Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: T-minus Five Years and Counting

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Can NASA return astronauts to the Moon by 2024? Vice President Mike Pence shocked the space community by announcing this ambitious new goal just weeks after the Trump Administration proposed a half-billion dollar cut to the space agency. Is the Administration fed up with the mounting delays to the Space Launch System rocket? How seriously should we take this declaration? Is it even possible given budget cuts and political dysfunction? Brendan Curry, Chief of Washington Operations for The Planetary Society, joins the show to explore these questions.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 the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. This is the April 2019 episode of this monthly series brought to you by the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, both the weekly show and this monthly program, which always features my colleague, the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome, Casey. Hey, Matt. Always a pleasure to be talking with you about space policy. You bet. And we have a colleague, someone who has now been with the Society for a little while, but it is his first time on Planetary Radio. Please introduce our guest.

Well, it's the new Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society, Brendan Currie, previously of the Space Foundation, previously of working on Congress, previously doing a lot of other things in Washington, D.C. Brendan, welcome to the show. Hey, guys, it's great to be here. It's an honor and a privilege. Looking forward to working with you guys. And again, like Casey, you said, it's always cool to talk about space policy. I can vouch for that.

Welcome, Brendan. And your vast experience has been added to just in the last couple of weeks and is going to be central to a lot of what I understand we will be talking about today, Casey. Before we get into that, though, and there is a lot of really significant stuff to talk about, let's talk about the most important thing that we can say up front in any of these programs, and that is support for the Planetary Society, which you can provide in the best way possible out there. All of you who are listening, if you're already a member, and we know many of you are, thank you for being part of the Planetary Society and supporting everything we do. If you're not a member, well, get on it. Get on it.

Go to our site at planetary.org slash membership and look at everything that not only will benefit the society if you become one of our supporters, but everything that we'll be doing for you and all the reasons that you'll have to be proud of your membership and your support for the Planetary Society. It's very easy to do. It's a bargain. It's very easy to do. It's a bargain. And you will be joining this program, but the program of space policy and advocacy at the Planetary Society. So that's if you already are a member or want to sign up as a member and then chip in some extra cash to help this effort that Brendan and I do in Washington,

D.C. to build this community of space advocates. Go to planetary.org slash advocacy. I think we have a doubling option. So you can put in five bucks. We have a donor who'll match that by five bucks. So it's an instant 100% return on your investment in this program. So that's something we do every year. And it demonstrates an ongoing commitment from our membership that this is an important part of what we do at the Planetary Society. And if you don't mind me saying, I would say maybe one of the most important things that we do at the Planetary Society, the work that Brennan and I do. So planetary.org slash advocacy, chip in a few bucks if you can. Otherwise, membership is a great way to support us as well. Important and amazingly effective. And we'll be talking about that some more at the end of today's Space Policy Edition,

giving you some more evidence of that that I think Brendan is going to bring to us. But for now, Casey, you and I talked on the weekly version of Planetary Radio very briefly about NASA's budget request. This was just a couple of weeks ago. We've got a chance now to expand that a little bit further as we conduct the Space Policy Edition discussion. And what's more, what was announced by NASA is probably not the final word. Well, we knew that because Congress will have something to say about it. But even NASA is saying, whoops, we're going to have a little bit more to say about this budget. But first, tell us what was issued, what we saw come out of NASA HQ just recently. It wasn't necessarily from NASA HQ. This is from the White House. This was the president's budget request for NASA. Pardon me. Sorry about that. With NASA input, of course.

Go ahead. NASA, the whole process that we've talked about before with the Office of Management and Budget and the White House. But I just wanted to say from the last time that we recorded a space policy edition about a month ago, we've had a budget come out. And then we've had this weird situation where we actually, as time has gone on, we actually know less. We are more uncertain about NASA's budget than we were after it came out as the budget release came out from the White House. We're going to be talking about a lot in this episode, and we're specifically going to be asking our questions like, how seriously should we be taking this new moon initiative? But let's start with the budget, because fundamentally, right, no bucks, no Buck Rogers. You know, the money pretty much defines what we can do in space. So we're talking about now fiscal year 2020, which obviously begins on October 1st, 2019. That's how the government carries its books. Supposed to.

But yeah, on paper. Yeah. As Ben points out, I don't know when's the last time we've actually had a budget for NASA start on October 1st. I don't know when's the last time we've actually had a budget for NASA start on October 1st. But the idealized version that we will be talking about here, the platonic ideal of the regular order is October 1st is the fiscal year. Well, the fiscal year always begins on October 1st. We just don't always have a budget. Maybe it would be the better way to put it. However, we're talking about fiscal year 2020.

It's coming up. So this is the normal process. The White House releases its budget request. Congress takes that budget request, does whatever it does, and ultimately creates an appropriation in time, hopefully for the new fiscal year. It kicks off, right, the entire year of debate. It sets the terms of the debate for how the budget comes together. The White House came out with this budget of $21 billion for NASA,

which represents about a $480 million cut to what Congress enacted for the fiscal year 2019. So they're coming out of the gate with a cut for NASA. It's pretty much spread across the board. And I have a page I put up online. We'll link to it in the show notes. And I have a page I put up online. We'll link to it in the show notes. But we're looking at, you know, roughly a 9% cut to the science division, a small cut to the exploration systems, including a significant cut to the SLS program, mainly deferring, proposing to defer work on the what's called the exploration upper stage, the version block 1B of this big rocket that will carry bigger and bigger payloads into Earth orbit and along to the moon. Also saw cuts to space operations, the ISS, cuts to aeronautics. Again, removing the entire education program, proposing 100% cut to that. Cuts of a number of Earth science missions. So a lot of repeated cuts from what

