Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Should the U.S. be in a space race with China?

Episode Date: February 1, 2019

China's space program notched an impressive "first" last month when its Chang'e 4 spacecraft landed on the far side of the Moon. The U.S. space program, in contrast, was in the midst of an extended shutdown. Some observers expect China's growing space capability and lunar ambitions to trigger a new space race. Not Dr. Roger Handberg, Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Florida. He discusses how the current geopolitical situation differs from the Cold War standoff between two superpowers, and how we shouldn't expect dollars to flow back to the U.S. space program as a consequence of China's space successes. Cooperation, or even friendly competition, is a much more likely outcome than a new space race. More resources to explore this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-34.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, Space Policy fans. This is the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, coming to you for February of 2019, right on time, too. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of the weekly version of Planetary Radio that I hope you're also enjoying. And I am joined once again by the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome back, Casey. Hey, Matt. I am unfurloughed, though we're all unfurloughed now. Not that I was ever furloughed, but I like to associate myself.

The shutdown's over. Maybe we should say that. The shutdown's over, at least for now. Yay! Yes, and I celebrated that in the weekly show. It was published just before this. Bill Nye was celebrating the same thing and hoping that we don't have to face this again in, well, less than three weeks now as people hear this. But it is worth celebrating, right?

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Hopefully we can have a we can cross the low bar of being happy that the United States space program has no longer furloughed 90 percent of its employees and made the rest work for free. Yeah. I mean, it's it was so funny. I had just finished an interview in the morning last Friday with a reporter talking about who knows when this is going to end. Here's all the bad stuff happening. And as I wrote about in my follow-up article on planetary.org, it really reminds you how quickly seemingly endless things can end. Politics can just flip so fast. And we have a temporary funding deal that keeps NASA and other federal science agencies and other agencies open for the next three weeks until February 15th. So it's good in the sense that NASA employees will

be paid. They're going to get back pay this week. So that's good. The bad thing is it's three weeks. How can you run a space program not knowing they're going to be open in three weeks? You really can't. Really what needs to happen is that NASA needs to get funded for the year. We actually have a petition for that on planetary.org slash advocacy. It's just absurd that we have to keep talking about whether or not to shut down the space program for no reason. But this is where we are. So one step forward, we need to get the rest of the way for the year. Let's take that breath and just be happy that the doors are open. Yeah, it's better than nothing. We can say that. You know, the old line that I think is appropriate here, it's like the feeling you get when you stop

hitting your thumb with a hammer. Yes, that's where we are apparently these days. And I will appreciate that when you have it. Right. And and it really, again, goes to show you what the political situation is right now. And again, no one is arguing whether or not NASA should be shut down. But NASA happened to be part of this, something that's really interesting that might be worth exploring in a longer post. something that's really interesting that might be worth exploring in a longer post. NASA just has kind of gotten some bad luck, if nothing else. And let's just shove to the side all the validity of all the other agencies being closed. They shouldn't be. But in particular for NASA, the way that Congress funds the government is that they kind of break up all of government into 12 chunks, right? These are the 12 subcommittees in the Senate and the House. Each one has a different jurisdiction over a different set of agencies. NASA used to be in the same congressional subcommittee jurisdiction that covered health and human services, which is a very uncontroversial, very big aspect of U.S. funding. And then they just, for some reason, jammed in NASA and the NSF into that kind of grouping as well. About 15 years ago, I think, 12, 15 years ago, they restructured some

of this and they created this new subcommittee called Commerce, Justice, and Science, where they just put together Commerce Department, Justice Department, NASA, NSF. And so NASA moved away from Health and Human Services grouping into this new CJS grouping. CJS also has a benefit or maybe the negative aspect of having to encompass the census, one of the very few spending requirements in the Constitution, in the U.S. Constitution. So the census can be very expensive. That grows and shrinks over time. NASA ends up competing with that. But the whole point of this is the health and human services part of government was funded last year. It was the quote unquote uncontroversial part. It was funded. If

NASA hadn't ever moved, NASA would never have closed this time, right? This is a partial shutdown. So merely by the fact, kind of some accident of history of bureaucracy of how NASA becomes part of the funding system in Congress, it just got shut down due to bad luck. And it just kind of drives you crazy when you think about potential alternative realities there. But we are where we are. That ain't changing anytime soon. I did see that figure that came out early this week, I think, that the Congressional Budget Office, was it, saw $11 billion was the cost to the federal government of the shutdown, and the $3 billion of that won't be recovered. What about the contractors out there? NASA has many. We heard over and over how some of them might never be paid for

the work that was done during that period. Yeah, that's true. And we heard some of this the other day where Administrator Bridenstine was asked that question during a public town hall after NASA came back to work. Right now, legally, there are a variety of ways in which some contractors may get paid for their work and others may not. And you see some legislation in Congress trying to move through to back pay all contractors or contractors, particularly for low income employees in those contractors. But there's right now no guarantee and it really varies contract by contract. So yeah, a lot of folks may never see any money for this period that the government was shut down. There are at least a couple of bills,

one from a Democrat, I think, one led by a Republican, that hope to cut off the possibility of another shutdown. Do you think either of those has any chance? I can no longer answer with any reality about what will or will not happen or what is possible to happen. I hope this is an opportunity for folks in Congress to step back and see that shutting down the government is not a good thing. It's disruptive, obviously, puts people in financial stress. And it's really a function of kind of an inadvertent consequence of the modern way that we fund appropriations in the United States, it should be some easy way to say, like, if there's a lapse of appropriations, either you have an automatic continuing resolution kick in, or at least you pay the staff so they don't miss paychecks during that period. How you do that is, you know, the devil's always in the details. And so whether you have some funding indexed with inflation or

indexed to cut over time to encourage people to reach a deal. Who knows? So I'm glad they're talking about it. I think we should add more stability to the nation's government. And previously, it was just never considered because we didn't have this level of political instability. So this is something we have to figure out and address. I want to go back to where you started and the effect of this shutdown and other budget pressures on major projects that NASA has underway.

