Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: NASA's Post-Election Landscape

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

The United States' 2020 elections are over. What do the results mean for NASA in the years ahead? To help answer that question, we welcome back Brendan Curry, The Planetary Society's Chief of D.C. Operations. Join us as we review the changes in Congress and the White House that will impact the direction of the U.S. space program. Explore more here.  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/1002-2020-spe-brendan-curry-election-reviewSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the November Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We are very glad to have you. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined again, as always, by Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate and senior space policy advisor for the Planetary Society. Casey, I can't imagine what we're going to talk about. There's nothing going on. Yeah, well, I figure we'll wing it this episode, Matt. We'll figure out something. Well, thank goodness we'll have help from Brendan Curry, the chief of Washington operations for the Planetary

Society. Brendan, great to have you back. Thanks, Matt. And it's great to be back with you fellas. Looking forward to talking about all types of interesting stuff. We'll address at the top of the show, the top of the ticket. The fact that virtually every news organization, as we speak, has declared the race for Joe Biden. Of course, there are still those in the country who are taking a wait and see attitude, and in some cases worse. But I think at least as we speak, a couple of days before this show is published, the result does seem pretty clear. Casey, anything to say about the race to become the next president? Mathematically there, I think we're waiting for a delayed acceptance of that.

But we have a Joe Biden presidency to plan for both here at the Society and for space policy. So no matter what, the official, you know, the electors meet for the Electoral College in mid-December. They will vote. And then at January 20th, we will have a new president. they will vote. And then at January 20th, we will have a new president. All right, let's move on to other races that will also have a very, very big effect on how NASA and the space policy, space program of the United States moves forward. And I know that both of you guys have been following this very closely. We'll get into the significance, but what are some of the key races that have been decided or are closely. We'll get into the significance, but what are some of the key races that have been decided or are yet to be decided? In the Congress, the committees that we

at the Society mainly focus on are the, what are called authorization committees and appropriations committees. And as I've said, and Casey's mentioned in previous episodes, the authorization committees in the House and the Senate with respect to NASA, they draft up very policy-heavy bills. They're called authorization bills. And they're also the committees that do routine oversight over various NASA projects and programs. And then the appropriations committees in both bodies are the ones that essentially cut the checks for the various departments and programs. And then the appropriations committees in both bodies are the ones that essentially cut the checks for the various departments and agencies. And of course, the one we focus mostly on is NASA. By and large, with these committees that we care about, there has not been a dramatic change in the complexion of these committees by and large,

in the complexion of these committees by and large. But there are some notable changes taking place on the authorization committees, namely with the defeat of Space Subcommittee Chairwoman Kendra Horn from Oklahoma. She was defeated just barely by a Republican challenger by the name of Stephanie Bice. And then on the Senate side, Cory Gardner, who was a strong space proponent. He's from Colorado. He's a Republican. He was defeated by former Governor John Hickenlooper, while soon to be former Senator Gardner was strong on space for a variety of issues. Mr. Hickenlooper, as governor, was very well plugged into the space community as well and very cognizant of its importance. So,

we're very hopeful that Senator-elect Hickenlooper will be pretty smart and active on space issues. And so, those are kind of the big changes on the authorization committees. On the appropriations side of the fence, a lot of the action right now is with respect to the House, mainly because the full committee chairperson for the House Appropriations Committee is a woman from New York by the name of Nita Lowy. And she's retiring. She wasn't defeated. She's just walking away. She's been in Congress for many, many, many years. And so she's retiring from Congress. And obviously, it means she gives up her chairmanship of what is arguably the most powerful committee in the House. We'll have to see who takes over

that position as full committee chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, but also the subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee that funds NASA is something called the Commerce, Science, and Justice Subcommittee. And that was chaired by a gentleman also from New York named Jose Serrano. And also like Lowy, he's retiring from Congress, was not defeated, and he's giving up his gavel of oversight of the committee that's going to fund NASA. And so we've got to see who takes over his chairmanship as well. And there's been some speculation on both those fronts, and I'm sure we'll talk about them in greater detail throughout this episode. And maybe to put this in additional context here, the overall landscape of the House

of Representatives, the Democratic Party has at this point will hold their majority, though they lost seats. And so the majority in each chamber of Congress gets to basically set the agenda. They get to name the heads of each committee. And the heads of those committees are who kind of directs the focus of the committee, the schedule of the committee. There's a significant amount of power just being in the majority. So the makeup of these committees that we're talking about, the CJS, the one that funds NASA, and the space subcommittee that does oversight and also writes NASA overall policy,

those will remain in Democratic control in the House, though, because Democrats lost seats, there will be more Republican congresspeople on those committees, right? They balance out, there's a proportional representation in a sense of the committees themselves. That is correct. There's a ratio process that's going to be worked through over the coming weeks and months on how many Democrats will be on these various committees and how many Republicans will be on some of these committees. With the loss of some of those Democrat seats, those seats will be on those committees will have to be given up in some way or in some manner to Republicans. And so that's going to take a while.

