Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: NASA's 2023 Budget Request

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

The Biden administration is proposing $26 billion for NASA next year, with significant increases benefiting the Artemis program, Mars Sample Return and Earth Science missions. But not everything is good news: NEO Surveyor and Mars Ice Mapper are both slated for significant cuts, and inflation may take a bite out of any increases NASA would receive on paper. With Congress facing elections in the fall, how likely is it that NASA will get this funding? What consequences will this have on Planetary Society priorities? And what does this mean for the future of exploration? Chief Advocate Casey Dreier and host Mat Kaplan are joined by The Planetary Society's Chief of D.C. Operations, Brendan Curry, to explore NASA's next big budget. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/nasa-budget-request-brendan-currySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everyone, to the April 2022 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of the weekly show, joined again by the chief advocate and senior space policy advisor for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome. Hey, Matt. Happy to be here again, finally. Absolutely. We're only a week off. It happens now and then with very good reason. One reason is that it means we're going to be able to spend time talking about our main topic today. And that's why we're also joined by Brendan Curry, the Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society, who is talking to us from his place of business there. Are you within the Beltway or just outside, Brendan? Welcome.

Well, fellas, it's good to see you. And I'm coming at you live from beautiful Fairfax, Virginia. Oh, I love Fairfax. I love Fairfax. Saw a fox there once in a neighborhood. There was a little fox. It's probably the one that harasses our neighborhood, too. Well, welcome, Brendan.

We're happy to have you. And, of course, we're happy to have all the rest of you as well for this monthly Space Policy Edition. We welcome you, and we invite you to dig deeper by going to planetary.org and maybe specifically planetary.org slash join, where we have offered the opportunity for you to stand behind the Planetary Society. We would love for you to be a part of helping us create all of the stuff that we do at the society, including this very podcast. Casey? Matt, there's even more specific things you can do if you're listening and love the show. We are doing our annual fundraising effort for

this program, the Space Policy and Advocacy Program, that allows Brendan and I to work literally every day, even a lot of weekends on your behalf, advocating for space science and exploration to folks in Washington, DC and around the world. That's at planetary.org slash take action. We only try to ask for funding once a year. And again, it goes directly into our program work here. So very important if you want to be more than just a member, or don't want to be a member with all that entails, you can throw us a few bucks at planetary.org slash take action. And if you want evidence of the success of the advocacy work that is done by the Planetary Society and our policy work, well, it's not like we can take full credit. But look at the budget proposal just issued by the Biden administration

on behalf of NASA, which is going to be our topic today, right, Casey? That is. And it's a 988-page document. I've read through it at this point. This is one of the reasons why we pushed the show back. It's a lot in there. We'll do a detailed breakdown, but first, we're going to talk about some big picture things. Before we even jump into that, Matt, I just want to acknowledge, too, that something happened in between our two shows, which is that we had our day of action with our members of the Planetary Society getting out there virtually this time and meeting face to face with the members of Congress who will be funding NASA and responding to this budget that came out.

So if nothing else, I want to just first acknowledge and thank the 115 members of the Planetary Society who took a day off of work for the most part and met with over 160 congressional offices last month. These are the folks who are really putting themselves out there and committing serious time to represent all of us here at the Planetary Society. And they just did a fantastic job getting out there and really educating themselves, advocating really well, and leaving a wonderful impression. Brendan, I wanted to toss it to you. You've been following up on a lot of the meetings that our members had.

What's the feedback that you've been getting from congressional staff and members? Yeah, thanks, Case. It's been extremely positive. And one of the things it ties into what we'll be talking about with respect to the president's FY23 budget submission to Congress is that when the budget submission came out, Casey was really good about doing a quick apples to apples chart analysis, comparing and contrasting what the finalized FY22 budget for NASA was going to look like with respect to the FY23 proposed budget.

And that was another example where I could go back to these congressional staffers, some of which I know very well, some of them are new. And it was an opportunity to follow up after day of action, saying again, thanks for meeting with Planetary Society members. And oh, by the way, I'm sure you're drowning in all types of budget documents that your boss is going to ask you to provide memos on as the next steps are taken with respect to how Congress adjudicates the FY23 budget. And the charts that I was able to provide due to Casey's work was very much appreciated

because a lot of times they just, these congressional staffers, being a former one myself, you just get drowned in numbers. It's really handy to have a kind of quick reference guide. And we at the Planetary Society were able to provide that information to help those staffers' jobs a little bit easier to service their bosses better. But also those documents, I was also able to share with other friends in D.C., namely our international friends and allies who are here in Washington who are not quite as familiar with the American federal government congressional process. Also some of our friends in industry. So it's an example of how the Planetary Society as a nonprofit can be a trusted resource for information and data. The only angle we're driving is to have robust funding for missions that fit within our goals and priorities. And that's where everyone knows where we're coming from.

They treat us as an honest broker and look to us for help. And we're more than happy to provide that. Yeah. And I just want to emphasize there that you were able to follow up with a lot of offices after our members had already been there with this data. So it really emphasizes that when our members participate in the day of action, it's not just this one-off thing. We're actually working in concert with them, using these touch points to further engage and communicate and educate members of Congress and

their staff about these really critical issues. So you can read it. We'll link to it here in the show notes, but you can read about the event on planetary.org. Again, I just want to thank all of the participants who took their time and really just did a great job representing the society and you. Even if you weren't able to do it, they were out there working on your behalf. Now we can move on to that 988 page, did you say, document? Yeah, I just checked it. And I recommend reading this. Yeah, it's a great document. document. Yeah, I just checked it. And I recommend reading this. Yeah, it's a great document. And it just gives you a reminder of the breadth and scope of space exploration that NASA does.

