Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Our Equinox Space Policy Briefing

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic reminds us that everything we do in space depends on what we do here on Earth. The impacts on space exploration are being felt already, with more challenges yet to come. The policy team at The Planetary Society, including CEO Bill Nye, recently provided a members-only live briefing to share our analysis of the impacts and to take questions about our work and the future. We share excerpts from that briefing with you on this month's episode. Learn more about this month’s topics through links on the show page. https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/space-policy-edition-48.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everyone. This is Planetary Radio's Space Policy Edition for April of 2020. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined by the chief advocate for the Planetary Society and our senior space policy advisor, Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? You staying healthy? I'm doing my best. So far, mine and those around me doing pretty well. But, you know, we are told, sorry to say, the worst is yet to come.

How about on your end, up there in Washington? My wife and I are doing just fine, working from home, as you probably figured. So now the headquarters of Planetary Society Northwest, pressed into service as a recording studio here in the exotic confines of my bedroom closet. Welcome to podcasting from home. There you go. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people probably hearing a lot of background noise in their podcasts over the next few weeks. Yeah, at least you don't have a dog barking the way I did with Bruce during the What's Up segment from last week. But we rolled that into the action. It made it kind of fun.

It's appropriate, Casey, during these very strange and somewhat terrible times. Obviously, we hope that all of you are also happy, healthy, and feeling whatever sense of well-being you can during these very tough times. And we thank you. We thank you for joining us for this program. But we especially thank our members because, as you might guess, it's going to be a tough time all around. I mean, we are hearing sober people start to talk about financial times ahead that may be as difficult as anything faced since the Great Depression, to say nothing of the

health challenges we all face. And so it's going to be a tough time for nonprofits too. So far, don't worry about us. Not yet anyway. Planetary Society is in good shape. We have good management, good fiscal management. And we're hoping to roll through this and help all of you out there do the same. We are, of course, as always, grateful to our members and our donors. And now more than ever, wouldn't you say, Casey?

Absolutely. If there's a time where events, external events make me just so grateful for the support that we have from our members at the Planetary Society, I can't think of a better situation or more salient situation than we're in right now. So I just want to just honestly, heartfelt thank you for your support, for your ongoing support. As Matt said, we're nonprofits and just engaging with you and talking about not the immediate problems that we face, but what we get to solve in the future. I mean, that's in a sense, we see how that's a luxury, but also how important it is to keep our eyes downfield and say, what amazing and exciting things are yet to come that we can choose to do in the next 10, 20, 30 years that are enriching and exciting and just inspirational. And it's a real joy to be

able to talk about that with you right now. You know, you reminded me of a little text conversation I had with a very good old friend of mine who happens to be the local host for NPR's All Things Considered up in Los Angeles. And he mentioned how troubling it is. And it had not occurred to me, we all are troubled when we hear this news. But for all those folks out there, like my friend, who have to write about it and share it with others, our hearts go out to you as they do to healthcare professionals. And I'll go even a little bit further. You probably know of nonprofits in your area, ones that you love, small ones even. We got something from a theater company down here in the San Diego area that we love. And they put it bluntly, they're going to go out of business if

they don't get support from folks because, of course, their stages are dark. So think about them. And we'll be here when you get back. Planetary Society is going to be around. Of course, if you are in a position to support our work, which is now more important than ever with these challenges that are coming up, especially the work that Casey and Brandon Curry do, you can find out more at planetary.org slash membership. But we know a lot of you are facing unprecedented financial challenges, and so we wish you all the best.

And from that, Casey, let's talk about the news. It doesn't get a whole lot better, at least not for a few minutes here on the show, because as we speak, it was just this morning, I believe, that the new employment figures came out for the United States. They are not good. And I'm just wondering how you think that may roll over into the space business. We addressed this somewhat also in last Saturday, March 28th's Policy and Politics Briefing, which you're going to hear some excellent excerpts of in just a few minutes here on the show. So we hope you'll stay tuned for that. But any new developments even in the, what, five days since we did that program with Bill Nye?

Well, Matt, as you said, the unemployment figures, I think that came out today, 6 million new unemployment registrations here in the United States, in addition to the 3 million the week before. Unprecedented doesn't do that justice. Obviously, there's going to be long term economic repercussions that are going to reverberate through the space industry like it will through pretty much every other industry in the United States and around the world. So we talk about this in the briefing somewhat. And my overall thought, there's two tracks that I think about here in terms of the immediate consequences are you're starting to see already through a lot of companies in the space industry. First is the consequence of the drying up of private investment. So as the overall stock

markets have gone down, a lot of wealth has evaporated. The overall economic situation drives people to generally be more conservative in their investments. They have a lower inclination to pursue high risk, long term reward investments like space. So you're seeing companies like OneWeb, which was attempting to launch a global coverage of new small satellite communication systems around the world, declared bankruptcy last week, citing coronavirus and the lack of additional venture capital as a reason for doing so. Bigelow Aerospace that creates the inflatable modules in space has laid off its entire workforce, also citing the same economic conditions.

And I predict you'll see a number of particularly smaller companies that are in the early stages of venture capital, really struggling to continue to meet payroll in this situation. So I think that's the first consequence you'll see from this economic calamity, I guess, that we're seeing. The second is going to be a longer term issue, and it really will hit public financing. Right now, I'll use the United States as an example, but you're seeing this happen around the world. You're seeing massive stimulus and relief packages being passed. So here in the United States, we passed a $2.2 trillion economic relief bill for businesses and individuals. Combine that amount of spending with the decrease in economic output, and you're

going to see massive deficits hitting the United States and other countries. The consequence of this after the crisis has passed is likely a severe restriction or at least political battle attempting to restrict what's called discretionary spending, spending that Congress here gets to choose how much to spend every year, right? So you're going to have massive deficits. You want to try to make that look better. The United States will probably try to spend less. NASA is part of that discretionary budget. Most space agencies are part of that discretionary budget in various ways. That's going to make it a difficult fiscal situation to not grow NASA, but even maintain it, I would predict. So the overall fiscal environment, both for private

