure asteroids out of thin air, so to speak.

And so NASA has been unable, they've been looking for these asteroids, they've been unable to find most of them. And I think at this point, they found about 35 or 36% of what they expect to be out there. So they're not going to make this mandate. And ultimately, what you need to really find these small, dark objects in the solar system is to have a space based telescope looking in the infrared dedicated to this effort. And that has been very difficult to come by. That's a longer policy discussion. But in the meantime, what we have seen is that in the last roughly eight years, that $4 million budget is now up to $150 million. And that has increased a lot of support for ground-based observations for NEOs, more radar observations at Arecibo Observatory, and of course this brand new flight mission that they just confirmed this year, the formal new

request for DART, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, that will practice deflecting a small moonlet of another asteroid as it swings by Earth in 2021, or 2022. So there has been incredible progress made in planetary defense in terms of resource allocation, but we're still at $150 million. That's what, a little less than 2% of NASA's entire budget committed to this effort. So it's very small, and we still don't have the ability to search for these things in space in a way that you're going to meet the congressional mandates. So we have a long way to go still. And in the program that we recorded last night in front of the audience, we had Nancy Schiavo, who is the coordination lead for the DART mission.

We talk a lot about DART and why this is so significant. The first real attempt to see if deflecting an asteroid is even something that we can consider as a practical possibility. Yeah, I mean, we talk about a lot. It's like, oh, just smack something into it and deflect the orbit. Yeah. But we actually haven't tested that. And so what's Bill's favorite line that he quotes from a Boeing pilot

who did a barrel roll of the 707? I think it's, one test is worth a thousand guesses or estimates. Expert opinions. Expert opinions, okay. One test is worth a thousand expert opinions. So let's test slamming something into an asteroid and diverting its orbit. or estimates? Expert opinions. Expert opinions. Okay. One test is worth a thousand expert opinions. So let's test slamming something into an asteroid and diverting its orbit. That's good to know in advance before we bet literally the farm, the city, the globe on that effort, should it be necessary. All right. There's more going on than this, of course. By sheer coincidence,

the principal investigator for NEOocam, Amy Meinzer, is right there and gave us a wave. And Neocam was discussed a great deal last night because it is maybe the next step in what comes before you deflect them. That's finding them and figuring out where they're headed. Yeah, it's important to know what's out there, right, in order to do anything about them. NEOCAM has been through a long development process. It has gone through multiple what's called discovery mission competitions, these small planetary science mission competition. It's gone up, I think, three times at this point. It's made it very far along the way, but has never ultimately been selected.

And so the mission has been refined and refined and refined. It's hard to make it fit into a very small budget line in planetary defense, but ultimately the physics are the physics. You need something to detect asteroids in infrared. That means you need to keep things very cold on the detector level. You can't have a lot of heat generated by your own spacecraft because that'll wash out your signals. You have to have a lot of heat generated by your own spacecraft because that'll wash out your signals. You have to have a very delicately made spacecraft's bus and pointing and instrumentation. It's a space telescope, right? There's only so much you can do. So we've been supporting this mission. The point that they're at right now is that they've kept the team of this mission together by giving enough money to build a flight-qualified detector, the actual instrument itself,

and they will defer the building of the spacecraft to host it until they have enough money. So better than nothing, right? We're in a much better position than we could have been, which was to have the team to spend and to lose all the knowledge about this highly refined mission. The National Academies of Sciences are currently doing a study on the need for a space-based infrared telescope to look for asteroids.

That comes out in June. We may be talking about that report when it comes out. It'll help give a more broad scientific consensus perspective about the need for this type of detection thing. So this could almost give the sort of oomph behind an incentive for this that the decadal survey finding would be making this a high priority. Absolutely, yeah. And that's the idea that you want the scientific community formally weigh in. And I should emphasize, again, they've weighed in with multiple reports over the last 15 years about the need for this. I don't anticipate that there's anything going to be fundamentally different in what the committee ultimately comes to their consensus in. But we

will find out. This is why we do these types of studies. Space is hard. We're talking about a lot. It's hard to build a spacecraft. It's hard to send it into space. And it takes a long time to build. It takes a long time to go into space. And sometimes it just takes a long time to forge the political consensus to even get to that step one of building it. And this is why people in space business tend to be very patient. I will take 30 seconds turning from policy to say a bit more about why NEOCAM is so important. It's a follow-on to NEOWISE, which Amy Meinzer also heads that mission, and they're both infrared instruments. And the whole idea, Bill often quotes somebody saying, looking for

asteroids, most of them is like looking for a charcoal briquette in the dark. But you can see them in the infrared because they radiate heat. And that's why an infrared telescope, getting another one up there that's even more capable than NEOWISE, which was repurposed for this, is going to be so important. So enough of that. Let's go on to the broader budget news. You have some things to report that have happened since we last talked. Well, we talked about last time that the vice president has and the president have directed NASA to return to the moon humans to the surface of the moon now by 2024. So five years from now, not even five years from now, as we speak,

this is obviously an ambitious effort, and NASA will need more resources to achieve this. And so we're in this really unusual situation where even though the president's budget request came out in March and contained a proposal for NASA's budget in 2020 and the next five years, they're redoing this and are going to be submitting a supplemental budget request to enable NASA to attempt to do this lunar effort and I just want to emphasize the White House put out its proposal a month and a half ago changed their mind effectively and now we're redoing this for particularly for human spaceflight nothing has ever happened like this before in space history we expected this budget supplemental to come out a couple weeks ago.

It has not. Yeah, you were hoping we'd be able to talk about some of the details by now. Then we thought it would come out on May 1st, and it didn't. Yeah, exactly. I hoped we could talk about this in some detail, but in a way it actually makes our interview coming up with Mark Albrecht more relevant because the more I thought about this situation where we have a first term president using the timing of a major anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing to make a bold statement about returning humans to the moon

and then on to Mars, basically a rejuvenation of the human spaceflight program, but also announcing it and then turning over the details to NASA, this is very reminiscent of a previous time in history. And it's not the Constellation program. This is talking about the Space Exploration Initiative by George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush in 1989, 30 years ago right now. That initiative, for those of you paying attention, notice that we're not on the moon right now, nor are we landing on Mars at this point, which is what the original proposal was.

It didn't go anywhere. It failed. That initiative functionally failed. And it was, at the time, the biggest presidential-level commitment to space that they had had in probably 25 years, since JFK made that original moon landing speech. So why did it fail? This is why I talked to Mark Albrecht. He actually led the National Space Council and helped develop this policy.

He will talk about some of the lessons from that. But I think NASA today and us today as space advocates have a lot to learn from the Space Exploration Initiative and why it didn't work. And Mark was right at the center of this, right? I mean, he was charged with making this happen for the president. He absolutely was. And it was almost basically his idea to use the lunar landing anniversary to return to the moon.