Before we break down into the details, I'll just give a couple of high level numbers. And then Brendan can help us understand what are the next steps going to be for this budget, right? Go for it. So always the key thing here, this is a president's budget request. This is the proposal. This is the starting point of negotiations that the White House prepares that sets their priorities for NASA. Congress ultimately is the arbiter of where this money goes, how much NASA gets, and really whether they agree with or don't with whatever the White House is

proposing, right? So again, even though this is a proposal, this is still important. I've done the numbers on this in NASA's entire history. Whenever the White House has requested an increase in NASA's budget, Congress has followed through 86% of the time, right? So even if those numbers don't match up, there's a strong correlation between the overall funding approach that the White House proposes versus what Congress gives. The White House has many more people on staff to put this budget together. Congress generally engages at a higher level. So there's lots of just really important things included in this document, even if it's a proposal. So this is one of the reasons why we

spend a lot of time analyzing this. It's a policy document. It sets the White House's overall approach. It sets the administration's attitude about what it wants for our civilian space program here in the United States. Big picture stuff that we're looking at this year. They're requesting an approximate 8% increase over what Congress provided in the previous year. This is a nearly a $26 billion budget for NASA. That's great. If you just do a very straightforward adjustment for inflation, this would be the largest budget request for NASA since 1995. There's going to be some inflation adjustments that will drive that number down a bit, right? Because we're seeing very rapid

inflation at the moment. But in overall kind of generalities, this is one of NASA's best requests in 20 or so years. I think that's fair to say. Decent increases for deep space exploration, particularly for Artemis and supporting the human landing system, a second provider. The largest request ever for space science, which is great to see, including really strong support for key priorities of the Planetary Society in planetary science and astrophysics responsive to the decadal survey. And then just overall very strong support for NASA's meat and potatoes, aeronautics and space operations and construction of facilities, all these other things that go around that we need to invest in both human and material

infrastructure in order to allow these types of missions to happen. So again, $26 billion is what we're looking for as the request for 2023. Very solid number. So Brendan, what happens next now that we have the request out there? All spending bills have to emanate from the House originally, and then the Senate then takes theirs up after that fact. It's now on the Hill. Folks are going through it. Next step will be the House Budget Committee. They'll dig into it. And what they have to do is do the 1974 Budget Control Act. They disseminate how much each of the House Appropriations Subcommittees, what their allocations will be. The House Appropriations Committee is split up into

a number of subcommittees, like there's the Defense Subcommittee, the one that has NASA in it is called the Commerce Justice Science Subcommittee. The Budget Committee will say, okay, Defense Subcommittee, you get X billions of dollars. Here you go, have at it. The CJS, again, which holds NASA within it, will be told you're given this X amount of billions of dollars. And so then the next step will be the House Appropriations Committee will then try to, each subcommittee will take their allocation and decide within the CJS, the Commerce Department will get this much of the pie. The Justice Department will get that much of the pie. NASA will get that much of the pie, et cetera, et cetera. In my other example, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, the Navy gets this much of the

pie. The Air Force get that much of the pie, et cetera, et cetera. This is the point where it becomes zero sum, basically. So they get a chunk of money, and then the subcommittee has to spread that out among the agencies under their jurisdiction. Concurrently, though, also, you'll have what are called budget posture hearings. For our purposes, with respect to NASA, Administrator Nelson will have to go to the House Appropriations Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee, but as well as the

House Authorization Committee and the Senate NASA Authorization Committee to justify why I, committee to justify why I, Administrator Nelson, deserve this money that the president suggests that you give me this amount of money for these key priorities. And so you'll also have concurrently that process going on as well. And that usually eats up a good chunk of the springtime. And you really won't see what are called markups take place until late May into early June. Defense appropriations really is the big driver, especially this year with respect to what's going on with Ukraine and Russia. To give you some comparing and contrasting, I know we're the Planetary Society. We're not the National Security Space Society.

But Space Force, for example, their budget submission from the president is $24.5 billion. That's $7 billion more than they got for FY22. The situation in Ukraine is really a first test of fire for Space Force and how it's going to operate and contribute to how the United States handles itself with that situation. You'll start having these markups. They'll come out of those appropriations subcommittees in the House. They'll go up to the full appropriations committee. That'll be sometime in June into July. Then by the 4th of July, they'll start getting to the House floor.

And then around late July, usually after Labor Day, the Senate starts really taking action on there. And they're usually kind of slower off the mark. They want to see what the House cranks out. And then that informs how they're going to write their bills. Now, what's complicating things this year is it's an election year. Some of you have probably seen in the news that the redistricting in all 50 states is just about winding down now based on the last census. We're going to be seeing the primary seasons kick off. Also this year, we're having an unusually high number of incumbents in the House of Representatives electing not to run again. You have four House Republicans, some of them quite prominent, deciding they don't want to

run again. You have over 30 House incumbent Democrats deciding they don't want to run again. So that's going to put a degree of uncertainty on how things will shake out. This is something Casey and I are going to be busy with all throughout the year, and it's probably going to drag on up until Election Day. And depending on how the elections shake out, things may not be settled until around Christmas, to be candid with you. Christmas. In other words, the chance of having an FY23 budget in place by October 1st of 2022 is about as much chance that life will be discovered

on Mars tomorrow? Yeah, with respect to NASA, probably one of the problems in FY22 for the CJS bill, which I said includes NASA, the problem with what the House cranked out with, which was a very good bill from a NASA perspective, there was a lot of political consternation with the Justice Department section of that bill. There were some political hot potatoes that we don't need to concern ourselves with and get involved in. But that's part of the problem with having NASA tied in with a bill that has other departments in it. There could be, with respect to defense, I alluded to it being kind of the big driver of all the appropriations bills that the situation overseas may necessitate

it being passed by October 1st. That may be free and clear, but also sometimes, since that is such a big bill, the Senate often will, I don't want to say hold hostage, but they'll leave it hanging out there because everyone knows that's really the big must-pass appropriations bill. And then they'll tie other bills to it and let that be kind of the driver because everyone wants to see an appropriations bill for defense go through. There's a lot of things. And some of you may have heard Casey and I talk about before, this is a very unique year in that the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, and the ranking member from the Senate Appropriations

