Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: When a (Space) Cowboy Came to Washington

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

Historian John Logsdon discusses his new book, Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier. It explores the legacy of the 40th president’s major space policy decisions. We look at four major topics: early efforts at commercializing space, the survival crisis for planetary exploration, the Space Shuttle, and the decision to build the space station. Casey also shares good news about NASA's newest budget and how a battle between rocket companies could spell trouble for NASA's Lucy mission.  More resources to explore this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-35.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Space Policy Edition for March 1st of 2019, the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm your host and producer, Matt Kaplan. I hope you're listening to the weekly version of the show as well, but every first Friday of the month, at least we try for every first Friday, we bring you this special visit with the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome, Casey. Hey, Matt. Always happy to be back on my favorite edition of Planetary Radio. I'm not a bit surprised. Casey, you have a very special guest today. It's one of our perennial favorites on Planetary Radio, and he happens to be a board member of the Planetary Society as well. It's John Logsdon. We have a couple of other things to cover first, but do you want to tease that a little bit? volunteer that looks into a great depth and really some fascinating insights into the space policy decisions made by Ronald Reagan and the implications of those over the last few decades.

So we really go into that. It's fascinating, again, kind of seeing some very familiar debates that were happening in the early 80s that are happening now. So stick around for that interview. It was a lot of fun. Coming up in moments, but before we get to some of the news, and we won't be able to cover a lot of what we might have been able to talk about, we certainly want to talk about the NASA budget and one other blog post that you've published atary.org slash membership. You can stand behind this program, all of Planetary Radio, and so much more. Everything that the Society does, we really depend on our members to make it all happen. All of our advocacy efforts, which have been so remarkably successful with participation and leadership by Casey. Remarkably successful with participation and leadership by Casey. We hope you will visit, take a look at all the different levels at which you can become a member of the society. Join our happy brotherhood and sisterhood of space fans, space geeks, space policy aficionados. Space advocates. Space advocates, absolutely.

Which is something we actually give you an opportunity to do very directly, especially as a member. I really want to talk about this budget success. I'll just assume everyone will be signing up after that to help us be pursuing things like the budget. So we are in an interesting situation right now where we have a bit of good news to share about NASA, which we're not used to talking about in the last couple of months. Coming out of this 35-day government shutdown, NASA had basically three weeks or so of temporary funding, along with most other parts of the federal government, for the whole debate over a border wall to kind of resolve itself or to reach some sort of conclusion. Speaking just from this

narrow perspective on NASA, we ultimately got a deal that's funded the government for the rest of the fiscal year through the end of September of 2019. NASA got a formal budget from Congress, and it was a very good budget. So if you can just ignore the fact that NASA was closed for 10% of the year already, NASA came out with $21.5 billion. That is the best NASA budget adjusted for inflation in about 10 years. So it's the best NASA budget in a decade. That money is kind of distributed throughout the agency. Science is a huge recipient of that. The WFIRST mission will continue funding for the next couple of years. It had been proposed to be canceled as the next space telescope after James Webb. James Webb was approved to continue going forward, even though it reached its cost limits. Every earth science mission that was proposed to be canceled is not. So earth science actually technically sees its

best budget ever. It actually got a small boost up to $1.93 billion. And then planetary science blew through its record and got $2.8 billion this year. Just a fantastic number for planetary science, mainly growth in Europa Clipper funding. And then there's $200 million for Europa Lander. You see funding for the Gateway Project, the space station around the moon. You see funding for a new scientific initiative, send payloads to the lunar surface using commercial partners through the science program. Really good news just overall, if you can just move past the fact that NASA was closed down for a month. So this is fantastic budget news. And if you want

to read more about it, there is a February 15 blog post at planetary.org from Casey that says NASA just got its best budget in a decade. And one of the features I love about this, Casey, there is this interactive graph that shows adjusted for inflation, how the NASA budget has fared over many years, looking back right to the beginning. And I'll tell you what I found most fascinating is that the budget right now is above the level that it was at the end of the Apollo program when we all believed that NASA was doing better than it ever had. Of course, it had been doing better back in the mid-60s. I mean, it's reason to celebrate. It's great. I mean, it's reason to celebrate. It's great.

