Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: NASA's 2021 Budget Request Brings Billions

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

It's officially budget season! NASA's fiscal year 2021 budget request is out, and it proposes billions of dollars of new funding for Project Artemis. But not every program is so lucky: the WFIRST space telescope, two Earth Science missions, two Mars missions, and NASA's STEM engagement program are slated for cancellation. Why is Artemis growing and science shrinking? Will Congress let those cuts happen? The Society's Chief of D.C. Operations, Brendan Curry, joins Casey Dreier and Mat Kaplan to break down the details and political headwinds facing NASA funding in the coming year. Learn more about this month’s topics through links on the show page.  https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/space-policy-edition-47.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the March 2020 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We are thrilled to be back with you again. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined as always by our chief advocate, Casey Dreyer, and also this time by Brendan Curry. Casey, Brendan, welcome to the show. Hey, Matt. Great to be back, fellas. Very good to have you. We have lots to talk about. A lot of it will revolve around the budget that is coming together, not for 2020, but for 2021. I know that

you guys have a lot to say about that, and we'll have some other news along the way, no doubt. I also want to congratulate both of you on a tremendously successful day of action. And Brenda and I neglected to say that you are our chief of Washington operations. And there you are based right in the Beltway in Washington, D.C. And so this is near and dear to you. Yeah, it was a great day of action. Casey did a Herculean task of putting all of it together. And we had a great turnout. We had more people than we had last year come from all over the country.

And we just had a great day. We started it off with briefings at NASA headquarters. And then our intrepid members walked the hill and met with their elected representatives and their staffers and spoke about what the society cares about and our support for space exploration. Casey, you had a good time. I did. I mean, it's always fundamentally for me, I take a very selfish perspective. And I come out of that event just so invigorated and energized after meeting just our incredible members of the Planetary Society who selflessly dropped hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to fly out, come out to Washington, D.C. You know, they're paying for their own places to stay.

They're taking time off of work and they're doing it not because they get any personal benefit from the policies we're promoting. Right. There's very few, if any, space scientists or engineers or aerospace professionals. It's primarily just regular people who are there because they love space. Just seeing that kind of commitment, I walk out of that just ready to go work really hard every single day here at the Planetary Society to honor those people who came and demonstrated what a real committed space

advocate looks like. So it's just always really fun for me to see them, to meet everybody, to hear about their experiences, learn about their lives, and then see them just nail it when they go out. And they met with, I think, about 160 congressional offices in one single day. And as Brendan mentioned, we had a record level of participation, nearly 115 people. And we even had a surprise bonus participant, Bill Nye, our CEO, and Robert Picardo, our board member and notable holographic doctor from Star Trek Voyager, who also joined us on the Hill. So it was just a great day. Really proud of

what we did. And just, again, really could not be more impressed with our members here at the Planetary Society. And Casey, as you know, I hear from some of those attendees, they are listeners to Planetary Radio, probably listening to us right now. I bet we have a bunch of your participants in the day. Hey, guys. And they come back with the same kind of excitement and motivation that you've just talked about. What about the reception that you got? I know it's always been good in the past.

Overall, very positive. Again, people like space, right? I always kind of see this as politics, not the happiest place to be, particularly right now, right? A lot of divisive stuff going on. But when a member of the Planetary Society walks in and says, I want to talk about the search for life in the universe. It can just be this relief of like, wow, the staffer or the member of Congress, this is just really cool. This is really exciting. of like, wow, the staffer or the member of Congress, this is just really cool. This is really exciting. There's no divisive partisan politics here. It's just this question of, should we as a species and as a nation invest in truly inspiring, optimistic, forward-looking

research and scientific exploration? And so I always say we're doing them a favor, coming in and sharing our excitement and reminding them that not everything is battle to the political death about one side or the other, that there are these shared goals, these shared motivations that we still have. And space, again, as our boss says, brings out the best in us. Brendan, you've been a denizen of the Beltway for a long, long time. How does the Day of Action compare to other similar advocacy efforts? It's not unusual for organizations to bring in their members from across the country to do a Day of Action, or often they'll call it a

quote-unquote fly-in. On the day after our day of action that Tuesday, I still had one more meeting with Bill and Bob to meet with the chairwoman of the space subcommittee, Kendra Horn. And on that day, there were folks walking the hill in support of special Olympics. And so what we do is unique to space, but it's not something unique that other organizations don't do. But like as Casey said, and I may have said this on this podcast before, I feel that cable news and social media leave the normal American with the impression that everyone in Washington has knives to each other's throats all the time about every issue under the sun. And are there bones of

contention? Yes. But one of the great things about working in space is that it's one of those issues that still remain pretty bipartisan. And when you have everyday Americans who, as Casey said, came out on their own nickel to talk to their elected representatives about supporting something as grandiose as space exploration. It's refreshing from the staffer perspective. It's refreshing for the member. It's something everyone can kind of rally around. And it's just a wonderful thing.

And it's one thing to be a staffer and you're on the receiving end of a visit from someone who's a professional lobbyist, and it's a whole other ballgame when you're having a constituent come into town and just speaking from the heart, it resonates and it stays with you. And one of the things Casey and I encourage our folks to do is they'll be able to take the card from the staffer they're meeting with. You know, it's okay to keep in touch and zap them a note when they hear something or want to ask them a question. It's good to maintain that level of a relationship.

So it's an opportunity for everyone to get together who cares about space to voice their support. Most members of Congress want to support America's efforts in space. So it's a day of action, but I suppose really it ought to be a year of action. It certainly is for the two of you. Casey, you also talked about how our members participated in this day of action. You don't have to be a member of the Planetary Society to be an advocate for space, but it helps. So let's give our pitch. Everybody listening to this, if you're already a member,

thank you very much. You enabled the Day of Action. Maybe you were a direct participant in it, but if you are a dues-paying member, you are standing behind efforts like the Day of Action and everything else that Casey and Brendan spend their days up to all year long, every year. else that Casey and Brendan spend their days up to all year long, every year. You can become a member if you are not at planetary.org membership, which is also where you can learn about all the benefits of being a member other than the pride of ownership. There are quite a few, and we have many different levels that you can come in at. Guys, I don't know if you have anything to add to that, but we sure hope that we drive a lot of people toward looking at that page, planetary.org slash membership.

