Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Space Policy Directive 2—This Time it's Commercial

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

President Trump just signed a new space policy directive targeting the regulations surrounding commercial spaceflight. Casey Dreier, Jason Davis and Mat Kaplan dive into the implications of the new directive and what it means for the relationship between government and space. They also break down all of the good news in the House's new funding bill for NASA, and highlight NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine's turnaround on climate change. More resources to explore this month’s topics are at  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/space-policy-edition-26.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That great theme music can only mean one thing. It's time for the monthly Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. Hello, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan, the regular host of the weekly show, Planetary Radio, that you can find all the time at planetary.org. that you can find all the time at planetary.org. But this one, this one that so many of you are just crazy about, we're back with the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome.

Hi, Matt. As always, I am delighted to be here on our show. And Jason Callahan, the Policy Advisor to the Planetary Society, living there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C., and still able to emerge periodically and speak to us with great gusto about what's going on there. Hey, Jason. Hey, guys. How are you doing? It's good to see you again.

Despite his handicap of having to live in Washington, D.C., Matt, he is able to speak with us with passion. D.C. gets a bad rap sometimes. It's actually a wonderful place to live. Yeah, it's very nice. I love it. And I'm going to come back to that because, of course, I was there just recently with you guys. But we're going to come back to that because first we got to make our pitch. Of course, we would love to have you as a member of the Planetary Society by reaching us at planetary.org slash membership. But Casey, there is something else going on right now as we

speak that is also very important, maybe even more important for the advocacy efforts, the space policy efforts by the Planetary Society. No question more important in my completely objective, independent viewpoint here. We're doing our annual fundraising for this very program, this very program being not the show you're listening to, but Space Policy and Advocacy, the program that I run with Jason and our colleague Matt Renninger in the DC area. We are independent. We don't have corporate money that allows us to do this.

We don't work for companies or we don't benefit from the work that we do. We only want to see a greater presence in exploration and space science. And we do that because members and individuals like you, you listening to this right now, chip in a few bucks every year. And this is our annual fundraising effort, planetary.org slash advocacy. Any kind of a donation really helps us do the work that you're going to hear about today, the work that you've heard about all last year. And that just lets us do shows like this. So please consider supporting the program at planetary.org

slash advocacy. It really does make a difference and it allows us to be here. It's a pretty basic connection. Without your support, we cannot keep expanding this program. I think you've seen some of the great work that we've done. We will continue to do that and more as long as you're on our side. Casey, what was that URL again? It's planetary.org slash advocacy. Let's talk about some of those very tangible results that are enabled by the support of folks like you who are listening to this out there. I said that I was in town. I was in the Beltway not long ago.

Got to spend some time with you, Jason, and also Matt Renninger and Casey and a whole bunch of other folks. I was actually in town for the Humans to Mars Summit that I was hosting the webcast for. And I got to talk to Ellen Stofan, the new head of the National Air and Space Museum. But a wonderful, wonderful event took place. Actually, a couple of events that you guys were behind. Tell us about the kickoff event for this new caucus. Well, we've talked about the caucus a little bit, but just as a quick refresher, a caucus in Congress is just a group of like-minded Republicans and Democrats usually who get together

and it's somewhat informal. There's no big structures around it, but in the House of Representatives, we filed the right paperwork to create the Planetary Science Caucus. It's led by a Republican and a Democrat. We have John Culberson, who lives in Texas, and then Derek Kilmer from Washington State. And together, they're leading this bipartisan caucus to support the search for life and our solar system and beyond to really promote and increase awareness of planetary exploration and how industry, nonprofits, and academic institutions all relate to that. And we just filed the paperwork this year. The Planetary Society of planetary exploration and how industry, nonprofits, and academic institutions all relate to that. And we just filed the paperwork this year. The Planetary Society was a founding partner of the caucus. And we wanted to throw basically a party to let people know that we're

here, you can sign up and join the caucus, and also to create the opportunity for FaceTime between members of Congress and their staff and the actual scientists, engineers, and business leaders that are working every day in planetary exploration. So we had what I call an exploration exhibition. We did it in this beautiful room in the Library of Congress. We had over 200 people came by. We had multiple exhibitions from Lockheed Martin, from Moon Express, from Astrobotic. We also had multiple university institutions like Caltech and Arizona State University, leaders in planetary science. And we had a ton of scientists.

Also, the board of directors of the Planetary Society. I was there. Bill gave a speech. And we just had a big brouhaha to say the caucus is here. We're excited about what we're going to be able to do with this. And also just to build, as I call it, space advocates out of space fans in Congress. And you do that by giving them that face time, getting them personally excited about the opportunities that exist to explore our solar system and planets beyond. So it was a lot of fun, a little bit of work, but we were happy we did it. I am so sorry that I missed that afternoon event at the Library of Congress. Of course, you had a dinner that evening, and I was pretty amazed that you had so many members of Congress and at least one senator show up. Well, it really shows the amount of work that Matt Reniger and Jason have been doing in Washington, D.C., that you build these

trust and relationships beforehand, right? This wasn't the first time we talked to these members of Congress. Matt and Jason are in their offices all the time. Bill, when he goes down to DC, when I go to DC, we do these rounds of visits on Capitol Hill. It's that daily interaction, that daily trust building and credibility exercises that really allow you to form these relationships. And it's just really, again, a testament to the work that they've been doing on our behalf here at the Planetary Society. Yeah. And if I could, Casey, I just, I know I did this on the last episode as well, but I just really want to give a shout out to the volunteers that helped us out with that effort as well. It wouldn't have been possible without some help from some DC folks here. Yes. Yes. And every time I always feel like terrible that you have to remind

me. That's okay, man. I'm a callous individual who just uses other people to my own end. So it's hard for me to remember to know that we had some amazing, as Jason said, amazing volunteers support and from our members as well. So it's a really amazing experience and see what kind of groups that advocacy for space science bring together. And really, again, this is something new that we're pushing forward, a really advanced program to reach out to members of Congress, educate them about science, and also share that back with our members. So it's been quite a month, honestly. And it's just getting started. Casey, we delayed a day in recording this monthly segment because you also had something very big going on there in your version of Washington, the state of

Washington. That state of Washington. That's absolutely true. And I'll just make this one quick because it's more focused. But we're also looking into ways that the society can support policies at the state level that encourage space exploration. And obviously, those are going to be a completely different set of issues than, you know, I'm not going to ask Washington state to launch a mission to Venus as much as that would be cool. It's going to be a hard sell, I think, to them. But there's a lot you can still do at the state level to encourage space science, to encourage space industry, and even just to get people thinking of space as an option to leverage their needs as a state. Like, do you need to create STEM students at your public universities?

Maybe space is a great way to pull STEM students into that pipeline. Maybe you can support your local space industries or grab a piece of this growing industry while it's early and while it's young and make your part of the world a really key part for capability, talent, and funding that enables these future industries to thrive. So that's part of the discussions that we're having now. And I partnered with a professor at the University of Washington. We held a space roundtable with members of the state legislature. We had people from industry in Washington State, university, academics.

