Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The White House's Matt Daniels on the U.S.'s New Cislunar Strategy

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

For the first time in history, the White House laid out a national policy for science and technology in the vast expanse of cislunar space. This policy is not just for NASA — it's an all-of-government approach to establish the infrastructure and capabilities to enable a multitude of national and private actors to reach for the Moon and its environs. Dr. Matt Daniels of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy chaired the group that defined this new strategy; he joins the show to discuss the strategy, its ambitions, and implications for the future of lunar exploration and development.  Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/us-new-cislunar-strategySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everybody, to our monthly Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. It's wonderful to have you all with us. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed, the host of Planetary Radio for the Planetary Society, and I am joined by Casey Dreyer, our Chief of Space Policy. Hi, Casey. Hey, Sarah. Happy to be back on our second show. I know, right? And what an interesting start to the year for the US Congress. Yeah, that's a diplomatic way to put it. Right. I'm sure it'll have all kinds of interesting impacts on space policy going

forward. But before we get into any of that, who's going to be our guest this month, Casey? We have Matt Daniels, who's an assistant director at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. It's basically the part of the White House that sets all national policy to the president about what we try to invest in, where we try to go, and how we try to do it in regards to science and space. They have a brand new national strategy out that I think is really important from a really big sense, because it's not about anything on Earth. It's about a national cis-lunar science and technology strategy. This is the first time really thinking about laying a foundation for long-term presence, infrastructure, scientific and technology goals for the space between the Earth

and the Moon and the surface of the Moon, and a little bit even beyond. It's big and ambitious, but also the first time we've seen something like that. So Matt Daniels helped chair the group that wrote this new report. And he joins me from the White House to talk about the report itself, the strategy, why they did it, and what's inside it. Well, that's exciting to have someone straight from the White House talking to us on these things. And really cool to have this whole new Cislunar strategy. I know that it kind of covers the United States plans for Cislunar space and a little bit of the foundation for how we want to incorporate other nations into the strategy. But does it also touch a little bit on commercial cislunar missions? It does in an oblique sense. You can really think about this

strategy in that it's the United States formally saying that the country is going to be investing in establishing these long-term, not just goals, but investments in the space between the Earth and the Moon. And to the extent that it touches on commercial operations, it's saying to commercial companies, we're going to be working with you to define standards in operations, standards in communications, standards in navigation and tracking, really basic stuff that we otherwise take for granted, right? Like we assume every highway is standardized, so commercial shipping companies can drive on them with the same truck, right? We assume that GPS has a standard that our phones and any other piece of technology can tap into the same way. And this is what they want to extend out to space. So it's,

they're trying to create these basic levels of infrastructure in order to enable a variety of companies, organizations, private actors, and nations to establish themselves. Matt puts this in a way of saying, lower the barrier of going to the moon. And that's what the United States is aiming to do with its international partners in this. That's really exciting. I'm glad that we're finally formalizing this strategy. And I'm excited about what that means for the future. The more we can cooperate on these things, the more space missions we can get out there. And it's just it's an exciting time. It's one of those things where I kind of laugh. It's like, rarely does reading a White House policy document give me tingles. But this kind of gives me tingles, of laugh. It's like, rarely does reading a White House policy document

give me tingles, but this kind of gives me tingles, right? It's just like, and it's so practical, but also so ambitious. And we get into this in the discussion, me and Matt. But again, it represents this huge stepping point, this turning point, where we are really considering that it's not just Earth is something that, you know, the United States is going to have a policy. And again, its partners are going to have kind of formal policies governing. We're really turning outwards, right? And we're really, this is not, this didn't happen during Apollo when we were actively sending people there. We did not have a national strategy with the moon. Now we do. The implications of this are grand to me. And it's a start. And Matt will tell you from this working group, this is the starting point of what they hope to be many more advances and overall integrated approach and strategies about how the US and its international partners and this coalition of private companies and others to start to expand human presence beyond Earth in perpetuity.

to expand human presence beyond Earth in perpetuity. Well, that's really exciting. And if anybody out there is listening and wants to help support the work that we're doing here to advocate for space missions and all of our work with key decision-making bodies that shape these space strategies, please consider joining the Planetary Society. You can go to planetary.org join and your support funds all of our space advocacy work. And it's a good time to do so because we're actually hiring a new person to join our space policy staff. Can you tell us a little bit about our new director of government relations, Casey? Sarah, I'd be delighted to. I'm very excited about this. I'd like to welcome Jack Kyrillik, who'll be joining us this month at the Planetary Society.

We restructured our whole strategy here a bit, but we're committed to having permanent presence in Washington, D.C. as one of the preeminent and focused efforts from any space advocacy group, and really the truly independent space advocacy group, right, that we depend on, to just emphasize what you're saying, our members to support us. We don't take money from big corporate coffers. We don't take money from big corporate coffers we don't take money from big government efforts and and that allows us to care about these things that we care about jack is going to be there every day working for you working for me and working with me because i'm also a member i should say the planetary society out in dc so he's very exciting he's been a volunteer with us for 10 years actually actually, so he's already really committed.

He's got a master's degree in public policy with a focus on space and science and technology at SOUTH AMERICAN UNIVERSITY. He's been doing a lot of electoral politics, so he's great organizing ability, and I'm really excited to see what he's going to do to help bring our members into D.C. and to get us more opportunities to engage with members of Congress to really represent us well. Sarah, you met him briefly when he was out visiting, right? I did, yeah. I got to meet him just for a short time, but he was wonderful. Just really personable. I know he's going to be very successful in having these conversations for us in DC. Jack is great because he's highly motivated, highly capable, but also, as

you point out, just earnestly passionate about space, like all of us, right? And to me, that's just a perfect combination for what we want as the representative of the planetary society in Washington, DC. So I'm sure you will hear Jack in future episodes coming on to join me and talk about what he's doing in Washington, D.C. But until then, just very excited to announce that he'll be joining us this month. This February will be starting very soon after the release of this episode. That's so exciting to have him on. I'm just so happy to have one more person on this team to

help us because having that permanent presence in D.C. is just so important to what we do in space advocacy. So that's going to be awesome. 80% of life is showing up, and he's going to be the person showing up for us. Yeah. Of course, the people he's going to be talking to are, you know, the ones that are just now recently getting put into these new science committees. And there's a lot of shifting sands going on over there. Can you tell us a little bit about like, who's been appointed to these science committees? Right. So just as a quick refresher, right, the new Congress began January 3rd, just about a month ago from when this episode comes out. And it takes a little while to get spun up this year, even a little longer with the Republican majority taking its

time to choose its speaker and not much else. Actually, the House of Representatives can't really do much without a speaker. Now, they can't even swear in the rest of the members until they had a speaker. So they were a little late getting into it, but they're ramping up now. And part of this ramp-up process is that all these different committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate, they have to choose their membership. And it's a complicated process, and each party, Democrats and Republicans, has a slightly different way of assigning members to committees that we will not go in. That's even too wonky for me for this episode. But it's a process and it depends on kind of hierarchy and how long people have been there and so forth and so on. So it takes a bit, but we're starting to

