Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Pathfinder and the Birth of the Discovery Program

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Pathfinder Mars mission and Sojourner, the first rover on the Red Planet. Historian Michael Neufeld joins the show to put this path blazing mission in context as the start of NASA’s low-cost Discovery mission line. There have been 12 Discovery missions over the past 25 years, with two Venus missions now in development. Why did Discovery succeed when other attempts to reign in costs failed? What drove NASA’s readiness to experiment with new ways of building spacecraft? And how did an embarrassing loss for JPL push the lab to change its approach to planetary exploration? We’ll answer these and other questions as we explore the history of one of NASA’s most successful programs. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/michael-neufeld-discovery-programSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy July, everyone, and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the weekly host of the show, joined as always by our chief advocate, the Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome back. Hey, Matt. Always happy to be here with you and all of you. We have a wonderful conversation. I loved hearing you talk with Michael Neufeld, which is an interview that we just completed before this conversation that you and I are having right now.

I strongly recommend people stay tuned because, boy, is it relevant to a lot of the stuff that we talk about as we talk about planetary science missions today. Michael Neufeld's great. He's a space historian at the National Air and Space Museum. Space Museum. He has done a lot of work on the history of the Discovery Program, which is NASA's low-cost planetary exploration mission program, missions like InSight, missions like Pathfinder, which this month is the 25th anniversary of. We look at how NASA made this long-term commitment to doing low-cost, frequent planetary exploration, what it took to get there, and the outcome of that, and whether they've been able to maintain that. These are really the nuts and bolts of how space programs come to be. Michael Neufeld is also the author of, I would say, the definitive biography of Wernher von Braun that I would really recommend anyone to read. Longtime listeners will

remember him as one of our first guests way back in what was it, 2016? Von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. Wonderful book, still just a fascinating biography of that complicated and forever marked key player of early space exploration in Germany and the United States. So it was delightful to have him back to talk about the history of the Discovery Program. And really kind of think about, again, 25 years ago, the landing of Mars Pathfinder, the first successful US Mars mission since Viking at that point, almost 20 years. So it's a really fun discussion. Great reason to celebrate. And I will note that just a couple of weeks ago, as people hear this, I had back on the show, Just a couple of weeks ago, as people hear this, I had back on the show Lindy L. Constantin, the PI, the principal investigator, for one of those current discovery level missions, Psyche, that we all wish luck to as they try to deal with some software problems. renew our invitation to all of you who are not already members of the Planetary Society

to join up by going to planetary.org slash join, because it pays for all of this stuff that we do. It pays for this show. It pays for all of the great activity that Casey undertakes with Brendan Curry and others, including Bill Nye in Washington, to represent us. I just think of the influence that the society has had over planetary science, including Discovery-class missions, Casey, as proof of the value of this investment. I think it's a great return on investment if you want to talk about how much we've spent on our advocacy work over the years versus the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flown into planetary science since then, even accounting for that we're not the sole mover here, prime mover here. I think it's a really valuable and frankly, unique role that we play, really focusing on exploration, science, planetary science.

Very, very few other organizations are laser focused the way we are on that. And we bring that credibility, knowledge, experience, and reputational ability that you were just saying, to bear on all of this. And that is because, literally, we have members like you, who pay for this and who represent this and stand up and volunteer to support this organization that gives us us so much credibility that people choose to do this. It is a self-demonstrative action to say that people care about space exploration when they are voluntarily become members of the Planetary Society. Well said. Planetary.org slash join is where you can get your voice heard by

joining up, become one of this proud. What's the line? God, now I'm going to screw it up. My Shakespearean daughter is going to be mad at me. Mary, our Mary band.

Sorry. I'm not. That's Shakespeare. That's good. This band of brothers is from Henry the fourth. I think, Oh God, I'm in trouble now.

Anyway, I should know. This is why I do space, Matt. I don't do... Every humanities major listening to this now just wants to throttle both of us. Verily. You should also note that we are having this conversation. We try to make the Space Policy Edition timely, but we're having this one a couple of weeks earlier before the show was actually published because you were about to hit the road. In fact, you're about to head where I just came back from. I'll be in the Space Sustainability Workshop led by the Secure

World Foundation in London. I'll be traveling for that, representing the Planetary Society there, followed by some additional travel in Europe. And so I will be not around by the time you listen to this, but this is why we're recording a bit early. So if any really exciting space policy news happened between June 17th and July 1st, we will cover it in the next episode in August. You bet. Boy, and I guess if it's big enough, I'll just find you in Europe and we'll- You can call me down. In the meantime, what can we say? Well, let's start with the budget outlook.

I mean, really, we're kind of waiting for things to happen in Congress. Yes, we are. We have not yet seen by the time we're recording this in mid-June, neither the House nor the Senate has released their markup, their initial budget proposal for NASA for the coming year. That is likely to change on the books right now. And they're scheduled to have their first markup starting next week and then full committee markup appropriations at the end of June. So we will see at least the House's version of this sometime in the next few weeks, potentially by the time you're listening to this.

We will have full coverage of that as soon as they release the information. We are very much hoping and we've been asking you, our members and others to support Neo Surveyor, which is facing probably the biggest cut of any NASA mission right now in terms of $130 million less than they were anticipating this year, delays the mission by years, completely increases the scope and cost, disrupts the mission planning. And this is our asteroid hunting space telescope that I keep making the point, Matt, and it sounds crazy sometimes to have to keep making the point that we've just gone through a big pandemic, if you remember, as I was recently reminded, that these are low probability events, but they're not zero,

and they're high impact when they happen. And so it's smart to do some modest level of preventative investment. And we did that with mRNA vaccines, other public health investments that helped respond to a low probability, high impact event like a pandemic. What else is low probability? And what else is really high impact? Getting hit by an asteroid. Yeah, right. Very high impact, not zero. And so it behooves us to do, you know, we just learned from the pandemic that it's really good to have some basic tech R&D and testing abilities in place. In order to respond to a potential threat, we need the same for asteroids. At the same time, right after the pandemic, what does NASA do? They propose cutting NeoSurveyor. So it's a bit of a

frustrating situation for everybody, but we've just released a joint letter with the National Space Society, the other broader kind of focused societal membership supported space organization been around for many, many years. We were happy to do that with them to show that there's this broad support between, again, public institutional supported organizations like this is Planetary Society, National Space Society, in addition to a nearly endless list of supportive statements by National Academies reports, public polling, past congressional actions, you name it. This is what we're looking for in the budget to see if Congress restores the funds for that, at least in the House. We'll get another chance with the Senate. And then of course, just whether NASA itself will even meet the budget

growth that the Biden administration proposed for it. It did not make that last year, even with the Democratic controlled House and Senate and a Democratic presidential administration. So I will be looking even at the top line numbers to see if they line up with the proposal, in addition to Nioser-Bayer. I'm also just very happy to hear us working, putting out this joint document with the NSS. I'm a longtime NSS member, as well as a Planetary Society member, and it's good to hear about these two sister organizations working together. If we move on, there are some less significant but still significant news items for us to talk about. One of them we heard about takes us back down to the Cape and a report that was issued just recently about that giant, I think the biggest ever created land vehicle and the second