The original genesis basically can track back to him. So he was absolutely in the middle of this, working at the White House, working for a very engaged vice president, Dan Coyle at the time. And again, you see all of these parallels right now. We have a space council now led by Scott Pace, who works with a very engaged vice president, Mike Pence. So there's just a lot of interesting opportunities here. And I really want humans to return to the moon. I want them to go on to Mars. So I don't want to see them fail again. And I actually wrote a longer piece on planetary.org about some of these lessons as I see them by studying the history of the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989 and why that didn't work and what NASA could try to do today, mainly politically, but also institutionally,

right, and strategically for how they can try to get this plan through. And so we don't have another Lucy in the football situation where we think we're going to the moon, we talk all this rhetoric, and then ultimately the resources aren't there to succeed. We have that interview coming up in just moments. It is outstanding. We actually recorded it, what, about a week ago. And I was so impressed. First of all, he's a very articulate, smart, and committed guy. This is obviously a guy who really believes in space exploration, as we do, as Scott Pace does in the new National Space Council. And he's very open about what he sees as where they took missteps, the places where they might have been able to handle it better, but also about the resistance that he found.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's easy to look back and see the mistakes from perspective, right? It's a hard thing to do, to usher some big domestic legislative effort through Congress at any point. There are many more paths to failure in general than there are to success. In a sense, Mark is very open about his mistakes that he made looking back and giving advice now. And it's not, in a sense, condemning the folks of SEI for messing that up because they tried their best, right? They're very smart people. Absolutely. And it's hard to do. This is where we talk about where we are now.

I am skeptical that NASA can pull this off. I am skeptical the resources will be there, right? But there are paths to success. There's just not that many of them. And so hopefully by looking at the lessons of the Space Exploration Initiative, we can cut off a few of those pathways that lead to failure that we know for sure and maybe increase these odds that this can succeed.

And we've actually started to see, even though we don't have a NASA budget out yet, the supplemental, some information has leaked. And something that's really interesting to me that we know now that we didn't know when we were talking with Mark for this interview, is their proposal is to ask for all the money that they need up front over the next five years, not year to year as they normally do through a standard budget process. This would enable them to have a pot of money that they could spend as needed and not have to wait for the slow process of politics or election seasons

or even a changeover of a presidential administration and really give a chance to succeed in this, right? To have the flexibility that you really need to succeed in that. It's a bold move. I think it's a smart move. It's also politically more difficult in the short term because you're going to have to ask for five years of funding up front. It's going to sound like a lot more money. It's a big ask. It is a big ask, but there is a precedent for it. After the Challenger disaster, a big ass, but there is a precedent for it. After the Challenger disaster, the Congress appropriated about $2 billion or so from accounts in the Defense Department, and they gave it to NASA

with basically no strings attached. Usually when NASA receives an appropriation, they have about two years to spend that money. And when they gave the money for Endeavor to rebuild after Challenger, that didn't have that restriction. So NASA delivered Endeavor on time and under budget because they had that flexibility, the money was there. So there is a precedent. Notably, it's easier sometimes to get political action to happen in the wake of a catastrophe than before.

Politically, this will be a big ask, but it's not coming from nowhere. And so we're in a really interesting situation. Of all the times will be a big ask, but it's not coming from nowhere. And so we're in a really interesting situation. Of all the times to be in space policy, this is a really unusual and fascinating time to be following this. We have so much... When we started the show, I kind of wondered, are we always going to have something to talk about every month? And now I wish we had a daily show sometimes that we could talk about everything because there's so much we can't talk,

we don't have time to talk about, but this is fascinating. So as we record this, hopefully by the next episode of Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition, we will see some numbers at this point. We'll see the political situation. You probably will have heard me talking about it

or writing about it at that point or maybe even asking you to take action if it's appropriate, in line with the Planetary Society's principles. But right now we're in this really interesting waiting period, which again, very similar to 1989, after the president made the announcement to return to the moon and then let NASA figure out the details, except NASA kind of screwed it up in 1989

and asked for a $500 billion commitment, which was a non-starter. So we'll see what that level is. So let's see if we can learn from history by going directly to the source. And that's Mark Albrecht. I just, before we go to it, I want to tell people, as you just heard Casey say, keep an eye on planetary.org, because we're not going to talk about Space Policy Edition, at least not at length, for another month until the first Friday in June. But Casey's going to continue to cover it there. And you may very well be able to help with this process because we frequently look to our members and the rest of you, our listeners, to take action about these issues and these opportunities that we care so much about. And I don't have it in front of me. Do you remember the title of your most recent blog?

Of course, people can find it by looking at planetary.org under blogs. In fact, specifically under Casey's blog on the dropdown. Yeah, I mean, it'll be in there. I think it was, what did I call it? What we can learn from a failed return to the moon. Give us a little bit more of an introduction to Mark Albrecht and we'll start in there. I think it was, what did I call it? What we can learn from a failed return to the moon. Give us a little bit more of an introduction to Mark Albrecht, and we'll start that tape. So Mark has been in the space business for almost his entire life. He was the executive secretary of the National Space Council under George H.W. Bush. After that, he worked for Lockheed Martin's International Launch Services Program,

starting to work with the Russians to develop a commercial launch capability with their hardware. He has a number of awards and degrees. I think he has a doctorate in public policy. He's very well-versed both in the political background and how industry works in space. He wrote a book about his time as the executive secretary of the National Space Council called Falling Back to Earth, a firsthand account of the great space and end of the Cold War, the great space race. That book I found very fascinating. I actually went and reread that book,

looking and thinking about this situation with the Space Exploration Initiative. I'll recommend another book at the same time. It's called Mars Wars, the Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative by Thor Hogan, a historian for NASA. Both of those books together, I think, give a really good perspective of the struggle and effort and ways that which this effort, the well-intentioned, never came to be.

And so hopefully we can learn a lot from that now and we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. And we can succeed and see humans on the moon, if not in 2024, maybe sometime while we're still young and sprightly. Yeah, well, speak for yourself. I just want to be around whether I'm young and sprightly or not. I will you in front of the TV in terms of that. Thank you, Casey. Here is what I hope you will agree is a really delightful and fascinating conversation between Casey Dreyer and Mark Albrecht. Hi, Mark, again, thank you for joining us here at the podcast today. I was just reading through your book,

Falling Back to Earth Again, in prep for this interview. And I was reminded we're recording this in April of 2019, literally 30 years ago in April of 1989. You were in a very different situation. I want you to step back and give us a little bit of background. What were you doing roughly around this time? What was your primary concern? What was even your job title? Well, thanks, Casey. It's great being with you guys.

I think this is a great opportunity to talk about then and now, because much about then is germane to what's happening now. Although obviously, there are a whole lot of new elements that are worthy of discussing and seeing how they fit together. So let's go back. 1989, from a space, let's just talk about space and space policy, the Congress in 88 had included language in the authorization bill, the 88 NASA authorization bill, encouraging the next president, who at that point obviously was unknown, whether it would be George Bush or Michael Dukakis, to reformulate the National Space Council, which had been instituted under President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. And the argument was that, in fact, space policy was beginning to drift, that, in fact, we needed to bring some coherence and continuity to all the activities. There were things being done in the Defense Department. The shuttle had launched. We'd had the Challenger accident. We'd started a complementary expendable launch vehicle program in the Air Force to make up for the fact that the space shuttle was not going to be able to launch as many times so that it could be, in fact, the national launch system, which is what it was intended to be. Space Station Freedom, at that point, which had originally begun under President Reagan earlier in the 80s, was experiencing a great program slippage, great cost

increases. There were even questions about the technical feasibility when they talked about a one-meter centrifuge that was going to be used for biometric research. There were questions about the feasibility of actually even make that happen. And so the Congress in 88, knowing that there was a presidential election, included in the authorization bill the request that National Space Council be reformed. And in fact, when George H.W. Bush was elected, he in fact said it was his intention to, in fact, reform the National Space Council under Vice President Dan Quayle. So my participation really began during the transition and the early days of the Bush administration, when Dan Quayle asked me to run the National Space Council and become its executive secretary.