As you mentioned, Casey, the leadership in both parties decides who gets the chairmanships essentially for these committees. And so there's going to be a lot of politicking going on right now. And so there's going to be a lot of politicking going on right now. Well, the American public has voted last week on what they want their next government to look like at the state and federal level. But in the Congress, there's going to be more activity going on with respect to the makeup of these committees, who gets to sit on what committees and who takes the leadership of these committees. And that's a much more murkier process. There's a lot of things that are called into play. Who gets what? For example, I mentioned Kendra Horn being defeated and she's no longer going to be the chairwoman of the space subcommittee. Now, you just cannot look at who populates that subcommittee right now on the Democrat side and just kind of go down to the next person on that list underneath Kendra and say, well, gee, automatically that person gets the gavel.

No, it doesn't work that way. Right. There's always a bit of this congressional shuffle that happens when constituting a new Congress, which happens every two years. So people will move around, people will vie for these open seats. So there's not a clear outcome yet of who's going to fill these roles. And again, particularly for these leadership roles of appropriations and CJS appropriations, that has a lot of power and influence basically over our focus and priorities here at the Planetary Society, because the CJS committee, they write the first drafts of the NASA budget legislation in the House. And it's a lot easier when you're writing that legislation, the earlier you draft the

legislation, or the earlier you have input into that, the more likely your goals are going to be reflected in the final legislation itself, because it gets progressively harder as the legislation moves through Congress to alter the text because it requires more and more people to vote to amend and more and more political coalition building to achieve those results. And so the person who controls CJS committee controls that drafting of the NASA legislation, very important person. And then of course, House Appropriations themselves, they help delegate how much money that each subcommittee has to work with essentially sets the size of the pie for the committee like CJS to divvy up between NASA, Commerce Department, Justice Department and the other kind of competing agencies under their

jurisdiction. So we will know more about this when the new Congress comes together, probably a few weeks after, right? It takes a few weeks to work this through, Brendan, with the new leadership assignments. One would hope, Casey. In the ideal case. Let's talk about the Senate side real quick, too. So this is the House. So we had a number of basically take away from the House. We've had one key chairperson lose a race and will be replaced by a Republican. That Republican won't have the opportunity to chair, right, because they're in the minority party in the House at the moment. Yep, that's correct. And then we have four retirements in the Appropriations Committee that will be replaced by people to be determined.

On the Senate side, as you pointed out, we had Cory Gardner lose to John Hickenlooper. The Senate control is still up in the air. So at the time that we're recording this, the two open Senate seats in the state of Georgia have been pushed into both of them are in runoff territory. There will be a second election for those seats between the top two vote getters that'll happen in early January. So after the new Congress. January 5. Yeah. Just two weeks before we swear in the new president. Right. But after the new Congress comes together. So it'll be an interesting situation there. The Republican Party has so far won 50 seats. That puts them right at basically almost the majority.

The Democrats, if they pick up both of these seats, if they flip both these seats, then it's a 50-50 tie. And because Kamala Harris is the next vice president, they would technically have the slimmest of slim majorities in the Senate, which would allow them to control the overall flow and committee chairmanships and so forth. All of this comes up as we see the incoming Biden administration moving full speed ahead, appointing, I read, over 500 volunteers and others to help them through the transition, which we will be talking about shortly. But I wonder what this means right now for the discussions underway in both the House and the Senate. In fact, just today, we learned that the Senate has recommended a budget for NASA. What happens with all of this, guys? In many ways, a lot of this is taking all in a concurrent manner. It's not staged in a orderly manner with respect to the transition team. That's a function of the executive branch, really. And so they're proceeding ahead as they see best to do. And the

Congress still has to finalize their spending bills, and they're trying to do that as best they see fit. And so it's all kind of different processes that aren't always neat and tidy going on concurrently. And there may be at times overlap, and there may be at times no overlap, or the processes may be in some cases willfully ignorant of the other. Yeah, we're going to be in this lame duck, so-called session coming up now in Congress the last few months. So a number of members of Congress, Kendra Horn and Cory Gardner, they still get to go and finish up their terms, even though they won't be coming back next year. And as you point out, Matt,

we do have a cliff coming up for the federal budget. The spending authority expires in mid December. The Senate has just finally moved and released their own draft of legislation to fund the entire government. They're not even going to bother to vote on that to pass it because there's so little time to get a consensus legislation with the House of Representatives. They're going to go right into negotiations. So they basically stated their negotiating position, and we move forward from this point out. So this is one of the big remaining issues left for this Congress to deal with. Of course, there's everything else related to COVID and the economy and here is that fundamentally, the balance in Congress hasn't changed a whole lot, I think is what we can take away from this. It's very likely that the Republican Party maintains a majority in the next Senate. And so you'll have divided government still, which means that the favored projects in the

Senate will continue to have that probably be favored going forward in future spending, regardless of what a Biden administration would prefer. And then also that you would have, at least for the next two years, the Democratic majority in the House working with it through their priorities. So one of the big questions for me, and this is something I would be curious to hear you speculate on, Brendan, a bit, would be Kendra Horn put forward earlier this year, a NASA authorization bill through the House of Representatives that had a very different approach to a moon-to-Mars program than what was currently being proposed in Artemis using a strong commercial partnership for developing a lunar lander.

