Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition Special: The 2019 President’s Budget Request Unveiled

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

As promised, Casey Dreier and Jason Callahan are back with a special review of the just-released FY 2019 President’s Budget Request (PBR) for NASA. It contains good news, bad news and odd news. What is likely to stand? What will Congress ignore, going its own way? NASA’s new lunar ambitions, Mars Sample Return, WFIRST and more hang in the balance. Let the debate begin.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a special version of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of the show. We told you that we would come back when Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan were ready to take us through the budget proposal that has now been issued by the Trump administration. And so here we are halfway between the normal release times or dates of our show, which of course is usually the first Friday of each month, but we just couldn't wait to get back to you. So Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society is on the line with us. Hello, Casey. Hey, Matt. Happy to be here. And Jason Callahan, our Space Policy Advisor there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Jason, welcome back to you as well. Hello, guys.

How are you doing? It's good to be back. We will, because it's the right thing to do before we get into talking about the budget, remind you that this is a service provided by the Planetary Society. And really, if you want to get down to it, provided by our tens of thousands of members for all of them, but also for the rest of you who are not members. If you listen to public radio, you hear people talk about this all the time. Get on the stick, freeloaders. It's time to become a member of the Planetary Society and put a little bit of money behind this program that so many of you apparently enjoy listening to from what we hear. You can do that by going to planetary.org slash membership.

And we would love to have you as part of the family. Please join us. Please support this program, the regular monthly edition of the Space Policy Edition, and, of course, the weekly show, Planetary Radio, that we have been bringing you for nearly 15 and a half years now. I don't know if you guys have anything to add to that. No. Just hit them freeloaders, Matt. Don't let them get away with it.

All right. Don't leave us out of spite now, because we've got great stuff to tell you about. Tell us about what has come down from the administration. Well, just to let's step back and review real quick for those of you who are just need that refresher. The president's budget request is a proposal from the White House detailing how it would spend money for NASA in this case, not just the upcoming fiscal year, which is the 2019 fiscal year, which begins this October, but also for the next five years beyond that. It tells you where they think the agency is going.

And really, you can see it as a declaration of priorities by the administration to say, what is important within NASA, how important is NASA within the rest of the federal government, because I think Jason has this nice line, policy without funding is fantasy. And so you get to really see where they want the funding to go. And that tells you how serious they are about what they say they want for the space program. So the budget proposal, it's by law supposed to come out the first week in February, usually comes out a little later. This got delayed, it had some weird stuff happening at the very end, trying to react to

the increase in spending caps that Congress has given itself. And so NASA would receive a proposal here in the president's budget of 2019, for about $19.9 billion. And that's a good request for NASA overall, just from a top line perspective. But then in the future, this run out years going into 20 through 2023, they bring it back down to 19.6 and keep it flat, which is basically a functional cut every year because it does not even grow with inflation. functional cut every year because it does not even grow with inflation. Now, you ask yourself, is this really a statement of support by the Trump administration for NASA? And in a way, yes, because relative to pretty much every other federal agency, it doesn't get cut huge amounts.

And so in that context, they're showing, oh, NASA is relatively important, but it's not exactly throwing money at this new initiative that they had talked about, which is sending humans back to the moon. We'll go into the details of why that is, but really we have this statement of NASA is important enough to throw some money at, but we're not going to cut it, but we're not really going to put much more resources into it. And it's up to NASA to figure out how they're going to go forward from here. I think that's a really accurate assessment of what this budget says. The other important things to keep in mind in the context of this budget, while NASA actually does better than most other non-defense discretionary agencies,

the defense side of the House got a tremendous increase. And this comes at the same time as Congress just passed and the president signed a really large tax cut that's coming straight out of deficit spending. While the government is taking these cuts, we're also seeing a tremendous increase in spending that's going to increase the deficit, which will continue to put pressures on discretionary budgets into the foreseeable future, which is also an interesting turn. And we've already seen calls for an increase in the debt limits for the federal government. So it's pretty ominous. They increased the debt limit as part of the deal that Congress just gave itself through the next year to get through the congressional elections in 2018 here at the end of the year. So they're set for a while.

It's a two-year extension that Congress gave itself for basically lifting spending caps. My guess is that they will continue to lift them because that's what they've been doing generally. The party in power, no matter what they say when they're not in power, tends to like to spend money when they're in power because that's how you win elections. One other thing that's important to remember, and a lot of people, there's a subtlety to this. People will say, well, Congress has the power of the purse.

So this budget is dead in arrival. It doesn't mean anything. Why should we pay attention to it? My answer is always think of this document as a statement of priority by the administration. So regardless of what Congress does or doesn't do, the White House wants NASA to be doing what they laid out in this budget. And anything that Congress does not specifically countermand in its process of funding NASA for 2019, whenever that it's going to be, will come to pass. So Congress generally does not have a detailed breakdown of how NASA spend this money. You know, they'll just focus on specific areas of a lot of concern or particular interest of particular members of Congress. But this is a 700-page document. And anything that they do not specify the White House not to do, the White House will generally try to implement when Congress gives it the money, ultimately, to fund NASA in 2019 anyway. So lots of potential things can slip through the cracks like that. And it just, again, gives you a big picture. Another kind of thing is just it's fun to read, seeing what NASA is doing broadly as an entire agency.