Committee, Richard Shelby from Alabama, are both retiring this year. In the over 20 years I've been doing this kind of stuff, I've never seen the top Senate appropriators walk out the door together at the same time. So we're in a very unusual situation right now. So they might actually be motivated to pass something before they retire. So there's kind of an interesting mix of headwinds and tailwinds with this potential budget here that we're talking about. And I think the key takeaway, just as a reminder, is that none of this depends on the politics of NASA. NASA's caught up in the politics of everything else. Regardless of how good this budget is for the space agency, that's not driving the political discussion about what is going to pass versus what may be pushed

back. The other issue with the midterm elections, obviously, you know, right now, the Democrats control both houses of Congress by very small margins. If Republicans win, they may not want to do any kind of a deal to pass a budget before they assume power in the next Congress starting next January. So that will throw off a lot of, you know, this is why things tend to get pushed off until after elections, and then who knows after that. But as Brendan pointed out, a lot of complicating factors that may drive some consensus, particularly these large coalescing bills that fund the entire government vote up or down.

So if you want to get your defense money through, you have to vote for everything else. So it's, it's a long way, I think, of saying that we don't know what's going to happen, right? Is that the accurate way? This is the expert way. But these are the key forces, I think. Yeah. Sometimes I feel, Casey, you and I, we're like the old timey Saturday serials that people used to go see in the theater, where I feel like we leave our audience on a cliffhanger at the end of every episode with Casey and Brendan hanging on a cliff. Keeps people coming back. It's always the unpredictable nature of it. But I think that's important. And then also, I think you touched on this, but redistricting that is finalizing right

now changes a lot of where people will be voting, who will be running in their districts. That's become a much more politicized process over the last two decades that'll influence this, but not again, in a direct way. So there's just a lot of change I'd say happening this year. And in general, I think it's fair to say that members of Congress don't like to take big votes before lunch. It's better to have ambiguity than certainty on certain types of things. There's been countless stories over the years of there's been some big vote on whatever it is. Vulnerable members don't want to take a tough vote and they'll hang out in the bathrooms trying to avoid... Whoever is the whip of their party will have to go searching for the bathrooms

to try to drag them out and hold their hand and take them to the floor to make them vote. It almost doesn't matter which way they vote on a major issue. Their opponent in November is probably going to find a way to criticize them for it. Or if they vote against their leadership, does the leadership threaten to withhold campaign donor money and things like that. It's kind of a messy business. I mean, this is going to be an unusual midterm, usually midterm elections are really kind of only the super political nerds get exercised about it. This is kind of a unique year, non-space related, but something to be mindful of, especially our

members in Pennsylvania. And I'm from Pennsylvania. You have an open Senate seat that you have a Republican senator who said he was going to do term limited on himself, and he's staying true to that term limit. So he's vacating the seat. So that's an open Senate seat. The Republicans are going to want to hold on to that seat. The Democrats would love to pick that up. But you also have a term limited governor in Pennsylvania. So that's turning into a big fight. The incumbent that's leaving there is a Democrat. The Republicans would love to pick up that governorship. So there's other big races taking place across the land that maybe do not directly involve space, but they're going to suck up time and attention. And obviously,

the day after the 22 election is the first day of the 24 cycle. It's just going to keep getting more and more complicated and obtuse in some ways. The one thing I wanted to mention, Casey and I were talking about it earlier. Matt, you were there too. To the administration's credit this week, they unveiled an in-space. Our friends and allies are looking to us for leadership. And I really want to give some kudos to the administration to really trying to press ahead on addressing an issue that's been crying out to be looked at. And it's a group of folks from Commerce, State, Defense, Transportation, the Space Council, NASA, the Pentagon, and they're looking at trying to promote R&D,

in-orbit service activity, infrastructure, engaging the commercial industry, promoting international collaboration, environmental sustainability, and helping promote an invigorated workforce on this issue. And they want to, you know, just keep working on collaboration with all stakeholders. Because this is an issue that all the stakeholders in space have been kind of for a while been viewing this as a challenge within their own little stovepipe. And this is really a good faith first step in trying to get everyone together to work on this. a good faith first step in trying to get everyone together to work on this. And so that's something that Casey and I are going to be wanting to keep an eye on and where appropriate, make our own inputs to this group. So that's something positive that's come out of Washington this week. I just wanted to get that on the record. Very good news, especially in light of the story I just read this

morning as we're recording about the announcement by Amazon, by Jeff Bezos, of what rockets he's going to use to get his thousands upon thousands of satellites up in Earth orbit to put his network in place. For some reason, he didn't contract for any from SpaceX. It seems like an oversight, I'm sure. But it's good to hear that these kinds of policy things are taking place, even if they're somewhat outside of our agenda. Brendan, before we move on here, I wanted to ask, what kind of response are you hearing from Capitol Hill to this budget request for NASA? Has it been positive, negative, or they've been so distracted with the other big things going on in the world right now

that it's been relatively muted? It's been pretty positive. I don't think when Administrator Nelson goes in front of those various committees, he's gonna get yelled at. It again remains that NASA still is a very bipartisan part of the federal government. It enjoys a lot of support. I'm very hopeful and

optimistic. Of course, you know, there'll be some nitpicking on the periphery on some points, but the major thrust has been very well received and looking forward to those hearings. The next big space hearing is going to be, I think, on the 28th of this month, dealing with space traffic management, not a NASA budget hearing, actually. You know, I'm a glass half full kind of guy, and I'm very optimistic. And it's just something that Casey and I work on day in, day out and try to make sure our objectives are met. are met. Already, a lot of the congressional offices that our members met with on day of action have reached out to me asking us precisely what our priorities are for NASA. They want our input. After this recording, I have a meeting with the House Space Subcommittee folks about a bill

specifically being drafted. Probably may not see action until the next Congress dealing with specifically NEOs. They want our input on it. So it's another example of the work that we do on behalf of our members to help inform policymakers on good space policy, the betterment of all of us. I am so impressed. Brendan, first of all, thank you for bringing these insights to the Space Policy Edition, as always. But just hearing how deeply involved you are on the Hill, representing the interests of our members and so many other fans of space exploration. Thank you so much and keep up the good work. Well, thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. It's always great to be with you guys. That's Brendan Currie, Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. Casey, let's take a very quick break.