one that's being built, right? You're talking about the mobile launcher for the Space Launch System SLS rocket. The mobile launcher is, you've seen it, probably pictures, right? It crawls out from the vehicle assembly building with the full launch tower, with the SLS stacked on it, over to the launch pad, plops it down, and then the bottom rolls away and you have your, the whole thing is just ready to go. We need a second mobile launch tower to accommodate the upgraded version of the SLS, the Block 1B, which will have, it'll be taller, it'll carry people, and they could either rebuild the one that they have now, but that would take four or five years, and then you couldn't launch anything because that's the

only launch tower you have. And so starting a few years ago, Congress began appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars to build a second one to have it ready in time for the Block 1B launch. That project, which was originally estimated to cost around $350 million, That project, which was originally estimated to cost around $350 million, the NASA inspector general released a report analyzing the project. There's no way to sugarcoat it. A disaster, I guess, would be the right way to talk about this. The main contractor has spent almost half a billion dollars and done almost no work yet to actually start building. It's all been in the design phase.

And I think this is Bechtel? Bechtel, yeah. To name names? Yeah. Okay. Yep. And they seriously underbid the report claims on the project. They are not delivering. They have had a series of significant management issues and departures. The long and short of it is, if you put NASA's standard project analysis projections in, that this tower will cost nearly one and a half billion dollars

and take six years, more years to build. It's a shocking, I am not known as one to go whole hard into commercial spaceflight as the only answer to things, right? And to really rag on classic government contracting programs. But you look at something like this, and you just wonder, contracting programs. But you look at something like this, and you just wonder bafflingly. So Bechtel kept getting bonuses on the contract performance despite not performing. It just makes you really just so frustrated just as a taxpayer, but also just as a person who wants space to work, right? Who wants these projects to work? How do you end up spending one and a half billion dollars on a tower? And when you again, look over and you see SpaceX building multiple towers within months, frantically, it's just a

mess. The absolute wild thing to me, though, and this shows the profound level of political buy-in that the SLS has that I would argue that you will not see a single change in this program as a result of this. Congress reads this, they'll keep funding it. I may be wrong. We'll see, I guess, in the upcoming appropriations. There may be some harsh language, but I will imagine that the money will be there because of the strong built-in support for this. And so it's a frustrating situation. I don't have any great insight onto it. Bechtel, I should note, disputes the report. They said that they are facing COVID disruptions and changing plans. Changing plans, right? Yeah.

I heard a joke at the NASA Cost and Schedule Symposium, which I'm sure all of you attended this year, as I did. The movie. Yes. There was a joke about, I forget exactly i might mangle this there's a nasa contractor showing off his brand new sailboat to his friends and they said oh what'd you name it he's like oh i named it contract modification it may not be my delivery it may just be the level of jokes for uh custom scheduled people but that i was quite tickled by it nasa is changing constantly the

design requirements for the Block 1B2 because it's not done. And so that adds cost. But still, going from 300-ish million to 1.5 billion is a significant increase to me still. It's a frustrating report. And I think we need to be really honest and open about management failures and contractor failures in order to not just sweep this kind of stuff under the rug because we should have higher expectations for our space program than this. We sure should. Hey, you mentioned SpaceX in passing there. They were waiting for a report from the Federal Aviation Administration for a long time. And that finally came out with recommendations for what they need to do if

they want to launch any gigantic rockets from Texas. That's true. But at the end of the day, they got their approval to do it. They have to do, I forget how many, 52? I think it's 52. Remediation. Yeah, right. Yeah. To varying degrees of silliness. I think they have to do a report on the Mexican-American War, give money to environmental remediation groups and so forth. I don't have a lot to say on this one.

At the end of the day, they got it. It took a long time. Unfortunately, I think they had a huge public input. Some of it very spammy looking to me to read through. But at the end of the day, they get to launch. And I think that's the important thing. There's a whole host of other issues that we could talk about maybe on a different episode. But they're moving forward with this and now potentially doing an orbital launch at the

end of the year or early next year. So I think that's a very exciting step forward to see this project finally open up from a regulatory position. And Hal, I think as I read the description of these requirements set out by the FAA, as I read the description of these requirements set out by the FAA, the one that stuck with me had something to do with the type of shuttle that is used to get employees to the launch pad and back and around the site, which I just thought, okay, that's, that's fine. But it sounds like they might be able to achieve that without too much

difficulty. Oh, well. All right. Well, maybe we'll see that super heavy head to space. Excuse me, Starship. And then eventually super heavy as well head to space before too long. Just one other thing that I think you want to bring up here, and it is NASA's response to the direction that it look into some phenomena, shall we say, that NASA usually doesn't deal with, although it is accused by some of hiding evidence of. I'm being very cryptic here, but...

Phenomena of the unidentified aerial type, the UAPs, aka UFOs. Yes, well, for much of my thoughts on this, I would direct the listener back to my interview with Sarah Skulls. I think that was last spring, where we talked about this and her great book, Why We See Saucers, which is an interesting and very, I'd say sympathetic and fair minded account of the types of people who really are motivated to investigate this on their own, in addition to what we're now seeing, larger institutional investments, investigations and the DOD, and now NASA. Dr. Zurbuchen, who's the head of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, announced that NASA would be doing a limited project, kind of analyzing what's public data. They don't have

access to classified stuff, right? They're a civilian agency, led by a notable Princeton professor. And I think they're spending about $100,000. So it's very modest as these types of things go. And, you know, lay it all out. I do think it's a good thing to be open about this. And I think that's where I really ended this with there's no benefit for NASA, I think, to holding its arm out and saying it's too good

to think about this or it's stupid in advance, because that doesn't stop people from being curious about it. That just becomes part of the cover-up. Exactly, yeah. And so I think it's good to engage. I think they're engaging at an appropriate level. If there's something there, it'll be obvious. If there's not something there, I think that'll be pretty straightforward too. And so the whole sunlight is the best disinfectant. That's Zubukhin's argument. This is a high risk, high reward. We don't know what they are. So people expect us to look into them. Let's look into them. I think then at the same time, there's always going to be, I think, a group of people who have predetermined what these are and will not accept negative conclusions if that's what comes out of the NASA study. And that's ultimately

what we all have to do is just assume that this NASA study is, and I believe it is, being done with good intent and freedom to investigate what they think is real or not, and then freedom to publish what they feel is important or not. Which again, knowing how these systems are set up, they are. They can say what they believe they have found or not. And I think we just let that process work out. It's better to engage in the long run in a serious way at appropriate levels of investment for big questions. And Zurbuchen framed it as, yeah, it's a high risk. There's a reputational risk. And we saw some reporting to that effect on Axios and other kind of news sites about NASA's involvement in this. But at the same time, we just need to trust that by asking questions and approaching in

a scientific way that we, in a sense, trust and have confidence in the scientific process itself. And that means for what the outcomes are, and that's for everybody. So I'm overall rather sympathetic to this. And again, knowing the amount of resources being put behind it, it's not huge. So yeah, let's take a look. You might say the truth is out there. There you go. It's always an interesting thing. I'm using we in a very general sense here. It's such an interesting information environment because there will be people who will take the

fact that NASA is doing it as evidence that there is something, that there's a predestined conclusion that they will. Already happened, right. But the point is, I think that'll happen no matter what. And it's really about for people who aren't polarized on the issue already, which is most people, when they read about this happening, they'll wonder, why isn't NASA saying something about this? They're just associating the role of NASA with respectability, scientific integrity. These are all good things. And so if you see this as a problem, that if you don't think this is real and you think that too much effort is being spent on it, you don't make it go away by ignoring it. You engage with it if there's a serious and sustained audience out there.