companies and public investment in space is going to be pretty challenging the next few years here. Well, Casey, that paints a sad, but probably very accurate prediction. Of course, we can hope that things recover far more quickly than we thought. But when you're putting $2.2 trillion into relief measures, without debating the necessity of that, because I, for one, think that that was essential, that money's coming from someplace. Let's hope that not all of it will be coming from NASA. NASA would be a drop in the bucket to cover that new level of deficit. Yeah. Well, I think it's more of like, imagine the pie that NASA competes for, for its slice of the federal budget. It's likely that the pie itself is going to get smaller. So every agency

within that, competing for that amount of money is going to get smaller. So every agency within that, you know, competing for that amount of money is going to have to compete with each other to some degree. But again, I want to emphasize this probably won't happen until at least a year from now, after this crisis period has passed. Again, you're seeing a really a two track, I think you're really seeing impact on commercial sector right now, particularly in the pure commercial sector that has no government support or investment in public private partnership aspect. And then longer term, the public sector are going to be facing a cash crunch. Since we're talking about budgets and money, we teased this as well during the March 28 policy and politics briefing that we did for an unprecedentedly large live audience,

at least for the Planetary Society. We mentioned that you are doing some amazing work analyzing the budget for NASA, right from the start of NASA here in the United States. I have gotten a preview of it that you've provided. You have done some amazing work here. As I said to you a few minutes ago, I think you're going to have a lot of it that you've provided. You have done some amazing work here. And as I said to you a few minutes ago, I think you're going to have a lot of academics in your debt. Tell us what people can expect here. They may be able to see it about the time that this program becomes available. Yeah. And just to be clear, it's for planetary science within NASA. It's starting with our core focus area, the history of planetary science spending. This serves two purposes.

One, I want it to be a reference data set for how much every mission cost when the money was spent. And that you can see general trends of what was important in the history of planetary exploration at NASA since the late 50s, early 60s. But also, I think it's a great time. Again, we're all kind of stuck at home right now. We may have more time on our hands. We're traveling less, right? And so this is a great opportunity. If you're a numbers person, like I am, there's a great time to just dive deep into the entire fiscal history of planetary exploration at NASA. So this was fun for me to put together. I've been working on this for a few months. I really wanted to get this out as soon as possible to give everybody listening to it, not just academics, a chance to really dive in and say,

to answer your questions about when the money flowed where. As a policy person, money really ultimately demonstrates priorities. Right? Like you, if you, you can say you have priorities, but if you can track where the money goes, ultimately, that's the statement of priority in any type of organization. And so this data set, it's going to be live by the time you listen to this. You can go find it at planetary.org slash space advocate. I'll have a link there. It's a raw data dump. I'll have additional

interpretations, plots coming out in the following weeks. But it really will take you through every single planetary mission from NASA ever, going back to Ranger lunar orbiters in the 60s, all the way up to Psyche and Lucy. Now, every mission, how much was spent on it every single fiscal year since 1960, through the proposed 2021 budgets. And then you have a lot of fun statistics you can do with that data. What money was spent on Mars when? When was the big peaks of planetary science funding and what were they spent on? Something that I had a lot of fun with was seeing just the huge scale of the Viking program. Planetary science peaked in 1974 at nearly $3 billion adjusted for inflation using the best methods we have. $2 billion of that $3 billion was spent on Viking. So that was not a

balanced program, right? So you see these huge peaks in the past, but they were for very different situations. And we find ourselves now that we're balanced around $2.7 billion. So again, this is a rich data set. I could easily go on, Matt, about this for probably an hour. No doubt. But it's there. People can explore it.

There are revelations galore. No doubt. But it's there. People can explore it. There are revelations galore. That hump that we saw that you documented for Viking during the mid-1970s, it's plotted in one graph that you showed us against the spending for other planets, other targets around the solar system. And, you know, it prompted me to add my comment, the Martians win because Mars looked like the pretty clear winner over all of these decades. Right. Yeah. That's the fun thing. I plotted out spending by destination. And you can see that changes over time, right? You see these big peaks first in the moon, right, during the Apollo years, then Mars is the big one. And then you see bumps in outer planets as that became the primary focus of the program over time. And then you see

Mars clawing its way back starting in the 1980s, actually late 80s, late 80s with Observer and then into the 90s. It's just a fun thing to dig through. I'm actually going to extend an invitation out. What I really would love to have from folks listening to this who are into this kind of stuff is that I'm looking for gaps to fill in. So I consider this a of stuff, is that I'm looking for gaps to fill in. So I consider this a version one, and I am eager to hear from additional people, if they have insights, you know, particularly something I've wanted to really include in this was the cost of operations for missions. And

operations are frequently neglected when you're talking about the cost of a mission. Most formal cost analyses or reported cost of a mission from NASA only account for what's called the prime mission, right, usually a couple of years. And then they ignore the ongoing costs of the operational, you know, just to keep the missions going to pay the science and engineering teams to return the data. And that's usually your best return on investment. And so I did what I could with public data to reconstruct, you know, for example, the annual cost of operating Voyager since 1978. And there's gaps in that just from the public data that I can find. I'll identify parts of these on our website. But if you have insights

into operating costs of Pioneer, Voyager, Mariner missions, I am all ears and I'd love to include those in this data set. So again, I really consider this a version one and I hope to engage our membership and listenership to fill in and make it even better. Move over citizen science, citizen economics. Citizen budget, yeah. Budget sleuthing. Yeah, citizen budget research, yeah. I love it. All right, it's waiting for you there at planetary.org slash space advocate. And you can start digging in through the data. Casey, let's go on to this recap of this briefing

that took place on the morning of Saturday, March 28th. Morning for us, it was afternoon from Brendan Curry, our chief of Washington operations, who was also a participant in this. And for the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. It was the four of us who got together and talked for about an hour and a half, reviewing, as we have done twice a year for some time now, for donors, supporters of the Space Policy Advocacy Program at the Planetary Society. But we did something different this time.