The administrator even said it's going to take a few weeks to really figure out what the long-term impacts are on NASA projects. Missions like James Webb, missions like Mars 2020, those were in the hands of contractors mostly. And so a lot of those had been forward funded, is the terminology that they use. Basically, NASA paid in advance for work to be done during this period. So you saw general progress being made on a lot of space science missions, even some progress being made on aspects of the Space Launch System, the big new rocket, based on the fact that contractors were responsible for certain things and were paid in advance while NASA was shut down. Larger impacts, I imagine you're going to see on things that NASA has a larger hand in.

It basically kind of scales with the amount of federal employees or public employees involved in a project, the larger the disruption is going to be just as a consequence that they weren't able to work for 35 days. I imagine things like the Gateway may be delayed. Certainly things like offering new scientific grants for scientists to do the work that we want them to do in all this data that NASA collects. Long-term planning and programmatic definitions, the lunar program that NASA is trying to define, all of these things are probably highly disrupted, but we don't know to what extent yet. And that's actually part of the problem. Think of it this way. The government was shut down for 35 days. That's about 10% of a year.

So NASA just lost one-tenth of this year, of fiscal year 2019, to do nothing. And then it's going to spend probably at least another month spinning back up to figure out what it needs to be doing, what programs are disrupted, catching up all this backward backlog of bureaucratic needs, paying old invoices, answering emails, the whole gamut. And so you've probably lost at least two months of productivity. So, again, you've lost a sixth of the year to this, and that's going to have consequences when you have something as complex as space. Good Lord. You did post a short blog about the end of the shutdown. NASA gets a three-week reprieve, went up at planetary.org on January 26th, but you have that longer, excellent post that you wrote on January 18th, Misery's Mount, a shutdown drags on. I still recommend that people take a look at that. It has

a lot of good content in there. And as good as your writing is, Casey, I have to say, my favorite part is the cartoon that you closed with. The kicker is the terminology. It was a cartoon of a panda, right? The self image of China in a space suit looking at a long March rocket. The translation was roughly something like here, there's never a shutdown. And, you know, that's definitely kind of salt in the wound, but really kind of brings things into contrast. And also, of course, you had the successful landing of China's Chang'e 4 lander on the far side of the moon while NASA was shut down, right? While NASA's trying to

celebrate 50 years of Apollo, it was shut down for 10th of the year, China was landing on the far side of the moon. So it created a lot of obvious contrasts. We talk about China's space activities. A lot of people default to kind of this race mentality that it's going to be the new Soviet Union compared to NASA. China has big ambitions. They want to land on the moon. Ultimately, they have this kind of long-term program. They're developing a space station. They have plans for over 30 rocket launches in 2019. They're really maturing as a space program in China. But how we talk about that in relation to NASA so often devolves into this maybe habitual or habituated idea of competition or a space race. The reality is far more complex than that.

And we don't really have anywhere near the same kind of geopolitical situation that we did in the past. And to that end, I saw this great article on the Space Review, basically saying, you know, this isn't a race anymore. And we need to get over that and realize, you know, that this is something just a very different kind of setup than we had in the past. And to that end, I invited the author of that, Dr. Roger Hanberg, he's a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, to come on the show and really go into some of the history of not just the race aspect of the U.S. space program, but China's political structure, what they're getting out of their space program, and really what's different about this time and why it's not going to be a race in the future. And we recorded that conversation between Casey and Roger just a few minutes before this conversation that Casey and I are having right now. And we'll go into that, except that you thought maybe we'd let you get into one of these space policy additions without making the pitch.

No such luck. We need you to go to planetary.org slash membership and stand behind all of the efforts that the Planetary Society is making to make sure that there, well, for one thing, are no more shutdowns of NASA or, by extension, any other part of the federal government here in the United States,

but all of the other work that we have underway around the world and, of course of the other work that we have underway around the world. And of course, the production of this program, Space Policy Edition and Planetary Radio itself, planetary.org slash membership. Please check it out. We have lots of different levels. It's not expensive. And everybody who joins becomes a part of everything that we are up to at the Planetary Society. So Casey, you ready for us to go into that conversation? I am, but I'd love to just second your plug because I think it's really important. It's at the risk of this turning into a public radio fundraising drive. This is, I just want to emphasize that the membership is what enables the Planetary Society to be

independent and to provide unique content like this, but also to really take this action in Washington, D.C. I'd like to say, you know, we came out, you know, very strongly against the shutdown. Politics, besides the point, NASA should not be shut down for no reason. We had our official statement come out. And you know what? The next day, government opened again. Coincidence? Probably. But this is the kind

of stuff we're always engaged in right we're pushing it's making nasa making the space program making space science making exploration a visible and visible priority for the u.s government and more broadly and and you do that and we're able to do that because folks like you who are listening to this now chip in a couple bucks a month, it adds up. It helps keep us focused and able to do this stuff. All right, I'm done now. Well said. And public radio, huh? Yeah, too bad we don't offer tote bags, but we have all kinds of other great benefits. You know, I have a tote bag. I don't even know where it came from, but somehow I have a Planetary Society tote bag. You'll have to give more than a membership to get that though.