And then you say, OK, here's what we found. I look forward to reading that report. Let's move on to that great conversation with Michael Neufeld. We kind of jumped right into it in the conversation. So I just want to preface what the Discovery Program is, just for anyone who's not already familiar with it. It's a funding line. It's an account within NASA's Planetary Science, Planetary Exploration Science Division. It funds what

are nominally low cost, frequent missions that are competed in the sense that NASA doesn't have, they basically put up a chunk of money around half a billion dollars and say, hey, any good ideas for going to any planet that you can do with this? Scientists and consortiums and organizations, they basically pitch NASA. They have this big scientific competition every couple of years where NASA then selects one or two missions that rose to the top that are feasible, have high scientific return, are likely to succeed within the budget limits. These are supposed to be capped at about half a billion dollars currently. They're then managed by a principal investigator and a team that they put together in advance.

They've been very successful over the years. So we've seen a lot of really exciting missions. GRAIL that did the gravity map of the moon is a discovery mission. We saw Messenger to Mercury, maybe one of the most high profile and successful discovery missions that mapped all of the surface of Mercury for the first time. And Pathfinder, which again, we have the 25th anniversary of, demonstrated, proved that JPL could do a low cost planetary mission for the first time. That's the context. That's what discovery is. And it didn't come out of nothing, right? It had to be created and it had to be pushed through a bureaucracy and it had to convince people who were skeptical this was even possible, starting in the late 80s, early 1990s. And that's what Michael Neufeld and I will really dive into

is how that came to be and why NASA needed something like that at that point in its history. Great introduction. Here is Casey's conversation with Michael Neufeld just a couple of weeks before this program was published. I hope you enjoy it and we'll talk to you, wrap things up on the other side. Well, Michael Neufeld, welcome to the Space Policy Edition, or welcome back, I should say. Yeah, it's great to be here. Glad to talk about Discovery. Yes, let's define Discovery. How would you summarize the Discovery program and what makes it unique among NASA planetary programs? Well, the Discovery program began in 1993,

officially by legislation, but really had its origins in 1989, 1990, when there was a lot of disgruntlement in the planetary community. There were very few missions. There were huge, expensive JPL flagship missions, as we call them now. And there was little room for any kind of small, innovative or fast planetary exploration missions at the time. So, you know, try to shorten a long, complicated story.

It landed at a moment when it became possible to think about something new and innovative at NASA. It started before Dan Golden became administrator in 1992 and was originated actually in the Planetary Science Division. But Golden seized onto it as kind of the poster child for faster, better, cheaper. A lot to unpack there, right? So discovery, again, is this idea that we can do planetary exploration without your Voyager multi-billion dollar, multi-decade budgets and time commitment. And this wasn't a new idea in the late 80s or early 90s. Why didn't we have already something like that? And I think we can point to in the astrophysics division at NASA, they do have something like this, the Explorer program, which had been around

for decades. Was there something structural? Was there something institutional? Why did we struggle so long to get a small planetary mission program? That's a very good question and not easy to answer. One of the problems of planetary exploration in the 70s and 80s was essentially after the huge expenditures that took place as kind of the aftermath of the moon race that allowed us to do Viking and Voyager. The budget for planetary exploration went way down, and obviously the impact of Viking was many ways to kill Mars exploration for almost 20 years. We didn't discover any life, and there wasn't any excitement, and the budgets for NASA in the 70s

were poor. So the NASA leadership struggled to get just a handful of missions on the books. So the NASA leadership struggled to get just a handful of missions on the books. One of the things that happened was they decided in order to clarify NASA's organization, they would say all planetary missions would be done only by JPL. Because Ames had had some role with the Pioneer program, but there was an attempt to essentially conserve resources, focus on JPL, and there wasn't a lot of money. There was even an attempt in 1981 at the beginning of the Reagan administration to kill the planetary program altogether, which would have devastated JPL, maybe put it out of business. Well, that was fended off, but there was just a handful of approved missions, Galileo,

there was just a handful of approved missions, Galileo, orbiter to Jupiter, Magellan radar satellite to go to Venus in the 80s, and not much else. There was one attempt to get a cheaper planetary program. It was called Planetary Observer. And the idea was we could take Earth satellite technology, weather communication satellite technology, and make a cheaper, lighter spacecraft. That spun off something called Mars Observer. But the institutional forces of the 80s seemed to push us towards piling everything onto that one mission. So it got more expensive, it got more complicated, and then all the troubles of the shuttle program and everything else got complicated the budget even further. And so Mars Observer became the only thing that came out of Planetary Observer, famously. And it failed. Yeah. I mean, it failed,

it failed as a mission, but it also failed to be a low cost mission at the end of the day, I think the ultimate cost was close to a billion dollars, not adjusted for inflation, which was far more than originally projected for that. Right. One of the assertions I heard from a couple of people, notably Wes Huntress, who was the, among other things, the head of the at that time Solar System Exploration Division in the early 90s, then the head of the Space Science Directorate, he said because it was the only mission to Mars, every scientist who was engaged in that wanted to pile on their experiments. And so you've got more and more. It's like the last bus out of town. Everybody wanted to get on it.

We add this. Well, if we just make this instrument a little better, if we add this other instrument, if we just do a little more with this, we can get more out of it. And so there was a kind of mission creep that resulted in getting bigger and heavier and more complicated. This was after the origin of discovery had already started. And in the early years of Dan Golden being administrator, it blew up like a few days before entering Mars orbit. It was supposed to be an orbiter. I want to hit on something that I think is really important here.

Reflecting on this as I was preparing for this episode, is this exactly what you just said? This idea that it was every mission was going to be the last bus out of town. The planetary science community is approaching these missions in the late 70s and all throughout the 80s as grabbing whatever they could because there was just a dearth of missions. And it creates this death spiral in terms of cost because then there's no discipline. Your entire career, you'll never get this again.