This was much more of a minimal focus on the moon, really focused on Mars, and really pushing to kind of go a classical aerospace contracting approach to developing lunar landers and other key components of a potential human, you know, deep human space flight, lunar landing architecture. Do you think that is going to continue to move forward without her? Or do you think she was a critical voice pushing that perspective through the House Democratic process? I think there's definitely going to be an effort by the House authorizers to push something out of their committee with respects to a NASA authorization bill. The Senate has repeatedly offered up their version of a NASA authorization bill now for, I think now two, two years.

It's almost a point of pride almost for the NASA authorizers in the house to get something. I will not speculate what it may look like, but there's definitely a need for them to get something out there and put something on the table before the virus. Let me remind everyone back in 2019, the House was in session for about 135 or 140 days. At the start of 2020, the House was going to be in session only about 112 days. And that was mainly due to the election. They were trying to give members in the House time to get often opportunities to get home and campaign. And then, of course, the virus hit.

And then essentially the House and the Senate were mainly shut down from March until into early July. So the time available to do anything on a NASA authorization bill, even if it enjoyed strong support, if Kendra's bill enjoyed strong support in the House, the chances of getting out of the committee and onto the House floor passed, and then go into a conference committee with the Senate version and getting it signed into law was pretty remote. It's going to very much depend on who takes over that subcommittee from Kendra. Eddie Bernice Johnson. She will remain the full committee chair. And so she's going to have a say in it. As you alluded to, Casey, there was some contentiousness by

different stakeholders. Bill that was suggested that came out earlier this year. I'm sure that they behind closed doors have said or have made their piece on what they liked and what they didn't like. And that will all be calculated into what the next iteration of the bill will be in what will be the 117th Congress. Do we know anything about the new people coming in to replace people like Kendra and some of those retirements in the House Appropriations Committee? Is there anyone of them who we know has a strong space attitude or has said nice things about space? A lot of them tend to be because of the relative consequence of space in their districts,

people from space states, right? We have some people from Alabama coming in, Oklahoma, New York. Is there anything that tells us that they would have a strong opinion coming in on any space policy or funding? Well, on the House side, the woman who's going to be representing Oklahoma's fifth congressional district, which was the district Kendra had, the chances of her taking any serious activity on space is quite remote. Kendra was a bit of an outlier and unusual in that she just inherently enjoyed space as a policy area and a policy issue. And in her previous life, had some experience in space policy. And so she actually truly relished that subject area and was very happy to get involved, not only in chairing the

space subcommittee on the House, but she was also on the House Armed Services Committee, namely the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, which has oversight over military space. So it was really a labor of love on Kendra's part. I do not and have not seen anything from the woman who will be succeeding her in Congress as having a big passion for space. Let me go to Mr. Serrano first, because he was the CJS chair. He was from New York City and was never a huge space booster, but he appreciated the value NASA and the importance of having a decently funded space agency, what it meant to the nation. And he actually worked pretty well with his Republican counterpart, the ranking member of that subcommittee, a gentleman by the name of

Robert Adderholt from Alabama, whose district is not far from Huntsville. It also has residing in his district, the United Launch Alliance, Decatur, Alabama rocket factory, where the Atlas and Deltas are manufactured. Eventually, the new Vulcan rockets will be manufactured. And so Mr. Serrano in many ways deferred a decent amount on space policy and space funding issues to Mr. Adderhall in order to get the larger CJS bill dragged across the floor or dragged across the finish line, excuse me, in as much of a bipartisan manner as possible. Mr. Serrano's replacement, a gentleman by the name of Torres, chances are he's not going to have a lot to say about space in fact the chances of him even

getting on the appropriations committee are pretty slim to say the least and the same thing for the person who's going to be replacing full committee chairwoman loewe mondaire jones again from new york city hasn't really said anything about space. And again, chances of getting on appropriations right out. That's because appropriations is kind of like a plum assignment. A lot of people want it. So there's some amount of, you've either had to do a lot of service to the party or have some seniority or something, right? It's hard for freshmen Congress people just to kind of walk onto something like that. You're a thousand percent correct, Casey.

Arguably, the two most powerful committees in the House of Representatives are the House Appropriations Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Now, the guys in the Ways and Means Committee will say they're more powerful and the appropriators will happily try to correct them and disabuse them of that notion and say, no, they have more power. But that's a little inside congressional nerdy baseball there. As for some of the other retirements on the Appropriations Committee, you had Martha Roby, also from Alabama.