We opened it up to all of our members. And I think we saw about, very nearly anyway, an order of magnitude increase in our audience. Yeah, funny how that works. No, it was great. It was a lot of fun to do. I guess we don't need to tease it so much. What you'll hear is that it's a briefing on the current situation of space policy that includes the coronavirus situation we alluded to earlier. Some of our core focuses and enterprises are mentioned and how we're going to be moving forward with those in the next six to 12 months.

So you'll see and hear, I should say, me give that briefing. And then we take a lot of questions from our members who participated in the call. And that was a lot of fun as well, and you'll hear a lot of relevant issues addressed in that as well. I don't really have anything more. I think we should just go right into the briefing. Casey does use some slides. You'll hear him make a PowerPoint presentation, and we want you to be prepared. So if you want, you could pause this now. Don't

forget to come back and finish the podcast. Casey, you're going to post those slides where people can find them if they want to see them as if they hear about them. Yeah, the slides will be online in the show notes. It works well. I listened to it myself. It works pretty well without the slides as a reference. But if you want those with some additional data and pictures, of course, those will be linked to off the show notes for this episode on planetary.org. Yeah. And more specific planetary.org slash radio, and then just look for this episode of a space policy edition. If you are coming at us from someplace else and you'll find a link, just scroll down a little bit. You'll find a link to all of Casey's slides.

All right. So with that, let's let us take you back not too many days to Saturday, March 28th and the semi-annual, we called it the Equinox Space Policy and Politics Briefing from the Planetary Society. Casey, you've been talking about this next 10 years of space exploration possibly being the best ever. But now we have this new challenge that we're all dealing with. Bill, I don't know if you might want to say a few words to address that challenge and how we're going to continue to represent the wishes of our members and make sure space exploration continues. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, everyone. The Planetary Society is the world's largest independent space organization.

And among the things we do is advocate, especially in the United States, especially with NASA, not only in the U.S., but especially here. And what we want to do is remind everybody that this pandemic will settle out eventually and space exploration continues. If you want to send a mission to Europa that's going to get there in 2034, you've got to be working on it now. And if you want to get the Mars 2020 rover, now called Perseverance, the Perseverance rover to Mars, you can't let go of it right now. Otherwise, you've got to wait another 26 months and you've got to keep this standing army of technicians and scientists, engineers ready to go for two years plus. It's just we've got to make sure everybody keeps focused at an appropriate level on space. And in order to do that, we engage people like you, people like you who are willing to take the time to communicate with our congressional, especially representatives, so we can keep things on track despite all the stressful and surprisingly weird time that we're going through. So I want to just thank everybody again for taking the time on a Saturday to participate in this.

And listening to me, of course, is fascinating. Don't get me wrong. But we have people here who really know what they're talking about. And the great thing or the thing that I'm really looking forward to this morning for me this afternoon for many of you is your questions I very much looking forward to hearing what you wonder about and what Casey and Brendan can describe because as the old saying goes Washington is a small town based on trust and relationships. And unless they trust the Planetary Society, unless they trust people who have an interest in space exploration, things are not going to get done. But so far, through the diligence and integrity of Brendan and Casey, we have been able to be quite influential. The NASA budget, we're going to talk about this in great detail for planetary exploration, is up to $2.7 billion.

And I think we take full credit for that, don't we? No, we had a very large and important role. So thank you all again for your support. Bill, just to build upon what you were saying, I'm struck more than ever right now about the idea that the Planetary Society exists because of our members. And right now, when everybody is going through something that's a little anxiety inducing or stressful and just disruptive, I appreciate our membership more than ever. And it just reminds me even at a deeper level that everything we do out in space ultimately depends on what we do here on Earth. And our success in space depends on the success, the flourishing, and the health of the people here on this planet working so hard to make that all happen. And so if nothing else, this tells us about

the role that we as individuals play together and how important it is that we are healthy, that we are happy, that we are capable to focus on these big, exciting, optimistic, long-term goals in space. So if nothing else, I just want to say I hope everyone listening in is healthy, they're doing okay through these weird times. And we're going to talk a lot about kind of the ideas of what happens after this. But we at the same time at the society, we want to emphasize that we are taking this seriously, too, and that our thoughts are with you through this time as well. Brendan, any words to add as we open this? No, I'm in total concurrence with Bill and Casey.

And the only thing I would add is that sometimes here in Washington right now, things change by the hour. And so some of the things that I may talk about may be overcome by events after this call. But that shows, again, why we should do this again. That's going to be the default for all of our statements coming up, pending unexpected changes in the next 24 hours. Casey, before you go into your slides, maybe we have time to take one or two questions, and we'll start with those that were submitted ahead of the start of this event. There are a lot of people who are talking about the COVID-19 challenge and what we're going to be left with. And of course, we still don't know how deep the

effect of this is going to be on the American public and on the federal budget or anybody's budget for that matter. So a lot of people are wondering about that and how the Planetary Society is going to respond to this crisis where space exploration is, as you're fond of saying, we all know it's the most important thing in the world, but not everyone agrees with us. Well, I don't know if I would stick behind that statement at this very moment. I think public health is probably the most important thing in the world, literally. But again, I think what this does is that the role of these types of organizations, our goals aren't changing, right? This is a crisis that we face on

a global scale that forces us to have to work together, right? It reminds us that no country is independent of each other at this point. Once this media crisis passes, the goals and the outcomes that we're looking for, those are still going to be there. And we still have to make sure that we pursue those goals, even though those are going to take a backseat in terms of public policy, public attention and effort at this moment, and honestly, as they should. And so we're going to keep our long term focus going. But we also have to strategically position ourselves and be aware that these things have to happen first.