Just to emphasize something you said, your membership is what we walk into, Brent and I, into a congressional office. And they ask us, what's going on with the Planetary Society if they're learning about us? We can say that we're an independent organization. Their ears perk up when they hear that. In the space business, there's just not that many truly independent organizations that don't depend on large amounts of corporate funding or government funding to keep the doors open. The planetary society, because of that independence, because of the fact that most people that enable us to exist are just regular citizens or people around the world, that gives us this additional credibility. So when we come in with a policy

request, we're not doing it because we personally benefit from it or organizationally benefit. And we're able to pursue this advanced and year-round effort of space advocacy and space policy development because we have salaries, because we have jobs, because we can devote our full time on your behalf as a member of the Planetary Society. Every membership makes a real difference. And it's only through our independence at the Planetary Society that we're able to fill this critical role in the whole space ecosystem of being this independent voice. So I just really want to hammer on that. You're really contributing to a unique participatory system here in the United States and more broadly around the world with your membership dollars. Well said, Casey.

Thank you. Let's go to our main topic of the day, which is the budget, which was being considered there on Capitol Hill. And let's also start with this wonderful background that you provide in your blog post of February 28th that everybody can find at planetary.org. It's titled, Two Mars Missions Are Gutted. Despite near-record funding for planetary science, strong funding for NASA's Planetary Science Division isn't enough to support MSL Curiosity and Mars Odyssey, apparently. That apparently, that's also in the subtitle. That was not an editorial edition from me. I mean, you've talked about how it's a lot of good in a budget, and I would say there's a lot of really exciting and good things in this budget request overall

compared to previous years. But of course, they just can't leave well enough alone and let these two productive science missions at Mars just continue being successful. We saw for reasons that are opaque, but we can guess that the operating funds for the Curiosity mission would be cut by 20% if this budget went through. And then the operating funds for Mars Odyssey, which has been there since 2001, is cut by 92% going down to zero in the following year. It's functionally canceling that mission. Total, those two operating missions to restore them to full operations to a level that would provide excellent science as provided by or as analyzed by an independent review panel,

it'd be an additional 24 million. And this is 24 million, I want to emphasize out of a budget of proposal of 25.2 billion. So a fraction of a percent. Things like that. We'll talk about the number of frustrating aspects of this budget. Well, that's a good tease because we will get into a lot more details. But let's clarify, first of all, that we are talking here about the PBR, which, of course, has come up many times in the past on Space Policy Edition. And that is the president's budget request. But what does it really mean, guys? Every year in the late January, early February timeframe, whoever the president is sends up a budget request.

It basically signals to the Congress what the priorities are for whoever the president is for that upcoming fiscal year. One of the funny, get back to the day of action, we were lucky enough to have the budget request come out a week later than what was expected. So it came out on the day of action, which made things very interesting. Nice coincidence. Yes, yes. So it gets sent up to Congress, but it's not the end-all and be-all, and it's Congress's job to look at it and analyze it and say, this is what we like and this is what we don't like. We're still in the first inning of a nine-inning ball game right now, and the president's budget request is basically the umpire saying, play ball. There's lots to sort out between now and the end of the fiscal year,

or probably drifting into the next fiscal year, especially because it's an election year, but we can talk about that later. But it's a good starting point. And it gives us not only the Planetary Society, but everyone else who cares about stuff, let's say for the Department of Agriculture or various parts of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Interior, et cetera, et cetera, all these different federal agencies, it gives everyone an opportunity to kind of weigh in with Congress and say, yeah, we agree with this part of the budget or we don't agree with that part of the budget. And so there's a whole other series of offense that need to take place as we go through this nine inning ball game. To extend maybe the metaphor, it's like the umpire calling play ball, but also defining the rules of the game at that moment. The president's

budget request, as Brennan said, it's a statement of policy and it's a statement of the executive branch saying how they would like to spend money on their priorities for the coming year. And people will say and have over the years, yeah, Congress will dead on arrival and they'll tear it up and do their own thing. But that's really not true for the vast majority of the budget. The budget request for NASA is a 700 page document. The final congressional appropriation for NASA will be at most two or three pages. And so anything not specifically touched on in congressional legislation or related committee reporting by the Congress functionally is endorsed and goes through as proposed. At the micro level or smaller level,

for example, Mars operating missions that tend not to take a lot of public attention, the president's budget request can be very, very influential, particularly if we're in a situation where Congress is going to be delayed in providing the final budget. These interim periods, the White House's budgeting arm, the Office of Management and Budget, will control and limit spending to match the lowest proposed amounts in order to preserve flexibility for that program item going forward. So it's a statement of policy which should make us pay attention because that's what NASA will officially be trying to do unless Congress changes their mind or forces them to do something else. And in an ambiguous situation, or unless Congress has taken action, the White House, through its budgeting arm, will impose funding limits regardless. And so this is very important to pay attention to. And then I would say even writ large, and I'm working on some of these numbers to talk about more in the future, but the correlation between the president's budget request and the final congressional appropriation at a macro level is pretty strong.