So our immediate focus when I got there in just about this time frame, as you point out, in April and May of 1989, of course, was to try to get my arms around what was happening in the space community in general, and what would be a reasonable agenda for the new administration, not only just to bring some, as we say, coherence and continuity to the space program, but also to figure out what direction the president and vice president wanted to take us. So again, it's hard to go back to 1989 and remember, but the Cold War was not yet over, although there were questions about the viability of the Soviet Union at the time. The United States was in the midst of a very aggressive program on strategic defense initiative, which of course we now know ultimately broke the back and will of the Soviet Union to compete and began the end of the Soviet Union as we know it. But the SDI program was very aggressive. It was trying to do things differently in space,

a new way to do space. A lot of these things and themes sound familiar. They were trying to do things generally faster and cheaper and better. And there were a number of experiments and programs inside the Strategic Defense Initiative that were showing results that, in fact, things in space could be done much faster, and in fact, better, and much more inexpensively than had been the routine, both in the Air Force and in NASA, especially NASA. The National Space Council doesn't just deal with civil space issues. I mean, that's the point of it, right? So you were coming in and Congress recommended the establishment of, or the reestablishment of this in order to try to kind of provide, as you said, some coherence to the overall space, kind of strategic role of space, both in defense and civil. And at the time, how much was commerce in space part of this? Did that rise to the

awareness at this point? Or was that still kind of in the background? That was really in the background. Bob Mosbacher was the Secretary of Commerce at the time, a good friend of the president's. And as a Texan, he was interested in the space program. But at that point in time, commerce really had very little to do. Even FAA was just in the very, very beginnings of trying to figure out whether or not they would have some role and responsibility in the space launch business, as commercial space launches were just at the beginning end of the program. You're coming into this role as the Executive Secretary of the National Space Council. It hasn't been around in a while. Did you face resistance from the departments that you were tasked to organize because of

that, or did it vary? Was it just strange? Actually, Casey, it worked out quite well. Obviously, the president was interested and his longstanding connection in Texas meant that he was well aware of the Johnson Space Center and had followed it closely and had a strong interest in the space program. But we were blessed by a series of characters and actors in the administration, all of whom were real space enthusiasts, starting with the chief of staff, John Sununu, who reminded me from day one that he in fact got his Ph.D. under a NASA grant.

So John Sununu considered himself and is very technical, technically knowledgeable, which is usually the black hat in all this because it does require additional resources, was an out-and-out space fan. He was 100% enthusiastic about space. we were thinking about as a proposal for an aggressive re-ignition of the space program, Dick Darman, rather than being an obstacle, was an absolute enthusiastic supporter. Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor, was really consumed with President Bush. And I recommend to your listeners a wonderful, long book, but a very important book called The World Transformed by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft. And Brent and the president were really on a mission to define the world post-Cold War. And so he was more than happy to have the Space Council and our team take the lead on all national security space issues, of which there were many.

And so we had a very enthusiastic team inside the White House that was very supportive of us and what we were trying to do. I fought very few, almost none that I can recall, internal bureaucratic battles. So it sounds like not just the president, who you mentioned had an interest in space, but that kind of came from the top. Were they reacting to that leadership, I guess, from the president himself? Yeah, they recognized it. And what happened, Casey, that was really important is the Soviet Union, of course, fell shortly after President Bush took office. after President Bush took office. And what then happened on the Hill that was of critical importance, which mattered why Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Secretary of Energy Admiral Watkins became very, very interested in what we were doing, was that we were in the midst of what was being called a peace dividend. We had the largest downturn, almost dramatic cliff downturn in

defense spending because people felt that at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was disbanded, that in fact, the need for our defense spending would be dramatically reduced, even as much as 25% in a couple of years time. So that meant there was a lot of resources and capabilities in the Defense Department and the Department of Energy that really were looking for new roles and missions. When we came up with the plan to reinvigorate the space program writ large by a return to the moon and then on to a mission to Mars, Some of the key elements were very, very supported by these. Number one element was that rather than a competition, which had been the beginning of the Mercury and Apollo program, we would do cooperation. That in fact, U.S. would show its

leadership in technology and in world affairs, complementary to what the president and Brent were doing with their new world order, that the United States would lead by a new round of exploration that would be cooperative with allies and other partners rather than in competition with the Soviet Union. Right, because that engages the same, it also just engages the same kind of workforce, you know, particularly in the ex-Soviet Union or the Defense Department, we felt that there would be enormous resources available in the Defense Department, since the Defense Initiative would be dialed back post-Cold War, but so much work in terms of rapid development, prototyping in space for the Strategic Defense Initiative could be capability that would be well adapted

to a new initiative. So we encouraged the Defense Department, and Secretary Cheney was very, very open to applying as many defense resources to the concept of doing space exploration. The Department of Energy, of course, that is responsible for our nuclear labs, etc., with Los Alamos and Livermore National Labs, had enormous capability in thinking about doing space developments as they had been for the Strategic Defense Initiative. and great capabilities to the table. So the initiative we proposed to the president would be one that would be international and cooperative rather than competitive and bilateral. It would involve all of the federal government, defense, energy, et cetera, to bring all our capability to bear, that it would be done under a rubric of trying to do things differently in space, under a rubric of trying to do things differently in space, and that it would then give new direction for the civil space program, which at that time consisted of the space shuttle, which was, quite frankly, just laboratory experiments in low Earth orbit. There was no destination for the

space shuttle. And this program, the Space Station Freedom, which I know we'll talk about in great length, at this point was way overrun in terms of cost, way behind schedule, and of questionable scientific value. Our proposal was to try to square that circle, to take all these pieces, and to develop an initiative that would also give a great technology boost to the United States economy in the recognition that our defense front end R&D spending would be going down. Let's expand on that a little bit, particularly the domestic political situation at the time as well, because I think that's going to obviously be really, really important to the story. George H.W. Bush assumes the presidency

in January of 89. What kind of Congress is he facing? And what are the main political issues that are going to be dominating the discussion, particularly that are going to come into play here for this future initiative? Well, yes. First off, it was a Democrat-controlled Senate. And we had very, very powerful, important senators who were responsible things related to the space program and very interested, led by and including then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, who had his own aspirations for presidency. So there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm of supporting things that would be considered hallmark or signature George H.W. Bush initiatives. There was an ongoing fight with the Congress about the peace dividends and how rapid it would occur.

We were about to tip into a recession, and so there were questions about raising taxes or cutting spending. So on the one hand, the president was fighting to keep defense spending from falling precipitously off a cliff. On the other hand, the Democrat Congress was saying that revenue enhancement would be required. And that was a huge consuming fight with Dick Darman and President Bush and the Senate and House Democrats about whether or not we would be raising taxes to meet his requirements for more spending for defense. It was really not more spending for defense, but it was less rapid deterioration of defense spending. So it was a very contentious political environment. The budget deficit was also a major topic at this point as well.