see the outcomes now. It takes about a month. And we've seen now the Republican and Democratic members now announced for the House Science Committee. This is the oversight committee that oversees NASA, among other science agencies in the U.S. government, and also writes the NASA authorization legislation that sets broad policy and funding recommendations. We're seeing those flesh out together. There's a lot of new faces coming. And then we've seen not the membership yet, but the leadership of probably the most important aspect of NASA, which is getting the money, right? The no bucks, no buck Rogers. And we're seeing Hal Rogers, who's from Kentucky,

reassuming the chairmanship of what's called the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee of Appropriations. And this is interesting. This is the first time in a long while, actually, Robert Adderhall had been ranking member from Alabama. Hal Rogers is from Kentucky. Not a big NASA state, right? Not a lot of NASA centers in Kentucky. So this is the first time in a while that NASA, and also on the Senate side with the departure of Richard Shelby from Alabama, it's now being led by Patty Murray, my senator here in Washington State. And it's really the first time in, I think, 10 to 15 years, I have to double check, that NASA has not been represented at the leadership level of the appropriations committees.

So a little, you know, kind of like pulling my collar a little bit on my neck. We just don't have the clear parochial connection, right, in the way that Richard Shelby, Alabama, cared about NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. We don't have that clear connection to make. We have to make a broader and more strategic connection. This is what Jack and I will be working on this year, but it's a shift, and this is just what you have to do. Things change over time, but in order to keep NASA growing, we need to make these connections. So this will be occupying quite a bit of our time. Now we know who the key individuals are going to be on these committees that are really relevant to the outcomes we want.

I've wondered in the past, you know, how do you go about making these connections with them? Do you just kind of email them up and be like, hey, do you want to talk? Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. So it depends on, you know, this is Jack's specialty. And a lot of it is, again, literally just showing up. You go to events of space people in Washington, D.C. You can cold call and show up at their office.

You start meeting with people. And this is Jack's specialty and something that he has really demonstrated proficiency over in the past, and that's something we were really excited when we hired him, that he has been dropped into situations where he has known nobody and then made good friends and connections and valuable engagements with people within months. And so a lot of it is you have to start participating in the community, you start meeting with people. You start talking about them. And the key, actually, that we use, and our great advantage here at the Planetary Society,

is that we have members all over the country. And so we can always establish that we have constituents. And that tends to be the key. If you don't know somebody, you can say, "'Look, I have a constituent here "'who's a member of the Planetary Society, "'or we have this many members in your district. "'Can we talk to you?' And that's the magic, that's your open sesame, right,

of getting into a congressional office, is having that constituent connection. And then we also have our members of our board of directors and advisory committees that just kind of more and more people we can use to make this constituent connection. And that's really kind of the opening salvo. And then once you establish that connection, you start being friendly. And key for us is obviously like we're not just there to lobby them with the things that we need.

We try to be helpful to them. If they have questions about space policy, if they have questions about the budget. You know, they're doing lots of different things. We specialize in space and we don't get any financial benefit from our outcomes, right? So they give us a little extra bit of heft. And because of that, we try to keep our value to them as not just coming in with problems, but giving solutions, giving help, giving perspective and opinions that help them make better decisions themselves. And that's really kind of, again, this multifaceted effort to make these ongoing connections

with the broader community to help make NASA relevant, help it make it exciting, and also just give them an understanding, even sometimes, what we do, you know, what could be done. And that really sometimes will capture their imaginations. Absolutely. Especially once you establish just how much impact space industries have on all of these different states and their economies. By putting in the context of what's good for them and their constituents, we can all kind of come around to this like partnership on this, which is fantastic. Because in the end, space brings out the best in us. And it's something we can all really be proud to work on together instead of, you know, other kind of more contentious topics. It's a good way

to get in there. Yes, that's absolutely right. And again, these are people at the end of the day, right? They're not just, you know, despite what we watch on TV on Veep or House of Cards or something, they tend to be very earnest, most of them tend to be very earnest, committed individuals who work really hard for not a lot of pay and weird hours in a very difficult environment. And if we can bring them, this is what I always think, you know, we always keep going back to this Carl Sagan's word that I love so much, numinosity, right? The numinous, this feeling of being next to something bigger than yourselves. That's a transcendent feeling. And the opportunity to walk into someone's office who've just spent the day doing, I don't know, like spectrum communication, contentious policy,

or budget cutting stuff, or whatever kind of contentious issue of the day is, and come in and say, hey, you want to talk about something that elevates your spirit by the something that we do? Like, that's not just a feel-good thing. That really gives them a break and we're connecting with something grand and big and positive. And that makes a difference to them as people, right? And so, this is what Jack gets, right? And this is what I was looking for when we were going through this hiring process. But Jack really gets this passion and understands that that connection, that human connection, that numinosity is the ace up our sleeve, right? In terms of how we engage and pitch this as not just why we need to do this, but these are these benefits and opportunities. And even just making someone's day a little better,

you've just created a little more happiness in the world. You know, that's not a bad outcome at the end of the day. Absolutely. In the end, it's kind of like, you know, you've got a really fun job and I'm excited for all the cool adventures that you and Jack are going to get into, all the new connections we're going to make and all the fun things that are going to come out of it.

Well, I'm sure we'll hear more of it in upcoming episodes of Space Policy Edition. Absolutely. But I know we've got this wonderful conversation to get into with Matt Daniels right now. Is there anything else you want to share before we dive right in? Oh, I'll just point out that we will link to the National Cislunar Strategy in the show notes to this episode. So feel free to read it. It's actually not that long.

I think it's quite readable. And we'll link to some other things that we talk about. And again, if we use some, you know, know ostp is we will use that a lot that's just the office of science and technology policy and you know we're really again talking about this function of the administrative branch of the u.s government setting this official policy and what's exciting is that this and we talk about this at the end will trickle down to all other federal agencies this will be part of their charge to respond to this so it's a very exciting thing and again readable thing and again the more that we can support this type of thoughtful work the more i think this is normalized as this expected role of government is

to think about how we go out again again, not just for peer exploration, but to kind of make this broad, all-of-government awareness of the importance and value of the space around us. We'll make sure to put that document up on our website at planetary.org slash radio. Thanks so much, Casey. Let's dive in. Let's do it. Matt Daniels from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House,

welcome to the Space Policy Edition. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Well, we're here to talk about this National Cislunar Policy. And this is something that you helped chair this meeting of and then produce this eventual strategy and policy for the U.S. government. And obviously, we're looking forward to diving deep into this. But just big picture, if you had to summarize, you know, within about a minute or so to somebody,

what is our now national cislunar strategy? It's recognizing that the decade ahead is really important. The US government, a handful of other countries, and a bunch of private entities are all planning to send spacecraft to the moon and to land on the moon in the next decade. NASA has been estimating that over the next 10 years, human activity in this region of space is going to be at kind of the highest point that it's been since the space age began. And so we think it's not too early to start thinking about how we are going to grow and do new things in this region of space. And a big part of that is making sure that we convene the scientific community in the United States to get all the things that we want to work on in one place. I would say, for example,