We'll hear some words from the boss and be right back to dig deeper into this brand new presidential budget request for NASA. Greetings all. Bill Nye here. Missions of discovery are underway right now thanks to the Planetary Society, the world's largest independent space advocacy organization. And now is the time to join our space advocacy network to keep NASA's planetary science going strong. Help us fight for missions that matter. First, visit planetary.org slash takeaction to make your donations.

Right now, your gift will be doubled thanks to a generous member. U.S. residents can also sign the petition asking your representatives to support space science and exploration. With your backing, we'll keep advocating for space. Please go to planetary.org slash take action today. Thank you. We're back. Glad you stuck with us because now we're going to get into, well, it won't be the nitty gritty, not as detailed as you will be able to find from Casey at planetary.org,

but a great overview as we dig somewhat deeper into this new presidential budget request. Casey, where do you want to start? Well, we can start big picture and then we can hit, I want to hit a couple of big topics that the society is really interested in, namely deep space exploration for human spaceflight, and then space science, particularly planetary science and astrophysics. And then we can touch on a few technology key development issues, these big future forward aspects of NASA. Now, it's really valuable to read through this for anyone interested in why NASA does what it does or how NASA spends its money or why they justify it. All of these sections within this budget

justify what they're doing, say what they've done in the past year and say what they're going to do. Again, it's a fantastic summary of this hugely massive space program that we have. It's kind of a pick me up, frankly, when I see all of the really amazing stuff this space program is doing and will do. And I think that's the key takeaway for me reading this budget. Artemis is happening. We're going back to the moon. I don't know if we've really internalized

this, right? This is huge. In my lifetime, and I'm not a young man anymore. In my lifetime, humans have never, unlike some people here, have never been more than a few hundred miles away from Earth. Within two years, we're going to see humans, you know, this Artemis 2 mission. This isn't just a repeat of Apollo 8. They're going to go on this huge looping orbit around the moon. They will be further from Earth than any human ever has been, ever, including Apollo. This is happening. The money is there.

This is being built as we speak. And this budget supports it. This is going to be such an exciting decade. supports it, this is going to be such an exciting decade. This budget, because it's a president's budget request, projects what NASA intends to ask for in the future as well, not just for the upcoming fiscal year. So we're seeing now projections through 2027, 70% of the way through this decade that we're in. And we're seeing this funding continue. The key investments that we're making now are going to be leveraged and building into these, you know, they develop their own inertia, these programs for human spaceflight at the moon, and then these bigger programs, for example, Mars sample return and other really major

planetary missions, Europa Clipper, and also the next space telescope after the JWST. These are being built now and are funded now and funded reasonably well. Again, big picture, very positive budget, there's always going to be a few nitpicks and a few poor decisions. We'll highlight a couple of them, particularly in planetary defense. But the money is basically going there. So there's an 8% increase over the previous year. Important to remember that NASA did not get its full request that it had proposed previously from Congress. So it may not get this again, but it's still moving in the right direction. We're also seeing again, the priority, and this is why looking at where dollars go is so insightful. Rhetoric is cheap. You can say as much rhetoric

about anything you want. You can say this is important or that's important in politics, but you can only spend a dollar once. And so by the time you're making the decisions about where to spend the dollars, that tells you that's the real proxy for political priority. And so looking at where they propose money to go tells you what they really prioritize in terms of funding, in terms of enduring programmatic support, and also where they believe they will find support from Congress. So this is yet another reason to kind of look at numbers. Because again, you can have all the rhetoric you want, kind of like going back to the because, again, you can have all the rhetoric you want, kind of like going back to the Journey to Mars era of the mid-Obama period, but then you'll see that there was actually no money for that. Rhetoric is cheap, money tells you what they care about, and this is what we're

going to dive down now. Got some pretty graphics out of the Journey to Mars. Yeah, it wasn't nothing. The Journey to Mars always went to the moon first, right? So at least we can acknowledge that now. But again, that's useful to compare back a few, not even that many years ago, where NASA was so cash-strapped, it couldn't formally even ask to go back to the moon, even though it was building a moon rocket with SLS, congressionally mandated. It couldn't ask to build a lunar space station. It couldn't ask to build lunar habitats or landing systems. These are all being built now and are being funded now. And the request we're looking at is, are billions of dollars more than NASA was a few years ago? So what do you think, Matt? You want to start with human spaceflight as our big first topic?

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited. Well, Matt, put it this way. Are there things that you felt you were surprised by hearing some of the analysis or were there worries that you had going into this budget cycle about some of these human spaceflight programs? Yeah. I worry every year.

I wonder. Because you said talk is cheap rhetoric. You never really know where an administration is. I mean, after all, the Biden administration was brand new at this last year. And so there might've been some sort of carryover. Maybe now we're getting their actual approach, their actual philosophy. I have to say, I'm pretty encouraged almost across the board. Human spaceflight, who listening to this show would not be thrilled to know, as you have put it, that we really, really are going back to the moon. I mean, we've been doing this show, the monthly space policy edition long enough now that I can remember conversations where we

said, yeah, they're saying the right stuff, but where's the money? Where's the money to build the lander? And how are we going to do this by 2024? Well, of course the answer is we're not, but at least that's recognized now. And there is a pathway laid out and that is, couldn't make me any happier. Matt, you bring up a really good point that is worth emphasizing, which is even though last year was the Biden administration's first budget, you're right. It only had come out. They'd only been in power for a couple months. They still didn't have a lot of key people confirmed in NASA or in the Office of Science

and Technology Policy or throughout the White House. So you're right. This 2023 budget request, generally after their first year in office, is really the administration's priorities now, right? There's no excuse. There's no inertia being carried over from the prior administration. And yes, we see total continuity from what had really started to ramp up under the Trump administration.