Huge as well. So anytime the president talked about spending more money for things, he had the deficit and the requirement to help an economy recover were challenges as well. So it was very contentious. And our initiative, his initiative, fell right in the middle of all that controversy. Let's move into that now. So we kind of have the stage set. Something also really important, I think, into this setting is that July 20th of that year was the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, right? It sounds like from the reading of your book that this kind of idea that used that opportunity originated with you to say, should we announce a new direction

for particularly the human spaceflight program at NASA in order to tie some visionary kind of forward-looking agenda to this historical date? Is that an accurate way to describe it? Absolutely accurate. We knew the anniversary was coming. And it was not that we felt compelled to do something. It was more of a natural logical opportunity to redefine the space program. And I say space, I just don't mean this civil NASA program, but the entire US space enterprise. So we had the opportunity, and we used it to move the entire U.S. space enterprise. So we had the opportunity and we used it to move the initiative forward more rapidly. And in fact, we'll talk about this maybe too rapidly because we began to butt heads with the NASA institution that was, I will say at best, mixed about taking

on the space exploration initiative. A word we haven't really brought up yet, which is NASA. And there's a reason for that, obviously, that we're getting to. Timing, I think, is also really interesting here because I was thinking about this again. In some ways, the current situation we have now, where we have the Trump administration proposing this lunar plan, where we have the Trump administration proposing this lunar plan, they're facing a 50th anniversary of Apollo, but two years into their presidency, his presidency versus President Bush and the role of the National Space Council, you only had a few months before this anniversary rolled around. And so it does seem like you were pressed for time for that reason alone. If you wanted to do something for that opportunity,

there just wasn't a lot of time to lay groundwork based on the presidential election cycle. That's exactly correct. And we made many mistakes. As I will point out, we're far from blameless in all this. The anniversary is the anniversary. There's nothing we can do about the date. It is what it is. We made the case to use it as an opportunity to focus attention on this and lay out a comprehensive plan that we thought would be embraced by the public because it would be an attractive package, all the elements of which I've just described. NASA responded to it a kind of business, I guess I'd call it business as usual, whereas everything about the concept on the front end was that it would be an opportunity to redirect and revive and rein things. If the space station is currently designed, for example, is not absolutely elegantly focused on this new mission to get back to the moon and onto Mars,

make changes to it. Do what you need to do to bring your overall program into line with this new initiative. I think NASA was threatened. They were in the middle of a period of time when the leadership was divided. They were getting signals from the people on the Hill. There hadn't been a great deal of attention paid to the civil space program in the latter part of the Reagan administration, other than agreeing to go forward to space station freedom. So they had become habituated to seeing their congressional leaders. As a matter of fact, I remember when I came to the White House, there was an article, front page article in the Wall Street Journal about King Mallow, a guy named Dick Mallow, who was the clerk of the House Subcommittee on Space, basically. The thrust of the Wall Street Journal article was that basically this staff person, this clerk for the Appropriations Subcommittee,

Bob Traxler's Subcommittee on Space, was running the space program. And it was a page one article in the Wall Street Journal called King Mallow. The only reason I mentioned that, I mean, you think about that now, I mean, my goodness, it really did represent, I think, conventional wisdom in the town that, in fact, NASA had been orphaned by the administration. There wasn't a great deal of direction and leadership offered to them. And they had begun to see the congressional committees, appropriations, and authorizers as really the managers or board of directors. And they were very skeptical that those managers and board of directors would get on board with this radical

change in direction and were really reluctant, having, in their view, delicately forged a consensus to support the underlying programs of the shuttle and space station freedom. And were highly reluctant to make any modifications or changes to them for fear that they would alienate the people that, as far as they were concerned, were the ones who worried day to day about their enterprise and their funding and operation. And they were writing very, very comprehensive language in each one of the bills about what NASA should do and shouldn't do, much more detailed program direction than they were getting from OMB at the time. And so I excuse their behavior, but the was, rather than turning loose the vast engine of ingenuity and urgency that we had hoped that had existed under Apollo, we got a very business as usual response that said, we're going to do all the things we're doing at exactly the right, the same pace and funding levels that we're doing now. And anything you want to do, anything related to

this new initiative is going to be new money above the line. And of course, it was tailor-made for the Congress to resist. Let's step back because I want to get to this point. I want to talk exactly about that. So in this process of leading up to July 20th, 1989, you were feeling out this idea, you'd gotten basically the approval of the vice president and the president to say, we should look towards something big and it was going to be returned to the moon or maybe onto Mars. And it was kind of the contours were being figured out. You kind of had a remarkable exchange in your book where the first time you proposed this

idea to NASA administrator,ie, maybe a little shell shocked or basically they say no, right? They say that we can't do this. I remember it very well. Yeah. I remember the day we were at a hotel. In some ways, I was trying to be sympathetic to Trulie in this, like they had just come off the Challenger disaster. They'd come off from a decade of the planetary program had almost been decimated. The shuttle program had barely gotten approved by Nixon. The national interest in space wasn't particularly strong. In some ways, I can see that as understandable. They're like, we just got the space station, right? We're barely holding on to the space station. I just had John Logsdon on a

few months ago talking about Reagan policy for NASA, going into that space station decision and how long they worked for it, were they just worried that this wouldn't last? Do you think? Is that part of that response or it was just the fact that it wasn't used to thinking too big or that big again? I think both of those things. And let's be fair. First off, Dick Trulia is a great American, Dick Trulia is a great American, a hero, terrific individual, but he was not a guy that was constitutionally ready to step up. I mean, we can think and name other NASA administrators that were more than willing to step up and be aggressive and push the institution. Dick was more of the institution than above the institution. I think he really reflected, for all the reasons you accurately said, was a fundamental interior concern of,

is this really real? Is this going to be Lucy in the football? Are we going to put all our eggs in this bet? I'm trying to play their hand. By the way, we were giving them many, many reassurances to the contrary. For example, Dick Darman sat down and said, hey, look, I'm happy to up your budget by a billion dollars over the next several years. But there was sort of a reluctance and skepticism. And, you know, NASA had been sort of beaten down. It really was, it needed exactly what we were offering. What do they say? The first thing about recovery is you have to recognize you have a problem. And I don't think NASA recognized that it had a problem. They were so pulled in and they figured, hey, we've got this big initiative, Space Station Freedom, employing lots of people, good contracts, space shuttles operating. It's had hiccups. Remember all those mysterious hydrogen leaks that were causing us to miss launch after launch. I think they were sort of pulled in and this not only caught them by surprise, but it overwhelmed them. Your doctorate is in public policy, right? And it's a fascinating insight in a sense, this kind of bureaucratic inertia that develops in whenever you just have a lot of people. I don't know if I wouldn't say it's necessarily part of a function of government or anything.

It's just when you have lots of people, by the time everyone's aligned doing one thing, that becomes the modus operandi. To change that in any way becomes it's hard to make a big perturbation to something that has so much inertia to it, even if you're giving them good news, almost, it seems like. And I think one thing that was a change that occurred after our time there, and as a consequence of this, not only this, but I think the idea that the NASA administrator works for the president is something that after our time became commonplace. That became, people understood that the NASA administrator had to work for the president of the United States and be part of the president's team. Who would they work for previously, or what would maybe your impression be? I think they worked for the appropriations committees and subcommittees. Their primary focus was on the Hill because that was giving them primarily their direction and sustenance.

Yeah, I guess in absence of a strong presidential hand, or, you know, so to speak, in the budgeting process, if they don't think that the White House has their back, I guess that's a natural outcome, in a sense. And I think people, you know, there have been a number of things, and there's no point going down this dirt road, but, you know, there were a number of things, and there's no point going down this dirt road, but there were a number of congressional initiatives to try to make the NASA administrator like the FBI director. A 10-year appointment where Congress would be the primary determinant of their budget every year and their direction, et cetera.

I mean, even further cleaving it away from the executive branch. And as I used to say, you can't find NASA in the Constitution. You can find the Defense Department, you can find the Health Department, but you really can't find NASA in the Constitution other than promote the General Welfare Clause. As a consequence, there's nothing really that NASA has to do. Everything that it does is purely discretionary. And that's why the initiatives get so associated with the president of the administration during the period of time they're there. Because there's no joint chiefs of staff.