It's just an astonishing amount of stuff that this agency does. And this is why it's a 700-page document. So it's important from that alone, no matter what Congress does. And also, Congress acts slowly. We haven't even finished the 2018 appropriation cycle here, and we're already looking to 2019. So in that confusion and turmoil, a lot of stuff gets to be implemented in the meantime to the White House's desires. Casey, I agree with you that the assertions that the budget is dead on arrival when it reaches

Congress are overblown. But it's also important to note that the budget request that came out earlier this week is nothing like what the final budget is actually going to look like. There will be significant changes made by Congress. Yes. And big picture things like missions that are proposed to be canceled or director levels of funding to be applied, those will absolutely change. It's usually, to me, the smaller stuff that sometimes can fall through the cracks that we've seen in planetary science in the past and other fields. But yes, absolutely. Congress will have a lot to say, given what we're seeing here in this proposal. Are we ready to start breaking this down?

I guess we'd better after talking about it now. Yes. Well, okay, let me hit a couple of the highlights. We have all of the numbers on planetary.org. So I'm not going to go through all of them. But there's a couple of highlights that I'm going to raise. And then Jason, I'll turn it over to you for a couple of your highlights that take away kind of prime takeaways that interested you from the budget. But fundamentally, what we're seeing here is the Trump administration has announced its intent to return humans to the moon and for NASA to focus on exploration as its prime motivation. What struck me, I've been trying to decide how I feel about this budget. It's a weird budget to me because, as I said before,

it doesn't really increase NASA funding dramatically to enable a moon program, but it's also not doing nothing. It's doing a lot of things internally. It's shifting things around, moving directorates and having them absorbed into focus on human spaceflight. It's adding directed funds towards public-private partnerships in a lot of different ways. But again, it's not clear to what end or to what date they're even working towards or to really even what they want to accomplish. You walk away from this budget saying, all right, I guess they like the moon and they're going to do stuff there. But you couldn't necessarily say what exactly and to what end,

just that there's some money being put forward for commercial opportunities who are interested in the moon. They can pursue that more easily now. But again, nothing is that different. They fund what's called the, what is it? The Lunar Orbital Platform, aka the Deep Space Gateway. Right. The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. So it's the LOPG now. Wonderful acronym.

Great acronym. Yes. It captures the public imagination with the LOPG. Nothing really changed. NASA was already working on that concept. So now it's just formalized in the budget. They absorbed the Space Technology Mission Directorate into Deep Space Exploration Systems.

They kind of renamed some of the internal divisions and directorates within NASA in this budget. So instead of HEO-MD, which was the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, we now have Deep Space Exploration Systems, and we have LEO and Spaceflight Operations. They're breaking them up. But again, the overall amounts of money aren't changing significantly. They're just absorbing, they just grabbed STMD, which is about 700 million, plopped that into Deep space exploration to have directed research

and technology development for human spaceflight. And through a few hundred extra million for the LOPG and some other directed tech demos and money for commercial companies to compete for, but really not that much different. The SLS is still moving at the same pace. The Orion's still moving at the same pace, still have the International Space Station for the extent of this budget window through 2023 funded at the same rate. Not fundamentally huge differences here. And it's really questionable as to what exactly they're going to achieve and when through this effort. Yeah, one of the interesting things that I noticed about all of these reorganizational changes, it's starting to look a lot like NASA looked during the constellation years of the second Bush

administration. So you said that they broke it into the LEO directorate, or it's not a directorate, but the LEO operations and the deep space exploration. Well, the organizations used to be called Exploration Systems Mission Directorate and the Space Operations Mission Directorate. And those are basically the same two organizations, just with slightly different names. The Space Technology Mission Directorate was put together under the Obama administration. During the second Bush administration, it didn't exist. Those operations took place within the human exploration side of the house. So they basically just moved that back.

What it looks like to me is, and it's not surprising if you look at the makeup of the National Space Council, it really looks like this administration is trying to put back together some of the original pieces of the Constellation Enterprise. some of the original pieces of the Constellation Enterprise. Yeah, particularly if you think of Orion and SLS as your Constellation heavy lift and Orion moon capsule, it's the same capsule anyway. It's still there. You have all the same issues with that. The only difference is that they have this LOPG that, again, it's flexible, and I don't necessarily think that's the wrong way to go here.