And Brendan can talk a little bit about that in terms of in DC, because there's a lot of people who they're getting very stressed out. They're very focused on the policy making that's happening now. And if you're a space industry or space company coming in to demand something at this point, you can actually sound quite tone deaf. So, Brendan, do you want to expand on why it's strategically important to just know how to engage with members of Congress and their staffs at this point? Thanks, Casey. There's a number of things going on on a number of fronts. Everyone's hearing about industries looking for help or assistance or

bailouts or whatever euphemism you want to use. This is a time for the space industry to stand up and rise to the occasion. Our industry is renowned for developing high-tech, high-quality, rugged, high-tech, high-quality, rugged, state-of-the-art technologies. They're developed with an initial aerospace and defense application that are now being looked at to be repurposed to address this health crisis. I've told Casey this, the Pentagon is going to be issuing something called an RFI, Request for Information, on March 31st. And they said they're going to be looking for a lot of technologies to help them address this situation. And by name, they said space technologies. And the person at the Pentagon who is going to be leading this effort is actually former NASA administrator, Mike Griffin. And one of his deputies is retired astronaut,

Sandy Magnus. I guess what I'm trying to say is your space community is working to rise you to the occasion, but we as an industry at the same time cannot be seen as just looking for a handout or something like that. Be politically tone deaf. In case you've heard me say this before, I was a congressional staffer during 9-11. I then had the enjoyment of having anthrax mailed to my place of work. And I saw three types of people during that situation in my life. I had people that were not doing anything to be helpful.

I saw people that were quite craven and opportunistic. And then I saw people who were just checking in and asking how they could help. And I think this is an opportunity for us to be those types of people that are helpful right now. I just want to remind everybody that these are the three core areas of focus of the Planetary Society to find life, to explore worlds and to defend the Earth. We have more about this information in our strategic plan. I encourage all of our members to read that. That's still relatively new. You can see the URL below. But we connect these here at the advocacy program and policy program.

We try to feed back all of our work to these three core enterprises. So you can see Find Life really focuses on our work on promoting Mars sample return, Europa Clipper, and missions like WFIRST. Exploring worlds is getting humans to Mars and back into deep space. Really hits on our focus on aspects of the NASA budget, particularly the Planetary Science Division. And then, of course, Mars sample return feeds into these as well. Defending Earth, in this case, right, we've always talked about

asteroid defense, planetary defense from near-Earth objects and comets, and trying to make sure that we're looking for potentially hazardous objects, that we're finding ways to prevent them from hitting the Earth if we find them, and otherwise keeping humanity vigilant against that potential threat. Those three things really inform what our priorities are from a political and policy level, with the caveat that we have to be reactive to the situation on the ground. And in that situation right now is obviously the consequences of the coronavirus that we'll be talking about in a little bit. information about what we focus on at the Planetary Society, and particularly for our policy and advocacy program, at our policy principles. We've set out an expanded and more detailed version of what we spend our time on on your behalf at this URL. So I encourage you to look at those if you ever have a question about what we're doing here at the Planetary Society and what's informing our work. This was our day of action. I just want

to acknowledge the incredible work and volunteer effort and just overall effort expended by your fellow members of the Planetary Society. We had more than 100, almost 115 people came to Washington, D.C. from 28 different states, some as far as Alaska. This is most of them here in the Senate office building, Hart office building, taking this picture. We met with over 160 offices that day. We had a really positive experience. I'm very, very glad we scheduled this earlier this year before we had issues with the virus.

But I just wanted to acknowledge the incredible work done by just our incredible members. And everyone here in this picture came under their own dime, under their own effort. And that's just really inspiring to me and Brendan and Bill and everybody here at the society. The other thing that impressed me, Casey, is we asked how many people want to come back next year?

Everybody raised their hand. It was fantastic. Right. And we'll obviously, it's one of those things that we'll look for the reality on the ground of how to do something like this next year. But we want, these are annual events that we're managing. We saw great growth in terms of participation this year. So we have lots of ideas and energy for this going ahead. So thanks to everybody who came for that and advocated for space with us at the Planetary Society back in February. The three main topics we're going to talk about today are, we already kind of talked about this,

the coronavirus impact on the global space industry. We're going to talk about where we are with the NASA budget process. And then of course, just acknowledge that we're having a significant political situation coming up with the U.S. presidential elections happening in the fall that will have or could have significant consequences to NASA's policy and overall direction. And because NASA is just is such a large space agency compared to the world, what happens with NASA really does impact a global audience in the global space industry. So let's start with the first one. Again, we can talk about this a lot. I just want to mention a few points here. This is changing

literally by the hour. All of you know that this has been happening very rapidly. So just we'll keep this following as we go. But the idea is we are seeing already significant and widespread disruption in the space industry. A lot of that happens from the fact that people are being quarantined at home or told to stay at home and not go to work. You know, you can do a lot with teleconferencing these days, but you can't bend metal and build a spacecraft remotely. Right. That still requires people to be there. The next step here is that NASA has a number of response levels based on public health and other external situations. What's called stage

four is the most extreme response. It's basically an entire NASA Center being shuttered with only basic security and protecting property and life staff allowed to remain. No mission essential personnel even allowed on the NASA Center. So about half of all NASA facilities are at stage four now. I believe Marshall Space Flight Center just went to stage four yesterday. Stage three is the rest of NASA's at stage three right now, which means mandatory telework unless you're mission essential. Critically for us, probably as Bill mentioned earlier, this is where Kennedy Space Center is still at stage three. That is where the Mars 2020

Perseverance rover is under final ATLO assembly testing before launch in July. That mission is continuing to move forward. That mission is continuing to track a July launch. It has a three-week launch window thereabouts, a little over three weeks starting July 17th. Of course, as many of you know, if NASA or anyone misses that opportunity to launch to Mars this year, it will be 26 months before the next opportunity to launch. And that will add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of that mission should they miss that. That's obviously kind of my big nail biter right now is if Mars 2020 gets off the ground this year.