It has an R value of 0.98, which is a strong correlative statistical effect. Historically, if the president proposes an increase or increase or decrease, 83 percent of the time, Congress will match that positive or negative change from NASA's budget. Congress will match that positive or negative change from NASA's budget. So there's a strong amount of context setting, cognitive anchoring that happens from this budget request. Congress is then in a reactive mode. It really sets the stage of our entire coming year debating about the budget, what's in this budget request right now. So the PBR is not to be taken lightly, which is the impression that some people might get

because, yeah, it then does go to Congress. But what is the outlook in Congress? And is it complicated by the fact that the House, well, we know it controls the purse strings, but it's also controlled by Democrats, whereas the Senate is not. Right now, literally starting right now, you're starting to see what are called budget posture hearings, where you're seeing various heads of various federal departments

and agencies coming up to a variety of congressional committees that have jurisdiction over their respective department or agency, fielding questions about what's in their particular budget request, what's their justification for it. Right now, I'm hearing that Administrator Rodenstein may be going up for his round of hearings in the House and the Senate later this month. And then we'll also eventually have the House Budget Committee, they're supposed to issue something called 302B allocations, which kind of susses out how much money all the appropriation subcommittees can spend on their particular bill. And so that'll be going through the spring. The Senate usually lets the House kind of go first and lets the House kind of work some things out. It also gives the Senate the luxury of seeing

where the House marks what are essentially called the marks. It's a term of art here in Washington. It lets them see where the House is thinking, especially, Matt, as you said, since the Democrats control the House and the Republicans control the Senate, the Senate Republicans will then be able to take a gander where the House is thinking and thinking about how when they get around to marking up their appropriations bills, where they want to push and prod and see where they can get some leverage when it comes down to final negotiations, which takes place later, much later in the year and much further down in the process. The other year, the Senate and the House reached a two-year budget agreement, a big picture budget that set the size of the pie that they are going to divide

up to fund what's called the discretionary side of U.S. government. That means that we don't have to battle from a philosophical perspective this year between the Democratic-led House and the Republican-led Senate how much the United States should spend. That's been agreed upon already. And so what Brendan was talking about here, these 302B allocations, that's divvying up slices of that budgetary pie whose size has already been set. The bigger the slice that this Commerce Justice Science Subcommittee, the subcommittee that includes NASA funding, the bigger the slice they get, the easier it is to accommodate growth in NASA. The problem is, of course, that other things will have different priorities within that the Commerce Department,

Justice Department, things like the FBI are going to be jockeying for that, not to mention, of course, the census, which is happening this year. So the overall context is locked in. And there's actually kind of a difficult part of that, which is there's very little growth of that budgetary pie from last year to this year. I think about total, it's growing by $4 billion in the context of a $1.2-ish trillion slice. And so we don't have a lot of additional room to grow NASA without having to take it out of something else, which is going to be a political problem, regardless of the overall positive proposal for NASA, just because, again, the pie has not grown to accommodate NASA. There's another issue here, and it's just the times we find ourselves in, a rather contentious election year. It certainly is shaping up to be that. That, I'm going to guess, will also affect

how this budget comes together, not just for NASA, but across the federal government. Yeah, there's a little thing. It's happening, I guess, the presidential election. I'll let Brendan talk at length. He's been through a number of these. What happens as you approach an election is that fewer and fewer members of Congress are going to want to take a position on whatever, just because it can be theoretically used against them by opponents running against them for reelection or for election. Can and will be used against you. Yes, right. Yes. And so legislating, the pace of legislation tends to drop precipitously in advance of an election. So don't forget, all of the House of Representatives is up for reelection

and a third of the Senate is up for reelection. And so it's very likely instead of passing a budget for the year before the election, you will see Congress pass an extension to the current budget, a continuing resolution that will carry them through November 3rd. And so that they will be able to deal with it in the lame duck session of Congress after this. As the momentum for trying to get something done fades almost by the week, and I'm not trying to be flippant when I say that, the estimation is right around the 4th of July recess is when things, for all intents and purposes, in terms of trying to get anything major accomplished through the Congress and signed into law, the chances of anything like that happening are virtually nil. Just to give you some perspective, the House was in session last year for about 135, maybe at most 140 days. This year, the House is set to be in session 112 days. This year, the House is set to be in session 112 days.

Both the big political conventions happen this summer. Normally, both political conventions take place in August. But this year, the Democrats are doing theirs July 13th through 16th. And the Republicans will be in August, August 24th through 27th. But it is a little unusual for the Democrats to have theirs relatively early, essentially mid-summer. And so all that's going to compound the whole process of trying to get stuff done. And Casey talked about the reluctance of members to really take strong stands as election day looms overhead. But I mean, even some of the more mundane stuff that most people outside of Washington don't see, you see congressional offices put a hiring freeze because

they don't want to hire anyone right now out of fear that somehow a new hire could be used by a political opponent against them in some weird way. I've seen it happen before. So it kind of starts mounting and it's a nature of the system and it's a nature of the beast. And then after everyone's just going to be holding their breath and seeing how the elections shake out. And then the day or so afterwards after the dust settles, you'll see a flurry of activity depending on how things turned out. There's a whole other set of varieties that we could look at at some point, but that's probably best saved for a future podcast in early November with you guys. And then there are the wildcard issues. I mean, I'm thinking specifically of COVID-19, the coronavirus. Oh, yeah.

Who knows? Yeah, no. I mean, that's going to be the first item up for appropriations activity. It's going to be listed as emergency spending, so it won't be counted against any of those 302B allocations. But they're going to try to get something done with that on the House side next week. It's just a matter of how big the package is. But that's sadly turned into a bone of contention. There will be things, you know, obviously everyone on this podcast cares about space, but there's other things that take place in Washington that have nothing to do with space that sadly impact it.