You can see NASA's clearly coalesced around this idea. But the money here that they have for this, you know, they're putting real money behind it compared to ARM, let's say. And that's actually something that struck me from this budget as well. And you can tell compared to under the last years of Obama with NASA when it was theoretically the journey to Mars. But it was really hard to actually see any real implementation of that journey to Mars beyond the public facing statements and claims and PR stuff. There wasn't Mars directed research and technology for human spaceflight. Here you're actually putting money towards hardware and research that is directly applicable to lunar stuff. You can actually see that shift in focus. And I think that's a real statement that there is interest. It's just not really enough. But they're putting about half a billion towards this Lopji per year with the intent of launching it in 2022. And it's actually not even what would launch in 2022 was kind of fascinating. It's not habitable. It would be the power module. It would be the solar electric propulsion module that

they're taking from the asteroid redirect mission, plopping it at the moon. It would be like a dock, but it would actually not have a habitation module. So the earliest they could do would be 2022 on a commercial provider after spending, it looks like roughly two to $3 billion on this. And that's after, that would be, for the Trump administration, ideally for themG on an SLS, but the SLS won't be ready by 2022. It's a timing issue of development cycles. The other really big thing that they're talking about in human spaceflight is this idea of ending massive government funding of the International Space Station in 2025. Now, that's not a completely unheard of suggestion. This has been bandied about for six or eight years at this point, but this is the first time that the government's actually taken a position on when space station, at least the government subsidization of it,

will greatly reduce or come to an end. Now, the problem with this is that they don't indicate in the budget at all how they're going to do that. There's a lot of talk about looking for private interest in either running space station operations or putting up an alternative to the space station so that we still have an orbital capability for humans in LEO. But the real issue is that they put $150 million in the FY19 budget towards studying how that transfer will take place. But there's no indication as to how they're going to spend that money, which I think is really interesting as well. Yeah, let's talk about that a little more. I want both of those things. So the space station right now has commitments from not just NASA, but the entire international set of partners through 2024.

That's the current commitment. Now, NASA says and studies say that most of the space station could continue through 2028. Beyond 2028, you'd have to start replacing things because, I mean, you think about this, even 2024 means that the station has been, parts of it have been in orbit for a quarter of a century. That's a really long time to be in space. That is a long program. Yes, it is. Yeah. And so the idea of switching this to a minimal NASA participation or cheaper NASA participation, we actually mentioned this in our humans orbiting Mars report that we released a couple of years ago, absent billions of dollars showing up to NASA, which this administration

clearly has no appetite to propose, there's no real way to pursue a moon program and maintain an ISS unless you basically eviscerate anything else NASA does in terms of science, particularly, but also aeronautics or its workforce. You know, there's not a lot of options internally for where this money would come from. There's also not a lot of stomach in Congress to have that happen. Yeah, exactly. And so the problem is here, what do you do with the station? And or why are you continuing to run it? And so the solution for a lot of people just seems to be this assertion. And this is, this is where we were just talking about that you will just assert that it'll be

cheaper for a private enterprise to run it. And NASA will somehow be a partner and pay less. There is no pathway in that I yet understand how that will happen. And the money then that they putting forward here, and I actually wrote down the 150 million grows by 25 million a year over the next five years, but it's not just for it's Leo commercialization. And they're saying, next five years. But it's not just for, it's Leo commercialization. And they're saying,

so they're supporting people adding on stuff to the space station commercial modules or free flying commercial modules in space to make money and use for commercial purposes. That's a reference to like a Bigelow module or something. Right. And notably, the Bigelow company was very happy about this budget proposal. They released some very positive responses to it. And that's Bigelow Aerospace, basically, to support these types of ventures. But as Jason said, there's no clarity yet to what that even means. Right now, it's just kind of presented as a slush fund to say, let's use some government money to make Low Earth Orbit a commercial marketplace. We don't know exactly what the goal is, what the timeline is, what the evaluation would be,

what success look like in two years after spending $300 million. It's not clear yet. We need to learn just a lot more about what that would do. And then also, if you spend a billion dollars, which is basically what it adds up to over the next five years, you're basically, it seems to me, distorting a market. If it's such a great market, why can't people raise money from private capital to get up there now? There's lots of questions great market, why can't people raise money from private capital to get up there now? There's lots of questions for me, I guess. It's questionable. I mean, there's certainly a case to be made for the government having a function in propping up a market in its early years. But generally speaking, that's only successful when

there is a plan for what the government is supposed to do and milestones that are met. And there's no indication of any of that in this budget request. Yeah. I mean, the way that this is pitched almost is like, here's some government money that companies can get. It's great for those companies, but it doesn't seem to strike me as like this is what Jason said, what's the outcome you want to get? To say that there isn't a path forward on this, it seemed to be rushed. That's again, and that's the other takeaway I have broadly from this budget. This is the sloppiest president's budget request document that I've ever seen. There were whole pages that they posted that just said, caption goes here.

Literally, it's saying caption goes here, insert text here. Like they'd forgotten to put in the actual text. And there was typos and, and grammatical errors and punctuation issues. I've never seen that from a president's budget request before. No. Cause they usually, you know,

read these through. I mean, these are documents. These are pretty important documents. Are there even any private enterprises that have stepped up and said, Oh yeah, we, we want to take over the ISS.

No, no. Yeah. The short answer is no. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, we want to take over the ISS. No. No. Yeah, the short answer is no. Yeah, I mean, but also just like what does it mean? Like, are you have to operate the ISS like two NASA safety protocols? Like, there's no way you're going to make money doing that. What about all the other international partners? How do they interface with you?