So far, it is on track. We've seen delays already for other Mars missions. The ESA Roscosmos mission, ExoMars was delayed partially because of issues related to traveling restrictions around the coronavirus. ESA has suspended scientific operations on a number of its missions to keep people at home. And then also, I think two bigger picture things that we'll see play out on a longer term time scale that is important to follow is due to the economic fallout of what we're going to see here.

And we know we shouldn't sugarcoat this. We're going to be facing an unprecedented, are facing an unprecedented economic collapse or temporary collapse in terms of demand. And it's going to have echoing and long-term effects, hopefully not too long-term, but we just don't know yet. But what we're already seeing is drying up of venture capital, private money investment in the space industry. OneWeb, which was a big company that had been receiving billions of dollars, a huge amount of private investment capital to build a global, or I'd say a global coverage of internet providing or communication satellites, just filed for bankruptcy last night. Inside of coronavirus, you've seen other small

companies like Bigelow Aerospace lay off its entire workforce. This is probably just beginning due to the fact that it's going to be very difficult to continue to raise private investment funds for high-risk ventures with long-term payoffs like space. So that is something to keep in mind. And then, of course, big picture for public investment, governments, at least the U.S. government, other major Western governments, and other major just countries, they can't really go out of business, right? They can't declare bankruptcy, the US is fundamentally impossible to be insolvent. But there will be after this, we just saw here in the US $2.2 trillion expenditures yesterday signed by the president, there will be others plus the economic hit in

terms of revenue. There's going to be enormous deficits facing this country and other countries coming in the next few years. When you have historically seen growing deficits, it is harder and harder to spend discretionary funds. This is money that Congress, in this case, chooses to spend every year. And NASA is one of those agencies that receives that optional money, that discretionary money. So as deficits grow, there will be enormous pressure to restrain spending in the next few years after the immediate parts of the coronavirus crisis passes. And so that will place pressure, coronavirus crisis passes. And so that will place pressure very likely on the potential growth opportunity for NASA and other nations' space budgets. I just want to emphasize here, this was equity investments in private industry for private space. Total private investment was $5.8 billion. I just want to emphasize that the vast majority of that money, more than about $5 billion of it, went to late-stage investment rounds for SpaceX and OneWeb.

And then the other is basically Blue Origin. So the scale of investment has been in three companies, basically, one of them which just went bankrupt, and then all the other smaller companies take a fractional size of that pie. bankrupt, and then all the other smaller companies take a fractional size of that pie. So again, this just kind of puts into perspective, I think, that there's going to be a challenging fiscal situation for private investment into startup space companies. The NASA budget update we'll just briefly touch on here. I want to remind everybody that the NASA proposal from the White House, here's the overall process. We're only about here right now. Technically we have a budget resolution from a few years ago that has set spending levels. Again, things are changing so fast that it's unclear what

type of process or how this is going to move through this year, but we do have the President's budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins October 1st, that is to find out the White House's proposal for NASA. Again, notably, this all happened before the current virus crisis. And so that may and very likely will change the overall political contours of this. But this is the information we have to work with at the moment. Congress has yet to take action on passing through its appropriations bills for the entire government, not just NASA. And again, Congress, I believe, just recessed for about a month.

So we won't see any action on this until April at the earliest. Though, again, considering the difficulties facing this country and every country in the world right now, I will not be surprised if we don't see any action on this for many months, if even then. However, considering what we have seen from NASA so far, from the White House so far, I just want to put what we're seeing in context. The 21 budget for NASA proposes an increase to $25.5 billion. This is probably everyone's most familiar graph on this call. This is NASA's historical funding adjusted for inflation, right? So keeping as if every dollar was the same in the past as it is now. And to put this in context, this would be

NASA's best budget basically since the early 1990s, which is good, but also puts into context how much bigger NASA's budget has been in the past. That additional funding has been generally matched by Congress, so we see the dotted line is what the White House has requested. The green line here is what Congress has ultimately provided historically. So even though the White House budget is a suggestion,

it's a proposal, historically, congressional action tracks very closely to what the White House proposes, historically, right? So that's something to keep in mind. So we take these seriously. The five-year projection that the White House has made, again, back in February for NASA is also very good. again, back in February for NASA is also very good. You see that growth continuing forward, peaking at almost $28 billion in 2023. And primarily we'll just zoom in here on this proposed growth area.

And you can see the major areas of NASA as proposed in this budget with functionally the largest growth happening, this big bottom gray bulge there, human space flight, Artemis going to the moon. Everything else at NASA is functionally kept flat. Just reminding everybody what our current lunar plans were. These are going to change probably within the next few months based on an internal review happening at NASA right now. But this is what has been funded in the president's budget request.

Overall, they have put their money where their mouth was in supporting this effort. So this is some of the best proposed funding we've seen for NASA basically since the space exploration initiative back in the late 80s, early 1990s under George H.W. Bush. Something near and dear to my heart and our hearts here is planetary science. Just to acknowledge this very quickly, here is the last 10 years, again, adjusted for inflation at planetary science within NASA. The dotted line is the White House proposal. The solid line is what Congress has ultimately appropriated. You have seen through our work over the years,

trying to get Congress to add more than the White House's budget proposal has been very successful, but also just the incredible growth we've seen in the last few years in this program, getting up to about $2.7 billion. So last year, we had 2.7. This year, we have slightly less, 2.66. The rounded, it's 2.7. A few tweaks to get back to where it was historically can address a few of the minor shortfalls, but overall a very good situation to be in compared to where we were back in 2013, 2014. So again, this is a very solid budget for planetary science. It supports a couple of things I'll call out here.