they've done in the past. I wrote about this in some analysis after this came out, which was about, I think, mid-March. March 11, to be exact, at planetary.org. Excellent, excellent blog post, Casey, with a lot of great graphics. Well, thank you. Yeah. And I think I ultimately came down, it was a very frustrating request, because in some ways, it's very good, right? Like 21 billion, it represented the largest request the Trump administration has made for NASA in terms of its funding. But it's still a cut. And it's just like a mild cut. It's annoying cut, right? So we end up focusing on the cuts. They could have just put the extra 500 million in, kept it flat, and we all would have been talking about overall how good it was. So it was kind of a self-inflicted messaging problem. Overall, NASA, you know, in the scheme of non-defense discretionary spending, NASA did quite well in terms of it was cut the least of many other government agencies. But we're still talking about a cut, right? the government agencies. But we're still talking about a cut, right? The other interesting thing that's really relevant here, well, there's a couple. Let me actually just mention one that's a particular near and dear to my heart, Planetary Science. They requested $2.6 billion. That's the largest request for Planetary Science in history. So that was very good. However, that was still a cut from last year. That's a 5% cut to the Planetary Science Division.

What it really is hitting is the Europa lander. You don't have John Culberson pushing the Europa lander anymore. But you do see a new start from our sample return mission, which is an incredibly important mission and something that we've been pushing for really hard over the last few years. And they put in $100 million, which is about what you need to start that first year development. You have funding for Mars 2020, Europa Clipper. Everything is actually doing pretty well in planetary science, very healthy budgets. Obviously, we'd like to see that grow. We want to see the continuation of NEOCAM, the space telescope that would hunt near-Earth objects.

We'd love to see more work in the Europa lander, more research funding to keep scientists employed doing the science of planetary science. But overall, pretty solid. WFIRST, which is the space telescope follow on to the James Webb Space Telescope was again proposed to be canceled. Congress gave that 300 million last year, it needs at least another $500 million this year now. So that's going to be a battle going forward. That is, I think, the administration and the Office of Management and Budget expressing a significant amount of displeasure for the ongoing overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope.

So I'd say they're understandably hesitant. And this is kind of classic behavior of the executive branch office of management and budget, that when your program overruns in a big mission, they don't want to reward you with another big mission right after that. So Congress is going to have to step in on that. Brendan, did you have any other reactions to the request itself when it came out before we talk about all the subsequent issues that come from it? it came out before we talk about all the subsequent issues that come from it? Yeah. Well, you know, Casey, you and I, we were kind of like holding our breath when we heard that there was going to be a mandatory across the board 5% cut across all discretionary funding. And the fact that it wasn't hit with a 5% cut, I remember you and I were on the phone. We were almost like breathing a sigh of relief.

But there's still going to be some issues. I mean, the education office, or I think it's now called the Office of STEM Outreach. There were years when Congress was trying to zero it out. That's been a troubled office for a number of years for a variety of reasons. Mr. Bridenstine was at an appropriations hearing. I think it was literally the day after we were all in Huntsville. And he was getting asked about the zeroing out of W-1st. And he said, well, James Webb needs to go. And then we can start considering funding for W-1st. So it tracks exactly along what you were saying. There is a growing frustration with the delays on James Webb, so much so that there has been some discussion that the launch vehicle

that James Webb's been baselined for, the Ariane 5, may already be retired by the time James Webb is ready to fly and may have to fly on the essentially brand new Ariane 6. Like you said, it's a shot across the back. Yeah. And I also thought it was interesting, just like in 2019, that a lot of these cuts came back. I get these proposed cuts came back. In 2019, they proposed the same cuts in earth science. They proposed to cut the STEM engagement education office, proposed to cut W first. they proposed to cut the STEM engagement education office, proposed to cut W-1st. Congress pretty clearly rejected, I mean, about as obvious of a rejection as you can get. They actually increased

the funding for education. They actually increased the funding slightly for earth science and they put in all that money for W-1st. So in a way, I hear this referred to sometimes as the Statue of Liberty play. You know, if you have to do a budget cut, you say, oh, I'm going to close the Statue of Liberty. And obviously no one's going to let that happen. They made the numbers balance on the request, maybe knowing that this is going to be so unpopular. Yeah, so unpopular that Congress will put it back. And obviously Congress is already. I mean, you have folks like for W-1st in particular, they have a very good set of congressional supporters up to and including the Senate minority leader in New York who have a huge contract and a lot of jobs in upstate New York for W-1st.

And so if Congress can actually pass a budget, I guess they have to eventually. And don't forget, we got the sord damn cleats hanging over us with sequestration still having to be resolved this year. So Congress still has the debt ceiling. They've got to sweat. I mean, there's still going to be a couple, I don't want to say nail biter moments. That's a little dramatic, but there's going to be a lot of things where, you know, you and I are going to be pulling out our hair, what's left of it as we get through this process. I mean, if this was a nine inning ball game, we're at maybe at the middle of the first inning. Right. Do you want to quickly just remind our listeners what the situation is with the

Budget Control Act and sequestration? Yeah. I mean, can you do a 90-second version or do you need a 90-minute version? Yeah. How about we all go to a bar first? Sounds good. I bet the listeners would love to join. Maybe, yeah, we'll do a live episode one of these days. Yeah. We should. Tell people what we really think about space policy.