She retired. She's being replaced by a fellow Republican by the name of Barry Moore. And the Alabama delegation is a pretty small delegation. You know, you look at a state like Florida or California or Texas, the number of members of the House from those states are in the dozens, whereas some of the smaller states will have a handful. And Alabama kind of falls into that category of being one of the smaller delegations. Thus, they all fly in a pretty tight formation. There's an excellent chance that Mr. Moore will be a pretty ardent chances of him taking Ms. Roby's seat on the Appropriations

Committee is incredibly small. Alabama is very well represented in the Appropriations Committee with the seniority of Mr. Adderholt as being the ranking member, but also on the Senate side with Mr. Shelby chairing the entire Senate Appropriations Committee. And then with respect, the other retirement on the CJS Appropriations Subcommittee is a gentleman of my name, Tom Graves from Georgia. He's being replaced by another Republican, Marjorie Greene. Mr. Graves was really never an out-and-out champion, too much for space. I don't expect Ms. Greene to be too different, but again, she'll be a lowly freshman, and the chances of taking Mr. Graves' seat on the Appropriations Committee is pretty slim to none.

So with respect to Roby's seat on the Appropriations Committee and Graves' seat on the Appropriations Committee, that gets exactly what we were talking about earlier, is that the party leadership in the House is going to look and say, well, who deserves Roby's seat? Who deserves Graves' seat? And we'll give it to them. And that gets into some messy politicking, to be candid. Much more of this month's Space Policy Edition is just ahead. Brendan, Casey, and I hope you'll stick with us through this break. What a year it has been for space exploration. Hi, I'm Sarah, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society.

Will you help us celebrate 2020's greatest accomplishments? You can cast your votes for the most stunning image, the most exciting mission, the most surprising discovery, and more at planetary.org slash best of 2020. We've also got special year-end content on our social media channels. Voting is open now at planetary.org slash best of 2020. planetary.org slash best of 2020. The overarching phrase that comes to mind as I listen to all of this is so many moving parts. I wonder if we maybe can move back over to the executive side and talk about what's going on with this transition. You know, I mentioned those agency review teams, which anybody can see in the,

it's at the buildbackbetter.com website. And among these is this group of people who are going to be looking at how NASA may run during a Biden administration. Brandon, you've been through a lot of these transitions. Does this one look like it's going to stand out as it appears to be? lot of these transitions. Does this one look like it's going to stand out as it appears to be? The transition teams, they always are a little bit different. They're not always carbon copies of the previous one. They take on a flavor of whomever the new president is in his team, in his ethos, if you will. Sometimes they're called beachhead teams more colloquially. And it's just to start getting the incoming administration, having people in these agencies. And obviously we're focusing on NASA, but it's across all the major departments and agencies in the federal government.

And it's basically to make sure that there's some modicum of continuity between the outgoing political appointees from the departing administration to have some sort of orderly changeover with the new administration, all while keeping the permanent civil servant people apprised of what the outgoing folks are doing and what the incoming folks are looking forward to doing or trying to doing and getting assessments of where things are. And then the transition team then reports back to kind of the leadership of the transition efforts, who are a circle of people much closer to the incoming president. And they kind of, not to be crass, but kind of try to give the

incoming administration idea of where the bodies are buried and where there may be some issues that need to be addressed sooner rather than later in trying to help the incoming administration get a handle on the health and status of a particular department or agency. If everything's good, great. That's fine. If there's a problem, okay, where is that problem? Does it need immediate triage or it's something that can be managed? A lot of the talk right now is who will replace Mr. Bridenstine as NASS administrator. This transition team is also going to be charged with going in there and seeing where there may be issues of concern at the agency that may help inform who they decide that the president needs to nom addressed and it is of such a concern or of such a size that it may be felt that or recommended to the president that an agency head needs to have a certain skill set to address that. The NASA team, there's a lot of no surprises with the folks who are listed on that.

David Noble and Mr. Weaver. They were previously at NASA during the Obama years. That's David Weaver, who's now with the Airline Pilots Association. And David Noble, who interestingly is listed as being with the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Yeah, he did some time over at the agency as well. Yeah, he did some time over at the agency as well. And Pam Melroy is a very highly regarded former NASA astronaut. And Ellen Stefan, who was formerly at the other review teams, transition teams, you have a former astronaut, Kathy Sullivan, who used to be at NOAA. NOAA is within the

Department of Commerce. She's on the transition team for commerce. So she's kind of back there, which is interesting. And then on the Department of Energy side, you have a woman by the name of Madeline Creeden. And what's of interest to space fans there is that she was a longtime Senate Armed Services Committee staffer whose areas of expertise were not only nuclear weapons, hence her position with the transition team at the Department of Energy, but also military space issues. So she's quite familiar with space, primarily from a national security perspective, but also she's very well versed on civil space issues. And the Department of Energy has been starting to get more vocal about wanting to be a better partner for space exploration in terms of nuclear power generation for missions, but also nuclear propulsion for missions. So I kind of took note of that when I was going through these various transition teams across the board. You got two former NASA chief scientists here, Ellen Stofan, who you mentioned, and Waleed Abdel-Aati, who's now at the University of Colorado Boulder, very significant.