There's no threat assessment. There's no NATO allies. There's no, it's purely discretionary activity. And that's why, ultimately, it doesn't come through the normal cabinet-level grind. It really is executive authority. And that's the fact of the matter. say of the George H.W. Bush administration, then when you're working with a NASA that felt maybe that it had these multiple masters that they were trying to answer to, let's just jump back to this narrative. So you are talking with Admiral Truly or NASA Administrator Truly. There's hesitation at first, but to clarify, the next day he called you and said, we're up for the task. We will do this. From there on, functionally, the story is you have the 20th rolls around, you have kind of the broad contours of what you'd like to do, but NASA hasn't had a clear plan,

and they, or you hadn't maybe, what was the process of what kinds of plans we're trying to have for July 20th versus what were you using that date for? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's very interesting, Casey. And again, we made our blunders. And I would say that successive administrations have done better than we did because they didn't make our mistakes. I like to think they learned from our mistakes. But we turned it over and said to NASA, give us a plan for achieving the president's goals. That is to return to the moon and then on to Mars before the, what was it, the 30th anniversary, I guess. 20th. 20th. And that was a blunder. And we got no feedback from NASA.

Great guys. Aaron Cohen, you probably remember him, was a Johnson Senate director, was given the task by Admiral Trulli to go come up with what was called the 90-day study. And just to clarify, was this happening before the president's announcement on the 20th, or did this begin first, or did this begin after the public announcement? Well, once the president decided that he was going to do this, etc., he, in fact, I think in that speech talked about the fact that we've asked NASA to give us a plan to do this. I'm not sure. It's been a long time, as you point out, and I haven't reviewed it recently, but it was virtually

concurrent. It was like the next logical thing to do. Hey, NASA, give us a plan of how you can do this. And we were very clear to them. We wanted faster, cheaper, better. We wanted new technology. We wanted to involve the whole government. We wanted to think about international partners at every step of the way. We wanted to do this fast. We wanted a sense of urgency. We didn't want business as usual. And it was a blunder because we got nothing back from them literally until the 89th day. literally until the 89th day. We kept asking and saying, how's it going? It's going great. Well, could you give us a peek? I mean, is there any sort of, how are we doing? You know, no. I should have been a little more directive in my opinion to say, hey, that just won't cut it. You need to have the team over here at 10 days, at 30 days, at 45 days, at 50 days, telling us exactly where you are so that we can vector and direct it. But in reality, it came with a thud literally on the 89th day. The size of the report was... The reason why I'm kind of focusing on the timing here is what...

I think what I'm trying to convey to our listeners is that you effectively had the president make a public statement on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, committing to a big concept of returning to the moon and then on to Mars. But then turning over the actual implementation of it to NASA that at the time did not have a clear, or as we've just kind of talked about, was kind of serving multiple goals of its own. And so the president had already tied himself to a program that hadn't been fully fleshed out, is what I'm trying to get at. Is that an accurate representation of where you were? Yeah, I think less commitment to a program than commitment to a timeframe and destination and series of an initiative. Hence the initiative part. Yeah. And I guess because I'm saying like, if a person is just walking by and reading headlines or following the news at the time,

they see that President Bush calls for a return to the moon. And then this 90 day study must be what, you know, the next time they see what, let's just give away the game here. The estimate of the cost of the 90 day study was something on the order of depending on which one you know, the next time they see what, let's just give away the game here. The estimate of the cost of the 90-day study was something on the order of, depending on which one you chose, roughly half a trillion dollars. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then that became the yoke. I mean, just like that's what was tied to this idea, right?

Yep. Yep. And yeah, I mean, we can get into the TikTok. And it is fascinating. I mean, it goes really fast. When they talk about football players and they talk about the NFL and they say, what's the biggest difference between your college experience and the NFL? And they always say the speed of the game.

And the really excellent players see the game actually slow down as they get more experienced and become excellent. And when you're in government, the speed of play is just, there's so many things going on and it's coming at such unbelievable speed. It's hard to slow it down. But you mentioned this, look at where we are today. Vice President Pence gave a speech and said, in four years, I want to be back on the moon. He didn't have a specific plan. He didn't have a budget. He just said, I want you to do it. And what did he do? He turned to Jim Bridenstine and said, give me a plan to do this by any means. And this is literally why I was hitting on this so hard, right? This is what it was actually that speech and then waiting for the

delivery that made me reach out to you about this. Cause I feel like we've actually found ourselves now back in this situation and so much now is going to depend on the initial monetary kind of concept that's aligned with this original proposal. Let's just jump back real quick to SEI. And I really do want to make the comparisons here. But to fill out the story with SEI then. So the NASA, the 90-day study comes out. You know, we don't have to go into all the details. But basically it was maintain the shuttle as it is, finish space station freedom, build

a moon, build a heavy lift. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So maintain those two programs, build a heavy lift. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so maintain those two programs, build a heavy lift shuttle orbiter, the Mac, the shuttle C cargo C, then a moon base and then Mars. And you estimated the cost over something like a 30 year timeframe.

Right. Right. And, and anything over 30 years sounds expensive. I, I always point this out to people like the national park service in 30 years, we'll spend over a hundred billion dollars. Like that's, yeah, that's just for parks. No, no, Yeah, of course. plan. I mean, after all, at that point, we were spending close to $17 billion a year on NASA. So simply doing nothing else, milling around smartly for 30 years was going to generate $300

billion of expenditure. So our big disappointment, Casey, was that there was no innovation, imagination. None of the watchwords that we had urged them to consider were included in it. The space station had the same, you know, one meter centrifuge, which is completely unnecessary for this purpose, had all the kind of observatory stuff, everything was going along, absolutely with this as an overlay. So every dollar they felt associated with this exclusively would get charged to the SEI budget. It was so disappointing. Which also makes it really easy to cancel in Congress, right? Because you could basically say, well, we just won't do that part and everything else will be

unchanged. Exactly. And in fact, you know, my good friend Bob Walker at the time told me that, in fact, the NASA people up on the Hill were by and large talking about the initiative in the third person, i.e. that's the president's stuff. You know, we're here to talk to you about our baseline programs, our exploration programs, our this is and our that's and the other thing. And then there's this other stuff over here. There really was an embracing of it. Then there's this other stuff over here. There really was an embracing of it. And I do want to talk about where we are today and why things are different and how I think, at least in some small part, they're informed by our experience.

It goes longer. And Bush, you know, you all on the National Space Council, you tried to bring up other alternatives, tried to emphasize this as a starting point. But kind of the die had been, I feel like looking back, the die had been cast with that report that kind of always was going to be a half a trillion dollar plan. From what I understand, Congress basically surgically removed all the money proposed for SEI over the next few years. Is that effectively right? It wasn't all of it, but it was treated as a separate category of expenditures, and we got less than 20% of what was requested. What's worse, it never became the central organizing theme of NASA during this period of time, which eventually required us to say, hey, we need to get a leader over there who gets it.