Obviously, as you said, 2024 is out of the question. It's been out of the question almost since the beginning in terms of a lunar landing. But we're seeing again, they're requesting $7.5 billion for deep space exploration systems, right? So that includes the Orion spacecraft, space launch system, of course, and then the Gateway and Human Landing System. Human Landing System, the public-private partnership with SpaceX, and now that they've announced that they will be onboarding a second provider, this budget increases the total planned request for that program over the next four years by an additional $1.1 billion. So it's not the $10 billion that's kind

of floating around Congress over the next few years to authorize, but it's a significant increase, an extra billion dollars over their planned amount to start procuring another partner to come in, in addition to SpaceX. That's real money. They're specifically asking for a $300 million increase over the previous year. Something else that's really interesting about the budget we're seeing for human spaceflight and deep space exploration here for Artemis, last year they brought in Jim Free to run this. They're breaking apart what's called HEO-MD, Human Explorations and Operation Mission Directorate, Human Explorations and Operation Mission Directorate, this catch-all directorate management organization for low Earth orbit and for going back to the moon. They've split those in two so that we have one dedicated to developing everything you

need for Artemis and the other one focused on operating what we have. We're seeing the consequences of that now. They've restructured and reprogrammed how they are managing themselves. And this is really important too, even if it sounds a bit esoteric or bureaucratic, bureaucracy is very powerful in government, right? And you can build an enduring self-interested bureaucracy that defends its interests. If those interests are getting humans to the moon, that can be a very savvy thing to do. In this budget, you're seeing a complete restructuring of big portions of the deep space exploration program, specifically focused on Artemis and Artemis operations, which is just a wonderful thing to think about, really. The implications

of that is that's regular trips to the moon, right? Also, we've seen some very important ways you can elevate a program politically by breaking it out into its own management structure. Something that we've seen in this budget is moving the next generation EVA, it's basically the next generation spacesuits, which have been prior to this and somewhat baffling to me, previously included in the Gateway Space Station program. So it was a sub program within Gateway, which is meant to get people in orbit, not to get people walking on the moon. So you've broken out EVA into its own program now and surface mobility. So lunar rovers, lunar spacesuits, they now have a self-interested management structure high enough and can secure

and spend their own money for their priorities. And so Gateway won't be tempted to dip into that to fund their priorities when they run into management issues versus focusing on the human spacesuit stuff, which was identified, right, just the other year, as one of the key issues preventing a lunar landing by 2024, even 2025. We just don't have the next generation spacesuits ready, right? All of these things have to come together. We're also seeing a new division called, this is a fun one, Mars Campaign Development. So really taking and separating out a management area within NASA to always have this eye on Mars exploration for human spaceflight, to really focus on what Artemis is doing and make sure that that will be extensible to getting people out to Mars, to investing in the basic technologies,

particularly for life support systems that will be able to sustain human life for longer periods of time autonomously on the trip to and from Mars. $163 million is the proposed amount to spend on this for 2023 and in perpetuity. It's kind of restructuring some previous grab bag of R&D areas and sticking them together as this. But again, names and bureaucracies matter. So we now have a Mars campaign development division with this charge to focus on this aspect, right? Again, elevating that policy by imprinting it in the bureaucracy is a smart way to do this. Another factor that occurs to me here is that, and it's something you haven't talked about, and I'm glad you haven't had to talk about it, is that with this investment in Artemis and all of these facets of it, deep space, human exploration, you haven't had to say, oh, we're seeing great support in this area, but it's stealing from other areas that we care deeply

about, like planetary science. It's unlike Apollo, unlike the space shuttle. That's a great point. And we're in this really privileged situation right now, where we're just seeing growth, where the money is just being added to NASA, instead of being taken from other aspects of it and creating that political tension and division. What do we choose to invest in? We really started to see this under the Trump administration where Congress in general likes not to have to choose. It really works out. It's an easier pathway, as what my colleague Brendan was saying, where Bill Nelson's going to go to the House and Senate, and people won't be very angry with

him because this is kind of an all of the above budget. Everything is kind of getting elevated here and they're not really going after one like science or aeronautics or something to pay for Artemis. Politically, that makes it just so much easier. And again, a lot of that just has to start with where the White House is, where the White House is willing to put money to NASA in a way that creates this feel good, aligned strategy that Congress will then fund, right? I think that's ultimately a much smarter strategy than creating these political fights over certain areas. So yes, that's a great point.

We're seeing growth without having to sacrifice other aspects of NASA that are really important. We're seeing on the order of $700 million, $900 million increase proposed to deep space exploration next year compared to this year. Really substantial. Most of that's going to new Artemis stuff, human landing system, spacesuits, and then also the Gateway Space Station. Something else that's going to new Artemis stuff, human landing system, spacesuits, and then also the Gateway Space Station. Something else that's worth mentioning here, as we're recording this, we're in the midst of the big first wet dress rehearsal of the SLS rocket, right? I'd say there's a general attitude online really picking at the SLS. And you know, the SLS deserves a lot

of critiques. It's an expensive program. It was mandated by Congress. But at the same time, and I keep emphasizing this, I cannot think of a more stable program politically than the SLS right now. The administration requests $2.58 billion. That's an increase of $100 million over the previous year. It's completely extended into the future, right? It just gets multi-billion dollars as far as the budget projects out. It is moving into production for the Block 1B upgrade