So how can you possibly try to control that? And I think the key to the discovery program succeeding where the observer program or even the kind of the pioneer ish program in the late 70s failed, was that it started out the gate with multiple missions, the idea being, all right, you don't get this mission, you don't get your instrument on this spacecraft, you don't get your concept selected, you'll have another shot in a couple of years. And that allowed almost this imposition of focus and being able to say no, because it just wasn't the end of things. And I wonder if that's kind of the key to this success versus previous attempts. Well, it certainly was one key. It was the idea that

there would be a rapid turnaround, that there would be, yeah, several opportunities. I mean, in later years, it's become very hard to reapply. But in the early years of discovery, the idea was if you fail on this round of competition, there's the next round of competition. But I think, you know, the word competition here is also critical. The idea that there would be competed mission selection. The traditional mode on which NASA had operated was that a political consensus formed to do a particular mission, Mars, whatever. And NASA would direct JPL or in an earlier time also sometimes Ames to build that spacecraft. And it was driven by engineering, usually not by science. Partly because we came out of the early days of planetary exploration, the main challenge was getting there at all,

just having a spacecraft survive and operate. So science was always kind of hung on to what was largely an engineering exercise. Science was not the central driver, in part because it was just so hard to get there. Now as the technology matured, it became more possible to imagine, you know, essentially having a competitive spacecraft in which the principal investigator in a university, maybe, or in an organization, could be JPL or Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, APL, could apply to say, I want to do a science mission to Mars or an asteroid or whatever, and here is the framework in which I want to do it. That's different than

saying, NASA, you go build a spacecraft, you know, JPL, you go build a spacecraft, and then you ask the scientific community what instruments you'd like to hang on it. And also, I think, too, the concept of ownership or centralization of management through the single PI of a mission. And also the idea that you have to argue in advance that your mission is going to fit with some cost envelope, right? As opposed to being assigned and then kind of ladling on a bunch of additional aspects to this. Planetary seems interesting case because they had comeling on a bunch of additional aspects to this. Planetary seems interesting case because they had come out of a history of, and it may be that kind of curse of Apollo era aspect where they were flooded with money for lunar projects back in the 1960s. And then as the human spaceflight program kind of ramped down in the early 70s, it's,

as you pointed out, Viking was seen as this huge investment. It was the Cadillac mission of planetary exploration, right? If you adjust it to today's dollars, it's around $7 billion for that one mission, which was, I mean, five flight ready spacecraft. Coming from that history, then you could see just institutionally how there would be a challenge to even approach this from a more scrappy, lower cost concept, right? You would just because all the systems, all the approaches, all the designs had come from a heritage of assuming lots of money to spend with them. And this is where this other entrant comes in that I'm really fascinated by that you talk about in your research, that it was the idea of competition, not just from the science community, but the idea

that you have other NASA or space centers competing for the opportunity to build planetary missions. And this is where APL comes in. Can you talk about the role of APL in early discovery mission selection? APL and particularly Stamatios Chromagius, better known as Tom Kramigis at APL. This is at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, I should say. So, yeah, just for context for anybody, APL is an institution in the suburbs between Baltimore and Washington run by Johns Hopkins. Fundamentally, it is a always been a Navy contractor. Johns Hopkins, fundamentally, it is always been a Navy contractor. It's still dominated by Navy and defense work in which some space work was part of their job. They had done the transit navigation satellites for the Navy, and they'd done some what we now call heliophysics missions,

ionospheric, magnetospheric missions, that kind of thing. So they had this experience building small satellites, Earth orbit, for navigation and for heliospheric science. Chromagius was frustrated with this limitations of planetary exploration. He wasn't the only one in the early 90s, but he said, as you mentioned at the outset, astrophysics had long had the Explorer program. And it was not only astrophysics, but also the space physics, what later called heliophysics people, had both used Explorer to launch small payloads into Earth orbit. APL was positioning itself as an alternative for spacecraft development and really focusing on the fact that they could deliver it cheaper and faster than JPL. So,

which was threatening to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which at that point, as you had identified at this point as the planetary center for NASA. As the sole planetary center of NASA. As the sole planetary, yeah. Right. I mean, and effectively anointed that by NASA in the 80s. APL under Chromagius, who was basically focused on civilian science and had an important role, for example, on Voyager. He was one of the PIs of one of the charged particle experiments on Voyager. He was interested in a new small planetary program. And he said, APL can do this. APL can be part of this. That was coincided with

the fact that Wes Huntress had started as the head of Solar System Exploration Division in 1990. And he was looking around for competition because he felt like JPL, and I don't want to put anything JPL down, it's a wonderful organization, it's done fantastic things. But JPL at that time, he viewed as being a little bit bureaucratic, expensive, not feeling like it needed to worry about any competition from anybody else. Wes Huntress looked around and he saw APL as a possibility and the Naval Research Laboratory, which does significant Navy space work in Washington, D.C., as possible alternatives. Well, NRL really wasn't all that interested, but APL was interested under Prometheus in getting into small planetary exploration. You know, Huntress sort of set it up at the beginning of the discovery program

as he was looking around for a way to get this going and get it funded. You know, he said, let's ask both JPL and APL to compete for a mission which came to be called Near Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. This was kind of viewed early on as a potential cheaper mission. It's not as far away as Mars if you pick the right asteroid to go to. So it could be cheaper and less complicated. You don't have to land on it, really. You can just get near it, low gravity and all of that.

So this was viewed as a possibility. all of that. So this is viewed as a possibility. And so in 1991, 92, Wes Huntress asked JPL and APL to present proposals for a near mission for $150 million. And this leads to this infamous meeting proposals, like where you hear JPL layout, completely ignore this cost cap functionally, right? You summarize, what was presented then at this? And this story, again, is, I think, really critical to defining the concept and start maybe the culture of discovery program. This is actually at JPL in April 1992. And there's a meeting in front of this review board saying we've got to try to pick a proposal. JPL gets up and presents a program of three spacecraft, which would cost $450 million. And, you know, sort of iterative approach, the first spacecraft just goes out there and see if it'll work. And then another one, and then the third one, finally, after you've already spent

at least $450 million, would actually be the spacecraft, the science spacecraft that would go to the asteroid. It just made a lot of the people there in the room extremely angry. They thought, you know, you just don't get it. You don't have any idea what we're trying to do with this program. Then APL got up and said, we can do this for $110 million, one spacecraft, one mission. We don't even need 150 million to do that. You have a quote here in your paper from Jim Martin, who is the project manager for Viking, famously blunt. And he was, it says, furious yelling at JPL, you people think we're stupid, don't you? For this. So it really kind

of cuts to the chase of how much, how badly JPL misread the room at that point. Right. I mean, how much leadership and everybody else had just felt like, we know planetary exploration. We know how to do it. It's naive to think you can get to an asteroid for $150 million. It's going to take a lot of development, a lot of engineering, a lot of time. Yeah, it was completely wrong.