I mean, that's in today's parlance, but, you know, who gets it? We had to do it, and that was painful, and it took time. And in all the meantime, we were not making any progress. I do want to mention one other thing, Casey, two important differences. Number one is, again, with the peace dividend, the Defense Department and the Department of Energy had assets and resources that really, Defense Department and the Department of Energy had assets and resources that really, they at the leadership level, Cheney and Watkins, wanted to be involved in this eagerly, not drag, kicking and screaming. And the other thing is that we had essentially no commercial. We're so blessed with the activities today by the commercial companies, whether they're Jeff Bezos or Elon or the Sierra Nevada team or the Strata launcher or Richard Branson, none of that existed. And so in a sense, there was no alternative. There

was only one place to go to get this mission started and accomplished. And that was the federal government. And that was being led by NASA. So today there are alternatives. That's all. Right. Yeah. And using the standard contracting practices for all kind of aerospace style contracts. And reading Thor Hansen's book, Mars Wars, that covers this as well. He talks a lot about how National Space Council was pushing for do things a new way, a new way of doing business, but it was never really clarified, right? And in some ways, it's hard to pull out a new way of doing business out of thin air, right? That does take time to say, is there a different way to go about going to the moon, particularly

for a NASA that had just done it 20 years ago, a certain way, right? Absolutely. Yeah, Casey. And again, let me tell you, we spent, we did something called the National Aerospace Plane, which was going to be a joint DoD NASA program that was going to develop a large vehicle that would go from a standing stop to orbit and return with a winged body. with a winged body. And it was a joint DoD NASA program. It also did not make it to the final. And the whole argument was, of course, the holy grail of launches, reusability, because it's so bloody expensive. I mean, again, at the end, depending on how you calculated, each shuttle launch cost anywhere from $240 million to $400 million, depending on how you did the accounting.

Reusability was always the holy grail. Well, boy, it had been a lot easier for me to make the cases on a lot of these things. You know, like, what are you talking about, Mark? I don't understand what this faster, cheaper, better stuff is all about. If I had had Elon Musk out there launching SpaceX and landing, after having several failures, but landing successfully the first stage core of a Falcon back on Earth. What do they say? One peak is worth a thousand finesses. You could just go, well, what about that? We had no such things. We had nothing that we could point to to say, that's what we're talking about, other than a handful of experiments and demonstrations in the Strategic Defense Initiative program that were showing that things could be done much faster and much cheaper, and in fact, yield a better result.

Right. And I do think that's a critical difference. And let's start making some comparisons now, because again, why I think it's so interesting. And so I wrote a piece on Planetary Society website the other week, kind of grappling with how to feel about this announcement, because it is aggressive, a five-year time frame to return humans to the surface, to the moon. to the moon. It does have this X factor, though, of the whole commercial enterprise system that, as we just talked about, just has not existed before. It hasn't had a chance to fail yet. So there's really interesting opportunities there. I mean, we have the situation where, we had Space Policy Directive 1 back in 2017. the president directed NASA to return to the moon. Unlike last time, I guess, you kind of had some, you know, I was thinking about this personnel as policy, right?

It's the old saying, the NASA administrator now, I'd say you would put him into the gets it category. I would guess, I do. That is correct. Absolutely. But also, I mean, he came in late, but at the same time that prevented, with an acting administrator, very different kind of political situation. And so acting administrators kind of keeping the sea warm knows their time is limited. Doesn't have a necessary, you know, you don't have that

kind of personality conflict that came in. And something else is interesting to me too, is that I think the economic situation is much different. So I was actually pulling up some numbers before I talked to you today. Unemployment was higher, but it was also the GDP was shrinking. So the GDP is actually not too different, but it was on the way down. And so I imagine it's the direction you feel the GDP more than what it is necessarily if it's going up or down. And now we've had a growing GDP, a 2% to 3% GDP right now versus a 2% on the way down to a recession. Even that, I wonder if that kind of feeling

of the economy's growing, doing well, do you think psychologically that helps Congress accept more expenditures for something like this? It's an interesting point. I have to think about it. It's not, it doesn't leap out to me. Because in the 1960s too, right? You had a huge, you had lots of GDP growth in the 60s.

And that really helped, I think, pay for the space at certain points. Yeah, I don't know the answer either. You can tell me with your doctorate in these things. No, no, no, no. But I think one of the new elements that do confound and make this a different situation, and we're going to get to where we are today and why I'm modestly optimistic that they're not going to go down exactly the same road we did. It is, in fact, the development of the independent commercial space companies.

They have their own constituency on the Hill, and it doesn't cut necessarily in the same direction of some of the older ones. I mean, generally, if you're thinking back in the 70s and 80s, large defense contractors were more or less aligned with Republican administrations. more or less aligned with Republican administrations. I mean, this is a very broad brushstroke, and they're very competent, and they made friends on all sides of the aisle, etc. But as a broad brushstroke, the new commercial space guys, as much as anything, are very favored by many of the Democrats. You know, you're not having the old alignment here. And so to the extent the administration utilizes and relies on the new space enterprises or involves, etc., it's not going to necessarily cut, in my opinion, the same way as it did in the past in terms of a traditional aerospace initiative. And so I think there's some hope there that there's going to be more openness to the idea when it finally gets developed and

presented about what it is, how it is, and how much it's going to cost. And there's legitimate differences in ways of doing business because of the contracting changes or dissimilarities between a cost plus contract and your milestone based contract, right? You can, I mean, literally the government does not have as much insight into every decision. And so they can move a little faster. Can you build a commercial supported lunar lander? I't know but we don't know it can't work this way i suppose i mean the other thing i do just to look at politics something else that's different right now broad similarities obviously are kind of interesting too right we're facing a new anniversary of apollo um we have a white house as is indisputably interested in in space obviously

a very even to the role of the vice president, right? Kind of filling your quail, leading the space councils, obviously, into it. But at the same time, you do have a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, but you have a Republican Senate. And I would argue that we don't, at least on Congress right now, there's an acceptance of spending money a little more right now than there was back in 89. And so I think I was looking up the number. The deficit in 89 is projected to be $189 billion. How quaint for those days, I think we're looking at. And putting aside all the politics on the deficit, there's a willingness to continue to waive those Budget Control Act caps.

I think we just saw that Mitch McConnell is going to be making a deal with Pelosi on that. The monetary issue is kind of, at least for the next couple of years, theoretically loosened, right? So we actually have a role. And so I'd be really curious to hear, you know, going back to kind of what we were just talking about, there's some fertile ground, but what I'm worried about, I'll tell you what I'm worried about, this potential difference, which is what happened, I think, last time is that, and you brought this up, that the Democratic Party or, you know, this would and it would be the flip side if this had been a Democratic initiative for Republican House. By embracing this as a goal of the administration, you're going to induce opposition in the opposition party, literally by definition, the president being the leader of his party. And so to stymie that, there's going to be a lot of incentive, I should say, for the Democrats in the House, or at least maybe broadly, maybe not the ones

around the Space Committee, but just broadly to say, why should we give this a win to the president? Do you see that being a major hurdle going forward, despite the role of commercial space kind of being more accepted in Democratic circles? Certainly, there's going to be an element of that. I think you'd be unrealistic to think that the Congress, particularly the House, in this environment, and quite frankly, even in the Senate, with some of the members, are going to just say, whatever the president wants to do, yay, we want to do that. I agree with you. That will be a headwind. But there are also potential tailwinds. And one of them, as we described, is a general nonpartisanship associated with the new space guys. There was a period of time that the Obama administration, in fact, did a lot of things that institutional NASA didn't like. The commercial crew program, the commercial cargo program, those were looked at with great skepticism inside. So here you had the Obama administration, the fact that SpaceX was allowed to be certified and compete for national security space launches in a way different than they had done in the past.

Again, an Obama administration initiative. So in some sense, you have these new players not carrying the baggage, kind of institutional baggage that the players had before, you know, the Rockwells and the Bowings, etc. And so that's going to be a bit of a tailwind because to the extent those people are incentivized or included or enthusiastic about it or hell, willing to pitch in resources, which is a new thing. Imagine that. I mean, there are three ways to finance something like this, even though we don't know what the number will be. There's new money, which we talked about. There's repurposed money. And in my case, in our case, back in 1989, NASA was completely unwilling to repurpose any money. I think there will be participation by repurposing money inside NASA. And then there's contributed money, whether that's in kind by international partners or investments by commercial companies. Those are all sources of being able to close the business case on this new initiative. Also mentioning tailwinds that you have an advantage to this, kind of the two major institutional programs, kind of the old school aerospace intersection with congressional districts service.