And it was just a really interesting discussion. And a part of something, an ongoing project that I'll be doing here, we might try to expand this to other states as we're able to. Washington State, I think, is a space state that doesn't know it. And it's good to just start raising that awareness and say, what can we do now to position ourselves for the future? And those are the types of conversations that we need to be having broadly, whether it's at your local level, state level, or obviously the federal level where it tends to rise most of the time. And I would love to see that evolve into something that takes place across the country, because I think we are learning through this program and through activities like this

gathering that you just had in Washington, that there are a lot of people who care about space policy, plenty enough to support these kinds of gatherings, probably in many states across the country, even in states like Washington that haven't yet fully realized that they are all about space. Well, I want Jason to just weigh in on this, because something that Jason always told me from the very beginning, when we first started to work together, was how do you align what you want with the priorities of your kind of political institution that's around your political structure? And when you have seen big investments in NASA in the past, it's not because NASA sold itself better or the public liked it more or proved it more or less. It's because what NASA

was doing aligned with a national interest. And that's when you rise in priority. So Jason, do you want to just kind of talk about this more broadly as how you position these things as a priority and why that's so important? Sure. Well, fundamentally, when you're talking about policy, what you're trying to do is communicate to policymakers, generally legislators, in terms that they understand it that they respond to. The pressures that they respond to are generally very different than the pressures that scientists respond to or NASA leadership responds to. So what you're trying to do is find the way that your program, your project aligns with larger issues that these people understand or that is important to these people.

So at a federal level, the more that NASA can talk about how it contributes to economic security, to national security, to education and workforce issues, to international relations, the more effective it will be at receiving funding for its projects and programs, because people see those as having value beyond just the science and engineering. At the state level, those pressures tend to be different. So you're really looking more at jobs and education and economic impact. Talking about a mission to Venus isn't going to have as much impact with a state legislator as, say, talking about the department at which researchers are housed in their state or talking about the subcontractor who builds a system on that mission.

These are the kinds of things that Casey and Matt and I are really working to do, is figure out better ways to communicate how the priorities for NASA, how the priorities for space relate to these other pressures that legislators respond to. I have a new slogan for this. Think galactically, act locally. Yeah, we'll work on that. But again, that's really the point, because I think if you walk into somewhere and say, we want this for us, you're not going to get a very sympathetic hearing. But if you're coming in to an office and saying, if you do this, this is how it benefits your needs or the needs of the state or the needs of your locality, suddenly that becomes interesting,

particularly if it's a new idea and a novel idea. This is something that we're finding ways to try to expand what space means. And I think people generally think of space as being not them, particularly people who aren't really into space, who probably aren't listening to the show right now. Space seems out there as somewhat esoteric and far removed from the major political or personal needs that they have. And so finding ways to make it relevant to a broad number of areas, which I think it actually is, is going to be really important. And so that's, I think, why just to transition this, what we're going to be talking about later today in the show is I think we're making this argument better. And there's also this new argument to what Jason just said is that it's not just national security, international relations, STEM development, workforce issues. Now they're saying it's just jobs and capital. workforce issues. Now they're saying it's just jobs and capital. I mean, there's like when you align with a philosophical perspective of an administration, you suddenly become much more

relevant. And this is talking about capitalism, jobs, commercial space, and all these things we'll be mentioning later in the new space directive. But it's also I think, why you're seeing increases in funding for NASA now, which is what the house budget seems to be ready to do, which just came out last month as well, which we will also talk about. That alignment is really important. And this is how you create these enduring coalitions and that get people thinking about something that maybe they already like, but just don't have a reason to support. Well, you showed me the program, Casey, and I wish I had been there for this program in the state of Washington. Let's go back to the District of Columbia, the Washington on the eastern side of the United States,

Let's go back to the District of Columbia, the Washington on the eastern side of the United States. Start picking up with some of the recent action there, including another appearance by, he is now the NASA administrator, in front of the United States Senate. And it sounds like the new administrator, his thinking is evolving, shall we say. This is the very interesting thing about this. say? This is the very interesting thing about this. So Jim Bridenstine, one of his biggest attacks against him during his confirmation process was his views on climate change. His past views were very hostile to it when he was a congressman from Oklahoma. I believe he had moderated his views significantly during his hearing process. You know, he had a very close vote. He's kind of squeaked in now that he's there. He's the administrator. He was at a Senate hearing testifying about the 2019 budget request. And they had a really interesting exchange between him and Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii. I believe we

have that queued up if you want to get that ready to play, Matt. Yeah, let's play a little bit of that clip. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Administrator Bridenstine, thank you for being here. Do you believe that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of climate change? Yes, the National Climate Assessment that includes NASA and it includes the Department of Energy and it includes NOAA has clearly stated that it is extremely likely, is the language they use, it's extremely likely that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming. And I have no reason to doubt the science that comes from that. Do you agree with the scientific consensus, which includes many NASA researchers,

that the climate is changing and humans are the leading cause? Yes. Is it fair to call this an evolution of your views? Yes. Do you commit to supporting the funding, independence, and integrity of climate science at NASA? Without question. Thank you, Administrator Bridenstine. You and I have had multiple conversations both over the table but since then in person

and on the phone, and I just want to recognize your evolution on this issue. I think it's essential for one of the premier science agencies of the federal government for you to abide by the science. I think it's especially important because, as you know, you're the first NASA administrator that was was an elected official. You're also the first NASA administrator with an essentially partisan confirmation vote and so we needed to move through this period of sort of ideological disagreement, political disagreement, and back to the point where the NASA administrator is a leader of a science agency,

and you can't lead a science agency if you are not grounded by the science. I thank you for that. I don't think it's easy for you to come to that conclusion. But on the other hand, what I have seen from you and in my interactions with you, I have come to the conclusion that this is a true evolution, that you respect the people with whom you work, you respect the science, you want their respect, and there is no way to move forward if you're going to be undermining the science. And so I'm really pleased to see this change. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in front of a Senate committee just a few days ago. Casey? Again, what you're hearing, I'm very glad to hear him say this so plainly. I think that's

something he cannot say enough. And it's something that I believe very strongly. And we discussed this maybe ad nauseum, but at length on this show and on earlier writings during the state when Bill attended the State of the Union with him, which is when people change their minds, I mean, that's the whole point. If you're particularly if you're really passionate about addressing climate change, you will need people to change their minds. And when people begin to take those steps, I think the most important thing we can do is to support them in that process, because changing one's mind is not an easy thing to do, much less if you are a public figure and you're changing it in front of millions of people.

