Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Biggest Policy Moments of the Decade (with Marcia Smith)

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

As the 2010s come to a close, Marcia Smith, the founder of Space Policy Online, rejoins the show to explore the most significant and impactful space policy decisions of the 2010s. Mat and Casey also discuss the recently-approved European Space Agency budget, and what it means for planetary defense and Mars sample return efforts. Learn more about this month’s topics through links on the episode page.  https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-44.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Hello and welcome to the December 2019 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of this program, well, of the host of Planetary Radio, and it is my pleasure, as most of you know, once a month to also sit down with Casey Dreyer, Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society, though when we sit down, it is usually, oh, I don't know, about a thousand miles apart, but I have the great pleasure of actually sitting across from you today in the lovely Planetary Society studio in downtown Pasadena. Yeah, ironically, neither Matt nor I spend that much time in the headquarters because we live in different parts of the country,

but we are crossing paths in the night here, or through the board meeting here at the Planetary Society this week, and what a perfect time to come together and talk in person. And Matt, I can confirm you have a face for radio. Thank you so much, Casey. It takes one to know one. No, it really, there is, I mean, I always have a great time. Most of the people I get to talk to on the show, I do not see their faces unless at some point later,

maybe I'm lucky enough to meet them. But it's always better to be sitting directly across the table from somebody. So a little holiday treat for you and hopefully for our audience. Yeah, it's always fun to be here, Matt. We will open with our usual pitch because we know that, well, a minority of you out there are behind this program and behind everything else that the Planetary Society is up to because you are a member. But sadly that means that the preponderance, the majority of you, are not. Not yet anyway. Would you take a look at planetary.org slash membership and look at the benefits there, look at all

the different levels you can come in at, and become a part of this society that has among its mission objectives the stuff that keeps busy, keeps Casey busy day to day advocating for space exploration and space science really across the world, but especially in Washington, D.C., and not just Casey, but our colleague Brendan, who is also in town for the board meeting today. We hope that you will consider it, and of course, you will be helping us to keep bringing you Planetary Radio as well. That's my pitch. You may have other things to add.

I know you've still got a day of action coming. We do, yeah. Well, I was just going to mention, it is the holiday season. day of action coming. We do, yeah. Well, I was just going to mention, it is the holiday season. What better gift you can find underneath the tree or the menorah or whatever holidays you enjoy than a

gift subscription to Planetary Society as a membership. So someone you love or care about that loves space, give them a membership to the Planetary Society and give them access to the Planetary Report, all the great stuff that we do, and that special glow, that special feeling that you have. It's a cosmic glow. Yes, there you go. Yes, that's the cosmic background radiation equivalent of the satisfaction to know

that you are doing something special to help space exploration happen merely by being a member of this unique organization. So consider that. I will also plug the Day of Action, still open for registration. Those who want to join us in Washington, D.C., planetary.org slash dayofaction, February 9th and 10th of 2020. Also, for those of you who can't come to Washington, D.C., and those of you outside the United States, we have a new option for you. Same website, planetary.org slash dayofaction. You can pledge to take action remotely. And we will follow up with you online after you sign up so that on that day, on February 10th,

when your fellow members of the Planetary Society are out pounding the pavement in Washington, D.C., that you will have actions to take to email members of Congress, share things on social media, things that you can do to help them feel great and to know that the entire organization is behind them. So pledge to take action if you can't be there or join me in Washington, D.C. I love it.

Virtual advocacy in your pajamas. Yes. It's the modern era that we live in. What an opportunity. It is. All right. We have a few news items to cover, very significant ones, particularly for the European Space Agency. But I do want to tease people a little bit because we have the return, actually, of a terrific guest.

Oh, yeah. Marcia Smith. Some of you may know her already. If you don't, you should. Marcia Smith has been part of the space policy community for decades at this point. She runs, she founded and runs the online website, spacepolicyonline.com. Great source of policy information and news and analysis. She's going to join me to talk about something that I actually just realized not that long ago, Matt, with that this is not only the end of the year, this is the end of the decade. This is the end of the 20-teens, the 2010s, however you want to call them. We don't have to care anymore because it will be awkward with this awkward

framing of it. We will be moving past here in just a minute. So I asked Marcia to share with me and with you what she thought were some of the most important space policy developments of this last decade. And I had mine kind of list as well. We compared notes and shared some really interesting insights into the last 10 years of space policy. And I think you'll really enjoy that conversation. It was a lot of fun to have it with her. And she brought up some really interesting insights into that. And no kidding. I mean, I was listening in as the two of you spoke and got to hear it a second time since then, since I had to assemble the show. as the two of you spoke and got to hear it a second time since then,

since I had to assemble the show. It's great, so stick around, folks. Like I said, we do have some news items. Before we get to the good news for the European Space Agency and really for everybody, all space enthusiasts, what's happening in D.C.? A lot not connected with space, so here's the situation. So the fiscal year of the United States government began on October 1st. We do not have a budget yet for NASA or any other agency in the federal government. The government is still open, and that means we are in a continuing resolution.

We are basically extending last year's budget and carrying it forward temporarily to keep operations moving forward until the U.S. Congress can agree on final appropriations legislation for all federal agencies. We are in this stopgap. We have a time until December 20th. This is when the current extension ends. And so Congress either has to pass all of its appropriations bills in the next three weeks before Christmas, or they will have to pass another continuing resolution to extend that into the following year. Now, obviously, there are things like impeachment happening that throw a lot of things into the cogs of the machine of government here. So things are going to be slowing down. Some progress has been made. There's an agreement between the House and the Senate for overall spending levels at a very high level.

between the House and the Senate for overall spending levels at a very high level. They were called the allocations they're agreed on. That helps, but we don't know when or if we will have a budget before the 20th. And, of course, whatever Congress passes has to be signed by the president. So we're in a very much waiting stage. Every day that we spend not having a budget for 2020, NASA is unable to start new programs. So anything proposed in 2020, that means the Artemis efforts to the moon, that means really kicking up Mars sample return, and a number of other programs, they cannot really fully formally begin those because they do not have spending authority granted to them by Congress. Fortunately, though, overall, NASA's

in a relatively good position with this. NASA can also not end programs during a continuing resolution. So even once they might want to win. Yes, that's exactly true. And the White House proposed to cancel the WFIRST space telescope and a number of other missions in the 2020 budget. But NASA cannot stop any of those because they're in a continuing resolution from the previous year. So all of these programs are kind of in this weird state of limbo until Congress finally is able to pass a budget. So we are still waiting. We've been mentioning, you know, waiting now for three months. We will check in, I guess, in January and see what action is taken. And of course, we will cover any of that information on planetary.org when and if it happens. So maybe there will be more news.

I mean, there'll at least be another one of these CRs in place by the time we talk again, first Friday in January. Hopefully, unless you want to shut down for Christmas. Well, we'll talk about that. Let's go on to crossing the pond and talking about what's going on with ESA, the European Space Agency. I got to talk about this a little bit

because it was covered by our friend and colleague Jason Davis, our editorial director here, who puts together the downlink now every week at planetary.org. And the top three items in the downlink all came out of this recent meeting by, well, basically the people who oversee ESA, right? And it was all good news. Yeah, it was the member states oversee ESA, right? And it was all good news. Yeah, it was the member states of ESA got together in what they call a ministerial meeting that happens every two to three years. ESA, unlike NASA, is able to have a slightly more refined sense of how they do budgeting. They have mandatory spending that tends to be for science missions that every member nation has to contribute a minimum amount to, so they have a very stable

amount of science funding. Then they do kind of additional types of efforts beyond that for exploration and other, they call it space safety and security. They have to get, they kind of have to lobby their members, the nations, to kind of contribute to support those as well. And then you have a variety of other ways that they contribute missions. But the overall big picture here is that they tend to do budgeting in two to three-year increments at ESA, and they just passed or got buy-in from the member states from this ministerial meeting that just happened a week ago to have a three-year budget of about 12.5 billion, 12.45 billion euros. And so, you know, again, just to put that into perspective, that's about 13 or so billion dollars, 13.8 billion dollars. That's less than two-thirds of NASA's one-year budget, which kind of puts things into perspective. So this is over three years, right? However,

the difference being that is guaranteed three-year budget for ESA to work with. So the planning that they can do with that is much more advanced than where NASA is right now, which is we don't know what our budget's going to be next month, much less three years from now. And they're not building an SLS. They're not building, well, they are building a piece of Orion. Those are big money sinks that they don't have, which hopefully will make that 12-point-whatever stretch a little further. The biggest thing they don't do is maintain a huge human spaceflight program. That's roughly half of NASA's budget. They also, you know, aeronautics is not as included in that in the same way as well. They build the Ariane mission, you know, the rockets, they have their own programs, but everything is much more targeted and specific. And they tend to be much more robotically focused,

and you can get more bang for your buck generally out of that if you're not spending a ton of money. To put this also into another perspective, this 12.45 billion euro that they got for the next three years, that's a functional equivalent to roughly a 10% increase for ESA. So this is a very good budget for ESA. They basically got everything they proposed from their member states. That's an improvement from two years ago when the last ministerial happened. And there's two particular missions in this budget that I wanted to highlight that are very relevant to Planetary Society members and things that the Planetary Society supports. The first one is really kind of a cool mission. It's a relatively small mission, you know, relatively being 400-ish euro or something like a million euro.