I mean, it's not like a doubling of the budget, right? But it's much easier to do this stuff than it would be otherwise. I mean, if you look at the recent trend, and thank you for mentioning this new chart that we've put together, new interactive data that we have on the Society webpage, we've basically kind of crawled out of a dip that began when the GOP took over the House of Representatives in 2010 and started driving some hard spending cuts through the U.S. government. NASA suffered as part of those. And then basically politicians decided that it's actually better to spend money. And they started to increase spending as of 2014. This is the sixth year in a

row that NASA has seen a budget increase. And it's been steady at about 4% per year, which is pretty much in line with what we had recommended of 5% per year. So these are important increases. It's going to give NASA some of the breathing room it needs to pursue all these things. It's still obviously far too low for everything that NASA is doing. This is why we need to keep this growth continuing going into the future. This is not a time to rest in our laurels for this, but obviously I'd rather have the better news than bad news on this. This is the right direction for NASA to go in. That's the good news. Five days later on February 20th, Casey also published at planetary.org, this piece, NASA's Lucy mission gets caught up in a fight between rocket companies. Are we seeing this already funded and currently being put together asteroid mission, unprecedented asteroid mission put in jeopardy?

Maybe. And it's actually, it's this fascinating outcome. So what happened here is that, so Lucy is this mission, as you said, to these Trojan asteroids. It has a launch window of 20 days beginning in 2021, I think October of 2021. And if you miss this, you have one more chance to launch in order to get this favorable opportunity to hit all of these, like I think six different Trojan asteroids in one mission. But you have a very small launch window. So NASA's Launch Services Program,

completely separate division from Science Division or even the program, the project that's making this Lucy mission, their job is to select rockets for the needs of a particular NASA mission. Back in January, they had awarded a contract to the United Launch Alliance, the ULA, for the Atlas V, a 401 configuration, in order to launch Lucy in 2021. They were going to pay, I think the contract award is up to $148 million. Also in that competition was SpaceX's Falcon 9. SpaceX has filed a formal complaint with the Government Accountability Office, basically contesting this bid, saying that they had given such an obviously better price to the government that there must be shenanigans going on as to why ULA won the launch contract. So what that means is that at the moment, ULA is

on a stop work order for preparing this rocket for this launch. And Lucy, the mission, doesn't know what rocket it's launching on, which means at this point, as they're trying to optimize the mission doesn't know what rocket it's launching on, which means at this point, as they're trying to optimize the mission for saving every ounce of fuel, for getting shaving off every piece of mass that they can, they need to know what their launch vehicle is. They need to know what their trajectory is going to be going into space. They're different between ULA and SpaceX. If this continues, and if SpaceX basically wins this contractual dispute, they have to re-compete the rocket contract, which almost certainly means that another couple months is going to go by before they can commit to a launch vehicle and that Lucy very well may

miss their first launch window. Previously, when other missions have missed a launch window on this scale, it adds something on the order of $75 to $100 million per year to delay a mission. So the argument that SpaceX is making that they could save the government money ultimately is very likely not to be the case because it would cost the government more money to miss that launch window and to use a SpaceX Falcon 9. more money to miss that launch window and to use a SpaceX Falcon 9. So people are a little frustrated, I think, that SpaceX is competing this particular mission because of its tight launch window. This doesn't say anything about whether SpaceX or ULA is the right one or not, but the contracting process has been pretty open and fair in the past. So it's going to be interesting to see what comes out of this. So the least disruptive thing for the Lucy mission is that the GAO upholds the process and maintains it with ULA,

but it's still causing this disruption right now. It's disturbing. We certainly hope, as I'm sure everyone listening to this does, that this is resolved quickly and we get out there to the orbit of Jupiter and explore these asteroids of a type that have never been studied up close before. Casey, I guess that's going to have to do it for this other coverage this time, because we do want to get to your conversation with John, which, you know, I was listening to as you spoke to him. It is quite long, but it is fascinating. Anybody who is aware of John's work has has heard him previously on the show, or has read his previous books, know that John is basically the foremost authority. I think it's safe to say, or certainly one of the foremost authorities on the history of the U.S. space program.

And it just makes for a really interesting conversation. Yeah, we really go into a lot of aspects of the book. And I really encourage people to get the book and to read it if they want to up their level of space policy expertise. Again, I think what you'll hear from this interview is so many issues that the Reagan administration was deciding upon have echoed down through the decades and have really kind of led to where we are now in space policy and also started to deal with some of the major issues, particularly in commercialization of space, which, as you'll hear, maybe was a little ahead of its time, but really began in the early 1980s. So, yeah, let's go into this interview and let's see what John