Yeah. I was handed one the last time I was at the office. Apparently somebody found them in an old storage room someplace. You know what you do get though is a very handsome Planetary Society pin. Check them all out, planetary.org slash membership. Okay, let's now go ahead with that conversation that Casey had just a little while ago today, not long ago, with Roger Hanberg of the University of Central Florida. And we'll be back at the far end. Dr. Hanberg, welcome to the Space Policy Edition, and thank you for being here with us today. Okay, good to be here. You recently published an article in the Space Review that was called There Is No Space Race and you were looking at China and the United States and why don't we just start with that and I want to ask why now? Why are you

publishing this article now? What is the real reason here that we don't have a space race between China and the United States? The reason for the article, kind of the genesis of it, has been several things, but most recently the fact that the Chinese were able to land a lander on the backside of the moon. And that generated a lot of public comment that the United States is now going to race them, the Chinese, to the moon in order to get the people back there. It's not so much where we're talking about science because the argument is really not scientific. It's more about political clout and how we stand and how visible we are. Representative Wolf of Virginia has tried for the last decade or so, he's not out of Congress, has attempted to generate what we might call a space race between ourselves and the Chinese.

And the reality is he never got any traction. He was able to get the provision passed that NASA is unable to cooperate with China on an official basis or spend any money and do all the other things. But what happens is there's a lot of people that assume that now that the Chinese have done this, quote, first, and this is really their only first. If you go back and look at the pattern in Chinese space program over the last two decades, they've been basically going back and doing what the Americans and the Russians, the Soviets at that time, did during the 1960s and 70s.

That was the era of space first. You know, first people in the moon, first people in orbit, first multiple crew, first docking. All those things were all first. The Chinese have been in a situation where it's difficult for them, as long as they're staying in low Earth orbit, to do anything that's going to be, quote, first. To go to China, for China to go to the backside of the moon and have set up the lunar orbiting satellite in order for communications to be possible, that was a big first for them. And so they're very proud of that. It's very much like India a couple of years ago when they had their first orbiter of the moon. It was a project which they're very proud of.

They're going to do it again. They're talking about. And in both cases, what it gives them in their perspective is prestige, especially, you know, in relationship to the great space powers, which are historically now the Russians and the Americans. What they're going to discover is the Americans aren't really in a race, and we haven't been in a race for a long time. We're committed to doing space, but we don't have that feeling that existed in the 60s. I was in high school and college in the 60s,

so I remember being through the space race. You saw all the stuff about the Mercury 7, Life magazine, all those other kind of things. None of that exists. I don't think many people could identify for you one astronaut that's flown in the last decade. Let's clarify. When there was an acknowledged space race

back in the 1960s, what was the global political context that created that? And how is that different than the relationships between the United States and China now? In the original space race, when the Soviets launched their first vehicle in October 1957. They entered the space era. Wernher von Braun had thought that he could do it previously, but the United States was, for a number of policy reasons, which people didn't understand at the time, but it had now become clear, the Eisenhower administration was not interested in being first. What they wanted was the Soviets to go first, so the Soviets would take care of the problem of overflying national airspace.

So they actually went out in early launches before 1957 and 1956, and they would actually have someone search the rockets that Wernher von Braun was firing to make sure he didn't have a satellite in there that he, quote, accidentally would send to orbit because they wanted the Soviets to be first, is apparently a very clear policy direction now. What happened was the ISER administration, at least the president, did not understand the implications of the Soviets being first, did not understand the implications of the Soviets being first. Because what it did was it ratified or solidified the view that the Soviets had this great missile force that they could then use to attack the United States.

And so the United States was perceived to be in an inferior position. That wasn't true, actually, as we know later. But at the time, we had the missile gap, we had the bomber gap, we had a whole series of strategic weapon gaps. Those gaps led to a great deal of anxiety. There was a lot of people here. And then you had on top of that events occur, like the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a senior in high school playing high school football. And we went from North Florida to Central Florida during the missile crisis. And to this day, I never knew what happened. I was so immersed in the sport and all that. But for other people, that was very

dramatic kind of thing. And so the question was, space became a way that the Kennedy administration could recapture momentum that people felt they had lost with the Sputnik launches. Because remember, the Sputnik launches were vehicles that weighed a couple of hundred pounds or more. Our first one was going to be one that weighed about 18 or 20 pounds. And so everyone said, oh, obviously the Soviets can attack us with these giant missiles. Well, that reflected a difference in how the missile forces developed.

The Soviets went for raw power. The Americans went for minimization, minimizing the size of the payload, the rocket, etc. The result was that the Americans were always behind. So what we decided was after the Soviets in April of 1961 launched the first person into orbit, and then we did our Cannonball Express launch, which was up and down and landed in the Bahamas, we decided that we were going to compete. We had to reestablish our strategic importance, our strategic dominance, and that's when Kennedy announces the Apollo program.

The Apollo program was a very narrow objective, although we, in retrospect, make it much more dramatic. It was to beat the Soviets to the lunar surface and back to demonstrate that the United States was clearly still a great power and had not fallen behind in relation to the Soviet Union. When NASA got its budget, it got this giant budget, comparatively speaking. It also went on basically almost a war footing. They were working 12 hour days, six, seven days a week, doing all the kind of things

you do when you're in a state of emergency. And that was really very clearly the message. This was a competition. If you lose a competition, potentially it might have some dire consequences. The reality was a little more mundane. By going into a space race where we were sending humans, we had the effect, which was what people didn't understand at the time, that it meant that we didn't run a military space race. Clearly, Eisenhower and others wanted to separate the space program, the civilian human spaceflight part, away from the military. This is what makes President Trump's announcement of a space force