And there was just essentially no contest. I mean, there was skepticism in the room about APL's low cost estimate for NIR. But they said, well, look, we have this experience and it's, you know, it would be our first mission beyond Earth orbit. But still, you know, this is feasible. And so for Wes Huntress, it was essentially no contest. And APL was effectively selected, which of course at that point got complicated because then this whole idea of what became Mars Pathfinder sort of came out of left field. At least it came out of left field for Tom Kramigis and APL. Casey, we'll be right back with this month's Space Policy

Edition guest, historian Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum. As you may have heard, the NEO Surveyor mission got at least tentative good news in the U.S. House of Representatives appropriations bill that was released after I recorded this week's show with Casey. It requests a substantial increase for the mission in the fiscal year 23 federal budget. We'll continue to report on progress toward getting this dedicated telescope in space, where it will find many more of those near-Earth objects. Here's a message from someone you know about this part of the Society's mission. Hi, it's Bruce. Will you help defend Earth? The Planetary Society is advancing the

global endeavor to protect our world from an asteroid impact. It's the one large-scale natural disaster we can prevent, but we're not ready yet. Please, become a planetary defender and power our crucial work. You can double your support for planetary defense when you make a gift today. When you do, a generous member of the society will match your gift up to a total of $15,000. It's a great opportunity to make a difference. Visit planetary.org slash defend earth. Thanks. Thinking about why institutionally discovery succeeded versus not, or versus other attempts that had failed. Again, this idea of competition, the fact that JPL could lose, right?

Because they actually came back and requested, they kind of apologized and requested another day to reformulate and reassess when they realized exactly kind of what they're up against, how critical that was. But let's step back just for one second and just put this in a larger context. You'd already mentioned Dan Golden coming in, who does later, famously pushes this faster, better, cheaper concept for NASA. But discovery predates that. This is all happening in the context of a NASA budget projection starting to turn flat for the future. And then also, of course, the seismic world altering political change of the end of the Cold War. Right. And NASA seeing its role diminish as a concept of a function of that.

So, I mean, it seems like your discovery seemed very well-timed to take advantage of these broader trends about how and what government should be doing and how that should operate. Yet another factor, which is interesting, as you don't expect, is SDI, Star Wars. You know, the idea of essentially fast, minimal bureaucracy, get results quickly, that had come out of Strategic Defense Initiative and out of the experimental space programs that came out of it, which APL had also done for SDIO. And so there was a sense in the early 90s, and this also is in the wake of the Hubble-Mirror flaw being discovered. Right. Very embarrassing, right?

So NASA's been having, with the loss of Mars Observer the following year, right, you have a number of very public failures. And you point out the shuttle had been grounded a lot at this period too for tank leaks. A lot was not looking great for NASA in general. Right. NASA looked bad in the early 90s. And the sense was, you know, since the SDI, although, of course, at the end of the Cold War, it kind of really cut that back. But the sense was SDI was innovative and looking at new techniques to save money and get results fast. And NASA was bloated and bureaucratic and slow and wasting a lot of money and overruns. And NASA didn't look good. And also at this time, as you mentioned, the pressure on the budget increased because of the

end of the Cold War. And a lot of NASA's budget was based on competing with the Soviet Union, and now there wasn't a Soviet Union. So there was much more motivation in 1992 to go a new way and throw out the old model, or at least try a new model in addition to the old model, and try to do something else. And all of this is the background to why, you know, at the very end of what became the only term of the H.W. Bush administration, that Dan Golden was taken actually from TRW's secret military and reconnaissance program and made the head of NASA. He was a change. He was kind of hired as a change agent at NASA and known for that. And still, I think, is the longest serving NASA administrator, right? He served for 11 years, something like that. Yeah. I mean, because of that reputation of being the change

agent, he managed to survive the change of administrations in 1993 to Democratic administrations. And in fact, he survived all the way near the end of all of Clinton's two terms. And beyond that, into the George W. Bush administration a little bit. So he survived a long time. I mean, you know, I have to say, Golden was a controversial leader because he could be abusive. He could be very management by intimidation. So, you know, I wouldn't call him an ideal manager, but his whole point, you know, the point of his administration was to shake up NASA and say, hey, you know, we're bureaucratic and slow and expensive. We got to figure out how to do something different. I mean, again, so much of this seems like for changes like this to happen in a bureaucratic

institution, there has to be a credible threat to that bureaucratic institution almost. And I want to so you have this multivariate intersection of credible threats through new leadership, budget changes, socio political changes throughout the world. And I think with the mix of failures, and so you look at something like early discovery, the near missions like, oh, let's give it to APL, it's it's relatively low cost even if it fails it's not a huge you know you start looking at that risk success calculation becomes a lot less risky to fail let's bring in pathfinder at this point because this is you know it's the 25th anniversary as we're talking about this pathfinder starts its life up in nasa aims as this pathfinding kind of concept for like a, what was it, like a Mars base stations, right?

To do, is it seismic stations? I think seismic had a lot to do with the idea that they would deploy a network of small stations on Mars, which would be, could be a network of seismometers and other instrumentation, which was called Measure Mars Environmental Survey. Ames was looking to try to get back into the planetary exploration business. The last mission had been Pioneer Venus, the two Pioneer Venus spacecraft that were launched in 79. This was an innovative concept. Wes Huntress at Solar System Exploration was that, well, that's kind of interesting. They have a mission called Pathfinder, which would try to land one spacecraft to essentially pioneer this concept of landing a network. But, you know, he remained skeptical of the technical depth of aims

to actually pull off a mission like that. He actually sort of redirected it to JPL and said, you know, would you want to try this kind of small, innovative mission for Mars? Now, part of that story about the infamous meeting about NEAR at JPL was, as you mentioned, JPL went back and said, give us another chance. And they got out an innovative manager called Tony Spear, who would help to rescue the Magellan when it had crippling software problems in Venus orbit, and said, you go figure that out. And so Tony Spear came back with a credible concept for near at $150 million. But, you know, APL was cheaper. And so they went that way. But it brought to Wes Huntress's attention that Tony Spear might be the manager who could do something

that sort of ran against the grain of the way things were done at JPL in the early 90s. I mean, how important is this timeline, in the sense that if they had tried to move Pathfinder down to JPL prior to this, to losing a mission to APL, would we have a Pathfinder? Would we have had the mission that we ended up having? Or did it really take, again, this credible threat developing? It was like, okay, now JPL wanted to prove itself that they could compete on this level. Right. And certainly JPL wanted to have a piece of it compete on this level. Right. And certainly JPL wanted to have a piece of it. And I think Wes Huntress was thinking also,

we need to make sure that JPL is still on board, that they're cooperative, they're not being put out of the planetary exploration business by APL. So he said, he encouraged them to look into this mission. Now into this came this other idea of a small rover, of a sort of a mini rover that could be attached to or put on board this Pathfinder spacecraft. You know, he got excited about this idea of a technology demonstrator of the sort of mini or even micro rover that Pathfinder could carry and put on the surface

in sort of pioneer rover technology. So that became a package, you know, the Pathfinder spacecraft, something, a cheaper way to get to the surface of Mars and having a demonstrator for a rover. I noted this in the paper. I always feel like space projects succeed when they're solving problems for someone, right? It's not just doing it for their own sake, but they're solving a broader political problem. You're aligning a problem. You're doing something that is seen as useful.