Yeah. For space, it's relatively modest. Pocket change. Pocket change, yeah. It's called HERA. And HERA is going to be a partner mission with the upcoming double asteroid redirection test mission, DART, that NASA's making that's going to slam into a small asteroidal moon called Didymoon. Well, colloquially called Didymoon, or on the asteroid Didymos.

NASA's launching its mission, I think, in 21. It's going to slam into the asteroid in 22. This mission that ESA is going to do is kind of a replacement. They originally proposed to have a mission there to watch this impact. That didn't get funded two years ago in their last ministerial. It's called ADA, I believe. So instead, they retooled this thing. It's called HERA now.

It's going to arrive a few years later in 2026. this thing. It's called HERA now. It's going to arrive a few years later in 2026. But it's going to be able to come in and finally characterize this asteroid system, Didymos, its moon, and to precisely understand, it'll image the crater left by DART. It's going to be able to precisely understand how much energy was directly imparted into Didymoon, really measure and get down and refine the change in orbit of the moon around the asteroid itself. And what this is really going to do, ultimately, is to help us understand how effective an impactor would be to altering the orbit of an asteroid, which we will be considered pretty important should one be heading on a collision course to Earth. We don't want that first test

to happen in that situation, right? We want to kind of know how, we want to validate this beforehand. And so now what we're seeing, we're seeing an international collaboration coming in the 2020s to test in a real world scenario, the alteration of an orbit of another asteroid, and then characterizing that exact transfer of energy and how it changes it so that we can predict and better understand how we can use that to defend the Earth in the future in planetary defense activities. That's a very important mission. The Planetary Society came out very strongly to support this mission.

We encouraged our members in the European Union and Canada, who I learned, I almost wanted to have Kate Howells jump in for this, because our Canadian colleague and staff here at the Society reminded me that Canada is actually a part of the European Space Agency, is a partner. It's a slightly different formal commitment, but they commit funding to the European Space Agency. So our European and Canadian members signed this open letter to support this HERA mission. And lo and behold, European Space Agency member states supported the HERA mission. Very exciting. And I imagine that NASA, particularly the Planetary Defense Office at NASA,

they must be thrilled or at least very relieved because you can learn so much from studying impacts as we have learned from impacts on Mars, on the Moon, and elsewhere around the solar system. The return of data, well, first from the impact, but then from this HERA mission, is going to be tremendously useful. Absolutely. And, you know, they can get some of this data, they'll just observe it with ground-based Earth telescopes. That's why the NASA component could still move forward. But this is going to refine the measurements by a factor of 10 at least and give you a bunch of additional measurements in addition to that. It's a really nice mission. It's super affordable.

It's a no-brainer mission. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen. That's not how politics works. But so very happy to see that move forward. happy to see that move forward. The other major aspect I want to talk about of the ESA budget here was the commitment for ESA's partnership in Mars sample return. Now, it's always... Very exciting. This is huge. Honestly, huge. I mean, it's a huge commitment. This is over a billion euro commitment they're going to make to Mars sample return. ESA is now committing financially to building the Earth return vehicle, in addition to a fetch rover

on the surface of Mars. So this is a massive contribution, really meeting NASA about half, you know, 50-50 or so in this, or maybe a third of this huge program that's going to be moving. Yeah, because the 2020 rover is still pretty pricey. But yeah, but still, this is a huge, I mean, the first thing I thought of when I saw the approval of this was, for years we've been hearing people say, oh, great, the 2020 rover is going to go around, find these samples, and bottle them, and then what? Yeah, exactly, right? And so now we have a what? Well, we still—because we don't have a 2020 NASA budget, we still don't have an official start of NASA's contribution, which is the actual, the ascent vehicle off of the surface of Mars. And, you know, they're able to do some work on this because they're partially funded for studies, design studies in previous years.

NASA now is the one kind of holdout to formalize this project, which is NASA needs to come in and commit to building the launch vehicle off the surface of Mars and a variety of other kind of components. The collaboration between NASA and ESA on Mars sample return is going to be very tightly integrated. It still may change. This is still in a study phase. But generally what we know, and we have a nice article from Justin Cowart, who posted a guest blog on planetary.org that I'll link to off the show notes here. And he outlines these plans.

But basically Europe is going to provide the return vehicle. So it's an orbiting spacecraft that's going to go to Mars, wait for the samples to launch into orbit, collect those samples, and then come back to Earth and then land in the desert. ESA is also going to provide the small rover that will pick up these little droppings of samples. That's the Fetch rover. I love that name you used for it. Exactly.

And so, I mean, this is a major contribution for ESA and really exciting to see this. From a real world. I mean, it's Mars. Come on, it's the red planet. Not to diminish the small bodies communities. Let's just say from Mars. This is the Holy Grail. This is the big thing we've been working for for decades.

The community's been working for this. And it has always eluded the space community because of its complexity, because of its cost. And it's still not a guarantee. We look back 10 years ago, a few years ago, we remember that NASA pulled away from a joint mission with ESA back in 2012, the ExoMars rover. And so what you're seeing with this tight integration and also this big financial commitment from ESA, you're adding a significant international political stability to the NASA contribution of this program. So if NASA wants to cancel Mars sample return, they're going to have to create an international problem for the State Department and other aspects. You know, it's going to make it, it's a very smart move politically.

And this is how you approach big projects, right? This is how it works in space. This is why missions can survive. So a good way to compare this is from history. Back in the early 1990s, NASA was working on two large missions, what would become Cassini and CRAF, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby Mission, and they both would use a similar kind of spacecraft bus. Budget cuts were happening, of course, and so NASA ultimately had to choose functionally one of those.

And Cassini was the mission that went forward in a large part because it had a significant contribution from the European Space Agency on Cassini, right, with the Huygens spacecraft. Sure, yeah. And CRAF didn't have that. And so these types of building these international partnerships, or International Space Station is kind of the ultimate example of this. It really helps with this ongoing political stability.

It makes it much harder to cancel domestically because you have these other commitments beyond it. So this is, again, smart move by NASA. Very great of ESA to step up and commit at a high level for this mission. This is an expensive mission for ESA to pursue. Very exciting to see this. And another proof, I suppose, of the value of this kind of international collaboration is when it doesn't work out. Because I remember when the United States had a bigger role in the ExoMars project for ESA and then pulled out.

And it caused some bad blood that lasted a while. It did. And also a good lesson. It was, in a sense, easy for NASA to pull out of ExoMars because it wasn't tightly integrated as a program. NASA was providing a launch vehicle and then a kind of a co-manifested rover to go along with the ExoMars rover. And so NASA could just easily, like, lop out their contribution. And ultimately, ESA was able to find a new partner with the Russian space agencies to be able to provide launches and move forward with that.

But you're right. It did cause a lot of bad blood for years, and there's still some— I mean, obviously, they're willing to take that risk again moving forward with NASA. But you will notice in how they are proposing to move forward with Mars sample return, the spacecraft themselves are tightly integrated. For the sample return vehicle or the Earth return vehicle, the idea is that even though ESA is going to build the primary spacecraft itself, NASA is going to be contributing the sample collection device that's going to grab the sample, right? So they're within the spacecraft itself, significant multi-nation contributions that are required for mission success.

Speaking of tightly integrated, it looks like, thanks to ESA and this new budget, we may be a step or two steps closer to a lunar gateway. Not just gateway, but the Orion spacecraft itself and how it flies into space. So there's money, there's I think around 300 million euros to start building habitats for the lunar gateway for later in the 2020s. So beyond this kind of current idea of a small, meager gateway just to enable lunar surface access that NASA is kind of rushing through right now for the 2024 deadline. But for the later 2020s, ESA is putting in money to start building in, you know, ISS-like habitats. Additionally, they funded themselves to contribute the service modules to the Orion spacecraft. So, again, this very tight integration.

NASA didn't have any money to build a service module for Orion for all of this decade. And so they were able to leverage the European space agencies has a certain amount of financial requirement to contribute to the International Space Station as part of the large space station agreement. NASA said, hey, you can give us that contribution through the space station, but you can give it to us as a service module for Orion, and we'll call it even on the space station. And that will continue. So actually, the money for their space station operations is going to be going towards service

module construction for the next however many Orions that NASA is going to need in that period. And NASA will continue to call it even on the space station. It's separate from the Gateway stuff. It's totally wonky. Yeah, it really is. I mean, completely separate. They don't overlap.

No. Those projects. And the first of those service modules, I think it has been mated to the Orion capsule, right? It's in Florida. It's, I think it's... Are they doing testing still? They're doing testing. I think it's in Plum Brook Station, as we're talking now.