NASA has a lot of activities that they're focused on with the Artemis program. But when you bring the rest of the U.S. government together, you find, for example, that the National Science Foundation, which operates telescopes on the Earth's surface, NASA does space telescopes, MSF does them on the Earth's surface, is very concerned about the shielded zone of the moon and the radio quiet environment on the lunar far side and making sure that we don't ruin that environment for the long term. It's not too early to start thinking about all of these things. And that by doing so early and looking ahead at this, we can approach it from a sense of optimism. We can approach it with a sense of we can build positive futures. We can anticipate and solve problems. So let's look ahead and think about this concretely. The system-driven strategy has various parts that follow on that theme about what we should do in terms of research and development, new international cooperation, the fact that space situational awareness is kind of the foundation for everything else

operationally. So if you want to predict conjunctions of two satellites, in this case, orbiting the moon are going to pass close to each other. You need SSA to be able to see that in advance. And then there's a set of essentially information infrastructure that we can start to anticipate needing in the years ahead, like communications from the entire region around the moon and being able to know where you are and what time it is on the moon and near the moon. So we put those issues together and connect them to the future that we want to build, which is a peaceful, cooperative, exciting future, and get that into one document. So there's a million things I want to branch off from that, but that's a good summary, I think. And the way that i would take away this is that in a sense this is an umbrella policy

for all of government right not just nasa i think as most people are used to thinking about space they think about nasa you brought up a couple of agencies already that may have interest here right and so this is directing kind of a broad all government approach to the cislunar space, right? So this is if you want the kind of wonky details, we do this through something called the National Science and Technology Council, which is really the way that OSTP coordinates S&T parts of the U.S. government. We have places like the State Department involved, but really the focus is on S&T agencies like NASA and NSF and USGS. And we, in this case, also say, you know, a lot of the future issues that we're going to have to think about in this region of space, people with technical backgrounds have a particular sense of those today. sense of those today. So we wanted to create an umbrella kind of strategy, but also create a foundation for future policies and initiatives by the US government. So this is an umbrella

strategy, but it really puts people with technical backgrounds together at a table to say, what are the issues we anticipate? What are the things we want to do in this region of space? to say, what are the issues we anticipate? What are the things we want to do in this region of space? And then build an umbrella focused on S&T communities. Is it fair to say that we did not have a cislunar strategy before? Just phrasing it that way. I mean, there's stuff at the moon that we've done before. But in terms of what this is aiming to do, is this new? Is this a sui generis? This is new. i'm not aware of us having had a this lunar strategy before in fact um we should probably say how we define this here because everyone seems to have a kind of uh or ends up having a somewhat different definition of it

what we mean we adapt the technical definition the technical definition is really kind of everything within the moon's orbital radius. For a long time, this has been used to colloquially mean the region kind of in high orbits above geosynchronous orbit out to the moon. And we take it in this context to mean everything in the Earth-moon system above geo, but that's still in the Earth-moon system. So everything in the Earth-moon system beyond geo, including the lunar surface. And the reason we think about it that way is there's this kind of ways that we should think about space geography that are coming into focus. And some of the things that we're going to do on the Moon depend on what we do in orbit around the Moon, like having communications and future

position navigation and time capabilities. And some of the things that we want to have as precedents on the moon, like a shielded zone of the moon and protection of the RF environment there, also depend on what satellites in orbit around the moon are going to be doing as they go over the lunar far side. So this was a way to kind of think about the region of space and the moon together at the same time. I mean, and it it's a big it's a big region that we're talking about here right if you talk about the three-dimensional space that it's really mapping out and i mean this is a large area to have a specific strategy about right and and there's something innately exciting to me about starting to define and specify detailed foundational plans for how to deal with, you know, not just thinking

about even our nation, you know, the nation or the globe, but out to the moon as the cislunar, like this is the first like kind of full near-term space strategy we're building out now, right? I think we're seeing more and more focus, particularly on Leo as it's getting really congested, Geo as it's already very congested, and now the Moon. And so, it tells me, it says that this is something bigger is happening here at a fundamental level about the role of space in the high levels of the US government and other nations' kind of planning and strategy development processes, right? That this is becoming something to really think about at a detailed level. I think it's tremendously exciting. I'll be the first to say I'm always excited about space exploration, but we're kind of

doing a mix of exploration here and like scientific exploration and starting to build a new sphere of human activity. starting to build a new sphere of human activity. And so when we say that our activities in space have the potential to improve us and improve how we think on Earth, I think this is really exciting, partly because now we have a chance to put that into practice in space.

We can look at congestion in Leo and how we've made decisions about geosynchronous orbit and geo. And we can say, can we think ahead and anticipate the kinds of issues we might have, the kinds of problems we're going to want to solve? And can we start working on those today and not be reactive, but be kind of anticipating these issues while building the sphere of human activity? What you want humanity to be doing is learning from past experiences, right?

And extrapolating them out, understanding where this is going into the future. And just very quickly, I'll just say there are four main objectives in this system of science and technology strategy. I'll just list them real quick. And you can, you know, at a very high level, you mentioned one of them, research and development and science, expanding international cooperation. And then the two that, again, you kind of mentioned just now that are really interesting to me, this expanding situational awareness, right?

So where things are, and then also implementing communications and navigation positioning and timing capabilities, right? So understanding when things are and building this infrastructure, communications infrastructure out at the moon. So those are the four big objectives we'll kind of dive into here. But through these kind of objectives, you're seeing exactly what you're talking about. You're laying out and taking what we've learned from our experiences, particularly in low Earth orbit, and looking forward. And this is, I was kind of struck by the fact that situational awareness in cislunar space is no easy task, just from what we just established, right? It's a huge space. And right now, there's not a ton

of stuff out there, but there are some, right? And the areas in which we want to go theoretically can be congested. And I think this is what, again, is interesting to me is that, you know, this team that you led or this committee that you led to really start looking about this is seeing that this is going to be an area that is not going away, right? This isn't some Apollo-like... because what I brought up originally is like, is this the first strategy? It's like, you know, we'd sent humans there six times, right? And more into cislunar space, many more than six times. And a bunch of landing, you know, robotics and lunar orbiters back in the 60s and the Soviets were doing it, but we didn't have like a clear, broad cislunar strategy in the sense that it wasn't just,

it was just like this, the classic sense of that race, you solve it and then you just go back. And everything about this strategy suggests that this is not a, Artemis is like some one and done thing, right? This is laying out this foundational approach for ongoing sustainable presence. right? This is laying out this foundational approach for ongoing sustainable presence. Yeah, I think of, you know, as we were working on this, I love historical analogs, and I like reading about history. So I will also be the first to say if I can reach back to Vikings or Polynesians or Venice in the 1300s, I'll be the first to do that. But in this case, we found that we were bringing up historical parallels that were mostly in the 20th century. We ended up thinking a lot about kind of actually the early years of spaceflight, where people were kind of first putting things into space. And how do we, for example, put a civil foot forward and kind of put our ideals out there and show that we want to work with other countries.