And Pathfinder seemed to check off a lot of these boxes, right, for NASA. Pathfinder seemed to check off a lot of these boxes, right, for NASA. Pathfinder, it kind of, as you pointed out, it helped maybe smooth over some of the disruption at JPL after losing NIR. It gave an administration that was big on Mars, a Mars mission, but also didn't have the money. An affordable Mars mission that they wanted to head off, right? That they had seen this with Clementine of the small, cheap lunar mission happening. How much did that kind of play into this as being able to stop or to secure NASA's role in this area? Well, certainly, you know, there was internal to NASA, there was a concern between Wes Huntress. Of course, another part of this story is very complicated story is that, you know, the failure

of George H.W. Bush's space exploration initiative. So he gets on the steps of my museum in July 1989 on the 20th anniversary of the Paul lining the moon and says, we're going to go to the moon and Mars. And then NASA is tasked with finding a way to send humans back to the moon and onto Mars. And NASA comes back with this incredibly expensive program, something like half a trillion dollars or something. And it's an immediate political lead balloon. I mean, it's another part of the story why NASA in the early 90s was viewed as bloated and expensive. There was an attempt sort of in the earlier 90s to try to revive that, to get back to a simpler Moon-Mars program. Is there some way to rescue the Space Exploration Initiative? Huntress begins to think there's way to rescue the Space Exploration Initiative?

Huntress begins to think there's going to be competition for the Moon and Mars, and he could lose the Moon and Mars from the planetary division to this exploration division, that this exploration division, so certainly the heritage of SEI, would take on the mission. And in fact, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization creates its own mission to go to the moon in an asteroid called Clementine, which actually was done by Naval Research Laboratory. So yeah, there's a lot of sense of threat. Wes Huntress is thinking, are we going to lose our, is the Planetary Science Division going to lose its control over planetary exploration? Are we going to end up with competition? Are we going to end up being undermined or becoming marginal because of this competition? So he was looking for innovative ideas that would go over with NASA

leadership. And he didn't want to lose Mars for certainly to the exploration division. So that's where this whole idea of Pathfinder sort of originated and then sticking onto it an innovative mini rover, in addition, made it look sort of even sexier as a mission concept and help him keep that mission inside the planetary division. This idea, again, of pushing the boundaries still and using technology, almost as the science was going to be, you got science out of it, but it was still at the end of the day, a technology demonstration, which meant some of the costs could be kept lower, because you didn't have to, you didn't have to succeed. Right? It was the whole point was that it was experiment and allowed, at least on paper failure, even though this was probably a mission that they really couldn't afford to fail at the end of the day, because it came so visible, right? It landed on July 4th of 1997. And it was this huge event. I remember watching it as a kid, it was a massive event,

CNN would cover this live. At the end of the day, they gambled and won. And both Pathfinder and NEAR succeeded, ultimately. And both of them, I double-checked in my planetary exploration budget set. Both of them cost about what was predicted, $124 million to build NEAR and $174 million to build Pathfinder, plus $25 million for the rover. And when you look at that compared to Mars Observer, those are, I mean, combined, those are less than half of Mars Observer. Yeah. Right? Right. And when you look at that compared to Mars Observer, those are, I mean, combined, those are less than half of Mars Observer, right? Right. But something else key I actually just, I do want to hit on because their success wasn't guaranteed either, right? We had to get it through congressional approval as a program, right? The new start for the Discovery Program had to happen.

This is where something really also critically important happened, contingent on the fact that APL was a part of this, which was when they were proposing to start funding Discovery. At the beginning, it looked like Pathfinder would end up muscling out any other program. All the money would initially go to Pathfinder. What happened in this early 93 period when they were trying to get the Discovery program off the ground and what ended up paying off for APL? You know, when this Mars thing came out of what, at least for Tom Kramigis at APL, looked like left field, suddenly they were being displaced by NEAR was on the budget, was going to be pushed down in the order. was going to be pushed down in the order and later, and the Mars Pathfinder would come first, and the NEAR might not even be funded at all, or may not be funded till later. So it wasn't clear exactly how this was all going to play out. And of course, at the same time, Golden was now in office, and he was looking around for a program as a represent his faster, better, cheaper idea, and Discovery Program was it. So Golden was very excited about the Mars project and having an innovative way to go

to Mars and didn't really care about NEAR. But APL, I mean, Tom Kramigis was always very politically skilled, went to Senator Barbara Mikulski and said, they're going to leave us out of the budget. We were supposed to be first, and now suddenly we're not even going to be funded at all, or maybe on a very low level of initial funding without really a go-ahead to do the spacecraft. Just to sort of shorten that story up, it all went all the way down to the fall of 1993. And Barbara Mikulski said, the solution is you both get a program. So she managed to push through with the Senate and House appropriations that both NEAR and Mars Pathfinder

would be funded and Discovery Program would be authorized with those as the first two missions. And astute listeners recall Barbara Mikulski, ex-Senator now from Maryland, the savior of many a NASA science program, whether at Goddard or APL, right? We can trace her, help save James Webb Space Telescope, help save the New Horizons missions

to Pluto, helped establish also a very similar story, established the New Frontiers mission line. But all of that because NEAR was coming out of AP in maryland right she would not have done this if jpl had won near right so there's this political it's almost like

the innovation here too from a bureaucratic standpoint was to leverage the parochialism behind politics that fund space program it makes sense to spread some of these things around because then you build your congressional constituency to have support. And Barbara McCall stick in. She just gave the money to both at the end of the day. Much bigger than was requested initially. Right. Back to the point where Dan Golden was angry that somehow the budget he didn't want, but Wes Hunter said it made him very happy.

By that time, you know, he'd been elevated to be the head of what now is called the science directorate, but in those days was the Office of Space Science. So, yeah, it turned out well. Everybody was happy, basically. JPL had a mission to Mars and APL had its NEAR. I mean, to this day, as far as APL is concerned, NEAR was first. But officially speaking, Mars Pathfinder was discovery mission number one. Yeah, NEAR launched first. NEAR launched first, yeah. Yeah.