for Planetary Science. It supports a couple things I'll call out here. Both ESA and NASA now have approval to begin a Mars sample return campaign. This is, I chose this chart from ESA to show just how complex this process is going to be, but it's very, very exciting to see this moving forward. ESA's ministerial meeting back in November of 2019 approved funding for the ESA contribution. They're coming in with a major multi-mission, multi-billion euro contribution to this effort. And you're also seeing NASA as this budget includes a good portion for 2026 fetch rover or fetch mission and Mars ascent vehicle for launching in 26. And with entering formal formulation, the formal start of the project is early as this summer. So that might be delayed based on obviously

what we're seeing with the virus. It also continues to fund Europa Clipper for now a 24 launch date due to disagreement on which rocket to use to launch it. Congress wants the SLS, NASA wants a commercial rocket. Unfortunately, there was no funding for a near-Earth object surveillance mission, dedicated space telescope, which was a surprise based on previous statements made by NASA officials. And so that's one of the issues that we have to deal with when we are

going to be engaging in this again. And finally, I just want to make one more acknowledgement here about coming up some of the issues we'll be facing. Obviously, a big presidential election year, congressional elections obviously also happen too. The entire House is up for re-election. A third of the Senate is up for re-election. That's in November. I usually like to say when you're facing something like this with an election, it's almost like trying to project your analysis through the event horizon of a black hole. It's a singularity that becomes very hard. Physics kind of breaks down. But then, of course, this year we have something additional, which is that we have the coronavirus situation. And so really, it's like we're facing two black hole singularity events together and trying to model what the outcome of the general regular policy process is going to be. You can

kind of do that in some ways, but let's just say physics tends to break down with this stuff. And just like politics here, it's going to be very difficult to predict exactly the ripple effects about what's going to come out of the combination of coronavirus and the upcoming presidential elections for how it's going to impact NASA's immediate future. So that's going to be just a challenge for all of us to keep in mind. And I think it's probably safe to say that even though no matter what people say, we don't know what lies in the other side of that November 2020 black hole, the Planetary Society will continue to make waves. Oh, see what he did there? Stay with us for the rest of the March 28 Space Policy and Politics Briefing from the Planetary

Society. And then Casey and I will be back to say farewell. Hi, I'm Yale astronomer Deborah Fisher. I've spent the last 20 years of my professional life searching for other worlds. Now I've taken on the 100 Earths Project. We want to discover 100 Earth-sized exoplanets circling nearby stars. It won't be easy. With your help, the Planetary Society will fund a key component of an exquisitely precise spectrometer. You can learn more and join the search at planetary.org slash 100 Earths. Thanks. We're back with the briefing held on Saturday, March 28th. Bill Nye, Brendan Currie, Casey Dreyer and me, Matt Kaplan, will pick up with more from Casey.

Two things just to keep in mind. We know President Trump's space policy. It's being executed right now. We're going to assume Biden is the very likely Democratic nominee. He has not said anything, nor is there anything publicly stated about space on his campaign website. That's not unusual. Historically speaking, we will probably see more details as they staff up their policy side when they get closer to the election itself, because they start to prepare a potential transition team building out a broader policy. It's very likely it'll be similar to what we saw in the Obama era, and also we can look to existing Democratic proposals from the House of Representatives

for guidance in areas that we will likely see changes or continuity in. But again, as Bill said, big picture, here's where we are, and this is what we need to remember as we face this. Space is taking a backseat to the crisis at hand. That's reasonable, I think, and that's where we need to accept that that's going to be. Now is not the time to engage your lawmakers on spacious feuds. We're not going to be. Now is not the time to engage your lawmakers on spacious views. We're not going to be asking you to take action for a while until the time is right, when we have the appropriate time to make a real effort and not undermine our goals by seeming out of touch, as Brendan said. The Planetary Society, we already submitted feedback, outlines, formal

requests for appropriations back before the virus crisis hit. So we've already given our feedback to a number of formal input opportunities to key members of Congress and congressional committees back in February and early March. Again, as I mentioned at the beginning of this, we're a society, we're a planetary society, we depend on you. And we can't succeed if we don't have you with us. And so it's critical, obviously, for us, you don't need us to tell you this, but to just prioritize your psychological and physical health going forward. You know, we want you to follow your interest and be ready to engage again when the crisis subsides. And so the planetary society is going to be putting out a lot of great content,

opportunities to engage and to think about really exciting things in the future, because the future is still out there. There's so many exciting things to look forward to. We could see people walking on the moon, we could maybe discover life on another planet, or we could discover astrobiological signals in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. We could return samples from Mars for the first time in human history that were curated and selected by scientists here on Earth. All of this stuff is possible if we want it to happen and if we work to make it happen. We're facing this crisis now, but once that passes within the next year, all of these opportunities still remain. And that's where we're going to keep focusing on the big picture, optimistic, exciting future that

faces humanity here at the Planetary Society. So that's the end of my formal remarks, I would say. And we can start taking questions or follow up on any of the things that we just started to talk about. Bill, it occurred to me when I was listening to NPR this morning, they were talking about how we need to build excess capacity in our hospital, our healthcare system, because there may be another pandemic. I thought that that might just relate to planetary protection as well. You may be right mean protection or defense? Asteroid. Oh, my mistake. Terrible.

I'm thinking planetary protection because I'm doing the thing on that next week. You are absolutely right, Casey. Planetary defense. I thought you were talking about planetary protection, Matt. Well, we could, but it's not quite politics and policy. Sorry about that. We don't want the Earth to get hit with an asteroid. It is, as the hilarious saying goes, a very low probability event with very high consequences. High impact. Very unlikely, but very bad if it happens.

So to Matt's point, or to the NPR point, is having excess hospital capacity could be really good. Now, you may think of asteroids as a complete total catastrophe, wiping out civilization as we know it, as what probably or seems to almost certainly have happened to the ancient dinosaurs. But it's also possible that a big asteroid impact destroys a county or the edge of a big city or something, And then you'll want hospital beds. That's absolutely true. But this whole idea that it's not important, I think, is not right. It's a real thing.