There's some kind of long-term governance questions, which this first cislunar strategy doesn't really get into yet. But we found ourselves kind of looking for old articles on Antarctica before the Antarctic Treaty and thinking about how have we in the past thought about convening discussions about how we're kind of all going to be together in a particular region? And then we found some parallels also to and you see this maybe most of all with the comms and P&T and a little bit with SSA, the early years of ARPANET.

And how do we think about if we are designing communications approaches in certain ways, we might actually be setting precedents for the very long term. And we know that there are some things that we wish we had thought a little more about when we were creating ARPANET, but they were just kind of spreading forward. And maybe we could think about those things today. And again, we benefit a lot from having technical people at the table to help think about those things. In this case, thinking about scalable communications approaches, approaches that are going to be able to not just handle, you know, five more spacecraft, but many more spacecraft and systems over time. spacecraft and systems over time and starting to think not just about can we kind of solve navigation problems on an ad hoc basis for each mission, but do we have some kind of North Star that we want to start getting toward? And can we make sure that we're pushing the right parts of

the US government to be thinking about what is the kind of long-term future we want in this region of space? How are we going to think about standard time at the moon? How are we going to think about navigation and common standards and who provides that information? Because the US has traditionally provided this kind of information free to the world because we found that it was in our interest to make others want to work with us. So we provide a lot of this kind of information on a freely available basis, which is wonderful and a wonderful thing that the us does so how are we going to do that here and not to solve it kind of by spacecraft yeah i was that's really that strikes me that you mentioned antarctic treaty was obviously in my mind as i was reading this too and seeing this kind of again

almost seeing this in terms of a sequential step of how how to phrase this, we talk a lot about going to Mars, right? And this, you know, the US National Space Strategy talks about going to Mars eventually. And we talked about going to Mars in the last decade, but nothing really concrete happened with that. Because at a certain level, you know, Mars is just so far away. How would you even define something like cis-Martian space? It would be most of the, I mean, half of the solar system would be in that, right? And it would be so big to be meaningless. And it strikes me is that there seems to be kind of a sequential progression of policy as almost a leading indicator of technological capability and commercial development happening

in the 20th century, to some degree with Antarctica. I mean, maybe more the technological ability, because obviously there's not much commercial uh activity in antarctica but you kind of i was thinking all the way even back to the monroe doctrine you know if you want to go back that far of just like for the us like what is the near area sphere of interest and the sphere of interest as technology has enabled things to grow bigger you know more accessible enabled things to grow bigger, you know, more accessible, now is extending out to our nearest celestial body, you know, kind of, but in step, right? Like, in this progressive way. Is that a correct or useful way to think about this in terms of how policies like this drive

or lead this kind of technology, or maybe are led led by technology and then suddenly we need these policies to to address these new spheres that we have access to partly i think um and i should have been quick to add before uh when i when i added the antarctica part uh this is not to suggest that we want the moon to be like antarctica it turns out there are some people who have strong feelings about that on either side and we're not really there yet, but more just as kind of the flavor of governance questions that we think we may have more of in the future that we would like to approach with the wisdom of forethought and the benefits of not thinking about it once it's suddenly wholly upon us, but convening thoughtful people with some lead time in advance. To your question then, we have a cislunar strategy, but we don't yet have a

cismartian strategy. Will we someday have one of those? I'm not sure. That's an exciting thing to think about. I think in this case, we were driven by really starting from a fresh sense of what do we expect to be happening at the moon and in this region of space around the moon and to a lesser degree the kind of even larger region of space and the rest of the earth moon system and what we were finding was part of what makes this moment distinct is is the fact that so many actors are going we expect we expect over the next decade so many actors are going. And the actions by each kind of actor are likely to affect the physical and policy and operational environment for all the other actors. And so we should think about this together. And to some degree, you already see this with NASA in that the Artemis program includes

the Gateway Station, which is in a kind of orbit around the Moon that most people had not previously heard of, because it's actually a type of orbit that leverages some attributes of three-body problem orbits. So we already have some kind of examples of NASA thinking about this, but we wanted to widen that, and the kind of geography of space, in a way, gives a way to start to think about the Moon and also this outer part of the Earth-Moon system together in this particular historical moment. How much of this is also just driven by the fact that we do have commercial actors versus if this had just been nation-states? I think it's partly commercial. Maybe I'll broad enough to say non-governmental actors. I mean, part of the exciting future is universities and private institutions that are not necessarily for profit doing things at the moon.

I think it's partly that it's partly also that we have expressions of interest by both government and non-government actors in an enduring presence at the moon. So partly this is also it's shaded partly by non-government actors and partly motivated by uh if we're going to be there on an ongoing basis and it's not just periodic scientific orbiters there's kind of new and additional things that we could be thinking about and starting to work on yeah i mean that's why you have if you're talking about investing in a communication standard or networks or even pnt you assume non-governmental actors being i think in in a general sense of that you're building it for a general use purpose right it's an infrastructure purpose versus just a a national security or

national strategy need for for one country this kind of brings me to so let's let's kind of talk more in detail about the the strategy itself and i've gotten stuck because i just love the big picture implications of it. But it opens with something that struck me, and I'm kind of really curious for your interpretation of this, which is the opening. It says, the U.S. will lead the world in responsible, peaceful, and sustainable exploration and utilization of cislunar space, including the moon. And, you know, this is something that's not new, right? This is in the U.S US space strategy, every space strategy, congressional space policy, the US will lead. And I was thinking, like, as you're putting this together, you know, what does lead mean in this sense, right? Because we, you know, the US, as we went to the moon in the 60s and 70s, and no one

else, no one can take that away from the United States, right? It's done. So, in that sense, no one can never usurp that action of never being first again. But what does leadership mean in this context? Like, what would it mean to, is there a way to quantitatively evaluate what our leadership is? Is there a leadership quotient that we're worried about? Or is it just a kind of this broad? Moon gap. Yeah. I mean, well, that's interesting. Like, how do we define leadership? And then how do we know if we are leading or not, in these broad contexts of political? And there may be no easy answer to this. But how did you talk about this in terms of leadership, at least in your group and committee and with the intent in the OSTP? Let me preface this a little bit with, you do see this kind of language in kind of every space policy document of the United States.