It had a long, complicated path to the asteroid Eros. And it launched in early 1996. You know, it was a happy outcome for all concerned. The question was then, can this be turned into a sustainable program? Because even though Congress had authorized Discovery Program in the fall of 93, it had not yet authorized the concept that this would be a continuous budget line. So that's another really important idea. Most of you probably have heard of the new start, and there must be a new start in the budget. So if you want to have Viking, or you want a Voyager, or you want a Magellan, whatever, there has to be a congressional appropriation for that one program. The idea was that discovery

would be aligned. There'd always be a line in the budget that said discovery program gets, I don't know, in those days, probably like 500 million or something like that, or maybe less than that. But there would be a line in the budget that NASA could work with and did not have to go back to Congress and ask for permission for every single mission, every single spacecraft, did not need an individual appropriation. This was actually the way that the Explorer Program had operated. There was a line way that the Explorer program had operated. You know, there was a line for Explorer program and NASA would run this, that there would be some competitive applications for astrophysics, heliophysics missions. So if Discovery could do that, then, you know, you wouldn't have to worry about getting over the political hump every

other year for a new appropriation. Another part of it was, of course, now they want to actually implement the idea of discovery program. Those first two missions were assigned. So effectively, they were not actually the discovery model in terms of competitive, PI driven, you know, maybe out of a university. So there was a big workshop at San Juan Capistrano in late 1992, which the community was asked to propose missions. And so there was like several dozen very innovative concepts proposed by people in the centers and in the universities. And out of that, NASA selected a dozen or so and said, hey, these are interesting concepts. We'll send you some more, NASA selected a dozen or so and said, hey, these are interesting concepts.

We'll send you some more, give you some more seed money to try to develop them. So, you know, there was a real sense in the community, hey, we actually can do this. We actually can start competing spacecraft ideas. Overall, relatively successful. I mean, you follow up with Stardust and Genesis. Contour explodes in space. But then they continue Messenger, Deep Impact, Dawn, Grail, Insight, Lucy, and Psyche. It begins to succeed. I think you see a lot of other initial success in the 90s of not Discovery-class missions, but low-cost missions, you know, Global Mars Surveyor-class missions succeed initially

for a while. Watching this and analyzing this program now that's been going on for 30 years, I guess, almost 30 years. How has it changed over that time? And is it still the same program philosophically that it was, do you think, at the beginning? Well, you know, the one thing that's clearly gone away is low cost. The story behind that is in part because of the fate of faster, better, cheaper. So in the 90s, Dan Golden said, we've got to take risks. We got to be willing to accept failures. We have to be willing to cancel programs and run over budget no matter how much they've

already spent. Trying to foster this climate of we take risks, we're willing to have failures. And then, of course, the infamous two Mars failures of 1999, one crashes on the surface and the other burns up, or at least was misdirected such that it ran into the atmosphere and burned up or was bounced off. We don't know exactly what happened to it, but both Mars missions were lost, produced a political crisis. It produced a extremely hostile criticism in Congress. And it sort of illustrated the fact that we like to talk about taking risks and we like to talk about missions failing. But when missions actually fail, Congress and the media jump down the throats of the organizations like JPL. They weren't cheap enough to endure the double failure. Yeah, that's a good point. They're still hundreds of millions of dollars and not that cheap.

And the early discovery limit was $150 million, which would then be adjusted for inflation. So by the end of the 90s, it was more like $250 million. It was not politically acceptable to really lose spacecraft. And so the message that Golden and NASA took away from this was, we have to get more conservative. We have to pile on more reviews. We have to have more spacecraft. We have to have more backup, you know, not just single point of failure everywhere, all over the spacecraft where the whole mission could be lost.

In that sense, over time, the cheapness of discovery went away, but the reliability went up as a result of spending more money. There weren't many failures after that. I was part of a group that submitted a paper to the Decadal Survey, Planetary Science Decadal Survey, this last round led by Elizabeth Frank, and she used some of my data I'd put together about discovery programming. You just see this trend adjusted for inflation, looking at near and Pathfinder, those are about 400 to $500 million mission in today's dollars, if you add everything up, including the launch costs and operations. But now you're looking at Lucy and Psyche, which are the two latest discovery missions with their operations plan, you're looking at 800 $900 million, with a good chunk of that $600 million now being just building the spacecraft itself, right?

And so I guess those are still cheaper than other planetary missions. But yeah, I think that the argument of this paper was that the appetite for risk is functionally no longer there. These are just targeted science missions and no longer share that. I think also because another characteristic of early discovery missions, right? You had to launch them within 36 months. You could not spend eight years building them. And then they also.

It wasn't time to launch or was it just development time? But anyway, yeah, there was a there was a nation on the. It was a tight window for development. And then they had to fit on a Delta two. Is that correct? They had to launch on a Delta II. Or something even smaller. I mean, there were a few things. Lunar Prospector was launched on essentially on a refurbished ballistic missile or at least rocket derived from ballistic missile components. That $150 million cap was not to include the launch vehicle, but as you say,

it was limited to a smaller medium-sized launch vehicle as the assumption. Part of the problem also is when you got into the 90s, the Delta II became obsolescent. What became United Launch Alliance was developing new rockets, and the prices went up, and it got more expensive to launch things as well. What survived the discovery was still really important in spite of the fact that it stopped being so real, a low cost, risky program. The competition element remained very influential and important and innovative. outside NASA centers that could lead these missions, whether it be in a university like University of Arizona, Arizona State, or Johns Hopkins APL, or something else like that. Somebody else could do these things, partner with a center, usually APL, JPL, and then Goddard also came into the picture, and partner with a center and build a spacecraft. So there was

competition for the science, what kind of science you could do and how you could get innovative science under a cost cap. And there was competition between institutions that build spacecraft, design spacecraft. So this kind of stimulated more innovative concepts. So, you know, that part of discovery survived the end of faster, better, cheaper, survived Dan Golden and even survived its own crisis in the early 2000s when a lot of missions were running way over budget and behind schedule and still continues to be influential. of that is how the New Frontiers program, which is essentially the next level up, how that came

out of the idea of discovery. I mean, and there, I've told in a separate article about the competition for Pluto and how all that played out was, again, APL won with their concept. They beat JPL. And thanks to Barbara Mikulski, it survived multiple attempts to cancel it and became the starter for a new frontiers program that competed a midsize planetary mission. consequence of kind of institutional kind of bureaucratic ways of managing programs that the growth is just always happening until you need a crisis that just has some external forcing function that reformulates how these things work? I mean, as an observer and historian of these types of institutions, is this just a natural or inevitable cycle that we see? Yeah. Well, certainly there's nothing inevitable about the budget going up. You have to realize, I mean, we've been very fortunate. Unfortunately, yeah. budget was flat or declining and you know Wes huntress was searching around for a way to

essentially get more for his dollars and to convince Golden and the political system that there was worse still worth spending money on on planetaries so yeah exactly it's sort of budget crisis and sense of being you know politically being vulnerable certainly help motivate. So, yeah, when the budget just sort of goes up inevitably and there's no real danger, then, you know, institutions tend to become bureaucratic and sluggish over time because they're not much, nobody to compete against or no powerful motivation to reshape their organization. I mean, JPL has really changed the way it was organized. When I was last doing the article on Europa,