Do the Russians detach their segment and then move on and do their own thing? Are they going to buy into any consortium? Where are money saving opportunities? Like, again, the whole assertion that NASA can just pay someone else to manage it and then they will save money. It's a conceptual leap that doesn't have much foundational support behind it. It's an aspirational goal. It's an aspirational goal. It presupposes that NASA is running the station inefficiently now and that a private company would be able to find efficiencies that would enable them to save a significant amount of money.

And I just, I don't, I've not seen any indication that there's data to back that up. Right. Aren't there also already a lot of voices in Congress? I mean, among them, Bill Nelson, Senator from Florida, who say, no way, the ISS needs to continue on to 2028, or maybe even beyond that. Absolutely. There's that and Ted Cruz. There's a bipartisan reaction. I think Ted Cruz called them numbskulls at OMB, the Office of Management and Budget that put this budget together. This is a debate that we should be having about the future of the ISS. And it needs to be happening now because we need to start planning for a transition or an extension or something, right? We have to be at least open with the choice that we're making as a nation to say, this is worth $3 billion a year. And we will take the lost opportunities elsewhere because this is such a valuable platform to have.

We need to at least consciously make that choice. And right now, this is part of it. And we need to have a serious look. Are there alternative? I'm fine to say, taking a real study, are there alternative ways to run the station more cheaply to the taxpayer? We should absolutely see if there's a way to do that. I don't necessarily see from this that that's a clear pathway, and they clearly haven't done a good job communicating this intent to members of Congress themselves who ultimately have to approve this. And that doesn't strike me as a very good first step to seeing something like this actually happen. The human spaceflight planning that's put forth in this budget, there's a lot of information left to be revealed. But

another aspect of this that I found really interesting is they talk about going back to the moon and staying there. So this is supposed to be a sustainable lunar program. But you look at their timeline for building a human lander to get from the Lop-G to the surface of the moon. lander to get from the Lop-G to the surface of the moon. And they're talking about having a lander in the mid to late 2020s. Well, the problem is to build something that complex, you need about 10 years. It's 2018 now. So if you were planning to have this thing in 2028, you would need to start building it right now. And we're talking about, I've heard numbers on what the cost of a human lander would be anywhere between $10 and $20 billion. And that's historically accurate if you look at what it costs in today's dollars to build the Eagle lander from the Apollo program. It was like $12 to $15 billion, as I recall. It's been a while since I looked at that. But it falls within that range. Time to get out the old lunar module blueprints. But the plans that this administration put forth in the budget request also indicate that they're looking to commercial options.

Well, there's nobody investing in a commercial human lander at the moment at all. And it's hard to imagine that anybody's going to do that on their own dime because there's not, again, a market on the moon at the moment. So it seems like the kind of thing that the federal government could invest in if they were interested in opening this market. But $10 to $20 billion puts a huge hole, even over 10 years, in the NASA budget. It's clear from this budget request that they're not interested in spending that money at the moment. Their timeline and their expenditures don't make sense for what they're talking about in the long term. It's almost like an ideology a little bit reflected in the budget. The number of times that they say public-private partnerships or private partnerships or novel new partnerships with commercial partners, they use these phrases

all just sprinkled throughout this document. They use it almost as a as that same thing. It's just an assertion of it will just be cheaper. Why? Because it's that's what they are a commercial public private partnerships are cheaper. And you can point to SpaceX and say, sure, you got a great deal out of the Falcon nine, and even better deal out of Falcon heavy since they paid for that themselves. But the idea is that there was a market waiting to use the Falcon nine, you had a whole commercial satellite market that they could compete for. There's no commercial market already at the moon waiting for cheaper lunar landers to enable them or to do more stuff. There's nothing at the moon right now.

And so you won't be able to find the sort of private venture capital to come in and match necessarily whatever NASA puts in, which is what happened with the Falcon rocket development. NASA met one for one with private funding. That was a great idea to raise that kind of money. I don't necessarily see that happening on the moon. Another part of this, they put into science $200 million in planetary to start partnering with commercial lunar development for payloads. And so the way that they kind of pitch this in this document is that through the science payloads, they build up a commercial capability to land 500 kilograms on the surface and maybe return as well. And then they just say what Jason was saying, like, and then we scale it up to 5,000 kilograms

for humans. Right. And it just seemed like there's some steps there. But that seems to be where you can see, I guess, where the National Space Council is thinking in terms of what their planning is or their proposal is going to be, which is leverage science needs and to work with companies to build small scale landing and take off capabilities from the surface and then somehow leverage that into larger. That's where the magic kind of apparently comes in at the moment. And again, we just need to know a lot more. Like, what do you need? What are those 5,000 kilograms for?

How many people do you need to carry? How long does it have to stay in the surface? Again, what are you going there to do? That ultimately is the whole missing piece to all of this to me, that we don't have a clear motivation or goal out of doing all of this beyond that we should go to the moon. of how you're necessarily achieving those or even how those goals are driving what decisions are being made now to make them achievable in the future. It just says, okay, here's some moon stuff.

And this seems like it could be interesting if we do some moon stuff with this money. It's lacking focus to me. Are we ready to move on? I mean, we could keep talking humans and commercial development, but maybe we ought to move to planetary science, talk about some robots. Sure, let's talk about some robots.