There was something called the Budget Control Act. It was almost like a mutually assured destruction effort by Congress to make sure spending and debt issues could be resolved. And the result, if they couldn't come to a resolution, would be so dire that it would mean severe cuts all across the board. And Congress, ever since then, which I think it was 2011, I might be wrong about that case. Yeah, it was 2011. And fiscal year 2013, sequestration happened once. And then every year they've lifted the caps. Yeah, they've given themselves a waiver, a get out of jail free card and, you know, kick the can down the road. Well, and they essentially give it you give the problem to the next Congress. Once again, we're at that situation now. They've got to look at how they're going to resolve that. I would assume since we're on the precipice of the 2020 elections already, sadly, that you're not going to see any profiles in Courage about putting that issue to bed. And then the debt ceiling is something that, because I think it was the 1974

Budget Control Act, Congress has to vote every about 18 to 24 months on raising the debt ceiling. It becomes political theater, but it's still something that becomes a bit of Washington drama. And I don't take any pleasure in saying that, but it becomes something that, again, eats up time and energy. While those of us who care about space exploration and funding space exploration, the bills that we care about have to kind of get to the back of the line until all that kind of stuff is settled out. You worked on Congress for how many years as a staff member? Seven and a half years.

Seven and a half years. So in those seven and a half years, and then in your years afterwards working in the space foundation and other places around Washington, how much have you seen NASA driving the politics of either the debt ceiling or overall government spending? Never. Okay. That's what I was expecting. Yeah. So that's my point, right? That we're, these big things have to happen. So ultimately what, what has to happen first, the kind of the

zero with step before we even talk about a congressional ultimate appropriation for NASA for 2020 is that Congress has to have some bargain struck between the Democratic-controlled House, Republican-controlled Senate that the president will sign off on, that most likely will agree to waive the caps for spending cuts. Raise the debt ceiling. Raise the debt ceiling. And that has been the case. Ultimately, they've done that the last six years, Raise the 2020 elections. That would be my guess. Casey, I'm anxious to get to this sort of Alice in Wonderland situation you mentioned, where we know less now a month later than we did when this was first issued. But I do want to call attention once again to your March 11 blog post. It's titled,

Amidst Cuts to NASA, Mars Sample Return May Finally Happen, President's Budget Request for NASA 2020 Would Kick Off the New Decade with a Half-Billion-Dollar Cut. It is loaded with great details. There is this wonderful table that you've got that compares the enacted 2019 budget, the one that we're supposedly working with right now, and the President's budget request for 2020. It shows all of those changes. And it's more detailed than what we'll be able to go into here. If you're ready to move on, why is it that what we saw the president come out with in March is still very much up in the air, even before Congress gets to start working on it.

Yeah. So here's where things get really interesting, actually, from a policy perspective. This has been just a weird month of March for anyone following this. It's been all over the place. So the budget came out, as you said, March 11th. We started having hearings in Congress, most of those that Brennan was sitting at, you know, being part of that process. But just to jump back to this budget real quick, just to set this context, you know, we talked about the planetary science, we talked about some of the cuts, but what did it also claim to do? It claimed to follow the directive, Space Policy Directive Number One, which President Trump signed in 2017, which directed NASA to send humans to the surface of the moon again, and then on to Mars. And so the plan that has been developed over the last two years in this

limited budget situation has been, let's build something called the Lunar Gateway, which is this orbiting mini space station around the moon that has various ways to change its orbit. The way it's been pitched is kind of this open access staging point to either send things to the surface of the moon robotically or ultimately with human landers to do long-term studies of human presence in deep space, maneuvering stuff, you know, basically this kind of open platform for international and private companies alike. The goal had been, and I'm looking at this, this is the budget highlights that were released on March 11th, saying that NASA's planning to use these public-private partnerships to develop a human-class lunar lander that will return human to the surface of the moon by 2028. That was the operating goal, or I guess I'm already giving away

the pitch here. That was the operating goal in 2028. And even then, I'd say a lot of people would think that that was optimistic. The issue is starting to be, though, is that the SLS, which is required to launch the Orion crew capsule with the European-made service module that keeps the astronauts alive and powers the thing, in addition to major chunks of the gateway, the SLS has been falling further and further behind on its schedule. The original EM-1 mission, which was an uncrewed test of sending Orion around the moon, that has been delayed from 2020 now into at least 2021.

Originally, this was planned for 2017. Originally, this was planned for 2017. You're seeing a series of issues. And to that effect, this budget proposed offsetting development of these higher level capabilities of the SLS rocket just to focus on launch the damn rocket with Orion in Block 1A. Because you need Block 1A can still send humans around the moon in the Orion crew capsule. Quite a bit of kind of debate on this. And then you had Jim Bridenstine kind of drop what amounts to a grenade in the middle of this discussion. And Brendan, I think you were there at this hearing, right? Can you explain what that was in regards to the SLS? Sure. There was a Senate hearing a week before the Space Council meeting,

a Senate hearing a week before the Space Council meeting, and he kind of flabbergasted everybody and said that NASA is actively looking at other options besides SLS for EM-1. It stunned everyone in the room. He said that they will be looking at using existing launch providers or an amalgamation of existing launch vehicles. We got into some of that discussion this week when he was in front of the House. And then what was really interesting was they had the Space Council hearing the following week down in Huntsville, Alabama, which is where SLS is being, the program is being run. The vice president was there and gave very public statements that essentially echoed similar sentiments. It was a kind of stunning, stunning revelation that the vice president would almost double