So I'm going to offer a bit of a personal opinion here, as opposed to an institutional view of how we might start to think about leadership in this region of space. We could go back all the way to, and if you want to get wonky, we could go all the way back to the Webb McNamara Memo. There's something called the Webb McNamara Memo. It has an actual name. It's actually called the Recommendations for Our National Space Program Changes, Policies, and Goals. It was written in 1961, and it was co-signed by the then NASA administrator and the then Secretary of Defense. And it was a memo to the White House that helped eventually lead to the Apollo program. And what that memo recognized that was at the time a little bit new was that human spaceflight captures the

imagination of the world. And that there really is something about human spaceflight that is attention getting to humans here on Earth that is that draws us to be excited and engaged. And I think we often have an intuitive sense of that. And what this memo way back in 1961 said was, we should actually factor that into US policy, that this has relevance to, for example, American foreign policy for the US on a global stage. And we should undertake some of our space activities

with that factor in mind. So I would say today, the idea of leadership has still an element of that. I think we've had a refinement of that idea over time, that there is goodness for the United States in being the kind of country that other countries want to work with. And that that is still important to our security, to our kind of role in the world, and to a lot of the things that we care about. So part of leadership is kind of the visible and exciting things that we are doing, especially, and that we're especially good at, that can draw others to want to work with us. Another part is doing things that we, and now

maybe because we're in such a different moment from when that memo was written, today is totally different. We're in a moment where working with allies and partners, we, the United States, have a global network of allies and partners who are spacefaring. We see those on the International Space Station. I like to think of this sometimes as building the roots of Starfleet or the early years of Starfleet. Leadership means continuing to draw others to want to work with us and doing projects that we can work on together that are mutually interesting and that are good for humanity. And then there's kind of the things then that we have to do to achieve those things, which the strategy talks about as things like fostering new international

cooperation, advancing scientific discovery, and even promoting, in some cases, economic development or activities by non-governmental actors. I think that's a nice way to kind of phrase it in terms of basically you're establishing expectations and opportunities almost is the way that you're kind of phrasing it versus necessarily measuring a yard post of the size of your rocket or how far out a space probe has gotten you know or it kind of this old cold war school mentality. Yet at the same time, I wonder how much in the broader politics is seeing that kind of more simplistic leadership literally being ahead in some race. Like that being in the lead of something always has kind of this physical implication of like you're, you're further afield and I like this more kind of

nuanced view that you're bringing to it. And I think, you know, from reading some of your previous work, you really kind of lean into, again, what does the U S do really well, which again, this kind of international coalition building partnerships of, of choice,

right. Where people or nations want to work with us. And by doing so, we're establishing kind of norms of behavior and better angels of our nature style kind of activities rather than pure competitive processes. Well, I was going to add, so there is one, I think, interesting and kind of simple idea that actually runs through the cislunar strategy related to this as well, which is start also with our current moment. And one of the broad objectives for the United States kind of in our current moment and the decade ahead is that we want to make sure that the international we describe in kind of wonky way that the international rules based order extends into space.

That we have fostered this international system, which is based on rules and international agreements and the UN and all of that. And we want, and of course, that should extend into space. We could come up with examples on Earth where that's working or not working right now on Earth, but we want this rules-based order to extend into space. And in this case, also into cislunar space. One way that we could contribute to our future ability to extend this rules-based order, in this case, into this region of space near the moon, is to lower barriers to entry for other rule-following actors and to draw them to want to work with us there. And that can bolster our

future ability to lead in ensuring that we have this kind of rules-based system that extends out to the moon. I think, first of all, that idea runs through the Cislunar strategy. And that's also, to me as a space person, a very neat idea. Because if I were to condense that down a bit, I would say, arguably, it's in the US's interest to help make the moon and cislunar space more accessible to more of humanity if you kind of follow that idea yeah it's really cool and really exciting that is that's a really interesting way to put this in terms of simultaneously presenting kind of an optimistic forward thinking and non-reactionary perspective but also a very pragmatic national interest perspective too like it's it's serving a dual purpose there right yes that's that interesting

way of putting it lowering the energy barrier right i guess figuratively and and literally in some senses right to get out there and you're you're basically you're the one building the roads you decide where the roads go you decide what the speed limits are on the roads, right, to whatever kind of test this metaphor to its limits here. That seems to be something that has been really developing over the last, I would say, 10 years, really. This is a relatively new conception of space, particularly the cislunar area of space. And how much does that functionally then depend on the fact, I mean, kind of dancing around this a little bit, but the rise of China as a space power, would this be happening without, in a sense, the growing and clear capabilities of China? I mean, we're not even really talking about Russia anymore to this degree.

It's really about the growth of the Chinese space program from the U.S. perspective. So would this be happening without this? Is this a kind of a core motivator? perspective um so would this be happening without this is this a kind of a core motivator and if that is you know despite all kind of the good feelings about this is it fundamentally a reactive decision or is it mainly kick-starting something that needed to happen anyway i think this is um so i'll start by saying i think this is and based largely on everything we've been talking about intending to be the opposite of reactive because because in a lot of cases, you know, the world changes and we react and we should really be in the business of envisioning positive

futures and shaping the world to go in those directions. And so one way to think about this is we are in this moment where China has a growing space program. Unlike us, China combines their military and civil programs. So that adds some kind of complications when we think about the future of their government activities in space. We also have examples on Earth where the government of China does things that we definitely don't want to see replicated in space. So in addition to testing ASATs and blowing up satellites and things like that, we've seen China build islands in international waters and then say that they won't militarize them and then militarize them. And we should want to not go toward those futures in space.

And back to the leadership question, I think that's partly U.S. leadership drawing on a large part of the world can say, you know, the future that we want is this one where everyone participates and it's based on rules. We'll be right back with the rest of Casey's interview with Matt Daniels from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House after this short break. Hello, I'm George Takei. And as you know, I'm very proud of my association with Star Trek. Star Trek was a show that looked to the future with optimism, boldly going where no one had gone before. I want you to know about a very special organization called the Planetary Society. They are working to make the future that Star Trek represents a reality. When you become a member of the Planetary Society, you join their mission to increase discoveries

in our solar system, to elevate the search for life outside our planet, and decrease the risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid. Co-founded by Carl Sagan and led today by CEO Bill Nye, the Planetary Society exists for those who believe in space exploration to take action together. So join the Planetary Society and boldly go together to build our future. It strikes me it's this interesting mix, again, of which space has always been, right? This is nothing new.

And again, it kind of goes back to what you mentioned earlier, and actually in one of your papers about the US-China history in space and relationship, what you called politically significant spaceflight programs, right? Which is a nice way to put it. And Alex McDonald had a great chapter in his book, The Long Space Age, about kind of the symbolic and signaling power of human spaceflight, hard to make, hard to fake, right? The perfect signal. And everyone intuitively understands going to the moon is hard and you send people there.