I forget which one is where. But yeah, they're coming together. The first launch, ideally, hopefully, happening at the end of next year, early 21. When you have everything you asked for, which is basically what the budget was granted, we can talk about all the good news. And pretty much everything was supported in that request, particularly that the Planetary Society is invested in. Well, it's nice to finish the year with all of this good

news coming from Europe. And we certainly have a lot to look forward to here as well. 2020 is going to be a very busy year, especially for Mars. Oh, absolutely. All of the 2020s is going to be a pretty wild decade. We're looking here at the end of this decade that we're in, about to enter the 2020s. My big takeaway for what's going to happen looking forward as opposed to backwards is that NASA has, and a lot of space agencies, they've signed up for a lot of things for this next decade. We've committed a ton of commitments, and now we have to deliver on them. That depends on the budgets being there. That depends on the technology working as intended, right? All the development now has to happen.

We've been in a nice build in the last couple of years of budgets going up. The economy has been good the last few years. Everything's been easy to commit to. This is why I start to get nervous about the next decade is that if there's a disruption to that, there may have to be some hard choices. But, you know, that's the inner pessimist in me, right? For now, if I want to be present in the moment... Maybe the inner realist. After all, times have been good for longer than ever before in this business upturn. So, you know, recessions happen. Right. This is where I go back. It's like, I'm supposed to live in the moment. I'm supposed to

be happy presently, right? So I will be happy that we have this good budget and these good commitments right now. But space policy, my inner analyst and my inner advocate, is not meant to be in the moment. They're meant to worry about the future. We're setting up strong, but we have to continue it. And that's going to be the big challenge of the 2020s. And I'm sure that you and the Planetary Society will be working to make sure that we get the decade ahead that we think we deserve, that all of us deserve. And you know the way to make that happen? No, tell me. Is to be a member of the Planetary Society.

You bet. That independent voice of reason and support. So I do want to ask, Matt, because again, this is the last month here of the decade. How was this decade for you? Where did you begin? It was a great decade. Yeah? Well, when I started this decade, I was already doing planetary radio. That was a good start. But I was also still working for a local California university and having a nice time there, but inching my way closer to going full-time here at the Planetary Society. I had already been at the Planetary Society for about

10 years at that point, working part-time. Certainly excited about all the stuff that was underway. Spirit and Opportunity were already on Mars. Cassini had begun its great journey of exploration at Saturn. You know, it turned out it wasn't a bad decade, at least off Earth. I know in your discussion of the previous 10 years with Marsha, you go a little deeper into what made that happen and what didn't happen. That's absolutely true. There was kind of an interesting churn this last decade from a policy perspective. Marsha will talk about that. But we kind of began the decade with a constellation program to the moon, and we're ending this decade with human spaceflight direction to the moon. So it kind of, we ended up back in the same place,

and I guess maybe we know it now for the first time. And that is a point of frustration to Marsha. I mean, I won't give it away, but there are some very funny comments, particularly the close of this interview that we're about to listen to, because she does kind of fear that everything old is new again. There's some good grizzled space policy perspective in this, which anyone in space policy gains pretty quick. But again, it's fascinating to think back. The space age is not that old. We look back this last decade, there's been six of those total of the space age, roughly. There's been six of those total of the space age, roughly. We can draw some extrapolations, but there's still not that much data to take things as, you know, inevitabilities yet.

And so there's a lot of new stuff coming in, obviously, in terms of commercial aspects of spaceflight, public-private partnerships, maybe, you know, providing a new path forward. But again, we're still new at this as a species. This is still, we haven't even done this for a hundred years yet. And we're quite far from that, you know. And so, you know, we can look back and say, you know, every decade is going to tell us something. And I think this was an interesting decade, you know, for me personally, when I began this decade, I was not working at the planetary. I wasn't even doing space stuff yet. I was in my previous career, and I've had a decade of diving into space policy at a level I never thought I'd have the opportunity to do so. So I personally, I've had a wonderful decade, and I end it now talking, being able to do this show with you and to work at the Planetary Society and to

interact with all of our members. It's been an incredibly rewarding aspect personally. And also just to share this excitement of where we're going with people. The 2020s, even though it can be rough, I think we have, if things work out, it's going to be an extraordinary decade. It could be the most exciting decade in space in 50 years. Wow. Okay. Well, let's look back instead of forward at the previous 10 years. It's this great conversation that you just had a couple of days ago with Marcia Smith. And we'll do that and then come back and close this edition out. Marcia, thank you so much for being back with us on the Space Policy Edition.

Thanks so much for inviting me. So we're talking about the past decade here in space policy, and I asked you to come up with a few of your, I guess all of these are going to be somewhat subjective, but your subjective opinions about what were some of the most important space policy moments in the last 10 years. And I came up with a few of my own as well. And so we'll just kind of go back and forth and discuss them and talk about the long term consequences and why we each think these are really important pieces in space policy history for this last 10 years. We're just gonna start chronologically in no particular order here. You brought up a really important aspect of this, you actually kind of tied it into a way that book ended it nicely. Do you want to

start with this Obama's announcement that there was the end of the constellation program, basically that NASA was no longer going to send humans to the moon. Let's remind our audience how that happened and then how that relates to where we are now with Vice President Pence surprising everybody by announcing we're going to the moon really fast. Yes, and perhaps that's a way to characterize the decade, at least for human spaceflight, which is it's been a decade of surprises in the beginning and now in 2019 towards the end. On February 1st, 2010, President Obama announced

that he was canceling the Constellation Program. And there was a huge furor in Congress from Republicans and Democrats. It was not a partisan issue. It wasn't Democrats versus Republicans. It was the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue disagreeing strongly with each other. On April 15th, those few weeks later, President Obama went down to Kennedy Space Center and gave a speech and said, we're not going back to the moon, been there, done that. And instead, we're going to go to Mars.

Mars is our goal. And we need a stepping stone. And that stepping stone is going to be an asteroid. The asteroid mission never really won a lot of support anywhere. There were a few people that supported it, of course, but not enough to make a difference. And so a lot of the early part of the decade in terms of human spaceflight programs was lost because of this whole battle between Congress and the White House over the future of the human spaceflight program. And it was all at this time, a tremendous churn when the space shuttle program was being terminated. And that was a George W. Bush decision, but Obama could have turned it around and he chose not to. So you had the space shuttle landing,

the future of human spaceflight was very unclear. And this sort of characterized the early tumult of the first part of the decade. I think that's a really important moment to dwell on. This decade opened up with quite a significant set of changes that happened very quickly. And also, of course, in the context of the greatest recession that this country had seen in almost a century, the end of the constellation program, I think, can't be separated. The reaction, in a sense, can't be separated from the fact that the shuttle is ending. So you had these huge amounts of layoffs and an ending of basically these institutionalized jobs through all these congressional districts in Florida, Texas, Alabama, and California that have been stable for literally 30 years.

If these had been separated in some way, like if the shuttle had continued for another five years, that the end of the Constellation Program would have been less of a kind of a reactive force behind it? Well, I do think that a president standing up and saying we're not going back to the moon because we've already been there would have been quite a shock to the system no matter what. I have always been people who thought we didn't need to go back to the moon. And that apparently includes the two living Apollo 11 astronauts. But there are others like Bob Zubrin who've been saying for decades, really, that you don't need to go back to the moon. But I think that most people thought that that would be the natural progression back to the moon and then on to Mars. So I think having a president make that kind of a statement was really going to be a shock, even if you didn't have these other factors. But you brought up,

I think, one of the huge events that played into all that has happened in the past decade. And that was the tremendous economic downturn in 2008 that President Obama inherited when he walked into the Oval Office. And so he was actually pretty much enthusiastic about space exploration. He's the only presidential candidate I have known in my lifetime who actually used the space forum as part of his campaign ads. He had one there with the Apollo 11 spacecraft landing in the ocean and talking about he was a kid when it happened and all that. But then he walks into his office on January 20th and he has this huge recession. And I think that had to change some of his plans. And it is true that the Constellation program was costing a lot more than had been advertised. So when he had this expert commission brought together under

Norm Augustine, and they said, basically, you need $3 billion a year more, if you're going to do this, that was also a shock to the system. So it was not a good situation, no matter what was going on, to be happening at the time of this great economic recession. Yeah. And again, I want to dwell on the way that you characterize this, which I think is really insightful. This surprise, policy by surprise. You know, you mentioned that Obama went down to Florida. He gave the speech where he said, been there, done that. I think literally that was a quote from it, but also that we would go to an asteroid. I've talked to people who said that the call to send humans to an asteroid, that was decided on the flight going down to that speech. So it wasn't some aspect of pre-existing policy.