We always point out during these programs that space may be important to all of us, but there are a few other issues facing the United States and Americans at large. Casey, are you ready? We sort of teased people a little bit, but are you ready to start taking us through an overview of what this budget from the president, from the executive branch actually entails? from the president, from the executive branch, actually entails. You've got sort of a top line review, and then you've already given us some bullets from the good, bad, and the ugly, and some of them are pretty ugly. Yes, now that we've teased all the headwinds that it'll be facing, let's talk about what the actual budget request is. We've been maybe hiding the big news here, but this is an incredible request in terms of just top line growth for NASA. This is the largest single year request in probably 30 years. It was proposed to bump NASA from $22.6 billion to $25.2 billion. So nearly

a $3 billion growth in a single year. That is really important if you're trying to land on the moon by 2024. And this is what I was looking for. And this is what a lot of people were looking for to see how serious the Trump administration is about their 2024 lunar landing goal. Last year, right, this just happened. They announced the 24 landing goal. They did a supplemental request of surprisingly small amount, maybe about one and a half billion. That was good, but you really needed to see some significant increases to NASA to support this effort. Lo and behold, here it is. They came through with a $3 billion increase. All of that increase, functionally all of this increase to NASA,

is going to go to deep space exploration, specifically for crude lunar lander development, which ramps up from $600 million in 2020 to a proposed $3.3 billion in 2021, maintaining that 3.3 going up to 4 over the next few years. So spending, you know, off the top of my head, roughly $15 billion on that effort just in the next five years. So that represents, I think, a significant commitment and really shows us that we need to take Artemis seriously because this administration is starting to spend billions of dollars for that.

And I think that's really exciting. And again, just to put this in context, I said 30 years. If this budget goes through as requested, and again, we gave a number of reasons why that may not happen, but if it does, and it gets 25 or close to 25, if you adjust for inflation for NASA's history, this would be NASA's best budget since 1994. And again, also maybe puts in context that the early 90s had really solid budgets for NASA, which just hasn't been that great for decades. But this is a serious commitment. And I think that's probably the most important lead off and biggest question that was answered from this request that came out last month.

By the way, any of you who, as we talk about Artemis, are wondering when we're going to bring up SLS, that big rocket, don't worry, it's coming. Within this unprecedented budget, well, at least recently unprecedented, you mentioned that the science divisions suffer a bit. They do. And this is classic situation in terms of in the past, any big human spaceflight endeavor tends to come at the cost of scientific priority within NASA. So there's a few issues. And I just want to give proper context. Science does okay, broadly in this. And some science divisions do better than others. And so it's not a wholesale gutting of science the way that you saw in previous lunar return or Mars mission attempts.

This is basically keeping science, it's cutting it a little bit compared to previous years, and then keeping it relatively flat going forward into its five-year projection. But key missions are being canceled, proposed to be canceled again in this budget. Notably for us, for Planetary Society, WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, the follow-on to James Webb Space Telescope, the administration proposes to cancel that for the third time in a row. Congress has obviously rejected that proposal the last two years that it was proposed. They will probably do it again. It just passed. It's a key decision point C, moving the mission into actual implementation,

bending metal to start building it. Yet at the same time, it's proposed to be canceled next year. So it's frustrating to see things like that. They also proposed to cancel two Earth science missions that they've also proposed multiple times to cancel. You know, why are they doing this? It's obviously going to be returned by Congress. Congress has demonstrated multiple times that it supports these missions. And the answer just might be because the administration knows that Congress will fund these missions. And so they will make their books balanced by promoting their priorities, right? The statement of priorities, knowing that Congress will probably continue W-1st. But again, it just means a lot of churn and uncertainty for that program in the meantime, that we have to go through this again.

People have to speak out, engage their members of Congress to make sure that Congress puts the funding back, right? We can't just assume they will because Congress is ultimately responsive to its constituents. And we need to make sure WFIRST and other aspects of this budget that we share our opinions on this to make sure that they take the correct action. Almost like a trial balloon by the executive branch. But weren't we assured by some, including Administrator Bridenstine, that science would not be hurt by this focus on getting humans back to the moon? Yeah, Administrator Bridenstine, that science would not be hurt by this focus on getting humans back to the moon. Yeah, Administrator Bridenstine has talked about that, that you can't just go cutting other NASA programs to fund for a return to the moon. Broadly, this budget does that with these

handful of exceptions. I'd say what's interesting about this is WFIRST is canceled in this budget, specifically blaming the James Webb Space Telescope budget, specifically blaming the James Webb Space Telescope. So obviously, the James Webb Space Telescope is in a two year, you know, has slipped, you know, from its 2018 original launch date, it added $800 million to the mission. And that $800 million is roughly what the administration had originally planned to spend on WFIRST per year, $400 million per year for the last couple of years. They're framing it in this budget request as blaming the overruns in James Webb for the cuts to W-1st. And then the cuts to the Earth science missions predate the Artemis

project. And so, you know, for whatever reasons, political reasons you want to apply to that, those have continued, you know, that's just like good old fashioned, you know, let's go back to the well of proposing to cut these missions because that's what we've done now since 2018. Even though we're seeing these cuts overall, I would say it's not because of Artemis because Artemis has come in with this new money primarily, right? As generally as what Administrator Bridenstine said, we need additional funds to do this because you can't go back and create the political conflict by cutting all these other popular programs. And generally, I think they're doing that. Yeah. Back to the earlier discussion about gutting money on Curiosity and Odyssey.

I can't remember how many years ago, but there was an effort to switch off the Voyager probes to save money. And everyone went berserk about it. And thankfully, those missions were not turned off. So what we're seeing with Curiosity and Odyssey is not entirely something new. If you think about something as iconic as the Voyager probes, especially since our founder, Carl Sagan, had such a direct hand in both those missions. To Casey's point, it's somewhat of a, I don't want to say game being played, but there are some machinations that go through with all this stuff that everyone kind of knows really where things lie. And I think Casey's estimation of things are pretty spot on. I took a deeper dive into the

planetary science budget, Matt, on the blog post you mentioned that we'll link to in the show notes here. I'm looking at your graph right now, and it is so instructive, and you've got so much great data here. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, I'm going toive. And you've got so much great data here. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, I'm going to tease. There's lots of more really exciting data about planetary science budgets to come soon in the next month. We'll talk about it next month. But for now, for this 21 budget, I break down every division within planetary science. I look at why it's going down. Almost all of them do. Most of them go down mainly because of programmatic reasons. That's encouraging, right? That they're going down because they've hit peak funding last year on the current crop of missions that they're building. And there's this natural development