Jason, you want to say the biggest surprise that was in this budget proposal or maybe the lack thereof? Well, there were two of them, in my opinion. I think the biggest one for planetary science was the lack of a new start for a Mars sample return program. I think the biggest surprise in the budget was actually in the astrophysics budget, in which this request proposes to cancel the WFIRST mission, which was the top-rated flagship mission for astrophysics in the last decadal survey, although there are a lot of caveats to that story. Yeah, I was surprised to see WFIRST. So let's just talk about that one, because that's the big one, then we'll touch on some planetary science. If you just look at the overall science mission

directorate funding, it actually goes up from 2017, which was pretty impressive. In aggregate, it grows. The biggest recipient of that growth was planetary science for some of these other things we're going to talk about. But in the context of that growth, WFIRST disappeared. And WFIRST is what the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which was the, as Jason said, the top recommendation or version of that top recommendation in the Decatur Survey for Astrophysics. It was going to use those inherited space spy telescopes from the national reconnaissance office that NASA got a few years ago. And it was going to have as like a Hubble sized mirror to do wide field surveys of distant objects to get a better understanding of like dark energy. JPL was proposing putting on a Corona graph to study the atmospheres of

exoplanets. And it was becoming this big next space telescope to follow on James Webb. And the costs, the estimates had been growing recently, but at the same time, in much the same way that Congress had been adding money and kind of earmarking it for the Europa mission, we've been seeing a similar process with Congress putting in roughly 75 to 100 some million dollars per year the last few years directed towards W-1st formulation. And so it seems like there's a strong support for pursuing that mission. But this year, they pulled the plug and said, we can no longer afford this. And Jason, the reason that they said that we can no longer afford this was really fascinating to

me because I feel like they rarely have this much candor about it. Yes, I agree. It was stated unequivocally that W-1st and the cut of the Office of Education at NASA were directly related to finding funds for the human spaceflight program. Yeah, they were just like, we're going to do moon stuff, so we can't do the science mission anymore. Jason, you have said this as long as I've known you, that anytime human spaceflight at NASA starts getting a lot of attention, it just eviscerates science. Yeah, yeah. It's very rare that an administration wants to put more money into a NASA budget, and even the amount that ends up going in for new human spaceflight enterprises is never enough. The engineering for

that stuff is really difficult, and it's really hard to predict how much it's going to cost or what the effort's going to take. The estimates are usually very optimistic, and as these projects go over budget, they go looking for money, and there's only one place to find it internally. The biggest pot of money other than human spaceflight at NASA is science. Science tends to take a hit after they've eaten up the technology budgets. Which they just did. Which they just did. Yeah. So.

I want to come back to this point that you mentioned that this disturbed and even up in arms over this possible cancellation. I mean, I know a number of scientists working on WFIRST who are kind of in shock. That's true, but this is actually a really complicated story. And it actually, you know, just because I like to take everything as far back as I can in history, this actually is- Starting with the Big Bang. That's right. Hydrogen was after the proteins. to take everything as far back as I can in history. This actually- Starting with the Big Bang. That's right. That's right. Hydrogen was after that. Proteons.

Dinosaurs. Electrons were after that. So this dates back to a perennial battle within NASA, starting with the 1958 Space Act. Prior to the formation of NASA, space science, the direction of space science was really sort of determined by the Space Science Board at the National Academies, which is now the Space Studies Board, which is an independent advisory group. It's a nonprofit organization outside of the government that advises the government on issues of science. When NASA was first formed, the Space Science Board just assumed that they would be determining the direction of the science program at NASA. But NASA decided internally, no, actually, we're in control of the taxpayer dollars. That's our responsibility. You can give us the strategic directions, but we're going to

determine the programmatic direction. And basically what that means is you can figure out what kind of science questions we're going to ask, but we're the ones who are going to figure out what the missions look like. So that battle has continued at NASA for the past 50, 60 years. And this is yet another iteration of that. Starting in the 2000s, Congress sort of stepped in and it started including in language in appropriations and authorization bills, basically instructing NASA to follow the directions of the decadal surveys. So there are decadal surveys for astrophysics, for heliophysics, for planetary science,

for earth science, for microgravity research, and a couple other smaller decadals, I think. It's written into law now that NASA is supposed to use these as their directions, but NASA still doesn't really like that. So they do it when it's convenient. And when they want to do something else, they say, well, those are just the strategic directions. We're still in charge of the programmatic stuff. And W-1st falls kind of squarely into this argument. The argument is made even more complex by the fact that in the decadal, though it was the top recommended flagship, it was recommended at a budget level of about $1.6 billion. It's grown to more than

twice that. But part of that, as Casey alluded to earlier, had to do with the fact that the National Reconnaissance Organization donated two spy satellites that are very similar to the Hubble telescope to NASA. So that immediately gave them a huge chunk of cash, rather a piece of equipment that would have cost a ton of money that was far more capable than what they were planning to build. So that meant that the instruments got bigger as well. So it's not entirely the community's fault for just like hanging more instruments on a spacecraft and making it more expensive. They were given an asset that they hadn't expected, hadn't anticipated. And can I just jump in one extra thing? It's a good reminder, too, that nothing is really free, because ultimately part of the expense is adapting to the optics that were designed for Earth observation and spying to a deep space astronomy scientific set of needs. You have to work within what was already designed as opposed to designing from the ground up for exactly what you need.