There wasn't a huge push for it internally or externally from NASA. It seemed to be plucked out of nowhere from ever on from that point under Obama, that goal to send humans to an asteroid really kind of thrashed around, wasn't able to get anywhere because of that. Was that maybe a foundational error on the president's part or the White House's part at that point in terms of how to try to move the space program away from what they considered a failing program into something new? a failing program into something new? Well, and you have to remember they had that other really odd announcement at that speech, which is we were not going to do Constellation, so we were not going to do Orion. And then suddenly, a day before, an Orion mock-up showed up in the big building down at Kennedy Space Center where he was going to talk. And it was there on display. He was standing in front of it, giving the speech, and they were going to turn Orion into some kind of a crew return vehicle from space station, which made absolutely no sense. You did get the sense

that this had not been well thought out. Obama knew he had to come up and say something because there was so much angst in Congress that the shuttle was ending, and he was ending Constellation, and he did not have any ideas for where the human spaceflight program was going to be going right at the time when, as you said, there are going to be all these layoffs. So he had to come up with something and this is what he came up with. This aspect of the beginning of the decade has really, the consequences from this first year of 2010, basically, we're living in that consequence

still, and will likely for the next at least 10 years, given what came out of it, which was one of my items that I raised as one of the most consequential space policy actions of the decade was the subsequent NASA authorization from 2010. So this was the congressionally mandated programs came out of this were the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion crew capsule was maintained from the Constellation program, and in the deal of that was the official kind of enshrinement of using commercial providers for cargo and then kind of stepwise commercial providers for sending crew

back into low Earth orbit to replace the space shuttle. Do you agree with that? Where do you think the 2010 NASA authorization fits into this spectrum of space policy development in the 2010s? Well, I think from a civics lesson standpoint, it demonstrates that Congress does have a very strong role to play in these kinds of decisions and a White House, whatever White House it is, cannot make a unilateral decision. So I think that through the NASA Authorization Act, the Democrats and Republicans working together in Congress showed that they have the final say on this because they're the ones who have the money. You can look at the Constellation Program and say that Obama

canceled it. But if you look at the work that was going on at NASA, it really never was canceled. The destination temporarily changed. Instead of it being back to the moon and onto Mars, it was to an asteroid and onto Mars. But NASA was still going to be building a big new rocket. They were going to build a, quote unquote multi-purpose crew vehicle, but that turned out to be Orion. So those fundamental elements that you needed for a bold human spaceflight program were being built all throughout the Obama administration because Congress forced them to do it through that NASA Authorization Act. So it was a very interesting civics lesson that, you know, Congress has the purse strings and a very interesting aspect of the future of the human spaceflight program.

Because we would not be where we are today. You know, some people argue that we're in a strange place today as well, but we would not be here at all if it were not for the 2010 NASA Authorization Act that led to SLS and Orion. I'd like to dwell on this just a bit because it's an extraordinary piece of legislation to read, just in terms of the minute amounts of detail that is specified within the legislation. They're specifying the minimum metric tonnage to LEO capability of this heavy lift rocket, that it has to be able to be upgraded to 130 metric tons, that it has to use the same workforces from the space shuttle and constellation programs.

These are all mandated or placed into law by Congress. And I should emphasize here, we should emphasize that this is a Congress of President Obama's same party back in 2010. This is a Democratic, huge majority in the Senate and in the House. And it was a significant, even though, you know, they had a lot of Republicans supporting this, it was significant in a sense reprimand of the administration policy by his own party. Right. As I said, it was bipartisan. It was not a partisan issue at all at that point. It was Congress versus the administration. And Congress wanted to move forward with a human spaceflight program. They made clear also in that law that they wanted a balanced NASA program.

They didn't want money being siphoned off from science and other areas, technology development, other areas in order to fund it. They wanted a balanced program throughout NASA of science and human exploration. So there was a lot in that law. It was a very important law. And I think also just a notable aspect of it, it was a three-year authorization for NASA for these programs. We've had, I think, one or two authorization laws passed since that were just one-year authorizations that did very little to change anything. authorizations that did very little to change anything. Even the duration of that authorization itself, I think, is remarkable in the context of that decade, considering how little legislation has been passed through those authorizing committees ever since. Well, of course,

the language in the authorization bills remains in place until it's changed by a future law. So the duration of these bills, whether it's one year or two years or three years or five years or however many years, really relates to just how many years of funding are in there. And as we all know, the funding levels in an authorization bill are really not all that relevant because it's the appropriations committees that give the money. So the policy aspects of the bill continue no matter what the expiration date is of the law. Another, I think, maybe final capstone of this first tumultuous couple years of the decade in space policy, and this is something that you highlighted, that it was the final shuttle flight, STS-135, and the subsequent reliance of NASA on the Russians to launch people into space. Would you like to expand upon that one?

Well, and of course, if you look at the decade that we're just finishing up, the change in the geopolitical relationship between the United States and Russia has changed dramatically after Russia took over Crimea in 2014. So in 2011, when the shuttle was ending and we were going to become reliant on Russia to get crews back and forth, I think people were not as worried about it. It was only supposed to be a four-year gap. Four-year gap's a pretty long time, but it was going to be a four-year gap, and we were friendly with the Russians. As the years went by, and now it's already an eight-year gap, we're hoping it's not going to be a nine-year gap, but it's eight already.

And of course, our relationship with Russia has changed dramatically. So I think that the termination of the space shuttle without anything to replace it was a questionable policy choice. And you can look back on it, you know, hindsight is 2020 and say it didn't look so bad in 2011. But I think in hindsight, it was really not a good choice. You read both the authorization bill going to the 2010 authorization saying that both the SLS and Orion or the multi-purpose crew vehicle should be ready by the end of 2016. Right. crew seems to be always kind of slipping six months to a year into the future now. And do you see any reflection of that by folks on the Hill? I mean, the other interesting thing

here is the people who wrote this legislation and, you know, in creating these programs, a lot of them are no longer serve in Congress. Right. And so there's no, is there an opportunity, I should say, for reflection? Do you see people looking back on these and saying this was unrealistic to begin with? No, I don't. I don't know if you do. Some of the staff are still there, and even the staffs change a lot on Capitol Hill these days. But there are some of the staff still there, but a lot of the members have gone. Some are still there. Eddie Bernice Johnson, who chairs the House Science Committee, was there at the time.

gone. Some are still there. Eddie Bernice Johnson, who chairs the House Science Committee, was there at the time. But I think these members, they're not really reflecting on the past as much as they are looking at not even the future, but looking at today and what can we get past today. They're working on the fiscal 2020 appropriations right now. So I think that they don't really have an opportunity to sit back and reflect the way we policy people do. But this decade, to me, because I've been doing this for a long time, even though there's been a lot of tumult, it's not all that different from the past decades. And so here we are in 2019, still debating moon or Mars. We know the long-term goal is Mars, but how do you get there? What are the steps? How are we going to do it?

The new thing this decade and just the last couple of years really is the emergence of public-private partnerships as the procurement method of choice for NASA. It's a little bit surprising to me how quickly they have put their eggs in that basket because we still don't have evidence that these are going to work from a business perspective. We have one example, commercial cargo, that is working from a technical perspective, but NASA is still the only customer. And the whole point of these things is that NASA is going to be one of many customers. So we have not seen commercial cargo make that leap out of the government funded mechanism, but already we're into commercial crew.

We have not seen that work technically, but presumably you give them enough time, enough money, they'll get it to work technically. But again, is it going to be a good business case? But without knowing that, we're already going forward to commercial LEO and commercial human landing systems and all these other commercial aspects of human spaceflight

without really having the evidence that these are going to be successful rather than just more and more government money being poured into them. Yeah, and I absolutely want to dive into that more. And let's just put a pin in that for now, because I still want to wrap up a few items with the Russia dependence that I think is worth exploring. the Russia dependence that I think is worth exploring. So you brought up, again, this transformation of the U.S.'s relationship to Russia over this course of this decade. Do you think that that tight interrelationship and requirement of sending humans into space through Russia, did that change or modify or alter the overall statecraft

that the U.S. had on the global stage with Russia because of this dependence? Was Russia able to leverage that into their own advantage, particularly around Crimea and other issues that got them in trouble in the world stage? I almost see it as space having been isolated into its own little pocket. Both sides are protecting it because it's important to them for different reasons. I think both countries want the national prestige of operating this international space station, but Russia also gets a lot of money from it and they need money for their space program. The United States is willing to pay that money because it has no choice,

although it's working on these alternatives, the commercial crew program. So I almost see it as being isolated from the rest of the geopolitical landscape. Going forward here as we, you know, this long-term reliance on Russia, I look at this just, it's interesting to me because again, it was originally pitched as a brief four-year window, which is relatively brief, I suppose. But this long-term, it's been almost a decade now and probably will be a decade and will continue going forward throughout the beginning of the commercial crew program, assuming everything goes to plan on that. Do you think that has transformed in any way how NASA sees itself with international partners being in this critical pathway to being able to access space? And is there a long-term consequence from then, or Russia having grown too dependent on

NASA money to fund aspects of its space program as a consequence of this? Well, that's going to be a very interesting question, because obviously their space program has been struggling because they don't have a lot of money going into it. So as we transition from NASA paying Russia for seats to get back and forth, once commercial crew is operational, NASA and Russia both said that they're going to be flying their astronauts and cosmonauts on each other's vehicles because you want to be sure there's always at least one American and one Russian up there. But it'll be an era where the money is not coming from NASA to pay for those seats.