cycle where you peak at the midpoint of your development, and then the cost of the missions go down as you kind of wrap them up and launch them. So overall, that's what's happening in planetary science, which does see a small 2% drop from the year before. And just to add more context to what Brendan was saying, over the last 10 years, we've seen repeated proposals to end operating missions at Mars, most notably with the Opportunity rover saw zeroing out of its budget multiple years in a row. Obviously, those didn't happen. Those were undone, you know, or ultimately rejected by Congress or pushback from the scientific community. What's, again, strange about this, and I think if I can put on my psychoanalysis hat of why this is happening, some important context here is that Mars 2020, the next big flagship Mars mission, right, that's going to launch in July, hope to

see everyone down in Florida for that, it burst its budget cap which was kind of just announced in the context of this so that's an important thing to keep in mind here within the mars program an extra 300 million dollars had to be spent on mars 2020 to address a number of technical issues before it launched if i had to understand analyze why we're seeing pointless cuts in mars science operations missions, it's because that's the, you know, quote unquote punishment from the Office of Management and Budget to the Mars program saying you need to find savings throughout your own program to pay for your budget cap, bursting your budget cap for Mars 2020. That has been consistent over the years. your budget cap for Mars 2020. That has been consistent over the years. You know, that's kind of the slap on the hand warning sign that you get from the budgeteers at the White House for going over your budget proposal. So I'd say that's a related aspect of this. Though, again, it's not fair to Mars Curiosity or to MSL Curiosity because they didn't control that 2020 program, or Odyssey, which has just been

trucking along, giving us great science for roughly $12 million a year at Mars since 2001. What a deal. Casey, Brendan, and I will be right back with much more of this month's Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Yale astronomer Deborah Fisher. I've spent the last 20 years of my professional life searching for other worlds. Now I've taken on the 100 Planetary Radio. will fund a key component of an exquisitely precise spectrometer. You can learn more and join the search at planetary.org slash 100 Earths. Thanks. We'll leave the details to people who want to read through this March 28 entry, your blog post, at planetary.org. It's worth repeating. I just want to note, I mean, not surprisingly, big increase in the lunar exploration line, 51%. But also interesting, this research line up by 15% when, as you said, virtually everything else is reduced.

Any idea why? You know, I don't have insight into that. It's actually a very smart move. I think funding research, just to clarify within the planetary science division, the entire planetary science community in the United States, that's primarily faculty at universities and what we call soft money scientists, scientists who pay their own salaries by getting competing for government grants to do research programs. NASA is pretty much the sole source of funding for planetary science research in the United States. The National Science Foundation has its own priorities, but what NASA does to work with NASA data, they provide this source of funding to basically keep the community employed. And also, it pays for a lot of students and graduate students to develop a scientist. So it's basically

a pure investment into the scientific workforce of the United States. Compared to building spacecraft, scientists are cheap. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars per year. To say nothing to postgrads and graduate students. Oh, graduate students. Yeah, they might as well be popcorn, right? Free. No. And I say that as someone who met my wife right before she entered graduate school. And they are very much underpaid. But the issue being here. So if you invest even slight increases in the fundamental research for planetary science, that is a direct investment into the future workforce of the United States for creating

top-notch planetary scientists, students, and people who are just trained to be critical thinkers who work with technology and work through very complicated problems. So this is just a smart move. And there's always been a push to try to at least, you know, there's a big problem. Fundamentally, we could talk about this at length, but we probably won't today. But just the fundamental problem is as the size of this community grows, as people graduate, make graduate students and they become professionals themselves, there's more and more pressure for the same pot of money, right? There can be more and more competition to get those grants. And so if you're not increasing the overall grant size, the pool size, there are

going to be fewer and fewer people able to make a living as professional scientists because they won't have the access to funds to stay employed, to pay their mortgages, to buy groceries and so forth and so on. So if nothing else, increasing this to at least try to assuage some of the demand, growing demand for these competitive grants and to give more people access to work with planetary data is a good idea. There's one other cut here is moving out of planetary science, which has become an annual event, and that is cutting NASA's educational activities. Do we see that again? And do you expect Congress will once again say, no, no, no, we like this? that again? And do you expect Congress will once again say, no, no, no, we like this? Yes and yes. The STEM engagement, previously education division within NASA, funded at about $120 million, I believe, last year, is now proposed to be zero. This is continuing a long line of cuts from the Trump administration, but also under the Obama administration. They didn't propose

to remove it completely, but they proposed significant cuts to this division. Half of this education funding, STEM education funding, goes to something called Space Grant. Every state has a Space Grant office and every American territory has a Space Grant office. And they are charged with giving small grants, thousands of dollars, to students, to rocket clubs, to teachers for educational development. It's incredibly popular among Congress. Every state has a space grant office and you're supporting students who want to do space, right, at the student or teaching level. It's incredibly popular. So no question this is going to come back. We heard multiple requests already saying,

why are they doing this? I don't know. It's again, it's the same song and dance. Brendan, maybe we'll have some additional insight into why they go after this year by year. But this is the not unexpected in a sense, but always very annoying that we have to deal with. Yeah. For a number of years, even preceding the Obama administration as well, there's been a perennial frustration with how that office has been managed. There's been attempts even at the congressional level, fits and starts about severely cutting it or reducing it or zeroing it out. You know, like Casey said, at the end, it's very popular because of the space grant stuff, but there's always been this frustration level with how that office is managed and how it functions. And it's just to kind of make a point to, you know, straighten up and fly right thing more than anything else. If I can circle back to the Artemis stuff, one of the things that we've learned last week was that at some point this month, there's going to be some sort of human spaceflight at NASA headquarters, a gentleman

by the name of Doug Lovero. He's planning on making some announcements about how Gateway may be utilized in a different fashion or a different manner. So stay tuned to that. I think whatever he says will frustrate Congress. This is a big part of the NASA mission. And like we said, the budget already came out and now they're going to come out essentially over a month later saying, well, the big cherry on the sundae in this budget, well, what we told you in our budget release may not be what we're really thinking now. So stay tuned. There may be some frustration expressed by Congress about that. There's going to be a Space Council meeting at the end of the month at Glenn Research Center in Ohio. And I wouldn't be surprised if they use that as a venue to