And that added to the cost and complexity of the mission as well. Yeah, it absolutely did. And the community has been aware of this for quite some time. There was the inclusion of a coronagraph that was going to allow for really amazing exoplanet research using this asset, but that added to the cost as well. And that was not included in the decadal planning at all. At the end of the day, the community had really sort of gotten behind this mission, despite the fact that it was going to cost more than they had expected. And they seemed for the most part to be willing to take the hit on some of the smaller programs in order to get this asset.

So the fact that NASA and basically the National Space Council have come out and said unilaterally that they're going to cancel this mission without having consulted the community, it's problematic. And I can understand why by about $3.5 billion. And they had to find that money very quickly because they surprised OMB and the White House with those. Actually, they surprised NASA headquarters with those overrides. Yeah, they were hiding it for a while. It was like a Ponzi scheme of budgeting until the whole thing blew up. Just as context, WFIRST, I think, with the coronagraph is estimated to be something like $3.8 billion, which would make it, I think, maybe in the top five or top six most expensive science missions of all time. The first two being

the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb. And this is a pre-phase A estimate, so the costs are only going to go up. Yeah. And so to kind of come out right after James Webb had this horrific, catastrophic cost overrun, and then say, we're going to do another $4 billion mission, wink, and maybe more, it did seem a little gutsy, I guess, to go right into that. And so in a way, you can see this is blowback almost from that as well. And this is all besides the point for the science. And this is where it kind of comes down to me,

because the science opportunity with this mission is just so immense. It the calls to reduce the cost, scaling back that coronagraph and making it just sort of a test bed. I'm also wondering, is there much political support for WFIRST? My guess is probably not as much as there is for keeping the ISS in its current state. The ISS spends the equivalent of a WFIRST every year. So there's a lot more people invested in that. I agree with your assessment, Matt. I think there's far more political support for basically any human spaceflight project just because they're so much more expensive, as Casey just said. But there is tremendous support for W-1st in Congress, and it's not just parochial interests. It's not just people with constituents who are working on this. There is a shocking amount of support for space science at the moment, particularly in the House

of Representatives, but it's not clear how much leverage the people providing that support really have to keep a project of this level going without significantly adding money to NASA's budget. Yeah. I mean, the trick is, I mean, if you just look at the runouts, it would be very hard to absorb and do all the other things that people in Congress want to do. You know, in terms of planetary science and Earth science, all the other sciences, you have to work into that a five-year projection for spending an extra $3 billion. Right. Which actually sets us up for the worst case scenario, which is that Congress

underfunds but continues to fund the project for years and years and years. So the costs, just the longer it takes to build something, the more expensive it is. And the costs just continue to escalate. And that money just it eats the rest of your program alive. So that that's really the big worry. That's the vampiric approach. And so there is but there is so just going back to your question, Matt, there is congressional supportic approach. And so there is but there is so just going back to your question, Matt, there is congressional support, I would say that there is less powerful people than there were previously. This is a I think, in a sense, you're seeing the absence of Barbara Mikulski in this decision. She has classically been Marilyn Goddard's protector within Congress.

And she, I would say, nearly single handedly was the key person in Congress to save the James Webb Space Telescope. It's managed out of Goddard. WFIRST also managed out of Goddard. She retired, so you lost the top Democratic ranking member in the Senate on appropriations who could save you in a situation like this. But there are other people who are interested in this. I would honestly, I think there's going to be quite a big effort. And I would say the Planetary Society will be speaking in support of WFIRST, particularly if there are ways to reduce the cost of it. But the value of the science is so immense. And the contributions it could provide to human knowledge, it seems like such a waste to throw that away after building that consensus over so long. And so I'm confident there are ways forward with this. And if anything, this will, when you survive a near-death experience, the programs tend to be all the stronger for it. Look at Sophia as a good example. J-D-W-S-T itself. Yeah, or JW. It really brings out the question, is this worth fighting for?

And if the answer is yes, you will build that kind of stability that will ultimately serve in the long run. Ideally, as Jason said, in a way that doesn't undermine the overall balance of your program. So it'll be quite a bit. We'll be talking about this quite a bit going forward. Let's bring it back into the solar system. Jason, you already mentioned that Mars sample return also kind of ignored in this budget.