Casey? The transition teams, they're influential, but they're not kind of setting policy, right? They're basically fact-finding teams in a sense, as to kind of summarize what Brendan was just saying. And to some extent, they're kind of symbolic. I think it's notable that there are two chief scientists who are part of this team and with one of them running it, maybe telling us something about a Biden administration's approach to NASA as a primarily a science organization. But also we're seeing just a number of very thoughtful people included in it and a relatively larger team than I believe than last time through the Trump

administration. Listeners of this show will recognize Bhavya Lal as one of the transition team members who was a guest of ours a few months ago. And Alan Stofan, of course, has been on Planetary Radio a number of times. And I'm sure some of those other transition team members have also graced this show over the years, Matt. A couple. I find it interesting to either of you guys that there are no representatives from the aerospace industry in this group. Yeah. I think that's one of those symbolic statements, similar with a lot of the other departments transition teams, that there's much less representation from industry in general throughout the transition. Yeah. The Biden campaign, and I may not get this 100% correct

verbatim, but they came out over the summer with some sort of larger policy directives with respect to their transition team about if you're an executive at a company, and this doesn't just relate to NASA, but again, any department or agency, the Biden campaign and eventually transition leadership would have you undergo an ethics review process and there'd be a whole waiver process, et cetera, et cetera. So I think they were kind of early on signaling how they wanted the complexion of their transition teams to look. And the other thing, by the way, is just because someone is a member of a transition team doesn't automatically mean they're going to be staying on. It's not unusual for people to take time out of their lives and spend some time, in some cases, a lot of time away from their families because they believe in

some service to the government and they're proponents of the incoming administration, no matter who it may be. They believe in what they're trying to do and want to do their part and serve a role in a transition team, but then go back to their normal life. And they do not have in a transition team, but then go back to their normal life. They do not have any interest in staying on in a long-term fashion. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. Every one of these people named to this transition team for NASA, they're all volunteers. You mentioned in passing, and Casey, I think you were the first who told me that Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, who told me that Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, has already said that even if he were asked by the Biden administration to remain on, that he might be leaving. Is that hearsay or is that something that's come from the administrator? The administrator himself has said that he would

not stay on in a Biden administration. I think it's telling and quite complimentary that you've seen quite a few people online and other commentators express their desire to see him continue in the job that, you know, he's been a positive and very, I think, enthusiastic supporter of NASA. He's done a good job representing NASA itself and kind of respecting the agency and the history in which it came from and trying to maintain that appeal broadly to the public. But at the same time, as we've seen with changes in the past or administrations in the past, White House and the president, they have the right and the preference, you know, generally to appoint people who they trust and who are aligned with them politically and in the vision that they're going to bring to the agency. Jim Bridenstine has been, I think, a very good NASA administrator,

but he's also a conservative ex-Republican congressperson who has a future career likely in that world that he'd probably rather pursue than working with a White House who may or may not share his view for NASA. And so really, we saw this with Charlie Bolden, who resigned his role at NASA on January 20, when President Obama left in 2017. And it's very common that this is not unusual. I think what is somewhat unusual, though, is that we saw some reporting as we were recording this today from Eric Berger at Ars Technica saying that Jim Bridenstine's tenure at NASA was very much limited anyway. It was very likely that if President Trump had won a second term, that he would have asked for Bridenstine's resignation

and appointed a new NASA administrator sometime in the next few months. So Bridenstine has done a good job, but he'll be a relatively short term administrator no matter who would have won this election. Fascinating. It's not unusual if a president does get a second term that a lot of the senior appointees do depart anyways. And just that Mr. Bridenstine does have very small children back home in Oklahoma, even despite the virus and being quarantined for extended periods of time. There are challenges on the home front that everyone's going through right now that I think he wants to be able to address in a much more meaningful

manner, considering the demands that being head of the agency requires of him. Yeah, it's not an easy job for anyone to do long term. We've seen relatively short tenures of NASA administrators before. So this isn't unusually short. He really, in a sense, was like NASA's number one fan. And that was really refreshing to see. And really, it was inspiring to be excited, seeing him excited as a NASA administrator, still getting kind of really just geeking out in some of the stuff that NASA does. As for a future administrator, this is going to be a game now for the next few months, the administrator shuffle, or musical chairs, or however game metaphor you'd like to throw in here. It's a process that'll take some time.