down on what Mr. Bridenstine said in front of the Senate. Mr. Bridenstine's been in front of congressional hearings since he was in Huntsville. He's kind of walked back some of his sentiments. There's been stuff on the Internet that's been leaked that showed essentially some sort of almost Frankenstein booster with a Falcon Heavy merged with a Delta IV upper stage and the European service module and the Orion crew capsule and some of the options that they were looking at. I mean, it was quite staggering to see. And I think there is a sense of impatience with this administration and the SLS. I mean, some of our listeners will probably remember SLS in many ways is essentially the Ares 5 that was announced in the early 2000s. And so this is a program that in one way, shape or form has been

going on for quite a long time. I just think you're seeing some impatience. Now you're having Mr. Bridenstine in front of various congressional committees saying that they're looking at integrating the launch vehicle in a totally different manner than it was originally designed to help speed things along. The discussion of this amended budget request is something in the 20 years I've been doing this I've never seen before. Why is this such a big deal? Let's just give this context. Why is the administrator saying that we're going to look at commercial options to launch an uncrewed Orion around the moon? Why did that send off these shockwaves? Because the SLS was the program of record that

was supposed to do this mission. And the fact, Mr. Bridenstine has been quite public in his statements. He said he wanted all options on the table and he wanted a thorough vetting of it. He was asked the other day, you know, did you talk to budgetary and technical experts on this? And he said, yes, they consulted with them for quite a while and had been in communication with the vice president's office, who the vice president chairs the Space Council, for quite a while. I mean, the cover of Space News this week, it says NASA's core problem. It's a picture of the SLS core being assembled. Wow. And we should remember that SLS is essentially coming from congressional districts and states all across the United States. And so there are a whole bunch of people in Congress who their ears are going to perk up quite a bit when they hear that SLS may be devalued, shall we say? Yeah, I mean, I think that's why people were reacting was like, well, what do we have this rocket for if we don't need it to launch crew or Orion into the moon? If it's falling so far behind, if we're not going to if we're going to defer this heavier capability lifts version of it, what do we even have this for anymore?

Why are we spending approximately two billion dollars a year building this rocket for what? It wasn't just that there are jobs at stake for members of Congress. anymore? Why are we spending approximately $2 billion a year building this rocket? For what? It wasn't just that there are jobs at stake for members of Congress. Congress literally wrote the SLS into existence. And the NASA Authorization Act in 2011, they literally say the SLS shall lift this much weight into space. It shall use pieces and workforce of the shuttle contractors. So I mean, they kind of defined it into existence, which is why it's a very specific type of rocket. It is kind of by design inefficient, right? It's meant to create jobs, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, right? Jobs are good. I like jobs. I think the space industry should create jobs. But if you can't deliver, that's where this frustration

is coming from. And so what was interesting is that, as Brendan pointed out, the Ares 5 is basically the SLS. The Obama administration tried to cancel all of Constellation back in 2010. They got significant amounts of pushback, particularly from Republicans in Congress, because it just happens to be that a lot of these NASA centers are in Republican districts. Now you have a Republican administration. And when the Obama administration canceled Constellation, Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland was the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And she was quite fine fighting back against President Obama and helped have that SLS designed. I mean... And Bill Nelson, too, a Democratic senator in Florida. Yeah. So yeah, on the Senate Appropriations and Authorization Committees, they weren't going to

hear any of this. If someone would go back and look at that legislation and the level of detail they talked about this launch vehicle to have, it would be akin to in a defense bill passed by Congress, they ordered the Navy to build a new submarine and dictated the number of torpedoes it could have, the number of crew members it could have, the precise type of propulsion it could have, or if a new Air Force fighter plane, how many bombs it could carry. The level of precision of the technical detail was unbelievable. I remember sort of a corollary of this, former representative John Culberson of Texas, who you've already mentioned, telling me, as he told many people very proudly, that he had written Europa missions into law and that those must happen on the SLS, on the Space Launch System. Yeah. I mean, you have incredible capabilities on paper. The trick is you have to launch it and build it. And there's a lot of other issues. There's bottlenecks in terms of how many they can

build and launch. They're looking at max right now once a year, which is not- And that's a real problem. A serious problem. And that's a real problem. A serious problem. Because not only in terms of cost, but there's real concerns about safety of operations. When we were flying shuttles, the shuttle contractor community always used to say, we've got to fly at least five times a year because if we're anything below five times a year, essentially the ground support crews would become lax in their technical proficiencies, and that could lead to an accidental oversight, which could lead to a loss of a vehicle. At that launch rate, every launch is the first launch.

Yeah, and I've talked to astronauts that think that the operational cadence of SLS is very unsafe. Given all of this, this is what I think is then fascinating. Is the SLS actually threatened? No. Senator Shelby, who's the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is from Alabama, and he's committed to this program. And it's more than that. I mean, he's kind of the most visible. But at the same time, within a week and a half, you already kind of mentioned this, of Administrator Bridenstine talking about this. Their internal study was done, and the conclusion was only the SLS can launch EM1.

And there's actually quite a few good technical reasons that that's the case. I remember cautioning people on Twitter about this. After this study was announced, people started to dance on the grave of the SLS. Fundamentally, you have to keep things in perspective. The argument for canceling the SLS and moving to commercial only vehicles, in a sense, is like going up to a member of Congress, say Senator Shelby, and saying, hey, have I got the deal for you? Let's cut 15,000 jobs in Huntsville. Let's just get rid of them because they're unnecessary. And we'll start buying services from this guy in Southern California.