I talked to Charles Alachi and he said, yeah, I mean, we had to rethink how we organized our laboratory because it was always about one giant spacecraft after the next, you know, because it was always about one giant spacecraft after the next, you know, Viking and Voyager and Galileo and so on. We had to figure out how to compete with Discovery, how to have multiple proposals at the same time, how to partner with university PIs, whatever. And so, you know, the net result is that JPL is now, once again, the dominant player in Discovery wins on in because it has

reorganized itself to be competitive in discovery and new frontiers. The entire field of planetary science is just in a fascinating point compared to when discovery started, you had Dan Golden go to JPL in what 93 and address them next to the Voyager mock-up, the full-size Voyager mock-up. And he says, you're not going to get any more. Cassini is going to be the last mission like this that we're going to do. But now, of course, at JPL, they're doing not just Europa Clipper,

which is Cassini scale, not bigger, more expensive, but also Mars Sample Return at the same time. Right after having done Perseverance, more expensive, but also more sample return at the same time, right after having done Perseverance after Curiosity, it ended up these big, big missions are tenacious in terms of being able to, it's just, there's this drift or institutional set of forces that kind of drive you to those. And if we're seeing that a little bit with Discovery, I was thinking about is Simplex or the super small sat or commercial partnership providers, is that going to displace or recreate this kind of sense of innovation, exploration or experimentation and failure? Is that what we were going to see in the future? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly it's probably time to consider whether we need to have a new sort of entry level planetary mission program because discovery has become more mid-sized

than small and risky. Yeah, I know there were some various concepts for, and actually we had that one experiment with a Mars sort of CubeSats. So there could be more of the, you know, new ideas for cheaper sort of very focused, you know, one instrument kind of missions or something the flagship is not dead obviously it's been declared dead they're big long live the flagship yeah there's been it's you know the reality is there's still sometimes things we want to do something ambitious and you know like landing a large rover on mars and or returning a sample or whatever so So going to Europa, it's just not possible to do that on the cheek. Yeah, there's no shortcuts to some of those if you're going to

this hideous radiation environment around Jupiter, like that just that just presents a fundamental challenge. And what's interesting to me is I see, you know, I think we see NASA right now, experimenting with a lot of different low costcost planetary through simplex but also through the commercial lunar payload services but there's no coherent kind of broader goal that we saw with discovery and so it seems like we're attacking us in a number of problems but inconsistently like simplex has been kind of a handful of missions but it's not really an enduring program it's funded scattered now throughout the agency. CLPS is going to be maybe the closest thing that we see, but NASA is still providing all

of the resources for the instrumentation. And I wonder if what we're experimenting with is what's the bar for getting usable science data versus the engineering and overhead required to deliver one instrument to a different celestial body. What's the lower end of that spectrum, which is an extreme version of cost cutting compared to some of these. I mean, these simplex missions are $55 million, right? That's way cheaper than even the original discovery missions. I mean, that's probably what we need is a little more coherence in that program for finding cheap ways to go. But sometimes even competition among these programs is

helpful in itself. You state at the close of your article that Discovery is one of the few projects in NASA space science history to have not only worked but survived over the long haul. Do you still see that being true for the future of Discovery program that we have now with our two Venus missions and how people are engaging with it? Yeah, I mean, it seems to be, you know, very entrenched in the way we think about what missions are done. So the decadals themselves, the last one, the current one, the new one, you know, has supported Discovery and New Frontiers, have stated we need to keep them, and just how do we adjust the budgets and the expectations in those

programs so that they work? But yeah, there's no sign that they've lost their popularity or that they're going away in any way. It's only always a question of being able to afford these missions within the overall budget. And we can hope that NASA's budget doesn't go backwards, but things are possible. So the innovative and competitive dimensions of Discovery, you know, have been influential. And that means I think it retains a lot of credibility, even though it's no longer cheap and risky. Well, Dr. Michael Neufeld, the Senior Curator in the Space History Department at the National Air and Space Museum, space historian and expert on the history of the Discovery Program.

Thank you for joining us today. It was delightful to have you back on the show. It was a wonderful talk to you. I enjoyed it very much. Historian Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum talking with our own Casey Dreyer. Great conversation, Casey. So much of that stayed with me. One thing in particular actually came from you, although Michael completely agreed,

that change, major organizational change, often comes only when there is a threat, at least a perceived threat, and frequently a very real threat. Maybe I'd temper it and say a serious challenge, but now really, I think threat is maybe the way to go. Yeah, or maybe external forcing function, if you want to be more generic with it, but something from the outside generally, right? And I was fascinated and I continue to be fascinated about how NASA as an organization responds and adapts to this type of situation. And whether in absence of that, I think you're right, it's a very challenging idea when you step back to think about it. Because what we want generally as advocates, space advocates, is more resources for NASA. But would you have had a program like this,

absent that external threat of funding freezings and needing to do something more with less? And sometimes you can shake otherwise ossified bureaucracy or people within it to institutions run by people, right? With all the attendant complexities and frustrations that hominids bring to their group dynamics. And having some external thing, and I think about this all the time. This is, I think, why we have decadal surveys for science, but not human spaceflight, because we have the external forcing function of the scientific process of external data, right? That drives consensus. And you have an external political situation. the external forcing function of the scientific process of external data, right, that drives consensus. And you have an external political situation, you can drive consensus to solutions to that. Absent that, it's a much harder thing to drive internal consensus by mere beautiful rational argument alone, as much as we'd like to believe otherwise. And so it is fascinating. So again, I think it's an interesting perspective and a challenging one to think about as advocates, because at the end of the day, we want more missions and more exploration.

Generally, that requires more resources. But if there are ways to streamline, improve, make things more efficient, we should really think about ways to do that as well. I'd like to do it not in a negative structure always, right? I don't always want there to be a negative threat as the motivator, but again, our little hominid brains tend to respond very strongly to that as a motivating factor. I suspect that we have a listener or two out there or a few thousand who have also seen that it sometimes takes an existential threat to get an organization back on track or working at the level it should be or considering the kinds of new activities that it should. So yeah, space is no different. It's all us people standing behind

these things. Great conversation, Casey, as usual. Thank you. And I guess with that, we can wrap things up, except to remind everybody, if you like what you hear, and we hope that you also like what you see when you go to planetary.org to learn more. That's also where if you are hearing this someplace else, you can find lots of relevant links, ways to learn more about the stuff that Michael Neufeld and Casey were just talking about, and of course, everything else that we're up to at the Planetary Society. And while you're there, stop by the Become a Member page, planetary.org slash join, if you want to take the expressway. And please, if you're not already, consider becoming a member. And if you are a member,

thank you very much for standing behind all of this. Casey, thanks. Have a wonderful, wonderful trip across Europe. I look forward to hearing about it. And I look forward to talking again when we gather on the first Friday in August. I'll be there, Matt. That's Casey Dreyer, Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio. Hope you will join us every week as we bring you that weekly version of the show, and that you will come back in August for the Space Policy Edition. Have a great month, everybody. Stay cool and ad astra. Thank you.