At least that's what NASA is expecting. So is Russia going to be able to maintain the production levels of the Soyuz and everything and the rockets without that money coming in from NASA? I think that's a very good question, and I don't know the answer to it. But I think that overall, not just NASA, but I think all the space station partners feel that the space station is the prime example of international cooperation and getting through this very difficult marriage with people changing their minds, especially the United States, over the course of this program ever since the 1980s, on again, off again, adding Russia in the 1990s, all of that. It's really been a Herculean task to keep the partnership together. And I think that people see this as an encouraging sign that as we move further out into the solar system, that we'll also be able to get these partnerships and NASA wants to add commercial

partnerships and be able to keep them together no matter what happens. You identified this idea that perhaps NASA ended the shuttle too soon. I wonder now, in some ways, that having this dependence on Russia, it's actually kind of how the system was designed in the sense that it is forcing people to work together because of the shared goals are so strong that you can't just pull away and get angry about something you're actually can't separate, right? I almost wonder if that's ultimately a benefit in terms of policies. So maybe be one of the long lasting consequences will be, hey, different nations can work together in a very tightly integrated way that advances both of their interests in a peaceful manner. Well, I look at it somewhat differently, which is from an operational standpoint,

Russia has been a single point failure for all these years. And as we saw with the Soyuz MS-10, they can have failures too. So I think it's always best to have at least two ways to get up anywhere in space, to the space station or to the moon or wherever it is, to have a backup capability. We relied on Russia after the Columbia disaster because we had no choice. And then we ended up choosing to end the shuttle and be reliant on them for whatever period of time after that. We thought it was going to be four years. Now it's been eight. But I think that it does add another complexity to your operations if you are the only way to get up and back. And I think it's always better to have a second method. to be stretched out longer than they would have been otherwise?

Would there have been a lot more pressure if it had been, again, I guess the comparison would be maybe back to the late 70s under shuttle, where you had a roughly five-year break between human spaceflight launches in the United States. There was no other option to send humans into space. So do you think by having this option, the pressure wasn't on properly to push those other new programs forward? I don't know, because there's always the safety angle, and you don't want to put schedule pressure on people. And they're fighting against that right now, because everybody wants to have these commercial crew systems ready.

But everybody's saying safety first. So I'm not sure that putting pressure on the commercial crew program would have been a good thing to do anyway. Yeah, particularly for the first time through it. So we've kind of gone through this first couple years that I think are all, again, very tightly interrelated. The end of Constellation, the new human spaceflight policy, end of the shuttle, and then the 2010 NASA authorization bill that we're still living in that world of. So I'd like to move forward to something that I raised as a significant policy issue. It wasn't directly space policy, but it

had real space policy consequences. And that to me was the rise of the Tea Party backlash to the early years of the Obama presidency. In 2011, they lost the House of Representatives, the Democrats did, and replaced by a very budget-cutting-focused Republican Party that implemented the law that we know as sequestration a few years later, that was supposed to limit overall government spending and have these basic cuts to government programs if no spending cuts were agreed by Congress. And you can see during this period of the Obama presidency compared to other presidents in history that NASA takes a significant dip in terms of its real spending. If you adjust for inflation, it lost a significant amount of purchasing power

during the Obama presidency, which is unusual compared to most presidents. They tend to just at least follow inflation with a few exceptions. You also had just overall, because of that limited funding and these new programs such as the SLS coming up along, that you were really squeezed on various aspects of NASA's portfolio. So one of the reasons we had the ARM mission, the Asteroid Redirect Mission, was because NASA had no money to send to create a human qualified lander or spacecraft beyond what they were already designing for Orion. You saw significant cuts to planetary science, of course, that the Planetary Society focused on for years. And there just wasn't much to go around. You saw basically the delay,

cancellation of major programs at NASA that we're still rebuilding back from. And if you actually look at inflation adjusted numbers for NASA's primary budget, you can see that it never has actually recovered from where it started the year at. A lot was going on, obviously, during those years. And sequestration was damocly and sword hanging over all the agencies until quite recently, actually. And so they actually implemented sequestration in fiscal 2013. And you can see the big dip in NASA funding. And it occurred for just about every other agency as well when those across the board cuts went into effect because deficit reduction was the clarion call of the Republican Party during that era. And so they kept and they wanted to keep defense spending, not just level, but increase it.

So they wanted all the cuts to come out of the non-defense programs like NASA. So you had this constant tug of war throughout all those years. It's only finally come to a close now with the budget deal that they just got this year, because this is sort of the last hurrah for the 2011 Budget Control Act. So after 2013, when they saw what dire impact it had on all these agencies, including NASA, they sort of said to themselves, well, never again. But they didn't want to just vacate the 2011 Budget Act. So they did it in two-year chunks. Every two years, they would pass another waiver to the Budget Control Act. But then you'd have the damn clean sword hanging over you for the next two years. And so it was just long,

drawn-out process where you never knew from year to year whether or not agencies were going to be hit with sequestration or not. So it's been a very challenging time for agencies. And even though we seem to have finally gotten past that, you still have all the continuing resolutions and everything else that makes it so difficult for R&D agencies like NASA to plan their futures. That's not over. I mean, we're still going to have that. What was, again, fascinating to me was that, as you point out, like the moment sequestration or the year after sequestration was implemented, they kind of lost the taste for it. It was never easy. It became easier again through the political dynamics once President Trump came into power. But you can see the slow, gradual increase of NASA's budget after 2013.

But even before sequestration, and maybe you remember off the top of your head, was it fiscal year 2011 that had a full year continuing resolution? Or was it fiscal year 12? I don't remember. It was one of those. Yeah. Basically, no resolution was found in a sense. They limited to a huge extent the amount of money or influence from new budgeting that came in through both Congress and the White House. And again, I think you see these long term consequences to NASA, in particular, in its science programs, they canceled the ExoMars contribution that would have gone with the European mission. Even though we're seeing a lot of that starting to come back

now, a lot of missions under development, for a reason I'll bring up here in a second, we're still, I'd say there's still like a five to seven year gap, particularly in planetary, but also I would say in astrophysics due to overruns in James Webb, that you're going to see, you know, manifest itself in the next few years because of these budgeting decisions made seven years ago. Yes, and I think the future of the robotic Mars program, even though everyone's talking now about Mars sample return, I still consider that to be somewhat up in the air. And you would know better than me,

but I thought the planetary science community was really fighting for a communications infrastructure around Mars. And you don't hear so much talk about that anymore to make certain that these aging assets get replaced so that you can talk with all the rovers that are down on the surface. So I think that you're right, that there are these long-term consequences of what was happening during this past decade. And I'm not sure that the path forward is all that clear. Right now, Congress is being very generous with NASA. They're giving a lot more money than is being requested. I don't know how long that's going to last. It's the good times. And sooner or later, there's going to be a reckoning and someone's going to be interested in deficit

control again. And I think that NASA needs to be aware of that. NASA and all agencies need to be aware of that, this continuing plus up that they they've had the last few years because they have appropriators who are very interested in what they're doing. Senator Shelby, certainly in the Senate, and for until recently, Congressman Culbertson. But Congressman Serrano, who's currently chairing the subcommittee, also seems to be a space enthusiast. But you have to be careful in your planning because so much of this becomes personality dependent. You do get changeovers in Congress and some people lose elections and some people retire. So you really never can rest on your laurels. actually maybe defines this decade in some sense of a lot of promises are being made, and they won't really manifest themselves until the 2020s. Also, most of the costs won't manifest themselves until the 2020s. And so you see things like beginning the Artemis program or the SLS

production, these long-term contracts for Orion crew modules, Mars sample return, WFIRST, all these other missions that are just getting started in phases A and B, you know, the early study and formulation phase, the NEO surveillance mission, the new mission to search for near-Earth objects, all of those are going to be paid for in the next five to 10 years. But to your exact point, they're depending on a budget that has been growing and been generously funded. I think NASA's grown at an average of 4% per year for the last five years, basically ever since 2013.

And so that's, to me, the most unsettling aspect of this decade is that NASA's been told to do a lot of things, but the primary funding is to be determined by a different Congress with different politicians under different administrations. And that's not new. I mean, thinking about this decade versus previous decades, it seems forever since we've heard the old motto about how NASA needs to put 10 pounds of potatoes into a five pound bag. And even though people say it year after year after year, it doesn't change. They still expect NASA to do all this stuff and the money's not there for it. And then NASA, for its part, does not seem to be able to manage some of these big programs very well. And so you get

these constant overruns on James Webb, which makes people very skittish about W-1st. And we love Mars Curiosity, but that was a big overrun back at the beginning of the decade, and it was two years late. And so people worry about these things because they don't see that on the big programs that they're being executed the way that they're being sold. that they're being executed the way that they're being sold. And so they eat up all the seed corn for the new programs that are coming along. And then suddenly out of the blue on March 26th, Vice President Pence says, we're going to get people back on the moon in five years. And they don't even know the budget for it.

You know, Jim Bridenstine keeps telling Congress, we don't know how much it's going to cost. And yet they've announced this goal. So that's a whole nother layer of huge expenditures in the near term on top of all the things that you just listed that NASA already had on the books. So it's very hard to see how that case closes. And that was an example you also gave of the policy by surprise, the Vice President Pence's announcement for 2024.