And then of course, is subject to Senate confirmation, which may or may not depend on, you know, depending on how who the pick is, Republican Senate or a Democratic Senate could have two very different implications for who the NASA next administrator is next under President Biden. Is there any speculation underway? Are we hearing names of any individuals with the caveat that this is only at the rumor stage probably right now? Oh, indeed we are, Matt. The rumor mill is already generating. Brendan, you want to drop a few of the names that we've all heard about circulating? The one I keep hearing constantly is Casey Dreyer. Hey, sources here first. That's an exclusive.

Hey, sources here first. That's an exclusive. But that's kind of, I mean, that's kind of to the, like, anyone can float something and say, like, I hear Casey's under consideration. And that's kind of like the level of credulity they have with a lot of these. And it's going to get picked up probably by more than one journalistic channel. Yeah. And again, this is not just something that takes place with respect to NASA. You know, you have people who want the job, but they can't be seen too much as wanting the job, if you know what I mean.

Because that will raise antennas with folks who are closer to the incoming president. You know, why does this person really want this job so much? That kind of sets them on edge a little bit. So sometimes there'll be surrogates of those people going out and proselytizing and trying to socialize that person's name. It's a high wire act, really. There's been some astronaut name, retired astronaut names every now and then. There's some industry executives. But the other thing is when you, especially in a venue like this, that's listened to so many people, the folks that are seriously interested, they don't want to see their name in print or don't want to have their names being publicly bantied about. It's a weird process. It really is. And there's people who will be looking at this transition team list and will extrapolate that they could envision some of

these, at least two or three of these people as serious contenders. The other challenge for the administration, though, is that NASA is not a cabinet position. If you're a NASA administrator, you're not like the Secretary of State. You're not like the Secretary of Transportation or Defense or anything like that. Those high-level political appointees, by and large, need to be kind of squared away first, and then agencies like NASA get addressed, and then you go down the list, and then eight, nine, ten months later, then you're wondering about who's going to be made the president's nomination to run the National Endowment of the Humanities. So it's a kind of a pyramid structure of sorts. pyramid structure of sorts. And this administration is coming in with a lot of expectations and a lot of things they want to address right out of the gate, namely with respect to the virus and how they handle that. We had a flurry of high-level

Pentagon resignations last night. That's going to put a lot of pressure on filling those positions up very soon, especially, God forbid, if we have some sort of geopolitical crisis in the interim. Yeah, God forbid. More generally, before we leave this and maybe look across the world a little bit, there has been a good deal of speculation about the Biden administration perhaps placing, restoring a lot of emphasis on earth science, although that was not diminished as some people feared it would be during, as much anyway, as it would be during the Trump administration, largely thanks to the House and the Senate. What do you guys hear about the priorities that the

Biden administration may have for space? I mean, we heard last month on this show from Jeb Faust, Casey, that there isn't a whole lot known. That's still true. There hasn't been a significant additional amount of information or really any additional amount of policy insight. Again, we can kind of just summarize. I think our observations and guesses are still valid, right? Or we can just say, in the absence of clear information, we have the Democratic Party platform, which mentions climate, which mentions Moon to Mars, which mentions ISS. We have the overall campaign goals or policy goals of the Biden upcoming presidency as outlined in his campaign.

And we can try to align like what parts of NASA, what is it doing now that align with those priorities stated by the campaign. And that's where you get climate change and addressing climate and earth science and looking back again to their to that role under the Obama administration being likely a priority for the administration and NASA, the likely delay of the 2024 lunar landing goal, and possible reformulation of that project to have a potentially different approach, though there's less information about how that would happen. So that's where I look to some of the House Democratic policy proposals. But given again, the very tight or Republican run Senate, I don't think you'll be seeing a ton of major program changes at NASA, because there's politically, there's going to be a lot going on. And the Biden administration is not going to want to spend a lot of political capital on NASA, if it doesn't have to, it'd rather focus on other areas that are more salient and near and dear to its to its heart. focus on other areas that are more salient and near and dear to its heart. And so I think we're still at this role where it seems like moon to Mars will remain the overall goal. And it seems

likely given the future kind of issues with likely budget restrictions, priorities for earth science that we will see the slip of the lunar program get pushed back, if not reconsidered altogether. Interesting to read in this new budget proposed by the Senate, which as you said, Brandon, may not even get a vote before it goes into negotiations, that though it had a pretty good level of funding for NASA, has a pretty good level of funding for NASA, it pretty vastly underfunded the Artemis moon effort and the plans that would have enabled us maybe to put, as they love to say, the next man and the first woman on the moon in 2024. There was a lot of skepticism when they were able to do the few hearings that they did do this year