And it is, as the saying goes, the only preventable natural disaster. And as you may know, I don't know how long all of you have been members and once again thank you for support but as an engineer i'm just kooky for the laser bees so what we would do is find an asteroid 20 years away going to hit going to cross the earth's orbit in 20 years and either run something into it set off a nuclear weapon near enough that has enough particles and pressure waves going out to give it a nudge, send a giant, giant spacecraft that's massive and its massive gravity would give the asteroid a tug, or beam a bunch of lasers at the thing so that the oblating, the burning off material, would have enough momentum to nudge it.

And so for those of you who have been members long enough, we did this study at Strathclyde University in Scotland, and it's doable. If you have a powerful enough laser and you could identify the right rock, you could do it. But you won't be able to do it rock you could do it but you won't be able to do it unless you're prepared unless you're thinking about it by you i mean society unless we're really ready to take action and then as far as destination agnostic spacecraft it's very reasonable if you if we had the Space Launch System for real this big rocket for real or if companies like Blue Origin SpaceX are able to build very

large rockets we would deploy those use those to nudge an asteroid in some fashion and so this is takes the steady drumbeat as the saying goes because although everybody in a conversation in a congressional office acknowledges that it's a possibility, making sure it's funded all the time takes a steady effort from our organization, especially. First thing is finding the asteroids. That's the first thing. Over to you, Casey.

Casey Weade Matt and Bill, I think we should just dive into this a little bit because there are so many parallels to what we're watching now in terms of crisis response to a situation of planetary defense where if we detect an asteroid coming our way, we have a certain amount of uncertainty early on, and that certainty grows grows and the cost of dealing with that also grows. So again, in the US, we just passed a $2.2 trillion emergency relief bill yesterday and think of how much cheaper it would have been to put the proper prevention in place early on. But at the time, it's hard to spend the money.

We look at the same comparison for planetary defense. It's hard to get NASA now spending 150 million, 160 in 2019. And that's the largest budget it's ever had historically. The last two years of NASA funding at that level account for 90% of all planetary science funding in the United States in its history. The amount of money we put in now could have huge benefits in the future. But again... Just a little perspective on, let's say you had this extraordinary, perfectly figured out spacecraft that would look for asteroids, specifically, that would cross Earth's orbit. The estimate is about $450 million for such a space...

For that mission, yeah. is about $450 million for such a station. We're spending a third of that every year on all of the planetary defense programs. This is an opportunity to adjust the knobs a little bit. This will be an interesting thing to discover after we pass through the immediate crisis here is how willing will political systems be, particularly in democracies that are subject to more immediate whims of the body politic, for spending money on preventative efforts of a variety of things for public health and for national security or planetary security. So I think there's a lot we can learn from what's happening now and apply to planetary defense. Brendan, I think you might want to get in on this, but I also want to ask you, do you have any sense from your congressional contacts that planetary defense is something that could fall by the wayside?

Is there enough sustained interest? No, there is clearly sustained interest. The only concern I've heard, I was actually on the phone earlier with a friend of ours at the Applied Physics Lab that they're working on this thing called DART. And they're worried that that's a mission that's got very popular support. But now they're worried about since they can't get into work on that spacecraft, is it going to delay its ability to get out the door, essentially? Because there's a launch period. You can't do it just any time. The thing will get too far away. You've got to catch that rock.

Yeah, orbital mechanics don't care about what's going on on Earth with humans. And the other thing I wanted to say was that NASA is chartered with trying to identify, track, and assess NEOs that could be problematic. But everyone knows essentially that, God forbid, something that is a threat is discovered, everyone's going to be looking at the Pentagon to neutralize that threat. And so I'm a member of this thing called the Joint Space Task Group. And we meet at the Pentagon. And I suggested that we bring in Casey for a briefing from the Planetary Society to talk about the NEO threat. We met in a secure facility in the basement of the Pentagon. And I've been going to a number of these meetings for a number of years, and this was the most well-attended one I've ever been to.

And we had people from the CIA, the NRO, the British MOD, the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the Space Development Agency. There was a thirst from the national security and intelligence community to hear from us on this. That's so cool. More evidence of what the society is able to contribute. I mean, Casey and Brendan got invited to this meeting at the Pentagon because of this shared interest. Let's jump back to a specific mission. And it's one that all of us, all of our members care deeply about.

A lot of questions about this. One from Michael Neufeld, I'll read his. What is the status of the Europa Clipper launch vehicle choice? And you had in one of your slides, Casey, you didn't get a chance to talk about it. Is Europa Clipper in any kind of jeopardy? Europa Clipper is I kind of jeopardy? Europa Clipper is, I think, doing okay right now from my latest understanding of it. Again,

that could be changing very dramatically. It's in phase C, so it's under implementation now. They're starting to bend metal. The issue with the launch vehicle is an increasing worry of mine. And in some sense, it's the original kind of bargain coming up to really impact that mission. Using the Space Launch System can get you to Jupiter in two and a half years or so. Commercial rockets will take a lot longer to get there. There is a strong political interest in utilizing the SLS for all sorts of missions. And so it is currently written into law that the Europa Clipper must use the SLS. The problem is that the current procurement time for an SLS rocket is about five years. And so to make a 2023 launch date, which is currently the target finish point of the spacecraft,

the rocket would have had to have been began to be built two years ago. Obviously, that didn't happen. So right now, you couldn't launch any earlier than 25 on the spacecraft, meaning you'd have to stick it in storage after you finish it, tens of millions of dollars to keep it in storage. NASA is trying to procure and has been proposing to use a commercial launch vehicle. At this point, probably this the Falcon Heavy, that it will be obviously cheaper. It won't get you there as fast. You'd have to have additional shielding thermal issues to go through the inner solar system, but it can be ready sooner. Because of that ongoing division on the rocket, you can't close some of the engineering decision trees on