And we'll maybe make some more jobs in Southern California, maybe a dash in some Texas or Florida locations. How does that sound to you, Mr. Congressman? What a deal. And that's the fundamental political problem, right? No congressperson is going to say, what a great idea. Let's cut 15,000 jobs in my state and move them to another state. That is not how people get reelected. And that's not what a lot of members of Congress see their job to be. And that's the fundamental political problem of the SLS. This is why it was designed this way. And so until there's an answer for what

those 15,000 people are going to do, or, you know, I'm just picking out a number. It's tens of thousands of good paying jobs here. The SLS is going to continue, and all of NASA's planning has revolved around it too, as being the centerpiece capability. We don't have commercial rockets that are capable of launching Orion in the upper stage required to get it to the moon and its service module all at once. You'd have to separate, you'd have to have multiple different launches, connect them in space. There's all sorts of reasons why you can't do that. You have issues with SpaceX not having rockets, particularly the Falcon Heavy, rated to carry such payloads in terms of just the

reliability demonstration yet. Humans, human rated. Well, human rated, but even, I mean, there's a number of different categories of rating for rockets. The Falcon 9 was just certified last year to carry flagship missions, robotic flagship missions. SpaceX had to literally sue the Air Force. To even compete. And so the issue is, I mean, there's just some regulatory issues, but at the same time, ultimately within a couple of weeks, you saw, I feel everything is coming back just more solidly onto Space Launch System. It's still probably good. And this is, Brendan, I'd be kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this.

It is still unprecedented to have the administrator and the vice president effectively publicly rebuke Boeing, right? I mean, they never said the name directly, but that's the implication is that the prime contractor for SLS is not delivering. You've seen some really harsh reviews from the government accountability office and NASA's inspector general on the performance of its prime contractor for SLS. So now they're trying to scramble, can we speed up this program? And it's funny because at the same time, it's like, well, what were they doing in the first place? If they can speed it up, why were they dallying?

Is this going to actually make a difference? Can public pressure like this actually move something along for a program of such complexity? I can't think, in case you and I have talked before, I can't think of any other instance where, I mean, obviously government programs, whether it's NASA or something else, being behind schedule and over budget, that's nothing new, sadly. But just to have such a public shaming, if you will, is pretty stunning. will, is pretty stunning.

Boeing's the lead integrator, but it's also Aerojet Rocketine who's doing the engines. They're going to be trying to develop a throwaway version of the RS-25. I'd be interested to see what's the status of that, because we have a finite number of shuttle RS-25s left that are going to have to be thrown away. You've got now Northrop Grumman, who just took over overall ATK. They've got all that solid rocket booster stuff. And the Pentagon is keenly, keenly interested in making sure that if SLS doesn't happen, that means the unit price of the solid rocket boosters that the Pentagon buys will go up. They want this vehicle and this program to be a customer for that, you know, for solid rocket motors to help

reduce their unit costs. I don't know. It's a, I want to see that rocket fly. I really do. I know I sound like I'm coming across as a cynic and I'm not a cynical guy, believe it or not. But there are a lot of things that need to be addressed. They are lucky that they have Senator Shelby. And he's not alone. I want to make sure that fairly soon here, we get back to Senator Shelby's home state and Huntsville, where you attended that most recent National Space Council meeting, Brendan. And you've been to most of them because the story, the plot thickens. Casey, you've already mentioned this speech that was made by the vice president, which was, I don't know, Kennedy-esque or at least attempting to sound that

way. Well, I want to set a little bit of context and then I want to turn this over to Brendan, who was there. Just to remind everyone, so the budget came out March 11th. Within a week, we had Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, talking about being unsure about the SLS to deliver EM-1 on time. You have a bunch of other, you know, so people start worrying about the status of the SLS. Can it make its schedule? It's falling further behind. Two weeks after that, Huntsville, Alabama, Marshall Space Flight Center, there is the fifth meeting of the National Space Council. And Vice President Pence gives a speech in which, in addition to what Brendan already implied or stated, that critiqued the pace of these big contracts, not quite by name,

but basically critiquing the SLS, actually increased the pressure on NASA to deliver. I had said that in the NASA budget that came out again two weeks before, embraced a moon landing of 2028 through the gateway with a cut to NASA. And then the vice president, you're sitting there, Brendan, comes and says, what? What's NASA going to do now? That we will send men and women to the moon in 2024. Five years from now.

And that floored everybody in the room. Yeah, like 2028 wasn't ambitious enough. Yeah, yeah. They had just proposed to cut NASA's budget, and the SLS is falling further behind. They said, all right, well, let's advance the schedule by four years. Yeah. Well, theoretically, the gateways in the budget, we'll see how that program fares because no contracts have been let on that yet. But, oh, by the way, we're going to need a lander.