I can think of one more thing that I want to bring up, but let's talk about that. The Mars sample return program, NASA released some preliminary plans over the past couple of months for a lean Mars sample return program that was really interesting. It basically took on more risk

in order to return samples more quickly. But part of that risk involved the telecommunications capabilities at Mars. So Casey and I did a paper on this about a year ago, discussing the problems with the aging telecommunications capabilities at Mars, and the fact that we needed to put up a replacement. What NASA suggested was that basically we build a Mars ascent vehicle to lift the samples off of the surface of Mars to then be picked up and returned to Earth, that we do all of that a lot more quickly than had been anticipated in order to use the current aging telecommunications capabilities. to do that, you basically need to launch that mission by 2026. And again, getting back to the development cycle of large complex missions like this, if you were going to launch in 2026, you basically need to start in 2019. Since we did not get a new start, it's difficult to imagine that we

would be able to meet that launch window, which adds even greater risk that the telecommunications capabilities at Mars will not be viable by the time that the sample return spacecraft gets there. There are other possibilities. There are commercial possibilities being discussed to enhance the telecommunications capabilities, but they're not really discussed at all in this budget request. So once again, we're left waiting for details. And just to remind everyone, when we talk about the telecommunications capabilities, we're talking about those aging orbiters that have multiple purposes for being at Mars. And one of them is to get signals from the surface back here to Earth. Yeah. And they're critical. When we did this paper, it shocked me. The average speed of a direct

rover to Earth communications is about one kilobit per second. So that's slower than your modem in the late 1980s. Almost non-functional with that little data because particularly Mars 2020 will be generating the most amount of data per sol day on Mars in history for any Mars rover. It's just an immense data cruncher producer. And so you need to get that data back.

MRO is being, we just saw some press releases come out this week saying how their engineers are working on finding ways to extend its lifespan. They'll be doing the same with MAVEN. They'll be moving that from less of a scientific orbit into more of a communication support orbit. They've got a backup on the trace gas orbiter. to more of a communication support orbit. They've got a backup on the trace gas orbiter.

But all of that is to keep that aging infrastructure through the mid to late 2020s. I just could not believe there was no new start for a sample return mission after all the brouhaha we saw last year announcing it. What they have officially requested, this is to clarify here, they have put in $50 million for planning the future robotic

missions to mars that build on scientific discoveries and incorporate lessons learned from previous missions i'm reading here mars future supports study and technology development for a potential mars sample return mission and in developing concepts for a sample return mission nasa intends to leverage commercial and other partnerships that's all it says that that's the extent of the discussion that tells me that this is not happening in 2026. I do not see, I mean, let's just even say that somehow they squeezed, there's a lot of new tech for develop a Mars Ascent vehicle and a fetch rover. Let's say they do that for two and a half billion. If you think about what you'll need per year, you'll be needing to spend roughly 500 million per year starting in FY 2020,

which is impossible. I mean, it's just that you wouldn't be able to fit it in. I mean, the 2020 Rover began in 2013 and launched it. It had seven years to fit that cost profile in. It's a less complex Rover that was based on something that was already designed. And so lacking this, I was very surprised not to see a new start. And also in the notional budget that goes into the future that they're projecting, there is no room to add.

You just see the size of the Mars program shrink into the indefinite future. And I'd see no room into how you accommodate. If they can't fit W first into the five-year run out, there's no way they're going to fit Mars sample return to that five-year run out, absent big increases to the budget or sacrificing other things. And so it's actually quite troubling for the future of the Mars program, even though the magic words of sample return are included in the document, there is far from a commitment for making it happen. Well, maybe we'll see those rocks brought back by somebody else. China's gearing up to do it

from the moon. Can I say one thing, though? Because I feel I've been very negative so far, this budget. I do want to acknowledge. There's something I should acknowledge, that this aside from our sample return, I am not used to being happy with a planetary science budget. They requested a planetary science division budget of $2.2 billion, which is crazy. I mean, crazy good. requested a planetary science division budget of 2.2 billion dollars which is crazy i mean crazy good it's just we were struggling to get up to 1.5 for so long and now we're above two in the request

and we have two you look through the budget there are two discovery missions happening uh that are budgeted in lucy and psyche you're seeing another one and that's getting ready to launch you're seeing the new frontiers mission that's going to go either to a comet or to Titan budgeted. You see a Europa Clipper in the budget for launch in 2025 is what they put it in there for. And you see increased funding for scientific research for planetary science. Then there's a whole new $200 million a year to spend on this, as we kind of mentioned earlier, kind of ill-defined, but opportunities for leveraging commercial partnerships to send scientific instruments to the moon. And that's a decent chunk of money. It is. But again, you run into this problem with programmatic versus strategic

recommendations. There was no request from the scientific community for 200 plus million dollars for a lunar program. This is something that NASA just decided to do on its own. So I agree with you. I think that the top line level for planetary science is excellent, but it came with this huge mandate that costs most of that increase. Yeah. Though, let's also say one other good thing, that we got an asteroid mission included in the actual funding request. Even better, it's an asteroid mission. You're talking about the planetary defense mission? Yeah. It's not just that DART was funded, the dual asteroid redirect test mission. It's also funded within a new planetary defense line. So having a new program start for that project, I think, is very encouraging.

That is pretty exciting. I got one more, guys, which I'm surprised has not come up. And that is, is very encouraging. That is pretty exciting. I got one more guys, which I'm surprised has not come up. And that is, yes, Europa Clipper, the orbiter is on track, but no mention of a lander on that mysterious moon of Jupiter. They mentioned a lander, but only to,

to kind of crap on it and saying, we're not going to do this. We cannot afford a lander, which, so John Culberson, chairman of the CJS subcommittee on Appropriations, will not be happy to see that. But no, yeah, no lander.