start showcasing the modifications on Artemis. Well, there's some deja vu. Didn't we go through this last year when Artemis first became public? Yeah. Casey and I were talking. I got deja vu when I heard about this as well because last year we had the budget request and then we were told there was going to be a supplemental budget request and it was taking longer and longer and longer for the supplemental budget request to come, and Congress just got extremely frustrated. So there's a part of me that's girding myself for another rehash of something akin to what happened last year. I think this is a fundamental example of what happens when you have a very tight deadline, and it's a very difficult position NASA finds itself in,

where it's being told to land on the moon in less than five years, and they have to suddenly figure out how to do that. Generally, NASA, particularly with its human spaceflight program, is not known for moving super fast. It's slow and deliberate for a reason, right, which is focused on safety and sustainability and a variety of other factors. To try to move really fast and then to have these other cycles, like the budget cycle processes, running independent that they have to fit into, they just can't figure out or have been able to lock down on one configuration, which then, of course, as Brendan said, creates this frustration in Congress, creates a hesitancy to why should we fund you if you don't even know what you're doing yet? NASA's put in a very difficult position with this 2024 deadline for the first lunar landing, given what it has to work with politically. And yet NASA says they still

think that they can achieve putting those humans back up there on our satellite in 2024. Is this now edging us into the ugly column, Casey? That's a good segue. Well, I think even though we're seeing some serious money being proposed for this effort, 2024, in my opinion, remains highly unlikely. Again, I think we are reminded of this. We can bring this up. The Space Launch System rocket just announced from one of the high administrators at NASA,

Steve Jurczyk, that it would be now delayed until the second half of 2021, its first launch. And this is the first launch without crew, right? So an uncrewed launch. That means they have to have a second launch with crew go perfectly in 2023, and then have everything ready, a lunar lander, perhaps at the gateway, who knows, everything in place ready to go by 2024. And everything has to work perfectly for that landing. The third launch of the space launch system, the second launch with crew. The pace at which that has to happen, again, I just historical context here, the last time NASA or

any organization, any organization made a crew capable spacecraft in less than five years was during Apollo in the 1960s. No one else has done that. And that includes SpaceX, that includes Blue Origin, anyone. So this is the situation. It's just very unlikely historically from the context they have. And even the money that they're getting may not be enough to try to move something so quickly when the program itself seems to be quite in flux. Even the development of SLS, what's going to happen on top of that first stage, that is wrapped up in this as well. I mean, you've mentioned in your notes that they're going to be sticking with the 1A version for even longer than expected. for this context, right, the Block 1A version of SLS has this interim upper stage. It's slightly underpowered, relatively speaking, to what the full capability of the SLS could be. So you have the first core, you have its solid rocket boosters, and you have your second stage, the ICPS. That is enough, NASA claims, to launch Orion and its service module and whatever else to the moon.

And you don't need what Congress has been funding, an upgraded and enhanced upper stage, the EUS, which would be the Block 1B variant of the SLS. That enhanced upper stage is very powerful. You could do a lot of cool things with it. But NASA says it doesn't need it and would rather take funding and put it towards crew lunar development and focus the sls program on just getting off the ground basically just

launch right with what you have congress is very enamored and and key people in congress are very enamored with this exploration upper stage they wrote into the budget last year that it shall continue and they should spend at least $300 million on that this year. NASA, once again, proposes to defer that indefinitely into the future. I see very likely that Congress will write that back in to their legislation again this year. Concur. We used to talk about how great it would be so cool to put the Europa Clipper mission on top of an SLS because you could get out there a lot quicker. You wouldn't maybe have to do planetary flybys to pick up more velocity to get to Jupiter. Is that wrapped up in this?

Oh man, it is. This is the Faustian bargain of the Europa Clipper is becoming very relevant now. The Europa Clipper, when it was being proposed, when we were going back, when NASA was trying to reject the mission and it was trying to build this coalition, it was proposed that, hey, we can stick this on an SLS and it can get it out to Jupiter in two and a half years, direct to Jupiter. out to Jupiter in two and a half years, direct to Jupiter. It's incredible. Really fast. Great. If they need context for the SLS, they need to use it for things at the time, right? In the mid 2000s, they didn't have this Artemis program yet. They didn't have enough missions for SLS. So yeah, put Europa Clipper on it, get it out there. Everybody wins, right? We get a usage for the SLS. So the SLS coalition really liked the Europa Clipper. Scientists at the Clipper and other supporters said, hey, we could save all this time getting

out to Jupiter. Sure. What has changed at this point? So NASA, in its budget request now, as it's finally embraced Europa Clipper, NASA is proposing to not use the SLS for two reasons. The cost of the procurement, which the budget claims would be one and a half billion dollars for an SLS rocket. Also, the fact that they want the SLS rockets for their human program at Artemis. Right now, Boeing has a production limitation. They cannot produce

roughly more than one rocket per year. So if you use a rocket, an SLS rocket for Europa Clipper, that's one year you can't send humans to the moon. NASA internally wants to prioritize SLS rockets for Artemis and then use a commercial launch vehicle for Europa Clipper, even if it takes a little longer. Congress, on the other hand, has been for the last few years writing into law that Europa Clipper shall use an SLS to go to Jupiter without really acknowledging this production limitation issue. The other factor that this is why this is coming to a head is that Europa Clipper is almost done. It's projected to be completed, the spacecraft to be completed in 2023. But the problem is the current production rate of a SLS rocket, or not the rate, but the lead time to produce one,

is about five years. So if you wanted to have an SLS to launch Clipper, as Congress has demanded, in 2023, you would have had to start building that rocket two years ago, right? Which has not happened. You know, they still haven't flown a rocket yet. So this is the coming to a head. So already now this budget proposes to delay Clipper by one year to get another commercial rocket for that mission. Other commercial rockets, they need their own amount of lead time, right? They need a couple of years to procure those,