That's even harder to do because you are effectively admitting that you were previously wrong, you didn't understand something, and now you're doing it. It's a hard thing to do. Just naturally, humans don't like to do that. And this is great. I think we should be really happy about this. And we are hopeful that this will send a message and inspire others to change their mind and really think about science and how to incorporate science into their thinking and just have that ability to say, now I understand something better. My thinking has evolved on this. So I just wanted to mention that we had talked a lot about it. And Jason, I don't know

if you want to add anything to this, but I think this was an important statement for also how Bridenstine will be relating to the Democratic senators and members in House of Representatives going forward as NASA administrator. Jason, before you get in there, we'll point out, we'll remind people that not one of these Democrats voted for him. They seem to be warming to him, though. Yeah, that was an unfortunate occurrence at the hearing, I think. That's the first time in NASA's history that an administrator has been confirmed exclusively on a party line vote. And Bridenstine was confirmed by a single vote, which is it's tough for him because it means that his mandate is not as strong as it might have been. Equally important to that discussion with Senator Schatz about climate change for his relationship with Democrats on the Hill was his relationship with scientists within NASA. These are the people who are on the front lines. These are the experts on issues of science and climate. So it's very encouraging to see that the person who is leading the agency at which they work is starting to pay attention to what they're saying, agree with them, understand the science. It's really encouraging. This is the type of leader that you would want to have. Yeah. And it's also a good reminder that sometimes the narratives that

we have for ourselves, I'm thinking about the number of angry emails we got about Bill's participation with him at the State of the Union, that sometimes narratives that we structure for ourselves aren't accurate, or they change, or they become more complicated. And I think Jim Bridenstine has complicated the narrative in this particular instance. And I think it's important to see that, to realize that, to acknowledge that going forward. And ultimately, as Jason was saying, I think this is very good for him as an asset administrator, in relation to the scientific community more broadly. And this won't get anywhere near the fraction of media coverage that the earlier debates got, which is unfortunate. So

he's always going to have to, I think, keep saying this, which is fine. But again, something to just remember that things can be complicated. And in this case, the NASA administrator seems to be really doing the right thing. And we're really looking forward to seeing what he's able to do now as he's building these relationships across the aisle, which I think he seems very committed doing. And I would like to add one other thing to that, Casey. And this really is not at all sour grapes about the negative reaction that we got about the State of the Union thing. This is really more just an explanation of how those things actually happen in DC. We were sort of portrayed as being naive when Bill

went as Bridenstine's guest. But in fact, we had been interacting with his office for over two years at that point. And we understood that his views on this topic were capable of being changed. It's not like we jumped into this blindly, right? This was a very calculated effort on our part, a very calculated effort on his office's part to keep a conversation going and to show support for mutual understanding, for being able to engage in a dialogue like this. I thought the entire thing was a very positive experience in a way that many people didn't seem to understand. Yeah, I would agree with that. All right, gentlemen, moving in a good direction, I would say, at least from the standpoint of the Planetary Society and its supporters. Let's go over to the other end of Capitol Hill and talk about what is happening

in the House. There's been some action regarding a bill. Not our bill, Bill Nye, but a bill that is working its way through Capitol Hill. Well, this has been a very busy month, as you're probably putting together, not just for us personally, which it has been true, but also just for legislative activity related to NASA in Capitol Hill. The most salient issue that we're going to spend a few minutes here talking about today is the 2019 fiscal year, which begins, obviously, on October 1st, 2018. So coming up here in about four months, I guess. This bill, we had the president's request come out back in February. It was okay for NASA. It cut things a little bit. It was annoying in some areas. It cut education again. It cut Earth science missions again. But obviously, we saw a

very different funding situation for NASA come out of Congress eventually last year. And we anticipate that that will be the same this year. And so we saw the first glimpse of that. The House of Representatives released and passed through their Commerce, Justice and Science Committee, the bill that would appropriate funding for NASA, among other federal agencies under their jurisdiction. The news, basically the top headline is just, this is amazingly good. Maybe that is that too strong, Jason? Amazingly good. It's a very good budget. They're increasing NASA by another 5%, which is right in line with what we were requesting earlier. I think something about $21.5 billion if the House bill goes through for 2019. In recent historic times, this is a really remarkable budget and sort of

surprising if you look at how many other agencies have fared. This was the result of a number of factors, one of which is tremendous bipartisan support for NASA in Congress. But it also resulted from a deal between Democrats and Republicans having to do with spending caps. It had to do with some horse trading having to do with other issues. However, it happened, I'll take it. It certainly makes my life very easy in DC. Yeah. Let's go through a few highlights of each division because I just want to call out a few specifics. So again, this is the House budget. It has passed the committee. It still needs to pass the House. We don't know when that vote is going to happen.

And then of course, the Senate hasn't even begun. They've been working on it, but there's nothing public from the Senate side. So this is a parallel process that happens in both sides of Congress. Historically, in the last five years, particularly with John Culberson leading this committee, these numbers that he releases in the House tend to be the ones that really drive it forward. Ultimately, when they finish their work, his numbers tend to be really well reflected in this. So this is a very good starting point. These initial conditions are strong.

All right, so we have $21.5 billion for NASA. That's roughly 5% increase over 2018, significantly above what was requested by the White House, which they're kind of just ignoring in a lot of ways. But let's talk about science first. Maybe the biggest thing, Jason, is that WFIRST will live another year, live another fiscal year. In this budget, it would get $150 million, which is what it got 2018. It's less than what the project had wanted, which was 350. Would you call this kind of a warning shot to that project,

saying that you need to rethink about where you are right now before we really unleash the funding for you? Yeah, I think this was absolutely a placeholder. This was, we don't want to kill this project right now, but we don't have enough information yet to give it funding. Yeah, I think this is absolutely a heads up to NASA that Congress is going to be very interested to hear exactly what the plan is for this project going forward and how that relates to the budget pressures that the overruns on cost and schedule for JWST, how that affects the astrophysics budget and the rest of the space science budget overall. Yeah, so they keep WFIRST going, they give it some kind of a slap on the wrist saying you got to watch your project costs. But fundamentally,

this is good if you like astronomy, which I do. And I think also will be very strong motivation to the project to really think about where it is. And it's an interesting situation because some of the cost growth has actually come from mandates from Congress, particularly with Starshades. It does say that it wants WFIRST to be quote unquote Starshade ready, which seems like that would drive up the cost to me. But what do I know about engineering and space systems or anything like that? There's a lot of competing demands on this project. I'm just happy to see it live another day. That'll really help with their contracts, with their planning. You're seeing the project moving full speed ahead right now because of signs like this from