as we speak. It is profoundly and passionately supported by members of Congress, particularly in the states that really benefit from it financially, it is not going anywhere. The entire Artemis exploration campaign is in fact designed around it. So while it's integrating other things on the margins, notably, I'd say most importantly, SpaceX with the human landing system, the SLS is going to be a continued pillar of political support for Artemis in general. And I think there's a good argument to be made, frankly, Matt, that if we hadn't been building this space launch system for the last 10 years, we would not have this type of support or funding for Artemis in general that we would have now. Without this moon rocket, without having to justify the investments into this moon rocket,

without having to justify the investments into this moon rocket, we may not have ever had a moon program. Fascinating. And just an element that came out of the weekly show, in the current episode of the weekly show, where I talked to Brenda Clyde and Kirby Runyon, who are part of this Neptune Odyssey concept study, not a mission proposal, but a concept study for the decadal, the planetary science and astrobiology decadal that we are only a few days away from the publication of. They were able to wrap this concept study around the fair confidence that there will be a big enough rocket, whether it's SLS or Falcon Heavy, which is because they're hedging their bets, whether it's SLS or Falcon Heavy, which is because they're hedging their bets, that they can go directly to Neptune without having to do planetary flybys,

which means they can launch any time to Neptune. They don't have to wait until the planets literally align. Here's some of the fallout of knowing that we're going to have another really big rocket that we can hope is going to be available for planetary science missions as well. It's worth emphasizing here again that this is discretionary spending. And if you take it literally, Congress, if they wanted to, any year could just decide to spend no money on NASA. There's nothing mandating NASA to be consistently funded every year. In some ways, it's a miracle that NASA gets as much stable funding as it does in a discretionary system with geographically distributed elected officials who are, by the framework that we

have, responsible for their particular constituency, which again is in a certain geographic area, they all get together and decide every year to fund NASA and these programs. Regardless, you know, of what's happened in the past, they always have to decide to fund it again. Things like SLS are product of the system itself, right? In a democratic system where people have to show results to their constituency, these types of programs, these big programs, give an almost like a foundational baseline of political support for NASA that can then, I think, in a savvy way, be used to leveraged to do the really exciting stuff at the moon, getting humans beyond Earth, and then, or what Kirby's talking about,

getting these new slate of missions that can go directly to these really deep parts of our solar system much faster than before. That doesn't mean it's efficient. And, you know, democracies, by definition, are not efficient, right? They're the opposite of. It's baked into the system.

The more we can accept that, it can be just understanding why we have these. It's not a business, right? NASA, this is the public sector. It's by definition not a business. And there's advantages and disadvantages to both models. But when we have the framework that we do, how do we best utilize it? And again, I think Artemis, if we get Artemis out of having the SLS, that is more than worth it to me. That is a price I'm willing to pay than no moon program because we didn't have a built in constituency around a moon rocket that had to be used to justify its existence. So once again, we learn that all politics are local,

even when they leave the planet altogether. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's something else I want to mention in human spaceflight before we move on. Not a huge amount of changes in the human spaceflight portfolio, obviously that we talked about the restructuring for the deep space stuff, that's great. We talked about some bumps for human landing system orion and sls stay relatively flat there's a big bump for for ground systems which is basically representative of the second mobile launcher uh so if people want to get angry about the sls again they can see that the they have to build a new mobile launcher for the block 1b version and it is already wildly over budget and behind schedule uh somehow and they're asking for an additional i think 200 million dollars bump for ground systems to help accommodate

that so i believe the nasa inspector general is working on a report saying exactly what went wrong but the budget specifically highlights due to poor performance and vague design requirements, we need more money. So it's not the best. Yeah, not a great, clearly a serious problem going on there. There's two other things I want to highlight. So let's shift from exploration to space operations. This is International Space Station,

commercial crew, commercial cargo, but also, right, this future of commercial low-Earth orbit development, basically commercial space stations. The follow-on to the ISS, as currently proposed, right, is that we invest in one or multiple commercial space stations that NASA is an anchor tenant, a renter instead of the owner. Obviously, this has become a far more salient issue since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent threats by Dmitry Rogozin to withdraw Russian participation in the ISS. We should mention Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, basically. He he can be counted on to make some

fairly wild statements now and then. Yes, he's performative, some of those statements, right? And so when we can emphasize, right, and we'll have a future episode diving more into this, but nothing has yet changed with that relationship. And even recent claims to the contrary, with that relationship. And even recent claims to the contrary, it's not even clear what Russia can really do. They actually need the ISS way more than any other country does. They have no other space program really besides the ISS. It would be very difficult and expensive for them to separate their modules from the ISS. Potentially doable, but debatable whether they would. The big question is, will the Russians recommit with all the US and its allies to keeping the space station going through 2030? This budget acts like the space station will continue to 2030.

I think there's a good chance that it will. However, at 2030, the space station is 30 years old. It's getting clearly more difficult to operate this. So this commercial space station follow on has become much more important. And so you see a more than doubling of the proposal, the money for this area, 230 million, it kind of flattens out, they're asking for a total of about $1.4 billion for this over the next five years. That's a quarter billion more than that they were proposing in the previous year budget proposal, the run out for that. So there's some additional priority being given to this, right? If you just look at again, where are they putting the money? It's still relatively low, though. So but again,

we're starting to talk about quarter billion dollars a year being spent on this. That's real money. So I just wanted to highlight that, that that could help support these companies like Exium and others really invest in their demonstration missions. 2030 is going to feel closer than you think for these human rated, long endurance, highly safety require, you know, high safety requirement space stations.