so interesting, because he's revers reversing or was attempting to reverse what was a decision made earlier for the simple reason that people didn't want to. Space is militarized because there's military space satellites doing reconnaissance, doing communications, doing a variety of other things, global positioning. But there's no weapons. A space force may hold the implication of having weapons at some point, but that was what they rejected back in the 60s, because what they were more concerned about was we demonstrate that we have the technical capacity that clearly

people understand we can launch all the missiles we need to destroy the Soviets, even though the Soviets can do the same to us. And so it was a very different kind of context, very different in the sense of the fear and anxieties people had and the intensity that was there. But the reality was once the United States established its strategic dominance over the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. government started to back away from the Apollo program. When the Eagle landed in July 1969, for the government's point of view, the space race was over and there was no need to go on. That's why the last three flights were canceled of the Apollo program

were tragic in one sense from a scientific point of view, because they were the first missions that were going to fly with scientists and was going to do actual scientific study of the moon. There was one geologist flew on the last flight, Schmidt, and what they did was they collected rocks and they did things, but it was not truly scientific. They did things, but it was not truly scientific. What you had were fighter pilots who were taught how to look at rocks and say, pick up this one, it's more interesting than the other one. But actually what they did is they picked up whatever they could pick up and put in the bag and put it back on the return vehicle. The current relationship then between the U.S. and China is very different then. is very different than it's lacking this competitive, maybe national security edge in the same way, or at least in the self perception of just existence, right, that there was a perceived

existential threat from the Soviet Union at this point, particularly in the early 60s, as you point out with the missile crisis, using Apollo as a kind of a signaling factor to demonstrate US strength in technological capability, missile defense and so forth, or at least missile placement. But China, we don't have that, correct? It is a very different relationship the U.S. has with China. Well, in the space area, we don't have that at all. There's a competition going on. But in the space area, they have clearly been doing things and doing them well, they have clearly been doing things and doing them well, but they're repeating what we've done before. There's no feeling of, in the United States at least, at this point of competition.

People who want to go to the moon or go to other parts of the solar system are going to have to make the case to Congress or whoever is going to fund it on the basis of scientific and human exploration kind of questions, but not because of fear of someone else. Now, if the Chinese get to the moon first and we're not there, maybe that'll change the dynamics. I don't think so at this point. President Obama was criticized by a lot of people in the space community for saying, you know, we don't want to go to the moon, we want to go to the asteroid, and then ultimately to the Mars and deep space exploration. He said, we've been there and done that. And that's been the perspective of many people. To go back to the moon, you know, just to go back to the moon is not considered to

be very politically sexy. Given this fundamental difference that we have between the political situation and even kind of the self-identity that we have here in the United States in terms of we've been to the moon, you can't recreate a first and have that same kind of shock to the system that Sputnik represented or Gagarin represented. Why do you think people try to fashion China's growing capability in space as a race? Where does that desire come from? Is it something to recreate this ideal of Apollo where money was flowing freely? Or is there a desire to place China in an adversarial geopolitical situation that the USSR used to represent? Where does this come from? It comes from both, but the

biggest driver in the context of the space community is there has been this long-standing effort to recreate Apollo. If you look at the space exploration initiative under George H.W. Bush in 1969 on the 20th anniversary, it was clearly trying to capitalize on those earlier feelings, those earlier, you know, nationalist kind of things that drove us to do whatever had to be done. So there is, has been in the space community this continual thought

that maybe we can recapture it. It's been labeled the Apollo Syndrome by Dr. Pike out in Colorado. He, in an earlier article, talked about desire to go out and do it, do it again and do it with the same kind of fervor and enthusiasm that we did the first one. The Apollo program was a singular moment in history.

And in fact, I've heard it argued, what the Apollo program did was it gave us in the 1960s, early 1970s, it gave us a step into the 21st century. In other words, it came too early. And so there was no, so when it died, we've been trying to recapture that momentum that we gave up in 1972 when we finished the Apollo program. And certainly by 1975, when the Soyuz Apollo program was done, where they did their interaction meeting in Earth orbit. With those gone, Apollo's gone. And there's this continual... Now, for a younger generation, I don't think this means much. And that's big of their problem. The farther we get away from the situation of the Apollo program, people are not going to have that same emotional connection.

I don't know how old you are, Casey, but I was in college and graduate school, getting ready to go in the Army the next year, and I watched the Apollo landing. I remember very clearly when Armstrong stepped out, and that was a dramatic moment in history, stepped out. And that was a dramatic moment in history, which I'll always remember. And that's not possible for the younger generation. So if they're going to generate momentum, it's going to have to be for some other reason. Now, one of those could be just exploration in the kind of the sense of going over the hill to see what's there, all that other kind of stuff, the final frontier kind of talk. You know, this is why Star Trek continues to be a very popular TV show, even reruns that are now truly ancient, 50 years old. It's a dream.

And that dream has been lost, you know, as far as, you know, most people are concerned. So the people in the space community try to recapture it at different times. Jeff Faust, in one of his articles, when the last shuttle landed from the last mission, the Discovery, he said, when the wheels rolled to a stop, Apollo was done. Because that was in one sense the last vestige of the original ideas that came out of the Apollo program. Because the shuttle was the one part of the idea in 1969, this is how we go on farther into exploration of space. I remember seeing where they have these pictures and ads and talking about, in the 1980s, we're

going to be on Mars. We were lucky to be back in orbit by 1980s. You point out in your article that the shuttle program was kind of the last vestige of the Von Braun kind of paradigm of having this shuttle to a station base, you know, kind of a low orbit base camp, which would then take you to the moon, right, was this big idea. And we kind of leapfrogged ahead of that with Apollo kind of coming before the shuttle and station concept in that kind of broad outline. Let's maybe flip towards some of the Chinese policy. You've written a book back in 2006 about the Chinese space policy. What is China's sense of itself in space? What is its motivation for investing in a space program, not just for prestige,