how you adapt the spacecraft to the rocket because they don't know the launch vehicle. And you have to have ongoing delays in terms of launch because it still takes time to procure a Falcon Heavy or other commercial launch vehicle. And so right now, this current NASA budget actually pushes the launch date to 2024 regardless. And if we don't resolve this soon, we'll be in a situation I think very similar to Galileo, where you had the spacecraft was ready to go, but faced an increasing backlog on the space shuttle at the time it was using, uncertain second stage launch vehicle on the space shuttle, and then of course the Challenger disaster ultimately pushed it back. sitting so long, it added millions, tens of millions of dollars to the cost of Galileo, and of course, led to the partial failure of the intended to deploy, which really impacted the science success of the mission. So it's something I'm growing increasingly concerned about. You saw some language in the NASA authorization bill proposed by the House of Representatives earlier

in this year that called for a study on what launch vehicle to use. But clearly we're not talking about that right now, nor is that bill going to be moving through Congress anytime soon. And so you're continually stuck unless Congress releases NASA from that legal requirement to launch on the Space Launch System, or somehow Boeing is able to produce those at a faster rate to launch it.

So it's in a bad place, I think, at this point. Bill, any slippage in the Planetary Society's support for this terrific mission? No. Excuse me. That's what I wanted to hear. No, it would be fantastic, you guys. Since I was in school, people have talked about the possibility of life on Europa. In any case, it's an extraordinary world that everybody wants to have a look at.

So many of the technical or scientific engineering problems have been solved with respect to that mission. Just how to get it out there, how to get to deal with Jupiter's radiation, the number of orbits and so on. It's all been figured out. We've seen the administration every year cut all EPO, Education and Public Outreach funding for NASA, and Congress restore it, sometimes at an even higher level. We're seeing that again. Brandon, we'll start with you. Do you believe Congress will once again restore those

funds? And then the second part of that question is, for many people, if it gets cut, will the Planetary Society be able to be a part of stepping up and filling in that hole, that black hole? Brendan? NASA's Education Office has the ability to issue grants across states. There's always going to be congressional appetite to ensure that office is funded. The issue has been, even back when I was on the Hill, there was concerns with how that office was managed. And there were even a couple of times where Congress zeroed out its funding

just to kind of, in one of the earlier versions of the appropriations bill in a certain year, just to kind of scare them or shake them back into, you know, straighten up and fly right kind of thing. I think it's going to be fine. You know, there's enough people that are beneficiaries of those grants that I don't see the political appetite to zero it out. I think it's a statement essentially from the Office of Management and Budget saying, straighten up and fly right. It's like the tides, Matt, as regular as the tides. They propose cuts to the STEM outreach division and Congress will restore them. And so it goes in and out, right? And we've seen this for many years in a row now. If there's

one thing I'm certain about in the age of uncertainty we live in is that that office will continue next year. Bill, you're rumored to have some expertise in STEM, Bill, what would be the Planetary Society's role, whether it's cut or not? Well, for those of you who've taken the time to check out our strategic framework for the next five years, using the funds from people like you, we have a plan to develop a curriculum for teachers and for people outside of the classroom. There's a technical expression in education called informal education, and that means education outside the classroom. And when it comes to science in the United States and in most of the developed world, about half or a little more than half of what you learn about science, you learn outside of the classroom. And this has long been something touted in various ways about NASA itself and European

Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency, especially. It is how it engages young people, how these programs, rather, these agencies engage young people so that we have engineers and scientists in the pipeline to make discoveries and change how it engages young people, how these programs, rather, these agencies engage young people so that we have engineers and scientists in the pipeline to make discoveries and change the course of human history and so on. So the Planetary Society plans to go ahead with our education strategic framework in the coming years. If the education public outreach budget at NASA is significantly cut,

Casey claims, oh, that could never happen. We are going to stay the course. And with your support, we're going to actually tell you bluntly, this is something that our founders really believed in. Lou Friedman, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, very much wanted the Planetary Society to be involved in education. I mean, Carl Sagan was fundamental. I mean, he was an academic, but he was an educator.

Brendan, 10 seconds to close this out there from inside the Beltway. You're our rep. Stay tuned and we'll be seeing you soon. And thank you for the time, especially on a Saturday. And just be well. Casey, I know you have much more fantastic research that I've seen previews of, I and my colleagues, that you're going to be sharing soon,

looking across the entire history of really the space age and the history of NASA. Great stuff to look forward to, folks. Thank you for your support of the Planetary Society. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your membership. We will be talking to you again very soon there you have it highlights of the march 28 2020 space policy and politics briefing from the planetary society uh from our members to you because it was our members of course who

make all of this possible all the good stuff that you just heard about that bill casey and brendan are up to on our behalf. And in fact, even that program, it is our members who allow us to do everything that we do at the Planetary Society. And so we thank all of those of you who are, and we hope that the others of you who can consider such a thing right now will take a look at planetary.org slash membership. Great program, Casey. I look forward to doing this again. Absolutely, Matt. Great program, Casey. I look forward to doing this again. Absolutely, Matt. And everyone out there, please stay healthy and sane. Come and join us at the Planetary Society at our website. We'll be posting lots of content, more projects, more

stuff just to focus on stuff farther afield than what we're facing now. Because I always keep thinking about there's so many wonderful things yet to happen in space exploration. And once we get through this crisis, they're going to be waiting for us to tackle in the next decade. It's going to be an amazing decade coming up. We're lucky. We get paid to look up and we hope that you'll keep doing that with us.

And by the way, be on the lookout for more live and interactive events from the Planetary Society. Be on the lookout for more live and interactive events from the Planetary Society. Like so many other organizations, we recognize that this move is going to be more important now than ever, and we're making some plans. So stay tuned. Nothing specific just yet, but I think you'll have a chance to hear more of Casey, perhaps more of me, and some of our colleagues as well in the coming weeks as we face this challenge together. And of course, I hope you'll tune in to the weekly edition of Planetary Radio. There's a new one every Wednesday morning.

There has been for 17 and a half years. Thanks again, Casey. I'll be talking with you soon. All right. We'll be in touch, Matt. Stay safe, everybody.