to build them to long lead components, what have you. We're starting to see delays in Europa Clipper because there is a disagreement between the White House and Congress about what launch vehicle it should use. More even importantly for the mission, if you're going to use a commercial launch vehicle, you need to build to that launch configuration. And you need to add additional shielding for your thermal conditions inside the inner solar system, as you loop around Earth and Venus or whatever, you know, as whatever configuration you need to get out to Jupiter. So the mission needs to know what it's going to launch on what its thermal environment is going to be. And then also, we don't want this mission to sit around in storage

for a couple of years waiting for a rocket to launch it. The whole two and a half year advantage of the SLS disappears if it sits in storage for three years before a rocket is ready, right? This is an increasing worry for me that this is a problem. And I'd say we've seen Congress start to acknowledge that this is an issue. We saw'd say we've seen Congress start to acknowledge that this is an issue. We saw in the House authorization bill that was released as a draft the other month that we talked about included language to study this problem more thoroughly. But within the appropriations legislation, we're seeing this continual demand that it's functionally illegal for NASA not to use an SLS for Europa Clipper, and that it's starting to tie the hands of the mission.

All good considerations. And I'll point out that other bad things can happen if a spacecraft sits in a crate for a long time. Read about Galileo. But I also feel compelled to mention a Falcon Heavy costs less than a tenth of what an SLS will cost. Just saying. It's relevant context, right? Yeah. All right, where else are we under this ugly column that I mentioned? this show, on the weekly Planetary Radio, about planetary defense and how it looks like there is going to be a new and improved version of NEOCAM. And it's not in there, the way to find these

dangerous space rocks? Yeah. Last September, just for context, right? Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA, came to a meeting of scientists and said that NASA will initiate this new mission called the Neo Surveillance Mission, seemingly finally addressing this problem that NEOCAM couldn't compete within a scientific context. It needed a specific home for planetary defense to build a space telescope dedicated to finding potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. No-brainer mission, right? We should look for things that could fundamentally destroy all of civilization. Maybe give ourselves a heads up, a chance to react to them. We have a mission. It's been studied for 10 years. It's low cost by NASA standards, about $500-600 million. We'll work for 10 years and meet a congressional mandate to find asteroids 100 meters, 140 meters or larger within 10 years. Actually, the mandate was for this year, but NASA can't meet it because they never had the money.

So that was exciting, right? The Planetary Society was very excited. We had a press statement in reaction to it. Bill Nye called it perhaps the most important decision in human history to look for one of these things, to commit to that mission. Could be. Yeah, right? It has the potential to be a very important mission. I eagerly opened up the budget request this year, looking to see that NEO surveillance mission as stated that they would pursue it.

And it was not there. It failed to materialize in the budget. I was shocked. Everyone was surprised. Because again, and just even more context, if you poll the public about what the most important mission within NASA should be, looking for hazardous near-Earth objects is the top, right? That is the most publicly popular aspect of NASA's program. Matt, do you know what's at the very bottom in terms of public support? Sending humans. No, it wouldn't be sending humans to Mars. I know I've seen this. Oh, go ahead and tell me.

A little closer to home. Sending humans to the moon is the least popular. Ah, yes. So it's like a good example of how public opinion does not drive NASA funding. Right. Because we're talking about a $3 billion increase just for this lunar return program and functionally no money for this NEO detection effort. Very frustrating. Brendan, these kinds of surprises,

they're not unheard of in DC, even when we thought there was a commitment to get something done. I mean, this happens, right? Yeah, not just in space, but a whole host of other policy realms. You know, you could go down the list of all types of initiatives promulgated by whatever administration is residing in the White House at the moment. whatever administration is residing in the White House at the moment, and Congress can shrug its shoulders and walk away, and it all comes down to how much political capital does a president at the moment want to spend on kind of dragging that initiative, whatever it is, across the finish line.

It's always kind of interesting when you hear a statement from an administration on whatever it is, green energy or anything like that. A lot of folks take it at face value. And the reality is that it's a long drawn out process. In many ways, the founders made it very difficult to get things done in Washington in a kind of perverse way. Those of us who care about space, and again, everyone who's on this podcast and members of the society do care about space, it's up to us to hold our elected officials' feet to the fire. If they say they care about space, well, let's give them an opportunity to prove it to us. Great segue, Brendan, because we have an online away for you

if you're listening to this and you really want to see a NEO surveillance mission, planetary defense mission happen. We do have an online form for you to use to contact your members of Congress to support this. This project needs an additional $40 million this year. In planetary defense within NASA's Planetary Science Division, we want to bump up that top line by $46 million. $40 million this year. In planetary defense within NASA's Planetary Science Division, we want to bump up that top line by $46 million. $40 of that goes to planetary defense for this NEO surveillance mission. That would help get this mission going for a mid-2020s launch as originally planned. So this is a very affordable mission. I don't know why it didn't make it into the budget.

I'm sure Thomas Zurbuchen and the science mission directorate was serious when they said they wanted to start it. Somewhere through that process and the horse trading that was happening with this other big request for NASA, my guess is that the Office of Management and Budget seemed to just be skeptical and start zeroing out other new initiatives at the same time. This is where Congress needs to come in and say this incredibly popular. It's a no brainer. It's affordable mission. It's been studied. It's been endorsed by the National Academies. There's no argument against this mission, right? There's no serious argument against this mission. So this is why we're going to be, you know, the planetary side is going to be taking action on this. And we're going to give you an opportunity. You can go to planetary.org slash space advocate. You can find

the link there and you can contact your members of Congress in the United States. It still staggers me. Obviously I follow space every day because it's my job, but also because I think it's awesome anyways, but it's almost monthly. You hear some, you see something in the regular news about something that's going to be on a cosmic scale, a near miss. Even this morning, I saw something in the news about something that's pretty sizable that's going to miss us. But if it hit us, it would be devastating. And so, I mean, this isn't a speculative kind of threat we're facing. This is a real thing.