but it must have some sense of practical consequences and benefits from it as well? Well, I'm not so sure they're practical in quite the sense, although they do have illusions of practicality when they try and grow things on the moon, or they talk about sending various plants and other things to orbit to see how the effects of radiation. For the Chinese, the space program is part of this general thing that's been going on for the last 30 years. That is, they want to recover from the century of shame

that they endured with the collapse of the last Chinese empire in the late, about the turn of the last Chinese Empire in the late, about the turn of the century, 1900s. You know, by 1913, the Chinese Empire was gone, and they had been for a previous century, it was actually a couple of centuries, what they saw as humiliation by the West. It wasn't the United States as much as it was the Europeans,

but we replaced the Europeans because we were the great superpower that wanted to keep them out of the system. What it does is it provides them a psychological motivation, but it also provides them political clout in the context of the third world countries that they see themselves as a natural leader of. Now, they see themselves as a natural leader of. Now, they see themselves as having moved beyond that now. And so what you see is the space program is a source of great national pride and great political impact. They leverage it in terms of other underdeveloped countries or other countries. And they see themselves as using space to link themselves to the Europeans, not to Japanese, but to all the major space players. They are offered the opportunity to be on their space station. It goes up in 2022 or should be completed by 2022.

So for them, space has a value beyond building rockets. They can do that all they want in terms of military kinds of things. But what it does is it gives them that aura of being among the elite states. And that's critically important in the context of Chinese national politics. You see the rise of Chinese chauvinism. You see a nationalism, which is a two-edged sword for the leadership. You've got to keep them going in terms of rewarding them by providing new things to take pride in, etc. But I would point out the Chinese see themselves as running against the Americans in a sense, but not really.

Because if you look at their space program, things take time. In the United States, we compressed everything into about six years, six or seven years of actual flight from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. flight from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. Basically, we started in 1961. By 1969, we had achieved our objective. In their case, it takes, we launch, and we don't launch for a year or so. Because they're very sensitive to the possibility of failure. The United States has had several failures. We had the Apollo 1 pad fire, then we had the two shuttles go down. The Soviets lost people also, although that wasn't as publicized. But we consider that to be part of the business. For the Chinese, if they're going to be so dominant, they can't afford failure. And then you see that in how things are spaced out over time.

They put up their space station. It fell back to Earth. Fortunately, not hurt anyone. Although that was a source of great anxiety among Chinese policymakers, because that would say, oh, we're not as good as we think we are because we're dropping things on other people. And that may not be that they may not be happy with that kind of thing. The reality is that the Chinese government sees space as another lever of global influence and global power, and one that's going to grow

in importance. It's fair to say then that from China's perspective, they're not, in a sense, being reactive. They're just kind of pursuing their own set of goals in space, and they don't consider themselves to be racing with any other country. In the larger sense, you're right. They're not racing with other countries. If there's anyone they want to race with, it would be India, possibly Japan, if Japan was trying to develop human spaceflight. The Indian government feels very second, like they're being placed in second place by having a space program that doesn't have human spaceflight. So they keep talking about, let's say by 2022, we're going to have people in orbit and all that. How they get there,

I don't know. That's going to be a question. They may actually buy Soyuz rides. But where they're going to go is a different question. They're not part of the International Space Station. But for the Chinese, this space program, it's like driving a flashy car. There was a generation of people, that's why we had the cars in the 50s with the big fins. It's the biggest, most, well, this is a Chinese version

of Let's Play Prestige Games. And nobody else is going to play against this. Because the Americans, it's not the Americans don't care. The Americans are concerned about other things. And our domestic politics doesn't help us. Because to support a space program the way some people would like to support it would require a lot more attention be played funding would have to be more stabilized than it's been yeah certainly i mean i think it didn't escape anyone's notice that as chunga 4 was landing on

the far side of the moon the u.s space program was shut down through a lack a lapse of appropriations i mean that actually brought up another question i wanted to ask you again like as a political the U.S. space program was shut down through a lapse of appropriations. I mean, that actually brought up another question I wanted to ask you. As a political scientist, do you see an advantage to states like China that have a more centralized and less democratic kind of focus in their setup or institution as a country that enables longer-, consistent and persistent focuses on these types of goals versus a more U.S. style democracy where you have this kind of an unpredictable, a little messier, less stable long term commitments. Does that just

give a natural advantage to space programs in that context? Not necessarily, because in an authoritarian state, it's the leader that will be the key. And if he decides, or she, but most likely in the Chinese case, he decides that they're not interested in doing more in space, it'll change in a heartbeat. But I don't think that's going to be their issue. The Chinese program will probably continue on the way it is because it's like the American space program. You know, when Apollo was

done, there were some people who said we take all the money that we're spending on that, we're just spending on things on Earth. Never happened. But what it meant was NASA always had a limited budget. It could only go so high because politically it wasn't feasible to go beyond that. But the bottom line, which people in space policy don't often recognize is it also has a base below which we don't appear willing to cut NASA, barring a national economic disaster. The NASA budget has reached a certain level. That level may not be what people want. What's that old song?

You don't get what you want, but you get what you need? For NASA, that's their reality. They get what they need to keep the space program going. The problem that NASA has is the leadership has always been focused on human spaceflight. So that means any time there's a tough time coming, what they do is they go and say, let's take money from science. Or let's take money from somewhere else. You have this prompt continual tension. You know, from the perspective of being an outsider to NASA, I think the space science program has done amazingly well given limited resources.