Congress that they will be funded. You even had Jim Bridenstine say that he feels pretty confident that WFIRST will survive. And he's part of the administration, which I thought was an interesting crosstalk of which we will kind of get to some of later, the difference between some of the budget requests and what NASA is saying itself. Just one additional external factor that was just in the news, which was that apparently Canada has decided, at least the government has decided not to contribute money to WFIRST for an instrument, one of the instruments that would have been on this follow on to the JWST, which I wonder if that is also a reaction to the lack of confidence in this project moving forward. So there are probably a number of factors determining that decision. I don't think it's just concern over

the cost of W-1st or the concern that the administration has said in its budget request that it wants to cancel this mission. I think it also has to do with the reality of looking at JWST's overruns and the likelihood that W-1st is actually going to end up being delayed, even though it will likely fly. Canada has their own science interests, and it's entirely plausible that they wanted to spend that money on something else. It's plausible that maybe that money shows up at a later budget iteration. And the way that the timing on Canada's budget and the process by which they determine space budgets is very different than the United States. So I don't know that I would necessarily say that that's Canada saying we're not interested in WFIRST. There are a lot of factors to be considered. Apparently, there's a lot of pushback from astronomers in Canada,

not surprisingly. Casey, take us on. All right. So we're still on the science mission director part of NASA. I just want to highlight a few other key things in there. James Webb, which we've talked about previous episodes, we know that its cost is going to increase. They've missed their launch date. They're working a bunch of problems. It's too early to know what kind of money they need. And so James Webb gets what it was requested, assuming it had been on track for 2019 in this budget, though they do express, I think, extreme disappointment. I think that's actually the language that they use, because every congressional budget that has passed for NASA in the last basically five years,

I think, has contained in the law itself, thou shall not spend more than $8 billion on James Webb. They shall. Congress is very disappointed. And that'll be interesting to see that going forward. Again, that's kind of another placeholder. And then I'd say maybe the most happy, the numbers that I see in that is Planetary Science Division, our bread and butter here at the Planetary Society, something that we've worked on tirelessly for the last, my entire career at the Planetary Society. And they are proposing just an astonishing $2.8 billion for planetary science. That is a significant, it's about $500 million growth over 2018. It's just a fantastic number.

growth over 2018. It's just a fantastic number. The primary drivers of that growth are the Europa mission, which they want to fund at roughly $500 million for 2019, keeping it on track for a 2022 launch. And they threw $200 million at a Europa lander project, which is so far not a project. And it's very similar to the story with the Clipper that they started getting money before NASA had officially began it as a project. Together, the Europa missions are roughly $800 million, give or take, which is larger than NASA's heliophysics division in the science mission director, which puts that into perspective. So these are kind of behemoth missions now. They're doing a big flagship project trying to rush it into 2022. And they want to have a lander to follow on after that, or at least the chair of the committee does, and I'm sure a lot of other people do.

And so that was just like some spectacular numbers. Also, a great number was planetary defense, something that Jason has been working on a lot. They funded that at $160 million, which includes full funding for DART, which is what was that, Jason, the double asteroid redirect test? Correct. Yeah, which is going to slam into a small moon around another asteroid in 2021 ish. And we also had funding to continue neocam for another year in that so at a higher level. So keeping neocam the asteroid detecting space telescope lives to be developed another year. And then also funding for things like Arecibo and planetary detection.

This has actually been one of the largest increases in a program line in recent years. I think just four years ago, this was at $40 million. Now we're at four times that. Yeah, and equally important is the fact that you got all the funding that you needed for both of the ongoing discovery missions for development. You got all the money that you needed for the selection for the next new frontiers mission. And you got a really good number for the research and analysis budget, which is the bread and butter for an awful lot of the planetary science community. You see a lot of balance in this program, despite the fact that we're building two flagships and potentially a

third at the same time. It's not something that I would have guessed was really possible even five or six years ago. I know. We have great ambitions now. This is just getting started because also in this, we should mention, this has a whole new program line, which is this future lunar initiative in planetary science, which is $200 million a year for NASA to purchase payload delivery services to the surface of the moon and basically to put scientific instruments on that. And that's part of this broader NASA lunar initiative that's seen in this budget request, which is fully funded. And that's a big line, $200 million a year for this. And a lot of people very happy about that. I mean, on the next weekly Planetary

Radio Show, we're going to take people out to the recent test, one of the very successful tests of planet-backed Zodiac. And Masten Space Systems is looking forward to putting payloads on the moon, largely because of this turn toward lunar missions and getting stuff up there and maybe bringing stuff back. I also know a lot of people at JPL and elsewhere who are Europa folks that are absolutely thrilled. But you mentioned that funding for a lander, Casey, that promises to be a very, very difficult thing to achieve. Oh, yeah. I'll let Jason actually speak to the lander. There's a lot going on in that one that has yet to be resolved. Yeah, just from a policy standpoint, the real sticking issue here is the fact that the lander was not called for in the National Academy's Decadal Survey for Planetary Science. That

document called for research into how you would do a lander, but it was very clear that the scientific community wanted to see the orbiter first and kick the lander into the following decade. The fact that NASA is really delaying a new start on this lander, I think is both a fiscal reality, knowing that building three flagship class missions at the same time is really difficult to do and stretches the technical capabilities of the workforce for planetary science. But more than that, they really want to have the scientific communities buy in on this mission. And that means that you have to go through the process. If you're able to delay this even just a year or two more, once we get started into the planetary science decadal process for the next decadal survey, I strongly suspect that this mission will be at the very top of the list. But that gives you all of the buy-in from the community

that you need that you don't currently have. So I think that that's as much as any technical issue, really the sticking point on this mission. Yeah. And it's interesting too, because they're in this strange purgatory with this mission where you don't have a long-term project committed to, you're not even in phase A, but they just released a request for instrumentation to go on a non-existent Europa lander. So they're trying to move it forward in weird ways. And it is really exciting. But as Jason said, you're really talking about adhering to the decadal survey. This is not in our current decadal survey. Maybe in the next one, which is when it would fly anyway. But we have to be careful to, if we're really committed to these missions, you're basically, I'd say the technical term is screwing over the ice planets

community with Neptune and Uranus by jumping right to a lander in this thing because they were technically number three on the large missions. Poor Uranus and Neptune. The outer planets have to wait even longer to get the attention they deserve. Yeah, that community is actually even sorrier than the Venus community at this point. They haven't had a mission since Voyager, I don't think. Yeah, that's right. One spacecraft ever that has visited Uranus and Neptune. Yeah, yeah.

So the other thing that we should definitely be looking forward to is the Decadal Survey midterm review, which is due out later this summer. And I strongly suspect that they'll have something to say on the Lander issue. Yes, that's a good guess. So moving on, just to get through some of these other parts of the budget, again, planetary science, spectacular number in here. And again, historically, the House number for planetary science is the one that makes it through to the end, after all of the cajoling and discussing and arguments back and forth with the Senate.

The other thing I just want to mention that it does request a decent amount of funding for the Mars program, which is another thing that we've been really focusing on at the Society. It funds an awesome, in my opinion, project, which is attaching a little helicopter onto the Mars 2020 rover,

and that is now official. It's going to be riding along. That's just going to be really cool to see that helicopter fly around that rover in 2021, 2022. And it also, more happy to me, but still not as much action as I'd like to see, is that it does request a report saying how NASA intends to deal with data relay at Mars in the next decade. And this is the thing that Jason and I have been hammering away at. And there is still no good answer from NASA beyond we hope our existing satellites don't die.