There's been really no discussion of a lander program. Some people have been, I've heard some people say, well, the Europeans can develop that, or the Japanese can develop that. I think we should just take the one out of the Air and Space Museum, the old lunar module, and make that work. Well, let me just read from the vice president's speech, because I think there's some language in here that I feel we should talk about, because I don't see a lot of people addressing this. And this is what I've been struggling with. So this is a quote from the speech by the Vice President at the National Space Council that, Brendan, you were at. To accomplish this, the moon landing, we must redouble our efforts here in Huntsville and throughout the program. We must accelerate the SLS program to

meet this objective. But know this. The president has directed NASA and Administrator Jim Bridenstine to accomplish this goal by any means necessary. If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we will find ones that will. I kept hitting those words, by any means necessary. How much should we read into that? I mean, by any means necessary is it implies a massive commitment, political commitment, right? Yeah. I mean, and that's why since then, the congressional hearings, I mean, I was at a House hearing yesterday and you had both Republicans and Democrats asking Mr. Bridenstine that essential question,

how are you going to do this? I think, Casey, you used the term earlier in the broadcast, whiplash, policy whiplash over the past few weeks. I mean, you have members of Congress who, these members of Congress, by and large, want to be helpful. They really do. They're not some of these members of Congress that scream, you know, why are we spending money on space when we've got problems here down on Earth? These people want to be helpful. They're asking for clarification. Mr. Bridenstine is telling everyone to keep their powder dry, wait to see the amended budget request, which again, I've never seen that ever happen before for NASA. So they're going to basically redo part of the budget request.

Yeah. Politically, how do you even get to a situation like this? Why didn't they just put that in the last budget request that just came out? I know, I know. Everyone's asking me that. I don't know the answer to this. But that's, I mean, just to- Seriously.

For our listeners, like, just to emphasize, we have no idea either, right? Yeah. You're a smart guy. I'm kind of a smart guy. We've never seen this before. We've never seen this before. Our listeners should know that no matter who's in the White House, the president's budget request starts off essentially notionally in the summer. And it really then heats up, though, in around Halloween. And by Thanksgiving, it's pretty much well baked in. There's nitpicking and stuff like that. But by essentially by Thanksgiving, the administration,

whoever the president is, knows what they're going to submit to Congress the following January. One of the problems is we had the partial government shutdown. So this president's budget request didn't get kicked out, which should have been in late January, early February, not till March 11th. And so everyone's kind of in a scramble. And then for NASA to come back and say, oh, wait, there's more to come. It really is unusual. So the administration kicks out the budget. All of a sudden, then we have this whiplash.

And one of the questions Mr. Bridenstine got asked was, who made this decision and when did you know about it? That's when he said, been in discussions with the vice president's office for a number of weeks, which essentially means the Space Council in some ways. He said the president just up and made the decision and ordered the vice president to announce it at the Space Council meeting. Yeah. Fascinating. It implies to me that there's been a breakdown of standard procedure or NASA was talking to the wrong people. Right. I mean, they're I mean, generally, when you're talking about this, when they're making this budget request, NASA is going back and forth with the Office of Management and Budget in the summer and fall before they release it. lease it. The Office of Management and Budget is supposed to have the priorities from the White House, from the top executives about how much money overall the government's going to spend, what the priorities of the administration are, and then represent that. And so what you see here is an implication that the Office of Management and Budget was not properly representing

the priorities of the president or vice president to NASA during this extended budget negotiations. President Trump is kind of famously mercurial and makes decisions very quickly and can change course very quickly. But it seems almost like he just started paying attention again now and didn't like the pace that he saw. Does that seem like a reasonable conjecture of what happened here? Well, the director of Office of Management and Budget is also the chief of staff, is also the White House chief of staff. Do you think he's? You think they'd be pretty close touch with each other? Yeah. Well, no. Do you think he's been busy?

Yeah. Maybe been a little pulled in a couple directions. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's more of a guy that's – it's tough enough to be director of OMB, no matter who the president is. It's tough enough to be White House chief of staff, no matter who the president is. And for this guy to have to kind of wear two incredibly demanding hats. I'm speculating here. I don't want to speculate,

but I just think that, you know, things may have gotten lost in translation at some point and to speculate is not appropriate for me to do that. Yeah, we're talking about Nick Mulvaney here, of course, who has those two very high level and very important jobs in any administration. Brendan, I'm curious. I mean, if you can relate this without any profanity, what was the nature of the conversations that you heard at the meeting of the National Space Council during the first break that came after the vice president dropped this bombshell?

Everyone was just kind of looking at each other. A lot of arched eyebrows. So that's interesting because I've noticed that a lot too, Brendan, that there's a mix of skepticism. And I have to say, honestly, and so I have this new post up on planetary.org today that struggles with this about how seriously to take this. Because I feel actually a real conflict between my advocate side of myself and the policy advisor side of myself, right? The advocate side is excited and enthusiastic, and I want this to work, right? Like, great, when is the last time we had such a clear directive that is short term by a president who has a real command over his party in Congress may be able to make some things move here. My skeptical policy side, however, and I list out these reasons in this blog post is like, well, this is going to be really hard.

I mean, this is this is a crash program. We have five. The last time NASA developed a human capable spacecraft, which they will have to do for a lunar lander of nothing else or anybody in five years is during the Apollo program. Right. And the quickest they've developed a human rated spacecraft since was the space shuttle, which took nine years and cost many billions. You have commercial crew struggling to get into low Earth orbit in seven years. How do you then build a lunar lander, possible gateway space station, develop and test the Orion crew capsule with humans and get the SLS ready to launch and capable. I mean, the first test of EM-2, the first crewed mission of Orion has been currently baseline for 2023. That's just the test, right?

When the president says by any means necessary, does that mean doubling NASA's budget? I mean, I almost think that's what you would need to do for human spaceflight. You would need to add something like $10 to $20 billion per year for the next few years and do it now. I think, as we talked about earlier, NASA was shut down. And I think this is why I've seen some critiques online of people saying, ah, you know, NASA's like staff is not excited about this. It's like, well, they were just furloughed for five weeks with no pay.