In the Chinese case, their space program is probably in about the same position now, except they have many more things to do that they haven't done before, like a space station. If the United States had agreed and let's say China had become a member of the International Space Station, we might not have a Chinese space station. Because for the Chinese, building a space station is like getting a new car to show that, yes, yes, we are equivalent to everybody else in the neighborhood. They are soliciting people to come

have their astronauts serve on it, for example in the neighborhood. They are soliciting people to come and have their astronauts serve on it, for example, the Europeans. From a political level, you just kind of raised this. Where did the resistance towards NASA cooperation with the Chinese space program start to come from that? I believe it came out of Congress. And if you want to maybe go into a little bit, what is NASA allowed and not allowed to do?

And do you think that's good policy at the moment? You just said it may have led to China developing its own space station in order to demonstrate its capability instead of participating with the U.S. What's the right pathway here? The thing about the Chinese in relationship to NASA came out of the 1980s, 1990s. If you remember back in 1998, there was a congressional report that talked about how the Chinese were basically stealing our lunch and using our technology. American satellites were on Chinese rockets that blew up during takeoff. For us, that's very horrific. But in doing the technical examination of why it happened, the American companies were providing information that related to their payloads that had been on the Chinese vehicles. Chinese vehicles. And so what happened was there was a lot of Republican concern, because they dominated Congress at that time, about the Chinese being given access to all this potentially militarily useful technology. Not clear it was that bad off, but the reality was it allowed them to put in place things, restrictions,

so the American payloads are not launched on Chinese rockets. They built on that, and so NASA got caught in the middle of that particular struggle. It was a struggle that was for reasons of national security, but NASA was the most easy to affect because NASA wanted to... 1998, the space station was starting construction, was really underway, and then we wanted to get other countries involved. That's when the Republicans were able to say, no, China will not participate in the ISS. Okay. They then go forward. Representative Wolf from Virginia pushes very hard on a restriction on NASA doing anything.

It went from them just not being in the ISS that we will not be involved. What they're allowed to do is they're allowed to have interchanges, but there can be no joint projects. They can't transfer information, our technology, et cetera, which is not a big deal in some ways because a lot of American stuff is open source. So it's not less of a closing. You're not exactly closing the barn door. You know, there's still a lot of stuff we'll get out there, and it will be available. But this is where we got into the

start of what we now see as a real concern by Chinese stealing American technologies. But now it's mostly about business technology, business related IT and things like that. It's an interesting game because when we did it at first, we thought we were stopping them from doing anything because the assumption the Americans made, I assume, from reading what Little said publicly about it, we assumed that we were keeping them down, that they would not be able to technologically advance because they are not at that level of the United States. That's no longer an issue. You know, the Chinese are producing space technologies that posture with China, you realize that, I mean, China's building up a lot of basic infrastructure, just becoming up to this level of equivalency. That's one of the primary things I remember reading about, just improving their ground stations throughout the world and in China, just to communicate with satellites, building their own satellite navigation service. It's interesting in that context then to see people, again,

keep insisting that there's this race mentality or this adversarial mentality. And do you feel that the better path forward from a policy perspective, or at least a political perspective, would be to cooperate more closely with the Chinese on this? Or do you think that there is a healthy aspect of competition that enables both countries to develop this? Or do you think that there is a healthy aspect of competition that enables both countries to develop this? I think competition will continue in any case. But I think with cooperation, you may have a better feel for what they are doing. They have a pretty good idea of what we're doing because we're so open as a society. But they are ones that, for example, they no longer need to get some technologies from us.

They have the equivalent technologies. What it would do in principle, see, this is always a problem with international cooperation. Does it cost you more to cooperate or do you get a benefit from someone helping you by working together? In the case of the International Space Station, we bought the early Russian stuff, but we did it for a strategic reason. We want to keep their scientists and engineers away from possible missile proliferation problems down the road. And so in the case of the Chinese, you know, our issue is still proliferation in a different way. Would we be better off? Probably. But in one sense, maybe not. Maybe we don't need them. You know, that's the American chauvinist perspective. You know, but for international cooperation in space, going forward is, I would argue, is a good thing because it allows you to do more and allows you to interchange information.

We're not talking about military information, but scientific information could be interchanged between different parties without, you know, any concern for, you know, all the issues that the politicians raise. The scientists and engineers in NASA are kind of between a rock and a hard place. We're concerned about security. That's always true in the United States. But so are the Chinese. So what do we work out between us that will allow us to cooperate and do the things that we want to do in regard to further space activities, either cooperatively or it may be we just operate in the same area.

But we do in a cooperative way rather than worrying about they're going to do something to us or we're going to have to do something to them. There are too many people who have these visions of Star Wars, people ride around in rockets shooting each other. That is the reality of space. Space is much more difficult at this stage. Look at the people doing something outside the space station. Look how hard that is to do and the short amount of time it is. And maybe someone else can come up with a better way to do it. Or maybe between us, we can come up with better ways to do it. We lose something by this, you know, separation. But the reality, political reality is NASA gets paid, gets its bills paid by the government. And the government says they can't do anything. That's the way it's going to be. government and the government says they can't do anything, that's the way it's going to be. So speaking of ways of cooperation versus competition, something that we saw actually that NASA was able to do, despite their kind of broad prohibition from working too closely with the Chinese Space Agency, was that as you highlighted in your article in the space review,

they, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to image some of the landing site areas for the Chang'e 4 lander. So this is a way I could see, you know, or it's a good demonstration of ways that the two agencies can begin to work together in areas like space science. And really classically, that was ways for back channel communications to happen between Soviet Union and the United States as well. So do you see a promising area? all. So do you see a promising area? Is this a good first step in areas like space science where there isn't a lot of overhead and other issues to deal with and ways that we could work together more cleanly? I think the most obvious one would be actually the lunar surface operations, because everybody's going there right now. We're going to be in different places.