Wow, that must, you know, takes a lot of work to do that. And that still holds that. And so I think there still becomes this political significance to now not just building up this kind of bulwark, in a sense, against perceived and real challenge to US, I'd say, power in certain areas and national security, but also in a sense that there is still a real competition, maybe is too strong of a word, but you still get something as a nation for doing human spaceflight out to of a word, but you still get something as a nation for doing human spaceflight out to the moon, right? That still represents something even

though it's quote unquote been done before. And I feel like we've seen at least with the, on the Chinese side, nothing, a particular focus on politically significant motivations behind their space program. You know, we look at even lots of selfies of the, you know, really cool selfies of the robotic missions and picturing itself on Mars and these great pictures, you know, to splash across the headlines. And I think there's a lot of us still benefits, you know, from it joins you into a very small and rarefied club, right? And so this is still kind of happening at pace at its own process. And through, I think, this development of a serious competitor in this domain, it does seem that there's been this coalescence around cislunar space as this, I don't know if I'd go

so far as to call it contested because it's so big, and a lot of it's theoretical, but at least awareness of it that drives attention, if nothing else. And so it does seem, I can see what you're saying, it's not necessarily reactive but it still has some point you have to ask you like 10 years ago nasa wound down its full moon program officially right there was very little mention of cislunar anything and so clearly something has changed in the last 10 years to make this not just a nasa issue right you're right on a lot of this and clearly to some degree the importance of signaling is not going to go away and so there's there's always going to be a bit of an element of that of course in this case

you know where we started this discussion we've been to the moon so we already we already checked the box of get there first clearly i think it is easy to forget when you kind of look at the u.s trying to dyad them that there's a lot of other actors who are going to be going to the moon. And so it's private actors, Europe and Japan, and we're hoping a lot more countries than those even. And so part of this moment, and part of what makes this moment exciting, is that there is this, there is and there can be, there's the possibility of this being bigger and tied to us as a spacefaring society. I think when China goes to the moon, eventually, that they will be going with the government space program. We will be having a lot of NASA activities in the vicinity of the moon and around the moon and on the moon.

But we will also have American institutions that are not part of the U.S. government doing things at the moon and this worldwide set of allies and partners coming with us to the moon. And so I think part of the moment is kind of realizing that this is this can be a strength united states this is a strength and it's a strength that we should be embracing because it's a strength and a virtue to have others want to work with us and to do things in this kind of international spirit yeah and and i've been obviously focusing on the u.s perspective of this a lot because it's a u.s strategy but again i think that's a really important fundamental thing to keep in mind with this right that this is i mean that's objective number two that we'll talk about right is expanding this international cooperation but even to your point let's just briefly talk about the the four big objectives here

in this strategy um the first one is again kind of along these these big picture positive optimistic lines which is you know supporting research and development and basic science, you know, to support growth in cislunar space and to understand it better, to understand the resources there. I mean, right out of the bat, that's kind of exactly what you want a science-driven program to be really focusing on. And so, I mean, in a large sense, you know, there's lots of great language here, but what's the intent again, in creating and crafting a strategy like this, theoretically, so you want to say support research and development. How does that then filter down to the agencies or in the ideal case of the agencies themselves?

What would you like to see come out of this strategy in terms of R and D as a, like, are there ways that you try to measure this or does this get like a memo sent to the head of every cfo in terms you know at every science agency or how does this kind of filter through the system to try to actually achieve the actual implementation of this that's a that's a great question and a compound question so the first part of it is uh you know we we used as an organizing principle r&d that can also help enable long-term growth in this region of space so doing scientific exploration but also learning how to have better scientific instruments on the moon learning how to have

humans survive beyond the van ellen belts for longer periods of time, learning how to have humans able to stay for long periods of time on planetary surfaces, and then thinking about the things that we're going to want to do in science at the moon, not necessarily next year or in the next five years, but in the long term. So back to the shielded zone of the moon and that kind of RF environment is tremendously important or term. So back to the shielded zone of the moon and that kind of RF environment that's tremendously important or could be tremendously important to the future of radio astronomy and even SETI, things that we do over the next decade will affect that kind of long-term future. So we wanted to think about how we put together R&D priorities in a way that enables this future growth at the moon

and in cislunar space. And then at the same time, that is exciting to people who want to be scientists and engineers, and that we develop programs where young people can start to work on these things. We can't do science unless we train people as scientists. We were talking about life at a university at Cornell earlier. So we always need to, when we talk about things that we want to do in R&D and science and technology, you can't have that discussion without thinking about how we're also doing education at the same time. Yeah. The wonky part of your question at the end there was, you know, how do we implement this with departments and agencies? Step one was bringing everyone to a table for a period of time to kind of iterate on this.

We also did an RFI last summer. So we posted through kind of a process where the White House can solicit anyone in the public could write a memo to us. And some of those, I have to say, unexpectedly was a joyful process. People made some really thoughtful letters and it was kind of amazing to sit with them and absorb these ideas. And we share those with departments and agencies as well. But now that we have the strategy, we essentially do a multi-step process where we work with departments and agencies to say, tell us how you're going to implement this. And we give some kind of focus areas to each department. And then they write back to us and describe how they're planning to pursue it. And we say,

that sounds great, or that sounds mostly good, but we'd like you to add this area. And we kind of settle into this new direction. Does the OMB get this memo as well? I am tied at the hip to OMB. So I have to not... I'm told I'm not allowed to commit the nation's treasury to... Dang. All right. Expansion of the move. Or at least not... I've not been given a blank check. All right. So making this realistic to fit with kind of how OMB thinks about things. OMB colleagues have a tough job. They have to make... I work on this, but lots of people work on all kinds of

federal policy and OMB has to put it all together and make sure that we can afford to do all these things. Yeah. They actually have to make things balance at OMB. Yes. So a lot of conversations with OMB focus on when is their new spending versus when are we talking about not duplicating things between departments and agencies? When are we talking about not duplicating things between departments and agencies? When are we talking about sharing data or just openly publishing data that particular departments or agencies are creating? And sometimes are we able to do things that we were already planning to do, make sure that we do them in a certain way that has these kind of big, important, more national

effects? All right. You mentioned something, actually, I always had a question about. So you said OMB, for example, is trying to balance. There's a lot of different priorities coming out. I mean, how are these priorities ranked? Like, is there literally like some internal ranking system? Like this is a policy strategy of like class 1B, or there's another one that's like class

AAA. How do you kind of hierarchically or just try to prioritize all these various strategies within an administration? Yeah, so one big way is the Space Council. So I'm in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The Space Council put out something called, actually, the Space Priorities Framework as a public document probably about a year ago now. So that gives a kind of first order. That's a public document. Anyone can look that up. But, you know, that's also how we fit priorities together internally as well. Apart from that, we also one way to think about how a White House

works is that there are policy councils. So OSTP, the National Security Council, the National Space Council. And then we work with OMB and we talk about what our priorities are as policy councils. And we have a kind of, we get to know our OMB counterparts and we work with them closely.

So a dynamic process, it sounds like. Let's move on to just an interest of time. Objective two, I just want to touch on, because I think, again, that's one of, When I'm pressed by somebody who tends to be skeptical about why the US is going back to the moon, I tend to fall on this the most, in terms of convincing a skeptical individual, this international cooperation in cislunar space. And so, obviously, excited to see that there. it wasn't too surprised but that's i think doesn't give it the proper respect that it really deserves the implications of this right

about how different it is this time and how important international cooperation is so was that just something that just i mean you kind of took for granted or how does that discussion in this committee work up to the international cooperative aspect of it? We took that from the beginning. And also that we have this kind of a lot of agreement between the White House and NASA and more broadly in Washington, D.C. on NASA's Artemis program, which is going to the moon and then going onward to Mars from there. And so Artemis as a moon to Mars program, well, we're going to the moon first. So that is a kind of first just pragmatic step. I think many of us also would say that the moon is a logical stepping stone into the solar system, especially when we're talking about a human presence beyond Earth. It's a place where we can learn to work in space, learn to work and live in space. Because since the Apollo program, we've really had humans in low Earth orbit within the Van