It's something that we're facing. This is a real, this is a real thing. It's something that we can do. As Bill says, it's the one natural disaster that's theoretically preventable. Yep. As long as we do what we should do, you know, the dinosaurs made the mistake of not funding a mission like this. Yeah, they were too busy squabbling about their own partisan. I need to know my triceratops. Matt, can we talk about some good stuff just to wrap this up? Because I do feel like we should mention the good things in this budget. Please do. Yeah. Take us back into the good column. Yeah. I mean, it's easy and fun sometimes to focus on the negative things. And there's

problems with this budget. There are flaws that we need to address. But the big picture is that we're talking here about a NASA budget that's growing by $3 billion to its largest level in 30 years. This is a great position to be in, even with the flaws in this budget. So I just want to make that really clear. This is exciting. This is exciting that we're setting up a serious effort to return humans to deep space and to the surface of the moon. It's exciting to see major science missions still moving forward, right? The James Webb is continuing. Things like Mars sample return is in this budget and has serious financial projections going forward for a mid-20s launch, 2026 launch. Mars sample return would begin formulation, phase A, this year in this budget,

and it's requested in the budget. That is very good, right? Exciting to see that. So overall, this budget is very strong. It's an exciting budget. It sets up a really exciting decade of the 2020s if you fix some of these things on the margins. And that's what we're going to be really focusing on.

So again, I'd say this is just, I was going back to some historical work in NASA budgeting and planetary budgeting and science budgeting the last couple of weeks. And I was reminded about the years where we didn't get to talk about big budget increases for NASA, where everything was cut and we had to choose among the decimation of missions, which ones to throw our support behind because we just couldn't do everything. This is a much better position to be in. And we should appreciate the fact that NASA is a growing,

broadly supported, and dynamic area of the federal government that is going to show big returns for us coming forward. And in the larger context, the vast majority of federal departments and agencies saw cuts in their budget submissions. That's true. NASA and the Pentagon were the real big winners in this budget request. So as Casey says, it's not a bad place to start. Take this with a grain of salt, listeners, if you choose to, because we're not particularly objective on this topic. So we may not be the only force for good, but we're certainly in there, in that alliance. Casey? Yeah. And we're certainly helped creating the environment where this type of proposal will be taken seriously and embraced more broadly, right? So we're helping to

set the context of this. And again, we're able to support the things that are really important to our members, right? Our planetary exploration, getting humans beyond low Earth orbit, exploring Mars, searching for life, and defending the planet against asteroids and comets. That's the kind of context we're creating in which these budgets can thrive. And that's what we're going to be working on this year. And Matt, if I can go back real quick to the planetary defense and the NEO survey mission, I don't think I've talked to you guys in a while, but, you know, back in October, I brought Casey into the Pentagon to give a brief about planetary defense, because while NASA under

law is chartered with identifying and tracking potential threats, if they do find something that is a threat, it's going to be the Pentagon's job to take the lead and try to neutralize and address that threat. And so we thought it was worth bringing Casey into town to talk to the Pentagon folks about it. And the room was packed. And we had folks from CIA, the British MOD, the Army, the Air Force, Space Development Agency, the NRO. We had folks from NASA as well there, obviously. And so it speaks to that whole criticality of this idea that planetary defense, it sounds science fiction-y, but it's a real thing. Well, you're proving my point, Brendan. Thank you for that. Gentlemen, I think we can close. Do you have any final comments before we provide one more bit of encouragement to listeners to become part of this effort by becoming members of the society? listening to this, if you don't engage in this process, very likely someone else will. I can

guarantee you someone else will. And you have no idea what they're going to say. You don't know if you'll agree with them. You probably won't. And so if you don't engage, you're functionally invisible in this discussion. So if you have opinions about this, if you have beliefs that NASA should be doing planetary defense or sending missions to Mars or returning humans to the moon, this is the time to start engaging on that process. And again, we've made some tools for you to do so on our website. So you can check that out at planetary.org slash space advocate. But again, this is something that Brennan and I will be working on on your behalf now for the rest of the year. We do that because of the support that you

give us, but we also do that because of the support that you give us, but we also do that because you give us the credibility to walk into these rooms as, again, that independent organization. So follow us online. I have a page on our website that will be included on the show notes for this on NASA's 2021 budget request,

and it's our entire budget for the year. And it'll track all the updates throughout the year about what's happening to this budget, key developments in Congress, and ultimately the final numbers. So you can follow this whole progress on our FY 2021 NASA budget page. And much more to come there. As you hinted at, Casey, I've seen a little preview of some of this data crunching that you're working on. And boy, is that going to be exciting to talk about maybe in next month's Space Policy Edition on the first Friday in April of 2020. You remind me also, Casey, of that it's becoming a tired phrase, but no less effective, no less accurate. If you're not at the table, you probably are on it.

effective, no less accurate. If you're not at the table, you probably are on it. On the menu. On the menu, sorry. Planetary.org slash membership. Join us, become part of this effort. Everything that you've just heard about, all of this work that is underway, and the fact that we have these two great individuals working on behalf of space exploration, on behalf of you as members. It's all because of those people who have stepped up and become members of the Planetary Society. Guys, thank you very much. Keep up the great work and we'll talk again. Thanks, Matt. Looking forward to it. Thanks, Matt. Always good to be with you.

That last voice was Brendan Currie, Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. That last voice was Brendan Currie, Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. And of course, also Casey Dreyer, Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Hope you will listen to the weekly Planetary Radio as well. If you are hearing this shortly after it came out, we've got a special treat coming. My conversation with Ann Druyan, the executive producer, writer, and director of many of the episodes

of the new third season of Cosmos. I'll be talking to her on our episode that is released on Wednesday, March 11. Hope you'll join me for that and that you'll join us again next month for the Space Policy Edition. Ad astra, everybody.