Exchanges of information about what's found and what's possibilities. For example, the whole question of how much ice there is or what's that proverbial one that everyone talks about in the engineering community? Helium-3, which is still awaiting the development of fusion reactors. Yeah, all you have to do is invent fusion, and then helium-3 is very useful. Those kinds of activities will, I think, provide a vehicle for, at least at the operating level, cooperative activities. There are not going to be any big exchanges of any information about maybe technologies, but what the results were of a particular

kind of scan or what you're discovering when you're reading around in the lunar surface, a variety of different things. And one of the biggest ones I think will be, I assume that the United States and other countries in what we call the West would be interested in putting some kind of receivers, telescopes, on the backside of the Moon. And that's a more difficult one to support. It doesn't necessarily mean people so much after you get it established, but it would be something where the Chinese have actually obviously shown they can do it. They have a satellite in orbit. We could use that satellite for communications also. So for the United States, we might put a radio telescope

back there. We might put some other kind of receiver back there, infrared. And you have the ability to transmit that information in real time back to Earth without necessarily having to invest in all the infrastructure that would be required otherwise. That would be a way that the United States and China could begin cooperation, and then that would carry forward in other areas. We send missions to various parts of the solar system, and the question is maybe Chinese experiments or instruments would go along for the ride. And that's an important thing because it allows a crossing over of national boundaries in the context of space science. Space science has the biggest, you know, if you talk about space technology, there's too

much competitiveness in terms of commercialization and military. But you talk about space science, you're talking about something that I think is doable. I think the community, at least the United States, would be amenable to it. I don't know so much about the Chinese, but I assume they would be because a lot of their scientists, senior scientists at one point were trained in the United States in many cases, then went back to China. Yeah. So it strikes me as, again, one of those real kind of tangible geopolitical benefits for investing in things like fundamental space science and research that you can use this as almost like a way to kind of dip your geopolitical toe into cooperation with another country.

Right. And it allows you to scale it up as other countries join, make it truly international. Do you see potential for recreating an Apollo-Soyuz-style mission when the Chinese have their next space station up? Is there any pathway that you can see forward for a NASA astronaut to visit that or vice versa at the ISS? I assume there will be. And the reason is because the Chinese are envisioning other people visiting their space station other than the Chinese. So I assume that means that some of the docking facilities, the others will be pretty standardized. I'm not sure that's true, but I think I assume that would be something that could be worked.

The question would be the politics, getting the politicians to agree to allow it happen. And NASA is not going to move unless it has that support. An interesting potential would be if you, or when, let's say, commercial crew is up and running, either someone could theoretically purchase a flight to the Chinese space station from Boeing or SpaceX that would be independent of NASA approval and authorization, right? So there could be ways to advance this, maybe. I'd have to think through it.

The maybe would be whether it would be allowed to launch out of the Cape. If you have a purely private launch thing, that still might be an issue because international law makes the United States responsible for all launches. So that theoretically gives the government a veto. Anything that flies from the United States. Yeah, it'd be interesting, a potential pathway. Something that's been in my mind in this discussion is, you know, the role of human spaceflight. And it's been interesting watching, you know, the ongoing justification for why humans go into space. And this has been obviously happening since the Eisenhower administration of why put humans into space. You almost look at it, seeing what countries

like China and India are talking about, that even though it's hard to define a single motivation that justifies the investment of human spaceflight. And, you know, the National Academy has had, I think, 10 reasons for this back in 2014. But obviously, there must be something valuable by the very fact that nations are coming up and saying, we need to put humans into space. Do you think that effectively justifies it in some way that it must inherently have value if countries like China and India want to start performing in that area? You know, that's a tough one because India does it for prestige reasons. China did it for similar kinds of reasons in the beginning.

The United States, ironically, may be the one that and and maybe the Russians, who are more doing it out of habit. No state has willingly given up the ability to access outer space. It's considered to be one of those markers of state prestige and standing in the global order that doesn't exist elsewhere in the context of space. Because what it tells you is that we have the money. Back in the 1960s, they had a whole series of articles where they talked about why the United States goes to space. Some of them were interesting because they went back to some of the Northwestern Native American tribes where they had, what's it called, potluck? Is that it?

There's a term they used where some guy shows up and he spends, basically distributes all these resources. And why does he do it? To show how rich and how powerful he is. Human spaceflight may have that same kind of aura. If you can do that, you have stepped above the run-of-the-mill other countries in the world. You're a step above. Right now, there's only three states.

Actually, two, but the third one is supposedly going to be back on track. If the United States stopped... back on track. If the United States stopped, well, actually, you might argue the United States is going to commercial low-orbit spaceflight because that way they won't have to worry about the government shutting it down. Right. You can absolve yourself of the increasing political instability and turn it over into more privately funded or pre-funded obligations. If people are willing to pay to fly, or there's reasons to send payloads there, the private sector will fly them. They're agnostic as long as you got a dollar. It just kind of goes back to this idea of this

prestige can be so amorphous, yet so powerful. And it's like, again, like once you start doing it, and this is ultimately, I think what came back to for Nixon when he decided to support the space shuttle program, they just took it as a given that you can't stop flying humans into space. You didn't have to go all the way to the moon anymore. And that's what I wonder if it will begin to change. The more countries that are able to access low Earth orbit, perhaps the real signaling factor will only happen if you're able to send humans deeper into space. And then you have to keep competing to be at the top of that club if low Earth orbit becomes frequently accessible, may lose that luster. And maybe that's one way we'll end up actually on the moon in the future or further out if that is required to maintain a great nation status. Well, I suspect your analysis is probably pretty accurate in terms of what observation. We continue