with respect to more degree of specifics and details with respect to the human landing procurement programs or effort for the Artemis program. And clearly the agency has not been able to, whatever information they have provided, has not reached a satisfactory level for the Senate to fund it at the level that the agency wanted it. It doesn't come as a surprise really to anyone. Yeah, I think this is notable. Even if President Trump had won a second term, 2024 was functionally not going to happen at this point. And the final nail in that coffin, I think, was the Senate budget, which again, is a budget prepared by the Republican controlled Senate, right? So his own party did not provide the funding requested for NASA to get this going. And if you don't get that money up front, right, if you don't get it

when you need it early on, there's no hope you can't even if you backfill that money later on, you can't get that time back. And so 2024 is functionally dead regardless. That's where having some sort of a plan for a longer, sustainable approach to the moon will probably be one of those items that this NASA transition team highlights as something that the next administrator will have to deal with and find some solution to. We just saw in the last few days a celebration of the signing of the Artemis Accords by a number of the United States international partners. Artemis has come up just in passing a couple of times already, but does it look like this is

something that's going to continue to move forward? And more broadly, I'm sure all of our international partners are watching very carefully as this transition continues. How does this affect us on the space front? Yeah, Brendan, particularly from your lawyer, you're a lawyer, right? Are we bound to support Artemis with these agreements we've made with other nations? What I thought was an interesting, actually, one of the things I did when I was in law school is I studied the space station agreements that we did. Those were agreements that proved to be incredibly resilient through, they started actually being put together in the Reagan administration, and here we are in 2020.

They're not treaty treaties in the traditional sense. They do not need to be ratified by the Senate. Personally, I think Artemis Accords is just a term of art that sounds very flowery. And I think it sounds nice and sounds very cool, sounds very historic. The historian nerd in me thinks they sound great. But they're essentially memorandums of understanding. I think our allies and partners were thirsting for something essentially written down. We did that with Station. Again, they've proved to be bulletproof. And I think these accords are going to follow in a similar manner. Yeah, I think one of those things where we can look at how Biden as a senator in his political career, and kind of even how he ran,

he didn't run as a as a radical in a sense, he's not here to kind of rip things up and start fresh. He generally, I'd say is a what I would consider a small C conservative, particularly when it comes to international relationships. And I think they would carefully consider any significant changes to pre-existing agreements that NASA has made with its international partners before changing them. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think there would at least be some careful consideration before they would. that I saw exhibited in Washington amongst our partners, our international friends and allies, many of whom have offices and representatives here in DC, that the then Bush administration didn't almost immediately move out on some sort of codification of an international component set

in stone with the then constellation. You had some talk about the NASA administrator at the time, Sean O'Keefe, and then also echoed by Mike Griffin about, well, we're going to, we the United States are going to say, we're going to provide A, B, and C, but we're going to need X, Y, and Z also provided to execute on this mission. We'll let you guys decide amongst yourselves who can provide X, Y, and Z. Our friends and allies really had trouble trying to discern amongst themselves who would provide X, Y, and Z and whether that would be acceptable to NASA. And it was almost like they wanted NASA to say, okay, we need you to provide X and you over there, you need to provide Y,

we need you to provide X and you over there, you need to provide Y, you over there, we really need you to provide Z because that then enabled them to go back to their home governments and say, this is what the United States needs for us. Let's put together a plan and fund it and go back to the United States and say, yes, we will provide this component of this mission. And I think the Artemis Accords finally got around to doing that and giving the political coverage for our friends and allies to go back to their home governments and to say, yes, this is for real. And if we want to take part in it, we better. And it needed to happen, I guess, is what I'm trying to communicate. It reminds me of that old saying, when the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold.

Well, just to go back to the international aspect here and how the Biden administration is going to approach some of these agreements, this is one of the reasons why I'm also bullish on the future of both Gateway and the Mars sample return projects. So Mars sample return now is just getting ramped up. It'll be entering formal start of formulation probably next month. But we have a very strong collaboration established now with the European Space Agency. And it's not severable in the way that ExoMars was, for those of you who remember the debacle around that when NASA canceled its contribution to this dual Mars mission back in the early 2010, 2011. You can't

separate Mars sample return contributions from NASA and ESA. They are tightly coupled. That's probably not an accident, right? They did that on purpose. But now in order to cancel Mars sample return, you have to basically really screw over your European partners because they've made contracts. They've begun funding this mission on their contribution. They're going to depend on the United States to come through on their commitment. So that's, I think, a good sign. And that's an area, again, where I don't see the Biden administration just casually

dismissing that. Gateway is similar. Gateway has a number of international contributions that are being built upon the International Space Station agreements for contributions from Canada, Japan, European Space Agency, and others. That is something that has a lot more international buy-in than anything on the surface of the moon that NASA is planning. And I think that will help significantly in terms of maintaining the political coalition necessary to continue with something like Gateway, potentially at the expense