Allen belts. For as long as we've been working in space, there are still some really fundamental things that we haven't figured out yet. So the moon is a great place to learn those things and experiment. And then it's a great place to work with many other countries, because the moon is simultaneously this inspirational, exciting, viscerally moving thing that humans around the planet look up and see. Mars is going to be a little bit further in the future for most countries. And so this is something that we can work together on,

and that we can think about having these kind of rich and vibrant partnerships with many other countries out of the moon. This was always, I think, the claim of Scott Pace and others that the moon was represented the sweet spot of accessibility and openness to a variety of coalition of nations, right? That Mars just couldn't provide. And even at a practical level, you can launch to the moon every month, right? That Mars just couldn't provide. And even at a practical level, you can launch to the moon every month, right? Versus once every 26 months. So it's much easier to have multiple collaborations with that. I think I would also add to that,

that it does have an excitement for many people. Yeah. No one tracks the phases of Mars, right? Not to the extent that you can see them from Earth, but like the moon as you point out is like very immediate and physical to everybody yeah i also like the idea that i mean the moon we're going to in in the decade ahead across the years ahead is not the same moon that we went to with the apollo program because when we went there uh the Apollo program, we understood it to be a dry, kind of barren place.

And now we have all of this extra, we have all this new knowledge about the geology and the fact that there seems to be water. Our knowledge of it has changed so much. It's like going to a different place and landing astronauts at the, I don't know if you've seen the pictures of astronaut training in the neutral buoyancy lab at Johnson when they're setting the lighting conditions of what

it would be like on the lunar South pole. It is, I mean, the moon already looks like an alien world. This is a really alien world looking place because the sunlight's coming from the side. And there are these deep shadows that you can't see into and this kind of very dramatic landscape. So I think it is going to be quite different and in some exciting and interesting ways. Yeah. And again, that coalition is just so you need something big enough to drive that attention and commitment, but also within the realm of feasibility, both budget and technologically, in order to drive that commitment too, right? And that's what seems the moon is just really that sweet spot for. And back to that idea that we were talking about before, that we can take that observation and not just have that as an observation, but say, this is a great opportunity for the United States to draw others to work with us in a new set of space activities.

Yeah. And that's what I love about what we're seeing in this broad sense. The Artemis Accords almost is like this zero level entry point for any nation, right? You can just raise your hand as a nation and say, I want to be part of this. I commit to these ideals, but it doesn't cost you anything to do that. It's just a statement of shared ideals. And then you have these kind of increasing, you know, like robotics or small sat contributions or propulsion contributions all the way up to building a module for Gateway, building a lunar surface network or something based on the level your nation wants or is capable of committing to. So you're giving these multiple entry points for nations, even ones that are developing or maybe just have the intent to develop their own space programs, but building the coalition as broadly and maximally as we can, which I think, again, is what really makes this stand out to me is this broad strategy. And back to the idea of lowering various entry, we can actually, I think and hope, make this easier as well.

So when you look at the trends that we've had in low Earth orbit over the last, say, 15 years or so, overwhelmingly, that's mostly dropping launch costs. We have this renaissance of private activities in low Earth orbit, and that's the biggest part of it. But there is also the fact that uh unlike the beginning of the kind of space age unlike the beginning of the space age if you want to know where your satellite is you can put a gps chip on it if you want to find and track your satellite you can buy that as a service if you want to downlink data from your satellite you can buy that as a service too or you can work with other partners to do that. And so there's all these things that have been not just launched, but all these other things

that have been difficult in the past for operating in space, just barely in space, in low Earth orbit, that are much easier now. And those things don't exist at the moon. And so if you want to send something, even just a spacecraft to orbit the moon, you risk losing it. And then you have to do searches to find it again. And this has happened. You have to think about how you're going to communicate with it and downlink data. It's very hard as a non-government actor

to get time on the deep space network. Very hard to do. And DSN is going to struggle to scale to many things in this region of space. DSN does extraordinary things as a kind of central node for the entire solar system and getting data from across the solar system. But it was not designed for tens or hundreds of things at the moon. Even knowing where you are for doing science operations at the moon and in lunar orbit,

hard to do that. Or you have to think, you have lunar orbit hard to do that or you have to think you have to work more to do that and so those are places where in the strategy where there's communications and pnt and even ssa those are the kinds of things that can help on a very pragmatic basis lower barriers to entry for moon following actors so i put a pin in that because i just well we'll address those very soon. Those two good objectives three and four, but I just want to, one more thing. I just want to acknowledge about what I loved at this line in an objective

two, which is again about international cooperation, it says that international science technology cooperation can foster peace. And I just love that line. And, and it's important to remember what's at stake with this too at some very fundamental level is that this isn't just for the purity of exploration and science there's some very pragmatic and important outcomes of doing this which is that i think that really sums it up nicely can foster peace absolutely. And peace is something that we have to proactively pursue and foster. We clearly can't take it for granted anymore, right?

I think a lot of people may have for a long time. So two other things I just want to acknowledge from that, and then we'll move on because we're running out of time. But I love the idea, by the way. You get my KCCL approval for the International Lunar Year. What a great idea. Totally, totally appropriate, perfect. I like that too. Love the historical trend, you know, you're talking about the student of history, right? The IGY, of course, being so important, critical to our entire space age,

and having International Lunar Year, great. Chef's kiss to that. And then, just also just wanted to acknowledge, you talk about the same thing, you're developing, with this international coalition, technical foundations for best practices, which isn't just being nice to each other, it's also really, again, practical

things like debris mitigation in lunar space, lunar ejecta, right? You kick up a lot of dust when you land on the moon, how's it going to impact everyone else's instrumentation and safety and hardware, even basic things, radio frequency interference, like all these really meat and potatoes stuff we need to figure out because they can have really important consequences. So I just wanted to acknowledge like this is setting these standards and expectations with international partners is to your point, it'll lower the barrier

of entry for people and other nations and organizations going forward if there's a clear set of standards and operations that also make everyone safer i love talking to you at the planetary society about this because there's a role for scientists and engineers in this these are areas where scientists and engineers can do work that is adopted by governments and that is picked up and used by governments. And so there has, I think that's one of the kind of greatest things about work in science and engineering that you can do things that have this kind of public spiritedness and contributions to governance. And this is one of those areas we're going to need to think about. We have international debris mitigation guidelines for earth orbit developed

originally by technical communities the moon has no atmosphere things that are in orbit around the moon could be there for a very very very long time uh we're going to need to develop some other practices yeah well that's where objective one comes in right the the research and development objectives three and four let's just touch on together and again i think again these are really foundationally exciting things for me in terms of expanding the scope when we think of some of the basic functions of government number three was extending space situational awareness right so you kind of again we've talked a lot of these or alluded to them already just knowing where things are having a catalog of knowing where things are which is something that um space force now the

department of commerce will be taking over kind of managing the catalog here for low earth orbit particularly things get more congested but then number four i just want to touch on too because again we talked about this the implementation of the communications positioning navigation and timing and you know just again knowing where things it just helps you know exactly where things are with the GPS at the moon. Timing, though, something about timing, it just made me very romantically think about, it's almost like taming the chaos, right? Is what Objective 4 is saying, is that one of the foundational responsibilities of government is to provide, in a sense, security, but also order to an otherwise kind of chaotic region and you do that even by just having at the same clock i was thinking about me almost you know how

you know time became standardized when you started having train schedules needing to run all over the country because suddenly you needed to know where things were when this is epical change from just in a sense the pure wilderness to something that we're applying some sort of human-made order onto and what's more human-made basic than just counting time so that something about that resonated with me uh well cool me too um i think it's uh i think it's i think it's this interesting thing where it has a kind of really nuts and bolts pragmatic importance. It has a kind of surprisingly neat technical attributes, which I'll talk about in a second. And then it has this kind of philosophical, interesting ideas.