to do human spaceflight for no practical reason. People say, well, we're doing all these things on the space station that have uses on Earth. Not very many. Most of the research that's being done is aimed toward seeing how well human bodies can sustain themselves in outer space. And that's important information, because the more we find out about outer space, the more deadly of an environment it becomes. You know, all the stuff on radiation, microgravity. Going to Mars may be a very much more dangerous endeavor even than

crossing the United States prairie back during the settlers' days. Do you think that there's a weakness or a tendency in the U.S. political system, at least in the last few decades, to kind of default to this reactionary positioning, particularly when it comes to issues in space and human spaceflight? It seems like a lot of the discussion, at least broadly, will be, well, we used to do something with Apollo, but Apollo itself was somewhat reactionary given Soviet capabilities. Is that just a function of this type of representative democracy? In order to create something, you need to have some motivating external force? Or is this more modern concept of looking for adversarial reasons to pursue policy? Interesting question. What would be the test of why it occurs would be,

for example, if we ever see an extinction level object show up and something has to be done in a cooperative basis. That is the test of whether or not we are divided by such animosities that we can't get along, or whether we could work together to do the best possible thing. People who advocate not doing anything with the Chinese, I mean, they're very clear why. They think the Chinese is cheating. Well, they may be cheating.

I don't know that. I don't know that one way or the other. But the reality is we're not really slowing down the dissemination of technology to China. Humans gather information by training, work, and they go back, and they do different things. For the Americans, I think we've got to do something which we don't do. When I testified in front of Congress about three years ago, one of the things I pointed out was we don't do what we did during the Soviet era. There used to be a government program that was funded to translate

all these Russian documents, magazines, scientific journals, etc. into English so that people can have access to them who don't necessarily speak or read or write Russian. In the case of China, we're in the same situation. We know the Chinese are doing a lot, and a lot of that stuff is accessible, but it's in Chinese. And that means that there may be things we're missing. I'm not talking about in terms of security, but in terms of scientific, or in terms of engineering, things like that. If we had some program to fund that, it was several of those that talked at that hearing, talked about that as something that, you know, we need to do.

You know, I see space policy as truly international policy. And that means that there's some people you like better than do others. But that doesn't mean you don't work with everybody. And then you find out if it works out. If it doesn't work out, then you go somewhere else. Stop working with them. There are different ways you can do it. Right. Just putting your fingers in your ears and saying, la, la, la, la, la, I don't see you, doesn't stop anything, right? It doesn't really solve or address anything directly. It seems to just be making, in some sense, the U.S. space policy irrelevant to what the Chinese are developing.

And they're also working to themselves create an international system of collaboration with other space agencies, correct? Right. And so what we may have is to, we don't, the United States does not necessarily want to be in the position of making states make choices between us and them, because I'm not entirely sure how much we would get because of the, would get because we have a reputation that precedes the Trump administration, precedes Obama. The Americans are always considered to be very arrogant in these kind of areas. The ugly American idea was more about political politics, et cetera, clearly appears also historically in the science and engineering fields

where Americans often tend to feel that they're the first team and the rest of them are just scrubs. And in this particular case, that's no longer true. And that's one of the lessons that politicians are going to have to be taught. They're not going to learn it on their own because they live in their bubbles. What you've got to do is bring that information forward so that they can, in fact, figure out what's going on and maybe make better policies. Well, that actually seems like a really good note to end on. So, Dr. Roger Hamburg, I want to thank you again for joining us here on the Space Policy Edition.

And I encourage everyone to read your latest piece on the space review and all of your previous pieces, which you contribute quite a bit. And there's good insight into space policy there. Okay, thank you. I hope all of you enjoyed that great conversation between Casey Dreyer and his guest, Roger Hanberg of the University of Central Florida. Casey, any thoughts that you've had since that little tete-a-tete with Roger? Well, again, I think it's just interesting and important to remember that we live in the present, not in the past. And there's such a desire to recreate Apollo or this kind of fantasy maybe that Apollo is when we had it good in the space program and all the money was showing up and that's when we could go to the moon

and do whatever. And looking for ways to recreate that is fundamentally, literally backwards looking, right? We have to acknowledge and understand the situation we exist in now and look at that realistically and say, if we can't get funding for the type of space program we'd love to see, then we need to look at new ways to change that and not necessarily hope that we go back to a very dangerous political standoff between two nuclear powers, superpowers in the world that are capable of destroying themselves. And so this type of discussion, looking at it from a political science perspective, I really think helps illuminate some of that,

the real differences that we have now. And also, again, just the idea that when you win a race like the U.S. did to the moon, it didn't really work out great for the human spaceflight program in the long run either. The race ended, everyone went home, basically, right? You had a very different space program after that. Having a long-term commitment to deep space exploration, building on a longer legacy and building a broader coalition, that seems to be a more stable way to go, even if it's not

always as fast as we'd like to see. A great example of why this monthly Space Policy Edition is such a valuable part of what we do at the Planetary Society and as part of Planetary Radio. Casey, thank you again. And I guess we will do this again on the first Friday in the month of March. I look forward to talking to you then. Can't wait. Also, it'll be almost spring by then, so I'll take it. Casey Dreyer, he is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. You, of course, Casey Dreyer, he is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society.

You, of course, can become part of the Planetary Society, planetary.org slash membership. Stand behind everything we do, including Planetary Radio. I am the host of the weekly show. I hope that you will check out what we're up to over there, talking to all kinds of terrific people, including conversations with Casey now and then. But we will see you here on the Space Policy Edition on the first Friday in March. Have a great month.