And we have and the Europeans and they it's a problem that we think is still there. We haven't seen properly addressed yet. So I'm glad to see Congress asking the same questions. I agree with Casey completely. It's very gratifying to see that Congress is stepping in on this issue because it's an important one. And while I believe that NASA has been working on this issue, they're not releasing much publicly about what's going on. And I think that that just that muddying of the waters just makes planning for an effective Mars sample return program very difficult.

planning for an effective Mars sample return program very difficult. By the way, I had no less than the JPL director, Mike Watkins, singing the praises to me of that helicopter that's going to be mounted on the 2020 rover and all the good that it's going to do to help the rest of that rover do its work by giving it a look ahead, stuff that can't even be done as well from orbit. So he's pretty excited about it. It's something they've been developing for a long time. It's an interesting situation because the science team was not that excited about it on Mars 2020. You had the project scientists say that they didn't really want this helicopter on that mission. Because, I mean, this mission is going to be interesting because they have a very tight deadline,

which is that their mission success, they have to drill something like 16 to 20 times sample caching in the first two years, the first two Earth years, first Martian year. I think Curiosity in the first Martian year, first two Earth years, drilled something like half a dozen times because they're complicated. it's hard to do.

The first time you drill, you have all these engineering requirements. And so they didn't want an extra helicopter flying. When the helicopter flies around, the rover basically has to sit and hide, you know, just in case a gust of wind would blow it nearby. It has to go into protective mode. it has to go into a protective mode. It actually limits your scientific observations whenever you fly the helicopter, even though it does have valid engineering things to offer. So it's one of those kind of whole tug of wars between the scientific needs and the engineering desires. I think it's great because I think it'll be one of the most exciting aspects for the mission for people just to get a kick out of, right? I think we need that in NASA mission, something fun and cool. But it is interesting to see that the scientific team

was far less gung ho about the helicopter than you would have thought. Yeah, very interesting. Well, when it comes to payloads, though, it's always a zero sum game, right? I mean, you're completely limited by your mass and power requirements. And anything that's taking up mass and power, it means that something else can't use that. So I kind of understand where the scientific community is coming from. But at the same time, I agree with you, Casey, I think the pictures will be amazing. Yeah. And that's the same reason why that same argument was why we had so much problems getting a microphone on a Mars mission for years, because it was why put a microphone when you can put,

you know, a magnetometer or something on it. And we would rather do something more scientific than have something outreach and accessible. So I guess Mars 2020 solves that problem too, by having not just one, but two microphones on it. So it's this mission. This is an interesting mission. They're cramming a lot on here. I think I wonder part of that is that they're seeing that this is maybe the last major Mars mission they get with scientific options like this for a long time, because any follow-on will have to be laser focused on collecting and launching those samples. Yeah, I think that's very, very true. And this is exactly what the scientific community put all their chips on with the last decadal survey. They basically said that any missions going forward needed to contribute to sample

return or they weren't worth flying. Now the agency is working along those lines. It's detrimental to the rest of the Mars science community. But in the end, I mean, we've been trying to get samples back from Mars now for basically my entire lifetime. It's time to do it. Yeah. I mean, this is as close as we've ever been in Mars 2020. We'll give us that sunk cost fallacy very, very, very well, right? We'll have those samples sitting on the surface just waiting to come home. It'll be a good motivator, but it's just how long will it take us to figure that out. Lots of important considerations. It just occurred to me that maybe they should put a little MP3 player on the helicopter that can play Ride of the Valkyries, and then we can hear it with the microphones

that'll be mounted on SuperCats. Yeah, let's send that along. I'm sure they can just Ride of the Valkyries, and then we can hear it with the microphones that'll be mounted on SuperCat. Yeah, let's send that along. I'm sure they can just slap, we can slap that on there. I'll drop a line to a mic watch. All right, yeah, good. Let them know. Just jumping through this other budget,

I know we need to get on to space policy directives here, but I do want to acknowledge a few other important aspects. Let's flip to human spaceflight. First is that they're fully funding this request for low Earth orbit commercialization money, $150 million. It's still unclear to me exactly what that is. I don't think

Congress exactly knows what that is, but they're getting $150 million to do it, whatever it will be in the support. So they're fully supporting that request. They're fully supporting the request for the LOPG, our Lunar Orbiting Platform Gateway, that'll start developing the propulsive module that they will then add habitation onto later. And so that is getting funded at half a billion dollars. So those are all new funding requests from the White House that are being fully supported. Jason, did you want to add on to that? Yeah, I was just going to say, I bet it would have been funded at a lot higher level if it had a better acronym. Just saying. Funded at a lot higher level if it had a better acronym.

Just saying. We'll work on that for the 2020 request. And they're also funding, again, they basically approved, at least in the House, has approved the restructuring, the internal restructuring of NASA, which is getting rid of the Science Technology Mission Directorate, absorbing that into Human Exploration and Advanced Exploration Systems, into human exploration and advanced exploration systems and moving the HEO-MD, the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, splitting that into two, into the deep space exploration and then low Earth orbit exploration. Jason, I don't know if you wanted to add anything about the implications of this internal restructuring, because this is a bureaucratic move, but it does have real consequences for what NASA is doing. It does. You end up with personnel sort of answering to different offices. You have budgets moving through different structures. In the end, though, I find it very interesting that the new

structure is very similar to what the structure was during the George W. Bush administration under the constellation architecture. It's not entirely surprising, I think, that NASA had always been sort of a fan of the constellation structure to one degree or another. I think the original structure was a little top heavy with management. I think that they've streamlined that a bit, but the arrangement at NASA looks very similar to me. The real difference being the science technology or the, excuse me, space technology mission directorate. Losing that is not surprising, but somewhat disappointing. Jason, this is something that has happened with NASA over the years on a semi-regular basis,

right? These kinds of reorganization? Yeah, actually quite frequently. It's one of the, from an analysis standpoint, it's one of the biggest difficulties at looking at NASA is trying to figure out how to compare year to year over a period of more than about four years, because there seems to be a reorganization in one degree or another about every four or six years. The things that are very similar though, whenever you have new priorities that cost more money than you expected them to. So in this case, talking about SLS and Orion and the LOPG and this new push to the moon, one of the first things that you tend to throw under the bus is technology development, because that's a cost that you won't see a benefit

to for a period of many years. So it's easier to eat your seed corn now than it is to actually hold that budget in place and try and find other revenue streams for the immediate needs. And that's always disappointing, but it happens with a great deal of regularity. I mean, I've heard people call it the bank of technology, wherever you have an overrun another project, you just go to the bank of technology, take money away from the tech budgets, and use that to patch your holes. Base Technology Mission Directorate was created under the Obama administration, specifically to try to avoid this, right? To make it its own mission directorate, to be able to give it some independence, to protect its budget in order to invest in potentially game-changing,

as you just never know in advance, but game-changing tech development that will really enhance future space exploration. So it's still going to try to do that, but the fact that it's not its own mission directorate, that it's absorbed into deep space exploration and human spaceflight, just makes it easier structurally and bureaucratically internally to move money around between those accounts in order to meet the more prosaic needs of the current missions as opposed to unknown future investments, right? Yeah, it really does. But I will say this, looking at the portfolio of technologies that STMD had been developing before it was absorbed into HEO, it's clear that what had happened with STMD is that a lot of existing projects