And now they're being told they're not moving fast enough to get to the moon. And it's, there's some serious issues in the way here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there has to be things behind the scenes that are going on both positively and negatively, in my opinion. Casey, you and I talked about this earlier this week. One of the options that I've heard being discussed is something called a zero-year appropriation. And for our listeners, when we lost Challenger, NASA said they needed a replacement orbiter, which eventually became the Endeavor. Believe it or not, that year, Congress appropriated in the Senate defense appropriations bill, even though NASA is a civilian agency, in the defense appropriations bill,

Congress coughed up enough money for NASA to use us however long they wanted to, to contract out and have the replacement orbiter built. By then, we had already built the test orbiter enterprise. We've had Columbia, we had Challenger, we had Discovery and Atlantis. So NASA could really go to Congress with real certitude about what a replacement orbiter would cost. If people are talking about zero-year appropriation for SLS, the problem is NASA won't have the certitude about what that causes because we still haven't had an SLS yet. And it hasn't had a lot of encouraging signs from the program. It's not like they've been killing it either, Right. I mean, and so you saw quite a bit, I'd say, of skepticism from the committee hearing that happened just the other day

after this announcement happened, right, with the House Space Subcommittee or that you were at. You saw some skepticism. Is that true from the House Democrats? Yeah. Yeah. They the chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, she's a Democrat from around the Houston, not too far away from Houston, and she wants to be helpful. She's just looking for details. The people on those committees want to help the agency. Something that our listeners should know is that, and Casey and I have talked about this before many times, and Matt's heard me say this as well, social media and cable news gives the impression that everyone is trying to fight each other about every single issue in Washington. That's not true. That's not the case. There are some issues where there's delightfully some bipartisanship.

That includes space. You have a lot of Republicans and Democrats who want to help NASA help itself. And when stuff like this happens or the James Webb program or, you know, fill in the blank, you know, you have these members of Congress who are allies and friends of NASA get a little exasperated that the agency that they're trying to spend political capital on to help can't give them the information and rationale as to why NASA is doing what it's doing. Casey, there's already also been concern about, gee, if NASA had to come up with all this new money, are they going to steal it from other programs like science, planetary science among them? And hasn't the administrator tried to present some reassurance?

He has, and I'm very grateful for that. And I think that is part of the benefit of himself previously being a member of Congress. He understands that rating science or aeronautics will be a non-starter politically in order to make this happen. We've seen that over and over, over the years, to varying degrees of success, protecting such things. But at the same time, we will see then, I guess, NASA is itself trying to figure out what this will cost. Recall Apollo. Again, because this is obviously in the light of Apollo in context, there's actually some relevance here. NASA didn't know how much Apollo would cost

when they were tasked to do it. And so they did their best guess. Administrator then, James Webb, basically just like, well, let's just double it. And which actually turned out to be a good idea. And that kind of got it

at a good first order estimate. And so, you know, it always costs more than you think. And that's just the first rule of any of this. And we've seen this over and over. There's always going to be problems. And the old saying is, you know, it's a you can do something on time, or you can do something on budget. And you can't have both. For Project Apollo, you had a perceived true space race between ideologically counter, very powerful state actor, kind of competing for these nations that were being created after the disillusion of European colonialism. So there's a real perception of importance here. They didn't have any flexibility

on time. And so they spent the equivalent of 120 or so billion dollars in eight years. Similar to the Manhattan Project. Exactly. And here there's the timing. They haven't made clear why 2024 has to be the time. Obviously, that's the last year of what would be Trump's second term if, if he wins a second term, but is that going to be enough to drive effectively? And Eddie Bernice Johnson, the chairwoman of the committee,

the science committee in the house basically said, is this enough to justify a crash program is what this would effectively be. And I don't know the answer to that. Maybe the question to start talking about, Brendan, is how seriously should we take this? Not to sound flippant, we've got to wait till April 15th and see what's in the amended budget request. If it's a pittance, amended budget request. You know, if it's a pittance, then I think we know. If it's a real doubling down, that's a hopeful sign. Mr. Bridenstine, who is a good and decent and honorable man, was in many ways saying, hold tight, just wait, let us get this to you in under now two weeks. I'm sure he'll be hauled up for another round of hearings.

Casey, I told you earlier this week, tomorrow morning, I'm having breakfast with the guy that has a ton of the NASA portfolio at OMB, and I'm going to try to see what I can learn from him, you know, because I'm sure OMB is probably going through a, you know, a fire drill right now. Because I'm sure OMB is probably going through a fire drill right now. More proof of the value of having somebody on the inside working for us at the Planetary Society. Gentlemen, you know, we're going to have people out there who will say, maybe already are saying, oh, you naysayers, you pessimists, what's wrong with having this great goal and putting our minds to it? Now, I guess,

like you said, Brendan, we have to see what's going to come out on April 15th to see if the administration is going to put its money where its mouth is. And that's what I keep going back because I was trying to express that through my duality of feelings here, which is- Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think you did that very well. Yeah. To be or not to be. Yeah, and in terms of why to be optimistic, we don't have a good template for this. This is new. We have clear interest.