has to say about this new book. Here is Casey Dreyer talking with John Logsdon. Hi, John. Welcome to the Space Policy Edition. I'm excited to have you here for the first time to talk about your new book on Ronald Reagan and his space policy, something I've been looking forward to a long time. Not as long as me. So, John, you opened this book with a chapter called A Cowboy Comes to Washington. For the benefits of our listeners who maybe aren't super familiar with Reagan's legacy, why was this an important context or set the context for when Reagan was coming to Washington and why that was a big break, at least perceived from the previous administration? first career was as a Hollywood actor, mainly in B films, including a lot of Westerns. And so he carried that identity with him basically till the end of his life. And he liked to ride horses. So that was part of his aura, I guess. He had done a lot of other things. He was a labor leader. He ran the Screen Actors Guild. He was a spokesperson

for General Electric for a number of years, did TV shows, and then served two terms, eight years total, as governor of California, at that time the second most populous state. And yet people thought of him as an actor. One of his strengths was his ability to play the role of president in terms of his rhetoric, in terms of his aura, his appearance. I think that's the context. When he came to Washington, he was viewed and he was ideologically an outsider. He had no prior experience in the Washington environment. He had had no prior experience in the Washington environment. He also carried a soup song, nice word, of not being really a serious person because of his acting background. And so people tended to underestimate him.

Is that part of his appeal? People describe this or even in the book, the self-described Reagan revolution happened. Why was that referred to as such, particularly given the context of, let's say, Carter administration? Well, Reagan had developed during the 60s, as he moved from centrist Democrat to a rather conservative Republican, a particular set of beliefs in far less government, a stronger military, set of beliefs in far less government, a stronger military, a almost ideological faith in the power of the free market and desire to cut federal spending. And he brought those beliefs to Washington, believing that it would be a revolution if he could implement them. And how did space, the space program or NASA then fit into this image that he had crafted for himself or this ideology that he was bringing? Well, he was a technological optimist.

He was a political conservative, a bit of a social conservative, but he believed in the efficacy, the power of technological progress. And space seemed to him to be one of the areas of technology where the United States had had a leading position, should have a leading position. And basically, he liked space. Reading this book, which really goes into a lot of the policy decisions on the Reagan administration, that he liked it really seemed to naturally fit with this image. He talked about a lot about the idea of the frontier and frontierism, which again,

compared to his idea of this cowboy coming to Washington, kind of really using that mythology and tying those two closely together. Indeed. I mean, he saw the space program as a prime example of American exceptionalism, of America being the leading light for the world, of pushing frontiers of human well-being and technology. He was fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrials. So space felt very natural to him. So is this why he doubled NASA's budget in his first year that he came into office? Yeah, really. Ronald Reagan was a hands-off president. He very seldom took policy initiatives. It took him six or eight months to get overall his government organized and up and running. And in those first six to eight months, the person that was making most decisions was his budget director, David Stockman, who was committed to the Reagan revolution idea of reducing the federal

budget. And NASA was one of Stockman's targets. In particular, and of interest to listeners to this show, the planetary program became a particular target. Stockman and his associates proposed shutting down, cutting to zero the planetary budget, terminating the relationship between NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab, turning JPL over to make it a CIA laboratory, and basically, until another decade or so, no new planetary missions. I definitely want to get to that. And David Stockman, before we do, let's just put a pin in that for a second. I want to have you kind of give the context of where was NASA as an agency in 1981 as Reagan and his administration was assuming power in Washington?

What was he inheriting and what were some of the major issues that they had to take action on initially? Well, the Reagan transition team for NASA headed by a very expert guy named George Lowe, who had been NASA deputy administrator, kind of the moving force behind a lot of the Apollo program. Was this the same George Lowe who pushed for Apollo 8? The same George Lowe. George is a kind of hidden male figure in the history of at least the human spaceflight program, although there is a good biography of him about to appear. At any rate, Lowe's report said NASA's at a crossroads and in an untenable situation, given the decisions to reduce its budget, the lack of any focusing goal for its activities, and all the problems it was having in bringing the shuttle into operation. So this actually sounds weirdly

familiar with a lot of presidents going forward. And that's the legacy of this is something I think we can explore a little bit. But fundamentally, the shuttle had just become, you know, it wasn't technically operational and accident declared operational, but the first test flights were just starting to happen, right? Yeah. Reagan entered office January the 20th, 1981. The first test flight was actually launched April the 12th, 1981. So it was approaching its test flight as he took office, but it happened under him. Just to make this really explicit, Reagan inherited the shuttle program. He had no control over it previously. It was a

decision by Nixon, as you explored in your previous book after Apollo. Carter and Ford had kept it going. Carter had kind of capped some of the investment in it a little bit, right? He kind of made a major decision on the shuttle to keep it going, but to not expand the size to five orbiters. Reagan not only inherited the shuttle program, he inherited the shuttle policy that it would become the vehicle to launch all government missions and that as soon as possible, expendable launch vehicles like the Delta and the Atlas would be retired and shuttle would become Uber Alas, the vehicle for the U.S. government to access space. So the first thing his administration did in terms of the shuttle was review that policy and revalidate it. I'd like to explore this a little bit. I mean, it's easy to forget, I think, the incredible optimistic projections that NASA had convinced itself would come true with the space shuttle. Obviously, you've written about