I know what you're talking about. congressional districts service, SLS and Orion, are actually feed directly into it, too. So I mean, those have been under development there. You know, I'd say, we're seeing a lot of discussion about whether SLS will be a part of this plan. But I think we're seeing this basically outcome saying like, well, we better we have to double down on it's the only way we're going to do it. But at least institutionally, the protective thing to do would be to give these big projects a clear role in this plan versus shuttle and station, which were only ever going to be in low Earth orbit. So you have, in some sense, the institution itself is motivated, if they want to protect those interests, to embrace this plan. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, there was some art in the design of some of these things. I think Administrator Bridenstine has already said, look, we are not going to raise or repurpose resources from SLS and Orion. Big sigh of relief to the institutional. Okay,

we're not going to take any money from SLS. I'm not going to take any money from Orion. Big sigh of relief to the institutional. Okay, we're not going to take any money from SLS. I'm not going to take any money from Orion. On the other hand, the challenge, President Stein says, is if you're ready there to meet this requirement, good on you. But if you're not, the vice president said by any means, and we will achieve his objective, or at least do our dead level best to achieve his objective. And if it doesn't include those elements because they're not ready, then it won't. That's a fair game. That's all you could expect. And I think it's a very reasonable set of boundary conditions. And in a second, I want to talk about one of the things that I know will come up here is if you look at the, as Norm Augustine said, the record unblemished by success of presidential

exploration initiatives after Apollo, there really is one success in there that doesn't get much discussed. And to my thinking, if this new initiative of 2024 is going to succeed, it will follow that model rather than the Space Exploration Initiative model or the Vision for Space Exploration model or the Obama guys that adopted, well, the Orion was an asteroid mission or something like that. And it's so under the radar. I guess that's the best example that it didn't have this presidential tag on it. And it's the best example that it didn't have this presidential tag on it. And it's the International

Space Station. By the way, I'm sure you'll have Dan or George on. If you haven't, you should. Their stories are wonderful and amazing. But I mean, they're literally, very predictably, and as per usual, when the Clinton-Gore administration came in, very shortly after they took office, Al Gore and the head of OMB, I've forgotten his name in that administration, called Dan Golden, who was then the NASA administrator, and said, hey, on Monday, we're announcing the cancellation of space station freedom. Done, finished. And he went through all the arguments that we always make. Oh, my gosh, well, then we don't have a destination. What are we going to do with the shuttle? We're out of the human

exploration business. We have no vision. We're humma humma humma. And basically, Dan said, give me a weekend. Give me until Tuesday of next week to come with a plan to you that would be accomplished in four years and cost only two, only would cost $2 billion a year. And they said, well, what is it? He goes, I had no earthly idea, but give me till Tuesday. And he and George Abbey and Tom Stafford and a group of people spent the weekend burning up phone lines. And what they did is they took the resources that existed and put them out on the table. Not ongoing NASA contracts. What in the world is out there that works and functions today that we could gobble together and call a space station?

And very quickly they discovered, and Tom was able to call his colleagues in Russia, that there was in fact a power module backup for the Mir space station that was essentially done and ready to go. There were already large fields of solar arrays for space station freedom that Lockheed Martin already had. They were done. They were just sitting there. And they literally tinker-toyed this together. And what came out of it was no longer Space Station Freedom, the International Space Station. And Gore and Clinton, to their credit, and of course, the enormous hard work of Dan and George and Tom Stafford and a great team of people came up and we started it and we

have a space station on orbit today. That would not have happened. But it is not son of son of Space Station Freedom. It has nothing to do with it. So there is a model out there that says these sorts of things can be done. And maybe they will follow some example like that. Trump, Moon-Mars initiative. This will be the let's get back to the moon in four years initiative that starts fresh and anew and doesn't have the... Who owns the space station freedom? I mean, in reality, it was the Clinton administration that approved this new thing, and it was not space station freedom, which they said is to cancel that example. People don't even think about it. And I guess the best reason they don't think about it is because you can't identify it. I mean, I bet you, if you ask people, well, who gets credit for space station for, uh, international space station, they kind of scratch their head and go,

I'm not sure who gets credit. So there you go. There's the example. And George W. Bush finished it. And I mean, technically finished under Obama, I'm not sure who gets credit. So there you go. There's the example. And George W. Bush finished it. I mean, technically finished under Obama, I suppose, but it was carried through. I am a little surprised, actually, to hear you use the space station as an example of the right way to do business, just because I know people critique that for being so expensive and being so delayed. And now it's, why do we keep it going? You know, what point does it finish its mission? But that's another story.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, but your point is in terms of how it succeeded over time. And I think that's an interesting insight. I hadn't heard it put that way, but I find that very compelling. You're right. I normally do not associate the space station with, with, with Clinton's legacy, um, because it kind of moved it. I mean, I guess they didn't even launch the first piece until 98, 99. Um, for the situation we find ourselves in now, would you recommend to the white house that they step back from messaging on something like this in order to

try to dissociate a return to the moon? I mean, because that's the other question is, people are saying, why 2024? It's certainly the last year of what would be the president's second term. Is the very date itself, do you think, going to be seen as a political... Yeah, potentially. I don't think that they were going to be able to airbrush away completely the administration, but it depends on how they do it and promote it and what it consists of. And I don't even want to... What I'm saying is I don't know what it's going to look like, but I suspect it's going to look different than what's considered the baseline exploration program now. Not separate from it, that continues apace, as Jim Bridenstine has said, but this is a bit of a

one-off. This 2024 objective is a bit of a one-off. It'll have a lot of utility for the longer range program, and it may use components, maybe significant components of the long-term program, but it's going to meet its objectives with an architecture that is potentially different than what most people are looking at now. I guess the way that you're putting it, though, I feel like we're almost walking into the same situation that NASA found itself 30 years ago, which is if we're not changing any of the programs of record and we're adding on something new, and we've heard Mr. Bridenstine kind of talk about, well, we can't go after X, Y, or Z in terms of NASA because that's just politically infeasible.

Are they walking into the same political trap of adding to NASA's budget as opposed to reorienting programs within it? That's the challenge. They will make their own decisions and recommendations, and we will see. But certainly there are people that are advising them that all of these lessons and rules, think carefully, think about repurposing, think about utilizing things that you already have. And again, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough to get it done. And so we'll see. I mean, I think there will be a clearly international component.

There'll be a commercial component. It'll be a different critter and a different beast. What its ultimate price tag is, and again, when you look at the three elements of resources, either new money, which of course there will be some, repurposed money, 2BD, and contributed or in-kind contributed resources, whether they're investments by some of these private companies for their own purposes or their in-kind contributions from international partners. All of that will make up what the total commitment is in terms of resources. And I actually think it's kind of an interesting move to have a five-year limit. The other aspect

of this in terms of cost, I kind of feel like, again, so much of this is going to depend on what are those top line headlines going to look like when the supplemental comes out. But there's an advantage here. Because we're talking about 2024, it fits within the OMB five-year baseline plan fine. But also, we're not talking about 30 years anymore, right? And so, say you add $4 billion a year for five years, it's still $20 billion. But that sounds a hell of a lot better than $200 billion or even $100 billion, right? Absolutely.