Wrapping that up, why do you think that keeps happening? Is it just a seductive thing to be able to announce and get good headlines? I mean, not that the Obama administration was looking for great headlines by canceling Constellation, but where do you see that common thread? What unites those two different types of politicians together in that same effective pursuit of policy? I wish I knew. I wish I knew. It's a great book that you can write, Casey. All right. Comparing 2010 to 2019 and why presidents, or in this case, I would say a vice president, made these sudden surprise decisions changing the direction of the human spaceflight program

and did not seem to have it very well thought through and just did it by surprise. It obviously did not work to Obama's advantage in 2010 because he just had everybody mad at him. With Vice President Pence making his announcement, I think everybody's just still scratching their heads because they wonder, where did this come from? Putting it at 2024, which is a political deadline because it's tied to the Trump presidency. And if he gets reelected, which adds a whole other layer of political complexity to something that is ordinarily a nonpartisan issue. I don't know what the reasoning was there. And hopefully Scott Pace will tell us the whole story someday.

Yes, that'll be something to look forward to. story someday. Yes, that'll be something to look forward to. Also, I guess, for Pence waiting until the Democrats had taken back the House of Representatives before announcing that new mandate wasn't the best timing, I would argue either. Well, it almost looks like something that's designed to fail, something that's going to be so much extra money in such a short period of time tied to a political deadline, and telling NASA, you know, NASA, if you're not up to it, that NASA is going to have to change not the goal, you know, NASA, if you're not up to it, that NASA is going to have to change, not the goal, you know, and telling contractors, if not naming them, you know, well, if you can't do it, then I'll find somebody who can. I mean, it's interesting rhetoric, but it's pretty hard to actually get an executable program out of

that. As we're finding out. And that'll be, that'll be, maybe we'll be talking about this in 10 years, how Artemis did. Oh, I hope not. We've been talking about it for a few decades already. That's true. Why change? Okay. Another item that I raised as one of the more important, and this, I think, is maybe more of an insider aspect of this, but important aspect in terms of success of implementation of space policy related to both of these topics we're just talking about here is the ascension, I believe, of John Culberson to the chairmanship of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Committee, Subcommittee of Appropriations in the House of Representatives. John Culberson, for everyone who may not remember, he, I would say, is an honest to God space fan. For anyone who's met him, he just personally exudes a passion for space at a level that I don't even see in most people who work in the space business. He

would sit and read scientific papers and his passion was Europa, finding life on Europa, the moon of Jupiter with a big amount of liquid water. A huge aspect of the fact that we have a mission right now, Europa Clipper, that's a flagship class mission, a $3 billion mission. That mission exists because John Culberson was able to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to that mission. And I would say effectively forced NASA to take on that mission to Europa. And he funded it through his force of his own will in that very powerful position as chair of that committee that funds NASA. So how do you see the role of Culberson overall with not just with Europa, but with NASA and its growing budget

that has enabled it to take on a lot of new projects. Well, Mr. Collison clearly is a space cadet. I don't think there's any question about that. And I agree with you that Europa would not be happening if it were not for his personal enthusiasm for it. I kind of liken it to K. Bailey Hutchinson and Bill Nelson in the Senate, who through the force of their wills got the space launch system and Orion. They got them back again. I don't know quite how to characterize that. SLS was a replacement for Ares, but Orion is still Orion. In any case, they used their force of

the positions they held because Hutchinson was both on authorizations and appropriations and Bill Nelson was revered in the Senate because of his knowledge of space. And so they got SLS and Orion, sort of the human space-like part of it. And Culberson, by the force of his will, got the planetary, robotic planetary side of it going. It's a similar situation. And I certainly think that the planetary science community owes a lot to Mr. Culberson. How much do you think in the history, at least in your personal experience or opinion on this, how much of these developments like this are tuned to just kind of the fortune of one or two people being in these politically powerful positions that enable these great things to happen? I feel like we've seen, you know, there's a handful of examples I could think of,

of these people being just at the right place at the right time who get the bug, who are excited about it, that basically the work goes beyond just the parochial political interest into something greater. Do you think that's a critical aspect to success in space policy over the years? Well, I think that there have been individuals who have tried very hard to affect space policy, and some of us succeeded and some have not. After all, Senator Proxmire was chair of the Senate Appropriations NASA Subcommittee back in the day, and he tried to stop the shuttle, and he did not succeed by the force of his will. But I do think that you can look at some of these programs and see that they had strong backing in Congress. Some of it is because of personal passion,

like with Mr. Culberson, and I think other is because of parochial politics. Culberson's, again, an interesting consequence. He assumed the chair, and I think the GOP has something like a six-year term limit on chairs. And he ended up serving four years because he lost an election in what was previously seen as a pretty safe Republican district outside of Dallas, or Houston, I should say. President Trump has been very pro-space and his administration, we were just talking about, has been very open and committed to space, particularly human spaceflight and the defense side of space. And you see all these unpredictable consequences where it's very

likely had Hillary Clinton won probably in 2016, that you would not have seen such a strong democratic resurgence in the House of Representatives in 2018 that ended up losing Culberson his seat in the House of Representatives and his chairmanship of the CJS committee. As you were pointing out, so much is unpredictable if you depend on one person to carry you through these really difficult situations, particularly in terms of budget, that it's not a great long-term recipe for success. Though, in this case, the project of Europa Clipper had gotten far enough along that even absent Culberson, we're still seeing some pretty healthy funding for Europa and planetary science. Though, with the big, I'd say, difference being there's no longer money going towards a lander. And perhaps if Culberson had stayed another few years, we would have actually seen a lander mission move into implementation or maybe formulation ultimately into implementation,

kind of skipping ahead of the entire decadal process. So that's a good what if, I suppose, of history. Well, Mr. Culbertson's loss is sort of interesting from a space perspective. The politics of Texas are changing. It was pretty well known that the demographics of his district were changing, and there was frustration on the part of some of the national Republican leaders that he wasn't paying more attention to his reelection race. And so there was a lot of speculation that he was going to lose pretty early on because he just wasn't paying attention to it. Part of that was just the changing politics of Texas. But his opponent reportedly got a big boost when she said that Culberson was more interested in the water on Europa than he was in the water in Houston. He might have been losing focus on home state issues, which is, of course, what gets people reelected. But your overall point is you can become too reliant on a single

member of Congress, and members of the House are only there for two years for sure, and members of the Senate are there for six for sure, and then they have to get reelected. So that's, again, why you can't rest on your laurels because you've got something through. You need to be certain that you have strong support for these programs elsewhere for whoever is going to still be in Congress. And I think Europa is one of those examples where clearly Mr. Serrano is very supportive of Europa. And I think in their report, they said they didn't put money in for the lander because there was enough left over from 2019. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but it wasn't as though they were saying we shouldn't do the lander.

Yeah, they just weren't throwing money at it the same way that Culberson was. Right. In the sense that, because I think if I remember off the top of my head with Clipper, before Clipper was actually requested by NASA and formalized by NASA, he had directed almost a quarter of a billion dollars to that mission over the course of three or four years, just for pre-studies. And so, I mean, NASA would almost be insane to not take that at that point because so much had been directed to it. And I think that was probably the same strategy with Lander that was disrupted when he lost his seat. And I actually had a blog post about that, that very ad that you referenced, kind of making fun of him for his big thing on space,

which is a good, I guess, yeah, as you said, a general politicking lesson, just to be aware of how to get always make sure you stay in touch with your home constituents. Right. And I just to put another perspective forward, I think that there are people who think that Europa is not the place to go. They think Enceladus is a better chance. And so when you get a prominent member of Congress, a powerful member of Congress, so focused on one moon, in this case, Europa, there may be some opportunity cost because there are other places where you might also search for life in oceans under icy crusts that if you just look at it from a scientific standpoint would be a better choice. So there are a lot of factors at play here. And sometimes maybe it's better to have the scientific community making these decisions rather than politicians,

just to offer that. Yeah. We could have a whole dive inside of this, but just in the interest of moving this forward into the last couple of items here that I do want to reference, we each have one more. And the first one I want to bring up was mine. And I honestly, I'll freely admit, I went back and forth on whether to include this because we just don't know yet. But I think enough has happened that it's consequential. So I listed Space Policy Directive number one, the first Space Policy Directive of the Trump administration signed in December, I guess about two years ago now in December of 2017. All it really did was change a line of text in the existing national space policy, an official document from the Obama era, to say that the United States will lead the return of

humans to the moon for long-term exploration and utilization is effectively what it said. That was the official policy directive that this was before Artemis. This was before the 2024 deadline. This was policy, basically the official policy to undo what Obama had announced in Florida back in 2010 of going to an asteroid. initiative, you actually saw a significant movement towards this goal in a way that we just never saw under the previous administration. I think helped by additional funding, helped by the fact that they were able to repurpose the deep space gateway into the gateway lunar orbiter, but basically orienting human spaceflight back to the moon right where we started at the beginning of the decade with Constellation. So Marcia, what do you consider the meaning? Do you agree with me that this is an important policy development of this decade? Because again, I really did kind of go back and forth on this. It's hard to say at this point. So yeah, he did get us back on the

moon path, which is where I think a lot of people thought we should have been anyway. But you still have these very prominent voices like Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin saying, no, skip the moon, go right to Mars. So we're right back into this decades old argument of moon versus Mars. Is it a significant space policy development? Sure, because it puts us on another path towards the future. But as you said, we don't know how it's going to turn out. And if it had just been that, and I give a lot of credit to Bill Gerstenmaier, because he'd been through so many changes in direction over his career at NASA, that he came up with this flexible thing where you could take something called the deep space gateway, and then suddenly, oh, well, it's a lunar gateway. So he did build a lot of flexibility in knowing that the winds were probably going to change