The nuts and bolts part is the way GPS works is, of course, based on a common timing signal and GPS satellites broadcasting their time. And then when you get four of those, you can figure out where you are. So our approach to GPS-like positioning and navigation capabilities does rely on very precise clocks and timing signals, really. So there's an idea here that if you want to do navigation and precise positioning for anything from predicting conjunctions to knowing where you're going to land on a kind of repeatable basis to knowing where you are relative to other things, that turns out to need clocks as well, because you have to know where you are at what time. There is a neat technical element to this. It was actually well captured. There was just a Nature News article on this, surprisingly, and to me, very cool, that the moon is not at the same gravitational depth as the

Earth. And relativity tells us that time depends on where you are in a gravity field. And so there is actually this special relativity issue of how do we think about approaches to clocks that account for the fact that the moon is not the same depth of the gravity well as the earth so how do you coordinate time between earth and places that are not gravitationally on the surface of the earth and maybe in the longer term when you start to think about second order details the moon is lumpy that's a technical term that the mass concentration of the moon might have implications for the gravitational field and create a need to have gravity maps around the moon, which would kind of further affect how we think about timing signals.

And do we account for that? How do we account for that? So there's some neat, I think, surprisingly neat technical elements of this that is a part of long future now, kind of philosophically, how we address these questions could affect how we think about humans living and thriving in other places throughout the solar system as well. I think one of the exciting things about our solar system is we have a lot of places where someday, someday, humans might be living and creating communities. And we're just going to have these kinds of questions on a bigger scale.

And we get to start to think about those technically a little bit on a very pragmatic basis today at the moon today. So I guess if I remember my special relativity roughly, then the moon should clock should tick slightly faster than Earth's because it's at a lower gravity. Well, so it's experiencing time a bit faster. Oh, God, i think so is that it's all right i won't hold you to the uh let's just say there are interesting uh practicalities of applications of special relativity involved in going to the moon which will and again i like how all these kind of feedback in again to this international cooperation collaboration identifying setting standards and also by figuring these out making it so future actors individuals organizations nations don't

have to start from square one that you have this and you're building infrastructure starting with you know chronos right you're starting with like the application of time and space and knowing where you are well i want to say, thank you for really spending your time talking with me and our audience about some of the thinking that went into this. Obviously, there was a lot of great discussions that fed into this. What is your hope for this cestalunar strategy? What's your kind of ideal case for how this gets applied through government? And is there a timeline for observers like me and members of the Planetary Society? What do we evaluate the success of this strategy that we all came together and agreed to.

So one element is, over the next year or two, seeing ideas from the strategy manifest in the activities of places like NASA and NSF. More broadly, what is my hope for this kind of strategy, for the cislunar strategy? It's that this is a first step that will be followed by others. That this is a document that will prompt new focus and new ways of thinking. This idea of thinking about the moon and this region of space around it, and new coordination across the US government, and that future leaders will find value in building successors to the strategy and building the next steps and policies that follow from the strategy.

This is very much meant to be a first step. And then that ultimately, we are a space-faring society. We're not just a society that has a government space program. We are increasingly a space-faring society. We're not just a society that has a government space program. We are increasingly a space-faring society. And one of the exciting things here is that we are building a new sphere of human activity at the moon and going from there into the solar system. When we really look into that, it turns out there's so much to do. There's a ton of different things for people

with very different interests and backgrounds to work on together. And there are so many exciting possibilities ahead. So it, in summary, is a hope that this is a first step to a very kind of exciting and varied future that helps us step into the solar system. Great way to put it. Well, we will check in with you in the future, Matt, to see how things are going with this. But again, thank you for your time. Very exciting new document and area of focus for the US government and again, all these agencies beyond and really for the whole world as we really start to look at the practical

implementation of what it means to be in cislunar space together. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Another wonderful conversation, Casey. Thanks for sharing that with us. Oh, yeah, that was a really fun one. And again, really great of Matt to take, you know, it's not easy working at the White House. You tend to be quite busy.

I can imagine. If anyone who's watched the West Wing, that's actually relatively accurate. So really appreciate the time that Matt gave us and really appreciate that he walked us through their thinking and details of this. These are big issues with big questions, and it's just so exciting to see this start to move forward at the highest levels of our government. Yeah, it's an interesting and kind of mind-bending place to be where the question is no longer, how do we get things into cis learner space, but how do we create a strategy to most effectively make use of that space? It feels a little different. Yeah. Well, and again, what I really liked about his perspective, and you heard me react to it in real time in the interview, but this idea that

this is an opportunity for the United States to establish behaviors and norms, but also expectations to make it easier for all sorts of other people to come into this aspect of space, right? So this isn't about establishing the US as, in a sense, leadership or racing to the moon and planting a flag. This is the United States trying to make it easier for lots of other nationalities and organizations and other actors to join us. And that's just such a cool way to think about it. And it's a broad effort that we want to have a long term beneficial presence, learning from things in the past and extending that into the future. Well, anybody who's listening obviously can learn more every month

with our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. But we also have a monthly newsletter, our Space Advocate Newsletter. Can you tell us where to find that, Casey? Yeah, just Google Space Advocate Newsletter. I think that's the easiest way. We need to work on a short, easy URL for this. But it's a free newsletter.

You don't even have to be a member of the Planetary Society, though you should. But it's a free newsletter. You don't even have to be a member of the Planetary Society, though you should. But it's a free newsletter you get every month. I write a little essay at the beginning of it. I link to key space policy events so you can kind of stay abreast of the situation about what's going on. I think it's a great newsletter.

Completely objectively, I think it's a great newsletter that everyone should subscribe to. And again, you just Google the Space Advocate newsletter and you will find it the top hit. Yep. And I always learn something new each time it comes into my inbox. So thank you for that. And as Casey said, this newsletter and all the rest of our work is made possible by our Planetary Society members. So if you want to help in our continued efforts to shape humanity's future in space,

it really does make a difference. And we're really grateful for your support. So if you want to join us, please go to planetary.org slash join, because you make all of this space policy work and this show possible. Well, thanks again, Casey, for keeping us up to date on the world of space policy. Sarah, my pleasure as always, and look forward to talking with you again next month. Awesome. And until next month, everyone, Ad Astra. Thank you.