of surface operations at the moon going forward. Despite the fact that we're starting to see Gateway run into some budget trouble and design trouble, which we can talk about in a future episode, it has the most international buy-in of any of the lunar projects so far. And I think that's a very notable and important aspect to keep in mind when determining kind of what projects will continue forward under a Biden administration and which may not. Casey, I wonder if you could talk about the resources that the Planetary Society is providing, will continue to provide as we follow this developing situation, this transition to new leadership in Washington. We have a lot of stuff on the website, much of which you maintain. Yep, yep. So we will have, or we have a post kind of summarizing some of these congressional shuffle that we talked about on the show today. I maintain a regular tracking detail of updates of what's happening to NASA's fiscal year budget. All of those are available if you

go to planetary.org slash space dash policy, planetary.org slash space dash policy. That's hard to say a bunch of times fast. Or just go to Planetary.org and look for space policy. So we'll have articles on this. We'll track the budget. And we'll be preparing to reach out to the transition team itself and, of course, the future administration and the next Congress, both Republican and Democrat, to represent the Planetary Society's members' interests going forward. And of course, our core goals do not change, right? The administration may change. The Congress may change. Our goals do not. We're focused on planetary exploration, the search for life, and planetary defense. And we will continue to work with who is in power here in the U.S. government and abroad

to make sure those things are a high priority going forward. Meanwhile, this program getting published on the 13th of November, well, about 24 hours away from the first operational commercial crew launch of a Crew Dragon. of a Crew Dragon. And we learned just hours ago that it has been certified by NASA, something else that we're excited about, which is somewhat independent of everything we've been discussing over the last hour. Yeah. I'll take the happiness and joy of watching astronauts launch into space on a relatively new launch vehicle and capsule. I enjoyed that back in May during the kind of initial burst of COVID. I will savor this now during this period of kind of political tumultuousness that we're in. One of the crew members is from Japan, one of our allies. And I can personally attest he's a heck of a karaoke singer.

Okay, well, I want to hear more about that in another episode. Maybe we can convince him to do a little singing on a future Space Policy Edition. Brendan, in the days and weeks leading up to January 20th, what's going to be keeping you busy? You know, just tracking the, you know, obviously the transition efforts, but, you know, finding out who's going to be leading these committees that we care about. the transition efforts, but finding out who's going to be leading these committees that we care about. Like we've talked about before, most of the activity is going to be more on the House side. If there's someone who's been a big space booster on one of these committees we care about, then gets a different committee assignment, who replaces them. One other thing that we're going to be keenly interested in is seeing if the Space Council, the White House Space Council, will continue under President Biden.

And, you know, again, that could be fodder for another episode down the line. But that's something else that a lot of folks, not only Casey and myself, but other folks here in the space policy community here in Washington are keenly focused on. space policy community here in Washington are keenly focused on. There's no question that NASA is still going to be around in a Biden administration and the agency isn't going anywhere. So we all know that it's just, you know, who's going to be at the top of the food chain there within the agency. But there is absolutely no guarantee that we will see a continuation of the National Space Council. And if it is, will Vice President Harris have the level of interest that Vice President Pence has had, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot to talk about. Just fascinating. Casey, anything else to add?

I think from this point, we're going to be looking at the changes coming up in Congress, and we will be, again, tracking those very closely. We'll have more to say about this when the new Congress begins in January. So we'll follow up on some of these key items at that point. And from here on out, I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas, personally. Good for you. And may those holidays be very safe and joyful for both of you guys. We will, of course, be talking again on, I hope, the first Friday in December, unless there is some very good reason for us to push that back. We'll go jump away from US politics for a while, for the first time in a while. We'll just have a good old discussion of Apollo and some of its implications for international policy and what

it was useful for and kind of why it happens. We'll kind of do a good historical policy with a big chunk of Apollo to talk about just in time for Apollo 14, let's say, 50th anniversary coming up. I look forward to hearing it. And Brendan, I look forward to hearing from you again. Thank you for the great work that you do on behalf of the Planetary Society there in Washington, D.C. You are enabled to do that. All of us are able to do our jobs because of the members of the Planetary Society. If you are one of them, we thank you.

We are grateful. If you are not and you've enjoyed what you've just listened to, please visit planetary.org slash membership, because that's where you can learn how you can stand behind the Space Policy Edition, the great work that Casey and Brendan do on our behalf, and everything else,

all the other great work that the Planetary Society is up to. Again, planetary.org slash membership. Lots of levels, lots of benefits. We hope to get you on board and make you part of this great space family. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being part of this. And I look forward to talking again. See you next month, Matt.

Thanks, guys. Good being with you. Looking forward to next time. That was Brendan Currie, the Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. And just a moment before him, you heard Casey Dreyer, Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Society. I'm Matt Kaplan of Planetary Radio. Of course, I'll be back Wednesday of next week with the regular edition of Planetary Radio.

Hope you will tune in for that as we talk to the leaders of science operations for two orbiters, long-time orbiters at Mars, Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Until then, stay well, stay healthy, and we'll be talking to you again soon at Astra. Thank you.