They said we're not going to do another flagship lander before we've even completed the first flagship to Europa, which isn't the worst argument, but definitely you're just extending your timelines here. Another thing actually just related to Europa that I wanted to toss in here, interesting language saying that they are proposing for the Clipper to launch on a commercial rocket and not the Space Launch System. Despite the fact that it is law that the Clipper must launch on the Space Launch System. And the reason they give is, here's the quote,

it is not possible to launch the Clipper on an SLS earlier than 2024 without disrupting current NASA human exploration plans. So basically NASA saying the SLSs are all spoken for and they're all going to the moon. Yeah, which is very different than what we'd been hearing just three months ago from folks at NASA headquarters. So clearly a lot of planning has changed, which probably is an indication of why the budget is as sloppy as you have indicated. is an indication of why the budget is as sloppy as you have indicated. That said, the other interesting thing about Europa is the fact that there's no lander in the budget actually adheres to the decadal survey recommendations for planetary science. There was no lander in the last decadal. There were recommendations for studies to do a lander in the following decade. So I'm actually okay with that. I would love to see a

lander sooner to be sure, but the decadal process is more valuable to me than a single mission. Excellent point. Casey, you said it up front. We were only going to be able to look at some highlights here. The details, of course, there's much more to this budget. You worked on a blog entry that was posted by Jason Davis on February 12th at planetary.org that does at least take a little bit more of a deep dive into the specific line items in this new budget proposed by the Trump administration. Is there anything else that either of you guys want to squeeze into this special edition of the Space Policy Edition. Our short episode is now almost an hour. I mean, there's always so much to discuss in these things.

I would say we could even just do more discussion in the future. But maybe the one other highlight that I thought was interesting was the continuing, I think the term is shitshow, with the Space Ground Systems segment update or the scan program for communications. They're basically giving up on that and throwing their hands up and saying, it's impossible to upgrade this communications infrastructure, and we're going to privatize it or something. That's basically the extent of it. Right. Yeah, exactly. There was another one of those public-private partnerships thrown in

because it will magically solve this intractable problem. Yeah. Give me a quick word or two about how Earth Science has fared. Give me a quick word or two about how Earth science has fared. Earth science got basically the same proposal it got last year, which was, again, better than I ever would have thought, but still a 6% cut from the year before. And they're proposing to cut five missions, and they all generally are more climate-focused missions, plus the spiteful cancellation of the camera on the discover spacecraft that was proposed by Al Gore, that looks at Earth every day that costs like $1 million a year to run. It's a weird thing to cancel. However, they're proposing every mission they proposed to cancel in 2017, they're proposing to cancel again, bring the budget down to 1.8 billion and kind of maintain it there for the indefinite future. Jason, any last words?

billion and kind of maintain it there for the indefinite future. Jason, any last words? The one other thing that I think a lot of people will be concerned about at first glance is that there's no funding in this budget for the Office of Education, which funds a number of really interesting programs like the Space Grant that we have benefited from. We've had a couple of interns run through on Space Grant, which has been fantastic. I think it's a great program. Fortunately, the stuff in the Office of Education enjoys a tremendous amount of support in Congress. And this budget for this office has been zeroed out in budget requests from a number of administrations, and it always ends up being funded again. So I'm actually not that concerned about it. it again. So I'm actually not that concerned about it. Guys, you have once again educated me,

and I'm sure everybody else out there, except the people in the OMB who put this together. And this is just the beginning of the story. As you said, we will continue to follow it in the monthly, the regular programs in this special part of Planetary Radio, the Space Policy Edition. Casey, any last words from you before we close out? Well, there's a lot more to this budget. And I just recommend if anyone wants to just up their game as a space advocate, just try reading a section or two, or just read through it a little bit every day. It's long, but I think it's a really fascinating document, because it really does give you a complete picture of what NASA is doing this year, what it intends to do, and what's coming down the pipe in like a very

near and invisible way. It makes you appreciate the scope of our space program. So it's at nasa.gov slash budget. And it's the president budget request. That's the full estimates would be the full document to look at. It's fascinating read. Dive in. That was Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy for the Planetary Society. Jason Callahan, thanks to you as well for joining us. He is the space policy advisor in Washington, D.C., monitoring things there on the Hill. And guys, once again, I want to congratulate you and thank you for the work

that you and your colleague, Matt Renninger, do on a daily basis to advocate for all of space exploration and particularly planetary science, because you have had such demonstrable success

over the last year and more. And I sure hope that that record is going to be able to continue on for the foreseeable future. I know you'll be very involved as this new budget, proposed budget, is discussed and hashed out over the next few months. Absolutely. You know the old saying, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And we are at the table for you, the members of the Planetary Society. So that's what we do every day for you. Members, that's really what it's about and why we are able to do this.

Once again, planetary.org slash membership to stand behind the work that Casey and Jason and Matt Renninger are doing and all the other great stuff that the Planetary Society is up to, including making this show happen. Planetary Radio and the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We're done for this one. We'll be back on the first Friday of March 2018. We'll talk to you then. In the meantime, Jason, take us out with that terrific theme music that you created for us.