A lot of presidents or other executive branch folks, it's unusual in a sense that the vice president is so visible on this, but, you know, kind of as a representation of the president. A lot of presidents have gone and made a speech once about space. They make some big goals and then you never see them talk about it again. You know, President Obama kind of did that at the beginning of, you know, when they were closing down the shuttle program and starting their big pitch for asteroids. You saw that with George W. Bush after the Columbia disaster, and then they never really follow up. So to see the vice president, you know, really take the lead and continue to follow up, that's a good sign, right? That shows ongoing interest. It actually is a priority for that office. I take that as an optimistic sign and a good sign. We've never seen the bully pulpit,

right, of the presidency kind of used this way to kind of actually bully in a nicer way, bully around NASA and say, hey, we expect better of you, particularly NASA's human spaceflight, it's used to receiving ongoing praise for what it does. That is interesting. And we'll see what is the power of that level of public pressure. And in a sense, the implicit statement of that is like, we accept that you will take more risks because of this. And then the other reason to be optimistic is that you have this new addition of commercial capability. And it's still not clear exactly how that plays in, right? And the answer is not SpaceX is going to do this with their Starship spacecraft, because that's even less proven than the SLS.

You can't bank on a private company for everything. You can't plan 20 years and hope that this private company will be around unless it basically becomes a contractor. But at the same time, you do have the Falcon Heavy. You have Vulcan, which is coming out from the ULA, you have Blue Origins spacecraft being built, and they all have ambitions to service this. And so I think you will see some really interesting opportunities presented by commercial actors in this space that allow new risks and speed to be taken in a way that classic cost plus contracts don't allow to happen. And so there's real opportunities there. So ultimately, though, it comes down to, I agree completely with what Brennan said,

we will know by April how serious this is. Even with commercial contractors, there's not like, you can't just say people to work faster and cheaper and then have them do it in government. Like you actually need to pony up the resources to do it, particularly with space. If they pony up the resources, then I'd say they're serious about it. And if they don't, then they're not. I would add is that still the term commercial is thrown about like crazy around DC in terms of commercial options for NASA, but also the Pentagon. One of the never-ending problems is that the word commercial when it comes to space is much like modern art. Everyone has a different interpretation of what the heck it is.

Fixed price contracts, let's say, or milestone-based contracts. Yes, good point taken. So different ways of contracting. And actually to that effect, very quickly here at the end, I want to give you the chance to say some other things happened at the National Space Council, which may actually play into this a little bit from a regulatory perspective. Can you quickly summarize some of those and how those could help NASA speed things up a little bit? Sure, sure. The Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Transportation were there and they announced a whole raft of streamlining of regulations to help foster American space startups and space commercial companies. Some of these regulations

haven't been looked at or reviewed or altered in 10, 15, or 20 years. I think that is good. I think it got lost out or drowned out by the 2024 announcement by the vice president. Just yesterday on Wednesday, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed out a bill that was very bipartisan. regulations, making it easier for companies to get permits, get authorization to launch and land. There's a lot of momentum on the commercial side. I'll leave it at that. I know we're pressed for time, but it's all good stuff. And it's bipartisan.

So that may give NASA some flexibility or options in terms of how they're piecing together their plan. I was thinking there may be ways for people to move more quickly. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So we will end on that note of hope, but with the assurance that by May 3rd, which will be the date of the next Space Policy Edition, we will have much more to talk about with that April 15 supplement or revision of the NASA budget as proposed by the President of the United States. Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure to talk with you in these interesting times in which we live. It's been great to be here with you fellows. Look forward to doing it again sometime.

Yeah, Brennan, that was fun. And Matt and mad that reminds me I believe that's also a like a curse or a blessing right may we live in interesting times and uh ancient Chinese cursed that was a fun interesting month uh and it's certainly giving us a lot to talk about let us end with another appeal to those of you who are listening, who have not made the decision yet to become a member of the Planetary Society, planetary.org slash membership. Oh, you are a member, but you think that this stuff that Casey and Brendan do for a living on behalf of all of us who love space and want to see it move forward, that they need all the help they can get. Well, you can do so also

by going to, what is the URL, Casey, to get more involved with advocacy efforts? Planetary.org slash advocacy. Kind of self-explanatory, actually. And I'm going to bring up one more thing, even though we talked about it last month, and that was, of course, the Day of Action, which was such a success with 100 or more volunteers in D.C. with you guys visiting the offices of their congressional representatives. And Brandon, it may not be quite the last word here, but you had an interesting story because you heard from some of your lobbyist friends about how this compared to other similar efforts. Yeah, yeah. Just about every industry that is actively engaged in Washington, whether it's the

automobile manufacturers or telecom folks or health insurance industry, they have their kind of day of action as well. There were recently two space industry fly-ins. One was 250-ish folks. The other was about 100. And these are all industry people. They're contractor people. In some ways, their jobs depend on them advocating for the programs that they want at the Pentagon and or NASA. And I've mentioned our volunteer day of action of having a little over 100 people. And they were super impressed. And that was all because of the great work Casey did in organizing that. And I just want the folks who

are listening to know that it did mean a lot. It did make an impression. And for the professional lobbyist folks, they were pretty gobsmacked that we have that level of support from the good people that are members of the Planetary Society. Casey, I hope you're very proud. I'm just happy to work for such a great organization with great members. It makes it easy. Gentlemen, I am very happy to work with two great advocates for space exploration and space development. Thank you very much for doing this. We will, of course, be talking with you again, Casey, on the next SPE. I know you've got something very special planned for next month, unless other things get in the way. Casey Dreyer is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Brendan, let me also thank you for your first appearance on Planetary Radio, and particularly the Space Policy Edition. Oh, it's great to be here and happy to do it again.

And thanks for all you do, Matt. That's Brendan Currie, the Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host and producer of Planetary Radio, hoping that you will join me next week for the next weekly edition of the show. We will be back with the Space Policy Edition on May 3rd of 2019. Take care, everybody. Ad Astra.