throughout the rest of the agency had been thrown into their portfolio. That was not the way that you probably want to do technology development at any organization. They had a fairly large and relatively stable budget, but a lot of that developing 11 technologies. It's plausible that moving that into HEO will limit that earmarking occurrence, but it's equally plausible that if you reduce all of those earmarks, you lose your constituency and your budget just gets cannibalized by larger needs. One of the reasons why they canceled W first in the president's request was that W first was actually using money from STMD to pay for a quote-unquote tech demo of a coronagraph, which is a science instrument under a different name, but they used STMD to pay for that

as opposed to the Science Mission Directorate to pay for that. So it would lower the cost to the Science Mission Directorate and shift some of that to just other accounts within NASA. And Mars 2020 is doing the same thing. The MOXIE experiment that's going to ride along on Mars 2020, which is going to create oxygen from the air of Mars, paid for by STMD, as is some of the instrumentation on landing. And so you've already seen STMD, in some sense,

be used to supplement flight projects, which is kind of not what I anticipated, or I think was necessarily the idea of that. But as you point out, it's just now going to be more focused on human exploration examples of that. It was an unintended consequence of an action that Congress took in 2005, where it stipulated basically that any project that goes over budget by 15% has to go before Congress and get approval for more funding, or it has to shut down. Now, as a result of that, NASA looked at their portfolio projects and realized that where you tend to find your largest cost overruns is in the development of new

technologies. So as a project, if you can move that risk out of your portfolio and into somebody else's, you're far less likely to run up against that breach requirement in the congressional language. It not only reduces your cost, it reduces your risk, which is really, really advantageous. And those same stipulations don't apply to technology development in STMD because that wasn't a flight project. So it was a very clever way of sort of dodging this stipulation from Congress. I don't know if it was necessarily the right way to do it because it reduces oversight. It reduces the pressures on the projects to develop technologies at cost and schedule, but it was an interesting result. It would be interesting to see if the Senate approves in the same way. So I know some people

are trying to preserve the independence of STMD going forward, particularly some of the previous chief technologists and engineers of NASA. The other highlights just from this budget I just want to mention real quick before we move on is that SLS and Orion, as usual, get their standard plus-ups of a couple hundred million each. You have additional money for ground systems development, basically building things like the new mobile launch tower and other things around SLS. You have not seen, I think it's interesting in the language, any slap on the wrists to NASA for the increasing number of delays

and likelihood of missing the launch dates for SLS and Orion. Kind of shows you again where the politics are on those, but nothing fundamentally different in terms of funding. And one other thing I'm going to mention, just because it's been so salient, particularly to our last episode, was that the committee here I'm reading, the committee, the CJS committee, reiterates that the International Space Station shall remain operational as long as it remains safe and operable, which doesn't sound to me like they're going to be transitioning away from that in 2025, if I were to bet on that. Anything about commercial crew, Casey? They yell at commercial crew for being late. That's about what it does. They want quarterly updates on where it's going. They fund the request, so it's getting the money it needs. They remain concerned about the overall status of each of the programs, so they focus on that.

That's kind of a standard line that you see a lot in the congressional reporting language. Commercial crew gets much more scrutiny in terms of its schedule. Yeah. And the only other thing I would add to that with the human spaceflight stuff is both in commercial and with SLS and Orion, we're entering the portion of their design phase where costs tend to escalate. So don't at all be surprised when these projects go significantly over budget, and that will put a lot of pressure on the rest of the agency. That's one of the big challenges that I see going forward for us is trying to make sure that as these large projects reach technological maturity and begin their testing

and integration phase and their costs increase, they don't come and eat everybody else's lunch. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to me because theoretically with commercial crew is that those overruns should be shouldered by the companies themselves, right? These are fixed price contracts. But the reality is if you don't have anything to show for it at the end, NASA is ultimately on the hook. That's right. Yeah. I mean, we're purchasing the capability theoretically, but if the capability never materializes, then we spend a lot of money for nothing. Right. All right. We shall see. Gentlemen, can we take a nice June stroll up Pennsylvania Avenue, which is a walk that I recommend pretty highly, to talk about this latest directive from the White House? Oh, of course. And I'm going to preface this by saying this is Jason's favorite topic to talk about today. So we're going to let me just give some

context. So we're going to talk about Space Policy Directive 2. Astute listeners remember that Space Policy Directive 1 came out a few months ago, and it was changed like basically 100 words in the national space policy to say that NASA should focus on sending people and things to the moon. That was effectively what it said. This is a very different policy directive. And this is much more focused on the regulatory structures that oversee commercial spaceflight and commercial remote sensing and spectrum allocation. Already, if you're feeling really excited about that, congratulations. Your top tier space policy wonk.

But more broadly, this is a very targeted set of directives that basically is really only hitting much more specific areas of what government limits or how government works with commercial companies. It has nothing to do really with NASA broadly and nothing really to do with space exploration because commercial companies don't do it yet. So I'll kind of walk through just some of the basics. But effectively what it's doing, it's basically saying, so there's multiple federal agencies that oversee operations in space. In the past, this has been one of the big complaints and problems from commercial companies saying, what parts of government do I need to interface with and who's responsible to tell me I can launch into space? So you have the FAA, which is part of the Department of Transportation that gives you your launch and return licenses. You have the FCC, which tells you what spectrum you can use while

you're in space to talk back to Earth. You have the Department of Commerce through NOAA that tells you how you can take pictures of Earth's surface and what types of regulatory issues and limits you have there. And you have a variety of export kind of licensing regulatory structures that limit what types of technology you can send overseas and so forth. And so you have this kind of a number of ways in which the federal government engages with space companies. This space policy directive is long. It's much longer than the last one. And it's basically saying, again, that each department that is responsible for these needs to, to the maximum extent that they can,

that in terms of national defense issues, basically is the only limit, but re-evaluate the current set of regulations to specifically promote the economic growth of these private companies. So it's really changing the role. And it's very much a consequence of the philosophical bent of who runs the White House is saying you can change your regulatory structures to make it easier, or at least less work for private companies to do their thing in space. The consequence, and I'll let Jason kind of talk about this, is that you have less control over what they do. And that's always kind of the push and pull. So Jason, is there anything specific that you want to add to the broad overview of what Space Policy Directive 2 is doing? Fundamentally, I disagree with the concept

behind it, because you're giving now all of these regulatory agencies conflicting directions, right? You're telling them to regulate the industry to make sure that it is safe or to make sure that they adhere to international obligations or that they adhere to national laws, while at the same time saying that their other directive is to make sure that all of these companies are as profitable as possible. Well, those two objectives are more often than not fundamentally at odds with each other. So you're giving people schizophrenic policy directives. At its heart, I think that that's the wrong way to go about it. That said, the comment that I've heard most often in DC is that we're really good at coming up with new regulations, but we're not very good at getting rid of the ones that we don't need anymore. An occasional reevaluation of regulatory regimes, I think is a good thing. But the idea that you're going to streamline them and eliminate any unnecessary regulations in the eyes of industry, I think is actually potentially dangerous and