Absolutely. And you can get so much more for your money these days. I mean, come on. Let's look at what the Air Force and NASA have been used to pay for launch services. I mean, again, when you use the shuttle, and I don't mean to bang it, I love the shuttle. It's a huge engineering achievement and a marvelous vehicle. Love it to death. But, Cole, our truth is, depending on how you account for it, each launch of the space shuttle costs anywhere from $240 million to $450 million. Wow, that's pretty stiff. If you want to launch that

six times a year, just do the math. That's just gas and refurbishment. And we can do those launch missions. I mean, SpaceX is charging a lot less. The Air Force has got a program with new initiatives in it that, you know, the price of launch is coming down. And that's a huge component of all this. I wonder also because of the style of contracting methods that we're using now, we're starting to find ways to build in an acceptance for failure. I don't know if we've quite demonstrated that yet. I was thinking about this in the context of watching the Beresheet lander attempt to get to the moon. It failed. They said, well,

we're going to do it again. And when you're building a hundred million dollar spacecraft, you can do that. Right. And particularly when you were working at the space council and those, the era, you had the Hubble problem of a multi-billion dollar, right. And then Mars observer, a billion dollar spacecraft just disappeared. And that was the whole point of better, faster, cheaper, right. In a sense, until I think we found the limits of that with the twin failures in 99 of the two Mars missions, they weren't cheap enough,

I suppose to, to, to accept a double failure. But if there's a way to make it cheap enough without risking, I mean, this is easier said with cargo, but can we fail? And that was,

you know, going back to that Apollo mindset, we failed all the time in the 1960s, right? And the lunar surveyor missions, or Ranger, we took them like six times to even hit the moon. Yeah, no, no, no, you're right. And again, it's really hard to talk about this without recognizing the fact that any loss is horrible. And if it involves human life, it's just unacceptable. But there's somewhere between the risk of exploration and doing new and unbelievable things and the sanctity of every single life. And it can never happen. You can never have a single

loss. I mean, Richard Branson and his team, they lost the pilot. It was terrible, but they got back up on their feet and they're launching again. There is going to be a new taste and a new expectation about what level of risk is acceptable when you're doing commercial thing where you're having commercial people and volunteers participate. You know, I remember one time Elon told me, we were in one of these panels back in the day when he was just starting and I was running ILS. We were talking about human raiding and the risk to human life. And Elon said, do you know how many people have died on Mount Everest? Of course I didn't. And he said, almost 500 people

have died. In fact, every year there are 10 or 15 people who die on Mount Everest. They're rich people who've paid enormous amount of monies to go do something that is completely discretionary, voluntary, and recreational. And they die doing it, many of them. And you can't even find it in the newspaper. So if you find a person who's willing to pay $250,000 to strap themselves for a rocket that we do our dead-level best to perform, and we have an accident, materially, what's the difference between that and a very wealthy person going for a trip to try to climb Mount Everest? Well, we might be putting that to the test here sooner than we think with Blue Origin. With your history, the National Space Council and being in a similar role,

you know, is there anything that publicly at this point that you would say to Scott Pace and Jim Bridenstine and everyone else who want to see this work, particularly in this period where the announcement of intent has been made, but the details haven't been set? What do you think is the most important thing for them to keep in mind in this period? Absolutely. It's simple and straightforward. And that is act like a team, be a team, keep each other totally informed, share what you know the minute that you know it so that everyone participates in the critical decisions that lead to ultimately what it is you propose and how you plan to implement it. No surprises. Exactly. Yeah, but you have to act like a team.

No hiding under the nut. You have to make sure all cards are face up on the table for everybody to see. That's how you're going to get an initiative that is well understood, is bought into, and the president and vice president can give their direction to go do it if they do. So, Mark, as we've kind of established, you've seen a lot of these proposals over the course of your lifetime and career. How do you feel then, I guess, about this? I'd like just to put you on the spot. No, I appreciate that. And I'm mildly optimistic.

There are huge pitfalls. There are undeniable headwinds. But there are things that are different this time that I think, and again, and I don't want to get into a dirt road here, but there's a whole lot going on in the defense side with the Space Force, Space Corps, etc. There are a lot of moving parts in America's space program today, a lot of moving parts. And the clear, clearly defined and independent swim lanes for activities are getting blurred. And so I think there's also opportunity, even the way we tried to involve the whole government in initiatives in a way that everything has been stovepiped pretty successfully. I think even on the DOD side,

there are a number of stovepipes that are coming down. And I think when you look at that together, and again, you take a model that says, let's take all the pieces that currently exist, not made up, not on paper, but exist, and let's put them on a table and say, can we cobble together a capability to go achieve this objective? I'm mildly optimistic that when you put all those things together, there's going to be a combination that works. Is it going to be different than it is in the past? Are there DOD potential resources that exist that would be applied to this problem? Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't know, Casey. I'm not playing coy with you. I don't know what they're working on. But I know they are taking the vice president's charge to do this by all means necessary very seriously. And that gives me a cause for some mild optimism. I'm with you. Well, Dr. Mark Albrecht, I want to thank you so much for joining us today on the Space Policy Edition. We'll have to have you back sometime. Love to do it. Thanks so much, Casey.

So that was Mark Albrecht, the former executive secretary for the National Space Council, to another generation, talking with the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, who is back here sitting with me on the couch outside the Planetary Defense Conference. Great conversation, Casey. Yeah, that was a fun one. I really enjoyed his insight and openness about that period of history. And again, very, very relevant to where we are now. So I hope other people are paying attention. Yeah, absolutely.

Let's just say again, because we won't be talking at length for another month, that between now and then, people should keep an eye on planetary.org because we're hoping to see this so-called supplemental budget. Absolutely. So I will be following this very closely, as you might imagine, and it is my intent to make sure all of you are informed with the best analysis and insight for how this moves forward and to, you know, possibly help make it happen. Counting on you, Casey, but based on past performance, I have total faith. Thank you very much for joining me here at the Planetary Defense Conference

and getting out this month's edition of the Space Policy Edition. Yeah, we should say Matt is also the producer of this show and his other show and traveling to do multiple live shows at the same time, so I'm amazed that we could get this opportunity here at Planetary Defense while we're both traveling. We crossed paths in the night, so to speak. So forgive the background noise of our hotel staff clearing up the buffet lines behind us.

But we don't have normal access to our recording studios, but such is the ways of a dynamic and active organization. That's showbiz, and we are on location at the University of Maryland College Park where the Planetary Defense Conference is. One more pitch, folks. Join us at planetary.org slash membership. Stand behind all of the great work that Casey does, that Brendan Currie does.

On our behalf, those of us who believe in the importance of space exploration and planetary defense, for that matter. It's only saving the world, as Bill would say. You can do that at planetary.org slash membership. It is the best way to become part of what we do to join our little family of explorers. Couldn't agree more. Casey, thanks so much once again. And I will talk to you in a month, if not before.

Sounds good. Always the part of the glamorous aspect of the Planetary Society. More couch interviews on podcasts. And free coffee. And free coffee. That's why I do this job. Got to have the perks. That's Casey Dreyer, chief advocate for the Planetary Society,

talking like a member of the media about free food. Did I say percolated perks? Yeah, I like that. That's from personal experience, by the way. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of the weekly, the regular edition of Planetary Radio. And we will be back on Wednesday, May 8th, if you're hearing this before then, with our show recorded in front of a live audience here at the University of Maryland College Park talking about planetary defense. That will be planned rad live.

Thanks so much for joining us, everybody. Ad Astra. Ad Astra.