These are not just easy things. You just, you don't swipe some credit card and buy a space station off the shelf. Not yet. Not yet. We're not there. So that's commercial Leo. Just wanted to highlight that. And the other thing I thought was interesting is space operations, which until now basically

has been exclusively the domain of low Earth orbit, now has a funding line for what's called exploration operations. This is the transition of the Orion deep space crew capsule from its development phase, which takes it through Artemis to the first time it flies with people into a production phase, you're building the same thing multiple times now as opposed to creating it for the first time. So it moves from development into production. It's very reminiscent, I think, as 1984 that the space shuttle went through the same transition

in the budget. You stopped development and you moved into production, so-called, even though it was never really quite the stamping off the shelf that they hoped it would be. But it's moving, again though it was never really quite the stamping off the shelf that they hoped it would be. But it's moving again, it's moving basically from one directorate to another. It implies, again, this regularity of operations, which is really fascinating. And it saves, compared to what the development was, about half a billion a year. So hopefully, there'll be a lower cost for Orion in production, which there should be. But also what was fascinating to me about this request is that in 2023, fiscal year 2023,

it actually doesn't request a dollar amount of money. This is the first time I've ever seen this in a NASA budget request. It just has three letters, TBD. Really? Yeah, they request a to be determined amount of money which is pretty funny to me uh in a spreadsheet numbers area so they're i think they're acknowledging the dynamic situation of not knowing what the wet dress rehearsal is going to be the earliest possible time for artemis 2 is going to be 2024 at this point anyway.

So clearly there's some churn in this program. Maybe this is somewhat ambitious, right? Or declarative of an intention versus immediate reality. But overall, their point is they're trying to shift this deep space lunar program into regular operations. And they're moving that. That is reflected in this budget as well. All right, let's move on to the science side of what NASA is hoping to achieve in this proposed budget, most especially including planetary science. But overall, how's it look?

Again, overall, very good. This is a total of about $8 billion requested for science. As the budget is eager to point out, this is the most ever requested for NASA science programs. I'd have to run the inflation numbers, but it's just it's a wonderful number and almost everything grows, or at least maintains a pretty solid footing. I'll just quickly mention Earth Science sees the largest proposed growth from $2 to $2.4 billion, really to support this new Earth Systems Observatory mission line that they're really trying to build up to do more climate monitoring in response to the Earth Science Decadal Survey. Very fascinating thing to me was that last year they they had proposed a 10% increase to earth science. And the Congress, which was run, again, by Democrats at the moment, which take climate change as a very important priority for them as a party, did not actually fund that increase. They

kept earth science flat at about $2 billion, very minor, maybe 1% increase instead. That was, again, my biggest surprise of the congressional budget last year. So it'll be interesting to see if we see this now 20% growth matched by this Congress sometime this year. Big, most things to talk about here in planetary science, right? And so let's move to planetary science, our bread and butter, what we've been fighting for for a decade, decades now, right, Matt? Before I nitpick a few things that I'm not as happy about, it's so important just to acknowledge the big picture here, that they're proposing $3.16 billion for planetary. That is a huge amount.

That is double what we used to pie-in-the-sky ask for back in the early 2010s. Planetary science has seen just enormous and amazing growth in the last five years, getting up to about a $3 billion a year program. And that has enabled just a burst of new missions and activity that we have, you know, really never seen planetary at this. This is historic highs. The last time it was roughly $3 billion a year was in the early 1970s. And two thirds of that was spent on the Viking project. Very brief spike for that, right? So we've never seen such a broad investment in planetary science as what we're seeing now. So starting out, let's just acknowledge this is a fantastic situation to be in. And I think a real direct outcome of the ongoing work that the Planetary

Society and its members have been doing for 10 years now, right? This is the long game finally paying off. So fantastic number, top line. Let's just acknowledge that first. Okay, where does this money go? This is the huge thing. This is crazy. Mars sample return, right, which now is set to launch in 2028, is accounting for roughly 26% of this entire planetary science budget. That's huge. That's $822 million for Mars sample return next year. That is larger than the JWST appropriation ever was for any single year, right? Even though it was for many, many years, so the total was higher.

This is a huge amount of money for a single program line. This is bigger. 822 million is actually bigger than NASA's entire heliophysics division going into Mars. So just from our sample return, we're seeing 345 million for europa clipper the overall budget for this is tailing downwards as they complete the spacecraft and get ready to launch in 2024 or excuse me 2025 and that program has seen some budget increases due to covid and other technical difficulties mars sample return is costing more than originally anticipated too. Those will be relevant here later.

Again, we're seeing funding for Dragonfly, right? We have a mission being built at our octocopter going to Titan. Really lovely to see two new missions reflecting the two new Venus missions in the budget, Da Vinci and Veritas. Both of those are kind of at low levels right now and they don't really

start to ramp up until later in the decade. So we're actually, even though we're at a huge level for planetary science because of Europa Clipper and because of sample return, the overall budget is actually surprisingly tight. It's being very squeezed by those two mega missions at the moment, which is putting a lot of pressure on things again, like that's pushing back the discovery selection rates, it's pushing down money being spent on research. And the real problem, the one real issue that I have with this budget, it delays the Neo Surveyor Space Telescope, this asteroid hunting, planetary defense mission that we've been fighting for for a long time, had just gotten a great funding and new start approved by Congress last year. NASA wants to basically put the whole

mission on ice for a couple of years in order to work through Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper. The overruns in those two missions came out of NEO Surveyor. So that's not a good situation. That's the one bad thing that we have. Notably, thankfully, NASA did not propose to cancel this mission. They just proposed to delay it. So this is a fixable problem. We hope we can get the resources that we need for that. It is troubling. It seemed like we were in such a good place when we were having this same sort of conversation last year. Planetary defense getting the attention finally that it has deserved in our view for so long.

And this telescope that we need so badly to fill in our knowledge. I mean, of course, Mars sample return, love it. Dragonfly, Europa Clipper, want them all. But none of them are going to help save us from a near-Earth asteroid. Right. And it's, again, frankly, a bit baffling to me in the aftermath of COVID, of a pandemic. I've made this connection in the pages of Scientific American in this op-ed that I submitted where planetary defense has a lot in common with pandemic prevention.