potentially undermines the goals that you set forth in the first place. Why do we have regulations? Why are they there? And let's keep it mainly focused on the space industry just to keep it relevant here. But why do you have all these government agencies and why do they have a say in what people are trying to do in space? For a number of reasons, the first being to protect people who aren't necessarily profiting from the space industry, whatever that industry may be. So if you're launching rockets and you don't have someone regulating you, doing things like buying insurance for a rocket is really expensive. So if you don't have a law saying if you're launching a rocket, you have to buy insurance, a lot of companies might not undertake that cost. And it's

not through nefarious motivation. Oftentimes, either they don't have the money or they think that the technology is really safe enough that it's not something they need to worry about. But that shouldn't be their call. Because if they're wrong, if a rocket crashes into, you know, this is completely hypothetical, but if a rocket were to crash into a populated area, the company just goes out of business. They declare bankruptcy and that's the end of it. And that entity is gone. But there are still a lot of people who are suffering and have experienced measurable loss, which they can't recoup. That's not fair. So what regulation does is it forces people to buy insurance. Other examples could be the United States is a signatory to the outer space treaties that stipulate a number of things, including ownership rights of things in space. This is sort of a hot issue at the moment. If United States agencies did not regulate companies about what our obligations are to that treaty, a company could go up and basically claim the moon. And quite frankly, other nations could do the same thing. And quite frankly, other nations could do the same thing.

So we want to be a good neighbor and adhere to our obligations because we also want other people to adhere to theirs. I'm not saying that companies are inherently nefarious in their motivations, but they're responding to very different pressures than the public good may want them to. So regulation is the way that you are able to ensure that business activities don't infringe on the rights of others. I just want to throw in the importance of the FCC's role in all this. In a previous life, I was something of a spectrum person. And electromagnetic spectrum is an extremely limited resource and there is tremendous competition. In fact, it's why the FCC came into existence to

deal with conflicts between different parties who wanted this or that piece of the spectrum. It takes a lot of expertise and a lot of handholding, and there are a lot of international treaties related to use of spectrum as well. It's not something to be dealt with lightly. No, not at all. And it's becoming more and more contentious as spectrum is becoming used even more broadly in cell phone technologies, computer technologies that are commercially available. Those companies are making billions of dollars

and that gives them a whole lot of power to come to DC and try and change the regulatory regime around spectrum. It's really important for NASA or the military to be able to hold on to the spectrum areas that they have for their use, because that stuff could shoot up very quickly through commercial needs or necessity. And that would basically end our ability to say communicate with spacecraft. Yeah, these issues are really big and really complex and are not easily dealt with by market pressures. Who is writing regulation? Congress is not really doing this, right? This is

generally happening through internal agency processes in the federal government. That's correct. So Congress sets up the regime by which regulations are written. So they tell, they sort of instruct the agencies what their swim lanes are, what you have to consider when you are writing regulations. But the regulations themselves tend to be written by subject matter experts at agencies. But there's a tremendous vetting process that these things have to go through. It often takes years to get regulations written because there are requirements for public access to the records and public commenting. There are requirements for sign-off from various different agencies that have expertise, knowledge,

or interest in the regulation. And then often these things are challenged in courts and it has to go through the entire court system before it takes effect. So the idea that you can just walk in and start deregulating things ignores a tremendous amount of effort that went into place to put a lot of these things in power to begin with. It's very, very complicated and it's not easy to unravel. So trying to do so very quickly always makes me nervous. Do you accept that the regulatory structure could be burdensome? When I talk to people who work in the space business, they always say that we spend so much time on the regulatory process. There's thousands of pages we have to submit. We spend thousands of human hours working on these things. Is this naturally a problem? Are there ways to

improve it at all, do you think? Or do you think this doesn't bear review? You're much more, as you said, kind of hesitant about this. My perspective, I tend to be a little more sympathetic to the companies. But as you point out, the process that develops regulations are nefarious, necessarily, but they could be unintended. And so how does directing a federal agency to review things with a certain perspective, how does that actually work, given that you already have a regulatory structure that came about for reasons? Right. Often what Congress will do is say something like, your regulation must take into account the fiscal impact it's going to have on the people that

you're regulating. And if it's over a certain threshold, then you have to demonstrate a much greater reason for implementing the regulation. The idea that these regulations are overly onerous, I'm open and sympathetic to that concept from companies. But I also think it's important to remember that regulations rarely are enacted out of the blue, right? There's usually a causal factor. And if you get rid of the regulation, that causal factor has not gone away. I'm sympathetic to the idea of streamlining regulation, but only if what you're doing addresses the reason that the regulation was there in the first place. Just getting rid of regulations actually can create as many problems

as it solves. The policy is saying is that it's saying you were supposed to review and then to some extent practicable change these. And that's going to be, as you said, a multi-year process before these really come into effect. But also we're seeing some reaction to this already from the Department of Commerce. So I'd say Wilbur Ross, our current Commerce Secretary, is kind of, to me, the surprising new space fan out of the Trump administration. He seems to genuinely be really interested in this stuff. And he wrote a New York Times op-ed after this directive came out saying that space is the future. We want to go to the moon. I loved watching the moon landings. And he is going to be consolidating and streamlining a lot of processes

at the Department of Commerce, basically taking out offices within NOAA, moving them up to the actual full director's office or the secretary's office at the Department of Commerce. He's calling it the Space Administration, which is an acronym that is escaping me right at the moment. But is there value to that? That seems like a smart thing to streamline at least the entry point for this regulatory process for new and upcoming companies. Yeah, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine in the space policy world last night on this exact issue. There can be benefit to these kinds of moves, right? To getting rid of middle management, basically, in the decision making process makes it easier to have decisions on a more timely basis.

The danger has to do with who's making the decision. I'm really happy that Wilbur Ross is taking such an interest in space because he is in a very high-level position in the government. He has a lot of power. The problem is Wilbur Ross has no background in space. So the decisions that he'll be making, if he's not listening to the people who know what the issues are, can be arbitrary and can actually create more problems than any streamlining could possibly solve. My understanding of what's happening within Commerce Department is that exact occurrence is what's happening. The decisions are being made only at a very high level. It's basically micromanagement. These decisions are being made by people who may or may not actually understand the ramifications of those

decisions. And I don't think that historically does not lead to good results. Is this something, do you think, that the country has an obligation to step aside? And because it's such a new industry that we don't want to regulate it too heavily, that we want to have a really light hand? Is there value to that historically too? Oh, absolutely there is. I mean, the worst thing you can do is regulate something before you understand what it is because you'll kill it. That said, I don't think we're over-regulating at this point. I mean, if you look at all of the language coming out of Congress for the past 15 years regarding new space industries, they've taken an incredibly hands-off approach. So I'm not entirely sympathetic all the time about this idea that regulation is what's