as the years went by. So I think that he did a good job at that. And after Trump put the moon back in the plan, NASA came up with a plan to implement that, saying we're going to get back on the moon by 2028. I thought it was not a bad plan. I thought it was reasonable, achievable if Congress came up with a reasonable amount of money. But then suddenly you have this pivot back on March 26th when suddenly, oh no, we have to get there in five years, which just seems a bridge too far in terms of the amount of money it's going to take. Even if you do this with public-private partnerships. Because as we can see with commercial crew, that's taking a lot longer than anybody had imagined. And people blame it on Congress because they didn't give it all the money it needed in those

first couple of years, but they were giving it all the money it needed by 2014 or 2015. And yet here we are in 2019, and they're still not flying. So there's no guarantee that bringing in the companies through public-private partnerships is going to accelerate this to that degree. So yes, Space Policy Directive 1, in terms of human spaceflight, was an important policy decision, but I think it's overshadowed by the March 26th decision by Vice President Pence. I was trying to think about this in terms of what did it actually change? Did it change? Did money start to flow or did programs themselves change around it? And I think the overall point that we've been mentioning, I think that we'll hit

on towards the end here is that not programmatically by having a flexible path or having these destination agnostic programs, they're designed to not change, right? So the money didn't necessarily flow any different to SLS or Orion because the moon, there was a moon directive now, right? Those kind of continued on the way that they had been under Obama. And even though Gateway had been started, I guess we did see significant upticks, though, relatively speaking, a couple hundred million started to go towards Gateway. Right now, I think we're seeing with Artemis, yeah, maybe that concentration of that change. We're seeing, I think, at least how NASA talks about its human spaceflight mission changing in a way and more rapidly than we saw under the, you know, compared to either asteroids or even, you know, we started to see this towards

the end of the Obama era, the pathways to Mars. But the rapidity of it seems, at least in their marketing, is notable to me. I haven't seen NASA pivot that quickly, which may not mean that much in the long run. But, you know, maybe does say something about the, it's tapping into something internally, it's allowing them to focus more. Well, I see the huge change being after March 26th. The gateway was going to be international, and that was a big feature of it, and sustainable exploration. And suddenly it was, no, we have to be there by 2024. So first we're going to do fast, and then we're going to do sustainable. then we're going to do sustainable. And as part of the fast, then they had to start pouring money into these public-private partnerships that they hope they're going to have for the lander,

because trying to get a lander in five years is going to be really challenging. And they changed how they were going to do gateway through public-private partnerships and all that. So I see the big change just in these last few months. How many months has it been? Eight months, eight, nine months. At the same time, you had NASA getting frustrated with SLS and deciding to put the exploration upper stage to the side because they wanted Boeing to focus just on the SLS itself. And now you're getting pushback from the Senate saying, no, no, you have to do EUS. And you get prominent people like Doug Cook and Tom Stafford saying, no, no, no, you have to do EUS. And you get prominent people like Doug Cook and Tom Stafford saying, no, no, no, forget about doing Artemis with all these commercial rockets, sending little

things up to the gateway and assembling on there. Let's stick with SLS at EUS and do it in just two launches. So it's thrown the whole idea of returning to the moon back into this chaotic soup of competing interests. You know, NASA has what it wants to do. And, you know, NASA tried to reflect what the White House wants to do. And Congress has its own idea. So I feel like we're right back to where we were, maybe not exactly right back, but similar to the situation where we were with, after Obama canceled Constellation, where, you know, Congress has its ideas on what should be done. Some of them simply don't know what to do. But you do have this pushback from Congress on some of these things that NASA and the White House are pushing from Republicans, from their own party.

Let's talk about public-private partnerships now, too, which I think was just such a critical development, at least as a concept throughout this decade? And you've touched on this a couple times, but maybe just big picture of how we define those. And then maybe also to acknowledge how a lot of people may think about those that may differ from the formal kind of way that we define a public-private partnership. Well, I think the way NASA is defining public-private partnership, which is that the government and the private sector put money into the development of something. And NASA is going to buy services from them instead of owning the hardware. Now, with commercial crew, Bill Gerstenmaier came the closest of ever saying what the percentage split was between the government money and the private sector money.

And this was years ago when he said that NASA was paying 80 to 90% of it. So it's still largely government money going into these programs, and it's the government buying the services. They still haven't gotten to the point where NASA is one of many customers, which is NASA's overall goal for these things. But I do think that's the concept behind it, which is both parties put money into it it and the companies make money off of selling services to the government and other customers. Going back to 2010, again, reading the authorization bill, which is so much skepticism included in that bill about whether commercial providers were reliable or capable. And it was a good reminder that that bill was written or passed a couple months before the first Dragon cargo capsule got into space even. We've seen this incredible growth of capability and also public-private partnerships, I would argue, basically driven by one company, which is SpaceX, in the last decade here.

And I think when people look at SpaceX, and you may have had very similar conversations before too, which is, oh, is NASA going to be put out of business by SpaceX? Which demonstrates to me that most people do not understand that commercial cargo and SpaceX's largest contracts are from the government. with commercial crew now still being delayed and kind of unproven in terms of what is commercial about it beyond the kind of fundamental IP property, who owns the intellectual property and who is buying what from whom. The idea being that there's not this big new market opening up, I think is really still unproven. Can you speculate? Why do you think that public-private partnerships as a concept have grown so popular, despite seeing, I'd say, mixed outcomes in the last 10 years? Well, I think that NASA is hoping it's a way of offloading some of the upfront costs and getting

things done more quickly. I think that's their goal in using these. And again, we haven't seen it all play out yet. The only success so far is commercial cargo. And I give credit to both SpaceX and to Orbital Sciences, which eventually, you know, has merged and become Northrop Grumman. But I think, you know, both of those companies demonstrated that you could technically build the vehicles, the rockets and the spacecraft to accomplish this task for a government customer. and the spacecraft to accomplish this task for a government customer. And they probably did it less expensively than if NASA had used the traditional cost plus contracts that they were using for SLS and the like. So I think that they have demonstrated that. As I said before, what they haven't demonstrated is that there are other customers so that from a business standpoint, they can make a go of it even if NASA stops paying for those services for whatever reason.

That's the key for these other things that NASA wants to use them for, like commercial LEO, having commercial space stations where NASA is only one customer. And I just don't know how you get there. There's a whole chicken and egg thing going on there. And I don't know, after all these decades of which we've had space stations, the first space station went up in 1971. It was a Russian space station, Salyut 1. So we've had space stations galore, and we're still looking for that killer app that's going to demonstrate that there's something profitable that you can do in space that makes

you more money than if you do it on the ground. And we're still not there yet. And people are still talking about things like now it's Z-Blan, I think. And then you hear other people saying, well, that's not really going to work out either. It's the fact that they're using this model that's unproven, not just for today, but they're building it into their future plans without any evidence that it's going to work out. Yeah, I almost see it as it's popular because it hasn't failed yet, in a sense, or hasn't been a proven. It allows the kind of pre-existing romantic ideals of lots of people in space doing all sorts of things that are independent from the either depressing

or frustrating machinations of government and allows you to transfer those into this other domain that hasn't disappointed you yet. You can say, oh, we'll have a private space station and we'll have lots of people go up there and they'll do it. And it's almost like this kind of base level assertion that because government's not doing it, it'll be faster and cheaper. It's taken as this predicate, like an axiomatic truth. Exactly. And we have yet to see that proven out. And I think an interesting counterexample to this is that we saw with the recent NASA IG report about Boeing, that they claimed threatened to pull out of the program, the commercial crew program, unless NASA incentivized them more beyond their fixed price contract to stay in. It always just reminds me, it's like when

the government is depending on these companies to provide a required service, just like we're require Russia to launch humans into space, it's never really a fixed price contract, right? It's never really a partnership because the government needs that capability and that gives a lot of leverage to the companies providing it. And the same will be true for At The Moon and Commercial Leo. And we saw that, of course, decades ago with the EELV program, Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles, where once again in the 90s, it looked like there was going to be a lot of launch business. launch vehicles, where once again, in the 90s, it looked like there was going to be a lot of launch business. And so Boeing invested a lot of money in upgrading its rockets. Lockheed Martin spent a lot of money upgrading its rockets at their own expense, in addition to some government money. That was some of the earlier public-private partnerships. And then the market collapsed.

And so the government had to have the launches, and the company said, pay us more. Otherwise, we can't build these rockets anymore. Out of all that came the United Launch Alliance, where the government basically told the two companies they were going to have to form a joint venture to provide these things and do all these other sorts of things, you know, combining production plants and stuff. So we do have that example of where a public-private partnership did not work out. The X33 program in the 1990s did not work out. So we have tried these things before and they did not work out. So now we have one example, commercial cargo, where it has worked out from a technical standpoint.