Yeah. Right? These are both giant disasters, in a sense, natural disasters that can be mitigated through smart investments in advance. Something like a neo-surveyor is like doing your kind of viral testing and detection early on so you know that there is a problem. And so to delay this mission that can have such a clear, positive consequence to the long term survivability of the human species is frustrating. But if you look at the very pragmatic

situation that NASA was in, my interpretation is Mars sample return has to launch on the Mars launch windows, right? These 26 month cadence of windows that open up in 26 has to launch that very tight timeline for that. Europa Clipper, likewise, is on a tight launch window opportunity to Jupiter, you have needs of missions going to the moon, you have other needs with missions going, you know, dragonfly, same of being able to launch to Saturn, the Saturn system on a certain timeline. to Saturn, the Saturn system on a certain timeline. Everything else has a much more fixed timeline while NeoSurveyor, you can launch that in a much more flexible window because you're just sending it to L2. There's no specific celestial event or mechanics you have to really focus on as tight. So it's much more of a delayable program and hence it was delayed.

One quick correction. In your first reference to Mars Sample Return, you talked about that two-year delay to 2028. You just mentioned 2026 just in passing there, which was the original window for that mission. But just because somebody out there in our sophisticated audience will probably have caught that. Well, all right. We will keep advocating for Neo Surveyor, of course, across this year. And what are the chances that Congress might feel differently about this and

want to see that move forward? I think it's a very strong opportunity that Congress can come in and correct this. We've seen a lot of positive feedback on NeoSurveyor in the past. We have a lot of built in support, particularly from the senators at Arizona, where NeoSurveyor is run out of. Also, Gary Peters from Michigan, other members of Congress have shown a lot of interest in this. So I'm optimistic that we can help improve this situation, particularly with the help of our members. The other mission I wanted to mention that was was flat out canceled in this budget for planetary science was the Mars ice mapper mission. This was kind of a weird mission specifically to detect near surface ice at latitudes where humans could potentially go on Mars, right? So it was kind of a resource detection mission. It was proposed to be extremely low budget with large contributions coming from the Canadian Space Agency and ESA, with NASA maybe kicking in around $200 million over the course of five years, which is, you know, relatively cheap for a spacecraft. Again, because of overruns and Mars sample return in Europa Clipper, NASA said that they no longer have money for this mission

and proposed to cancel it outright. Now, this is an interesting situation because besides Mars Sample Return, again, it's this weird tension where Mars Sample Return is getting huge amounts of funding. It's getting tons of stuff. We have all these current missions at Mars, but there's nothing in the works beyond it. Mars Sample Return does not have its own set of scientific instruments, right? It goes to Mars, grabs the rocks that Perseverance is collecting, brings them back. That's it. There's no follow on for the first time in 25 years. There's no future Mars mission that's just a science mission on the books anymore. So the cancellation of Mars ice map, or even though it was kind of this dual use human

exploration resource detection thing, obviously could do a lot of science. It's not clear how the scientific community was planning to integrate that. We will find out when the decadal survey comes out for planetary science, but it could throw off a lot of future thinking about Mars exploration. And again, if nothing else, this was the only nominally scientific Mars mission on the books. And so that's gone. It's just sample return right now. We have a very uncertain future for the entire scientific Mars program right now.

And that's, again, weird to think about, given that we're seeing so much success. The future is not being invested in beyond this. Casey, we're nearing the end of our time together. I know you want to get to that other major part of NASA science. Well, there are several, but we've talked earth science, we've talked planetary science. What about astrophysics? Astrophysics sees kind of a flat growth. It's a bit complex in astrophysics because the James Webb Space Telescope moves back

to astrophysics after it had been separated out for development. So it includes money for operations, and they actually bump up operations funding for James Webb in order to provide more scientific opportunities for people, which is great. It does propose again to cancel the flying observatory SOFIA, which would save them $75 million a year. That's been highlighted through the decadal survey as not worth the money. So NASA is trying to cancel it. Congress didn't let them do it last year. Good chance they won't let them do it again. I want to highlight that the Roman Space Telescope is funded and is now planning for a May 2027 launch. So we'll have our follow-up to JWST within the next five years here, which is really

great to see. And then in response to the astrophysics decadal survey, which we've talked about, they include funding for future strategic astrophysics technology development. This is specifically called out in the decadal survey to basically start doing serious work on the technologies needed for the next generation of mega telescopes that we would start building in probably the late 2030s. So it's a very responsive budget to this decadal survey. And I was just very happy to see this funding for, again, this like critical technology development you do now to help keep costs down in the future, right? No one wants another JWST.

And yet it is absolutely brilliant to see JWST coming together so perfectly because we can only imagine what damage that might have done if that big new telescope had not decided to unfold exactly as planned. Anyway, fingers are still crossed, though. Casey, there's so much more that we could talk about. You're going to address much of this in what people will be able to find at planetary.org. Where do they go to learn more? Planetary.org in the article section.

I'll have my piece up by the time this comes out. You can read my analysis and see some further numbers. We also have a tracking page for NASA's 2023 budget request that highlights all these kind of key elements we've talked about here. And then we'll follow and list and link to all congressional actions as they happen throughout the year. That's also on our website at planetary.org. So lots of ways to keep tracking this. And you can, of course, keep listening to the show. We will let you know when there's action by Congress. And while you're there at planetary.org, join us if you haven't already. If you are a member of the Planetary Society,

thank you, thank you, thank you for making all of this possible, including the monthly Space Policy Edition that I enjoy doing with our Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor, Casey Dreyer. We will be back, I believe, the first Friday in May for the next one of these SPE shows. In the meantime, every week, Planetary Radio, and we've got some great stuff coming up for you. Casey, I got Fred Hayes, Apollo 13 astronaut. Fred Hayes will be heard. Actually, the show will be published on the day that Apollo 13 had, well, Houston was told that they had a problem. I will eagerly listen to that one, Matt. Good work. It's going to be great fun. He's got a fun new book out. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in.

Thank you, especially Casey. I look forward to talking again soon and we'll see all of you on the airwaves and hopefully out there in deep space as well. Thanks for listening and Ad Astra. Thank you.