killing the industry. In fact, I think what's killing the industry is that the market is not developed enough to really support as many players as we have. I really think that the issue is demand, not overregulation. Right. That's what you see NASA actually trying to artificially do with the LEO commercialization money that they're requesting to actually try to create demand for same at the moon. So it's an interesting situation to be in. Something that I thought was really fascinating in prepping for

this episode was that we see Space Directive 2, so we want to simplify, we want to streamline the regulatory structure around this. Probably the most complex is getting a launch license from the FAA. And they have a specific office within the FAA, the Commercial Space Transportation Office, that approves these, right, and approves things to fly back and so forth and so on. And the big push and pull with that little office has been trying to give them the resources to handle just the increased number of applications over the years. You have seen Congress add like single digit millions, like a small number of millions, which is the difference of a couple of full time employees to help process these applications. But then at the same time, you saw the White House actually proposed to cut that budget by like a million dollars in 2019. So it's strange to see space policy directives come out that seem totally supportive of this regulatory streamlining

environment, but then at the same time proposing to cut the actual offices that have to implement these. That seems detrimental to the very industry it says it supports so much. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? These companies are screaming about the fact that regulation is overly burdensome and it takes forever to get any answer from the government. But then you limit the number of people, you continue to reduce the resources that these people have to evaluate the applications. So of course, it's going to take longer. And of course, it's going to be less satisfying because these people are trying to answer 11 million questions an hour and there's just not any way to do that effectively. So it slows the process down and it's unsatisfying for the customer.

So they scream more about the burden of regulation. When in fact, the regulation may or may not actually be all that burdensome. It's how it's enacted, how it's governed that can be the real problem. I agree with you. how it's enacted, how it's governed, that can be the real problem. I agree with you. Cutting resources and claiming that you're deregulating when in fact all you're doing is increasing the burden on the regulatory workforce, I think is self-defeating. Casey, you mentioned your sympathy for the companies that are dealing with these regulations. Hasn't the reaction from industry generally to SPD2 been very positive? Oh, yeah. As you't the reaction from industry generally to SPD-2 been very positive?

Oh, yeah. As you might imagine, the industry who benefits or is stymied or however they interact with these regulatory structures are very positive about seeing basically their viewpoint highly well expressed in this stuff. They're super big fans of this. I actually had a quote here from Eric Stalmer, who is the head of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group representing these companies. And I actually was going to ask Jason to react to this. He said that the signing of this policy directive will, and I'm quoting here, help make it easier for American entrepreneurs to get permission to invent new breakthroughs in space. You might say that the space frontier became a little

more open to the American people today. How do you react to that, Jason? Well, first of all, the assertion that the government is not the American people is just ludicrous. Every regulator is a US citizen as well. We all play our roles in this. Secondly, I really don't think that regulation has been stifling innovation in space. I think you've seen a huge explosion of it. I don't think that entrepreneurs are lacking for venture capitalist money because venture capitalists think that the regulatory regime is too intimidating. I think it's because these are really risky ventures from a market standpoint.

It's hard to find money to invest in these new ideas because you're not sure if there's a customer base. And I don't think regulation has anything to do with that. So again, I think this is an issue of demand, not over regulation. That said, I don't have any problem with a review of the regulatory regime and an attempt to make it easier for companies. I just don't want to do that at the cost of placing the risk or the eventual burden of any of those risks being realized back on the US taxpayer while they're not seeing the financial benefits in the same way that private business is. It's a balancing act, and I just don't want to see the pendulum move too far, one direction or the other. And I add one thing, which I did reach out to Commercial Space Light Federation to see if they wanted to talk about this for this episode. Unable to work that out in time for this episode, hopefully to get that perspective on in a future one.

Jason, just going back to what you're saying, I think that's the key point to me. And again, this is what's interesting about this directive, which it really is just a directive to review. So there's no real actionable consequences of this. You're seeing some proactive efforts on the Commerce Department and maybe in the Department of Transportation. But it's going to take a while to work through this. But how well is this going to survive into future administrations? Easy, I think, to have a light regulatory touch when nothing has gone wrong. Right.

Or something hasn't gone wrong in a long time. When something goes wrong, which is just an inevitability, because this is the real world, things just happen. Right. Space is hard. Space is hard and things go wrong. Will that cause us to reevaluate our regulatory touch and maybe react even more strongly if it had been seemingly underregulated beforehand, if that ends up being the impression. Could this ultimately be

a detriment? Of course it could. And that's what I'm talking about when I say I hate to see the pendulum swing too far in either direction, because you're absolutely right. If something catastrophic occurs, the example I used earlier, if somebody launches a rocket and it does land on a city, the amount of regulation will increase by orders of magnitude. And that will also be very detrimental to the space industry, to US space efforts writ large. So I don't want to see it swing too far that way either. I think if you have, the idea is to try and find the sweet spot of regulation that allows companies to profit, to find new niches within the market, to innovate and develop new technologies, to do all of those great things, while at the same time, keeping everyone safe and keeping the risk and reward posture as balanced as possible so that you don't end up with an overreaction later down the road. I think that's a great place to end the discussion today. This is something that will be an ongoing thing for us to follow, for you to follow

online. The real consequences in a very immediate level of having who runs a White House and what party runs a White House and what philosophies they're bringing for governance to a White House. Because again, all of this doesn't require congressional oversight. This kind of reminds me of the early 80s with Reagan coming in and their attitudes towards the regulatory structures of government and who they serve. So whether you agree with this or not, or if you're indifferent to it, it's one of those longer term real consequences, but also very hard to reach even the headline status. I mean, I think you saw this

when Trump signed this directive, there were no astronauts in pictures about this one. There was no live stream of this one compared to the first one signing about going to the moon. Yet, I would say this one actually will have a more immediate and practical impact than the moon directive, maybe in the next 10 years. Yeah, I agree. All right, guys, we'll leave it there for now. And of course, we will be back with more developments on the space policy front next month, the first Friday in July, with Casey Dreyer, the Director of space policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, the space policy advisor in Washington, D.C.

Their colleague, Matt Renninger, is the guy who fills out the full-time staff that the Planetary Society maintains to watch and actually have influence over all of this among the people who determine the real direction of space policy and space development, space exploration. Casey, you want to remind folks one more time of how they can become part of this effort and why it's so important right now? Well, as you're hearing, there's a lot going on in space, in space policy. It's good to have a voice in the room. We're your voice in the room here at the Planetary Society. So if you want to chip in, help us do our job better, help us do it for you, that's planetary.org slash advocacy. Thank you, Casey.

Thank you, Jason. Thanks, guys. It was fun. As always. This is Matt Kaplan. I'm the host of Planetary Radio. Hope you will tune in to the regular weekly version of the show. And again, join us on the first Friday in July for the next

Space Policy Edition. We've had assistance this week from the associate producer of Planetary Radio, Mary Liz Bender. And that theme music is from Jason Callahan. Thanks, everyone. Have a great month.