And that's all we have for data points. And yet all the eggs are going into these public-private partnership baskets. Maybe it'll work out. I don't have any special knowledge to say that they're not going to work out. I just note it as from a policy perspective, it's an additional risk. You were there through the 80s and that first burst of commercial space, right? You had the Commercial Space Act of 84. There was the proposed commercial space station that I forget the name of it right now off the top of my head that was supposed to come. The Industrial Space Facility.

Those all founded for the same reasons. And then, of course, Challenger changed a lot of the expectations about the role of shuttle. You're just reminding me of another one. So Landsat, commercialization of Landsat in the 1980s, that was going to be a public-private partnership in that field. Right. And again, I think because the key thing is the private partnership comes from the idea that a company and its investors are willing to pay money now with the idea that they will have a bigger return in the future, right? That there's a bigger market that they're gaining access to. I remember talking to a NASA person in the COTS office, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services office, about this a few years ago, and they're saying,

yeah, the idea of going into low-Earth orbit, that was a, you know, quote-unquote, that was a known problem, right? Generally, it's a solved problem. You can figure out how to do this. And then once you can do that, you can be like SpaceX and compete for, there's a whole private satellite communications market. You can compete for those launches, right? A lot of people want to send things into low Earth orbit and they're willing to pay for

it. No one beyond governments right now are willing to pay the amount of money required to send things to the moon, to do science at the moon, to send humans into space even. And so I think that's what we're kind of hitting here that this next decade, we're going to be kind of this unavoidable testing of this hypothesis. And again, this is kind of what I was talking about earlier about that we've made a lot of promises in terms of policy in this last decade in the 2010s, that are going to be coming into the for next decade. We're going to have to live with those consequences. And we will really see how well this public-private partnership model is going to work

when the harsh realities, I'd say, of the physical harsh realities of maintaining human life in space really are put to the test. Right. I agree. space really are put to the test. Right. I agree. Any last thoughts about this decade that we've just been through in terms of policy? You've been doing this since 19, I think I was double checking, 75 is when you started working at the Congressional Research Service. My apologies. I actually worked elsewhere before that. So I've actually been doing space policy since 1972. Can you believe it? Oh, so the start of the shuttle program. As Apollo was ending and shuttle was starting. So I've seen an awful lot. The end of 2019, the end of this decade feels very familiar to the end of other decades. There's always room for hope,

always room for hope, but hope is really not the best way to set your policy. I understand all the reasons that NASA struggles with this and the White House struggles with it and Congress struggles with it. There are no crisp, clear answers. We can just say, oh, we'll just do it this way and it'll work. They've been trying different things over the decades and some of them work and some of them don't. And we're just going to have to see what plays out in the 2020s. There's a lot of debate about moon and Mars. People are still saying, do we need to go back to the moon and then onto Mars or can we go straight to Mars? The one thing that's new right now are these public-private partnerships that NASA is relying on, even though there's scant evidence that these work. There haven't been all that many of them, so it's not that they may not work. But there's reason for skepticism as to whether or not they're going to work or not.

So the end of this decade has pretty much the same feel as the end of other decades. this decade has pretty much the same feel as the end of other decades. And I can appreciate why NASA does what it does and why the White House does what it does and why Congress does what it does. But there are all these different ways to try and solve that issue for human spaceflight is now where are we going and how are we going to do it and how much money we're going to spend. A lot of them have been tried in the past and so far they have not worked out since the Apollo program. And we're just going to not worked out since the Apollo program. And we're just going to have to see how it works out this time. Maybe we can even move away from the analytical aspect.

How do you feel about this last decade? I mean, you've gone through these decades in the past. Do you learn a certain amount of sanguine ability to just accept the system for what it is? Or was it a frustrating or exciting decade for you? Did you have any kind of different emotional color to this last 10 years that were unique? I hate to use negative terminology because I don't really feel negative about the space program overall. But I think it was a surprise when Obama decided out of the blue to cancel Constellation without working that through some of the political system in advance. And I think that's a lot of what undid it. I think that

if he had a great new idea of how to do this, and he could have worked it out, you know, with some of the key members of Congress in advance, so it didn't just fall in their laps, that maybe something better could have come out of that. And so when we had it again this spring with Vice President Pence, again, coming seemingly out of the blue with this idea to do something which seems absolutely impossible, which is to get people back on the moon in five years, it had that same feel to it. It's a frustration it is that we can't just seem to agree on the path forward and execute the plan. There have to be these pivots here and pivots there that mean that we never get anywhere. So I can't say that I feel more frustrated in 2019 than I did in previous decades,

because I've been feeling pretty frustrated for quite a long time. And you get to the point where, you know, I don't care where we go, just go somewhere, just agree on it, stop the fighting. You need to get people on the same page. And we had this little sweet spot at the end of the last decade, after the 2005 and 2008 NASA Authorization Acts, where Congress, first Republican, then Democratic Congresses, and the White House were all on the same page. And it was like, wow, what a relief. We know what we're doing. We're going back to the moon and onto Mars. And then it was all undone by Obama. And then we had a decade of chaos. And now it's getting changed again by Vice President

Pence. And it just all seems as though we're just never gonna get there. So it's frustrating. I hear you. So I guess I'll put in a request for December of 2029. And we will follow up on this next decade. I am not discussing Moon versus Mars in another decade. I'm done. Just pick one. I don't care. in another day. I'm done. I'm done. Just pick one. I don't care. Marcia Smith, founder and editor of Space Policy Online. I really recommend you follow that site. It's a great resource for all of this space politics and policy analysis. Marcia, thank you so much again for joining us on the show. We will have you on before a decade from now to talk about other topics in space policy. Thanks so much for having me.

It was great fun. That's Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, talking to Marsha Smith, not for the first time on this program, the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, of Space Policy Online. She's just marvelous, and I love that ending. I was cracking up both times I heard it, both when you were talking to her live and when I worked on it. And now yet again, it's just, I hope she's right. I hope we're not talking about Moon versus Mars in 2029.

Yeah, it's a perennial. We're wrapping up the show, so I won't go into it. But the fundamental problem, and I've talked about this on the show before, it's a problem and an opportunity, right? I guess if you want to spin it in a more positive sense is that for human space exploration, it's totally up to us what we do with that capability. There's no external force that drives consensus about what to do. Science is science. So you can get a bunch of scientists in a room, give them enough time. science is science. So you can get a bunch of scientists in a room, give them enough time,

they'll come out with a list saying these are the most important questions in the field. Because there's a boundary to knowledge of human knowledge. And you can generally define where that boundary is and say, this is where we push to advance our knowledge of the cosmos. Human spaceflight, because of its complexity, because of the inherent limitations of technology that we have now, we're kind of limited to just a couple of places, the moon, an asteroid floating around in space, or Mars. There's no external force that drives that consensus right now. In the past, that external force has been national security and political, geopolitical situations,

but absent that, we don't have an easy way to all agree at the same time. And that has manifested itself over the decades without a clear single purpose. So at this point, we have this choice we can make. We can continue and just choose one thing and just do it. Or we can continue the endless circular debate that Marsha was talking about. And I'm not just a space advocate. I'm a space fan, right? And I would love to see. And this is why the Planetary Society,

our first principle for human spaceflight, let's just get out into deep space. Yeah, can we please? I'll take anything. At this point, just get me beyond low Earth orbit. Get me out in there. Because that's the fundamental first. I mean, you can go a lot of places. you know, the moon, orbit the moon, whatever.

Float around and play Pinochle. You know, it's just like whatever you want to do, as long as we're further out, that's the enabling technology that we need to then decide where to go beyond it. But I will be happy to see humans on the moon, around the moon. will be happy to see humans on the moon, around the moon, and I'd be happy to stick with this plan because we should just choose something and do it. And because of the inherent complexities, it just makes sense to focus on that. So this is where we look forward to this next decade. I've been telling people this for a while, and I'll make this maybe closing pitch. We have set up a lot of opportunity for the next decade. and it's our job as space advocates and space fans and space supporters and ideally as members of the Planetary Society,

it's our job to make sure this all happens now. It's our job to make sure that we stay invested, that we stay committed, that we keep the pressure on people who make policy and legislators to keep prioritizing these efforts to deliver on the promises we've just made. Because of this incredible opportunity that we have, and because this could be the most exciting decade in space in 50 years, this is the gift we're going to give to generations beyond us. So the decisions we make in the next few years, I firmly believe, will be echoing down for decades after this. And so we better make some damn good decisions.

And this is how we, and if you don't get involved in this, and then you look back in a few years and go, man, that was so stupid. Why did we do this? If you didn't do anything, I don't have that much sympathy for you in a way, right? So this is why we stay involved in this and why we're going to try to make sure we start this next decade strong and we finish it in an even stronger position. So join us in helping to create this legacy, this band of brothers and sisters under, in part, the able leadership of Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Thank you, Casey. Have a great holiday and a great new decade. Thanks, Matt. We'll talk again in 2029.

You bet. Looking forward to it. And also January of 2020. Maybe a few times before then. Yeah, I think so. All right. That's it. The Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. You can find other great resources at planetary.org

slash radio, including some of the ones that Casey and I and Casey and Marcia have been talking about, including Marcia Smith's website. I hope you will check us out there and that you will listen to the weekly edition of Planetary Radio and join us, planetary.org slash membership. Take care and happy new year.