this at great length, but what was the role of the shuttle within NASA at the time? It's the people coming in representing NASA to the administration. The shuttle seemed to be the only or the most important thing within the space agency, right? Well, since Richard Nixon had approved it in 1972, it was the focal point for human spaceflight and for big engineering projects. It was what made, to most people, NASA. NASA was the ability to put people in space and operate with them. And so shuttle had been part of NASA's post-Apollo plans. It was really, its origin was as a logistics vehicle to go back and forth to a space station, therefore the name shuttle. The Nixon administration said no to the space station and said yes to the shuttle. And so as

Reagan entered office, the question for the future, immediate future, was would the second half of this combination also be approved by the Reagan administration, that is the space station? What were some of the projections for how the shuttle would operate? Well, I mean, Nixon, when he announced it, would say, said the shuttle would regularize access to space by routinizing it and would take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. It was supposed to be almost airline-like in frequency of operation. The projections that NASA used to set the pricing policy in the late 70s were somewhere between 40 and 50 missions a year, a launch a week almost, and at a price that made it cheaper than any of the expendable launch vehicles. Those were based on, I think, a lot of wishful thinking, some analysis,

and the buying in of a myth. Yeah. How important was it that it came after the successful moon landing? Was that key to being able to sell that myth that NASA could do anything if they wanted to, engineering-wise? Well, I think it was key to NASA believing it. I mean, after all, we just landed on the moon. We can do anything in space. I mean, the shuttle, it's a different story. It is, as you say, in the previous book called After Apollo, the shuttle that was built was not the shuttle that NASA wanted to develop in the first place. And it carried with its design the seeds of the fact that it would not be able to accomplish the

promises that had been made for it. So I think we've got a good table set here now of ideas. We have this new optimistic president coming in with a new administration, so-called Reagan revolution, optimistic, forward-looking cowboy. We have a space program that is just starting to deploy a new system with the space shuttle returning humans to flight from the United States since I think, what was it, 75 with Apollo-Soyuz. And then we have a series of decisions that need to be made. So I want to address kind of some of the main themes that you talk about in your book. And I'm just going to state those up front. We can talk about, you've hinted at some of them already, the survival crisis, as you call it, of planetary science in the United States. We'll talk a little bit, I think, about some of these shuttle issues and how that changed with Challenger. And then

also, obviously, the space station decision. And then finally, commercialization, which I think is an interesting and underrated aspect of Reagan's administration that you give a lot of consideration to and how that impacts today. So let's start at the very beginning, as you kind of hinted with David Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. This is the White House's kind of accounting office. They control the process of requesting money to Congress through the president's budget request. They control how money flows out after appropriations are given. So you had Ronald Reagan coming in on this promise to cut government spending, and he appointed this person, David Stockman,

to direct the OMB. Do you want to talk a little bit about David Stockman and kind of what he was bringing to the table at this point? Well, Stockman was a whiz kid. He was a member of Congress in the late 70s from Michigan. He had dedicated himself to becoming a budget whiz, understanding in kind of excruciating detail budget documents and all the little stories that are hidden in budget documents. He had a fairly libertarian view of economics. He said the United States was heading towards a major, Dunkirk was what he called a major debacle in terms of its government financing, unless budgets were cut. But on the other side, it turned out to like the space program comparatively to many other things. He even asked to come, you know, he wrote NASA specifically

asking to be invited to the first shuttle launch. You mentioned this in your book that just because you liked NASA didn't mean you liked NASA equally. And particularly NASA was becoming so associated with the shuttle and its human spaceflight program. If you're looking to cut NASA's budget, but the shuttle became the sacrosanct program within the agency, there wasn't much else left to cut if you were looking to cut. Well, it's important to understand from the White House point of view, not the NASA point of view, but the White House point of view, the reason that the shuttle was so important was its national security uses. Through lots of manipulation, we ended up in a situation where the observation satellites, the spy satellites that we needed to

monitor what was going on in the Soviet Union, other potential adversaries, could only be launched on the shuttle. The concern was to make sure that the shuttle was able to operate so that we could basically have the intelligence we needed. We had a president then that paid attention to intelligence. I'm sorry, cheap shot. Anyway, the immediate concern in the first months of the Reagan administration was getting the shuttle up and running. And so it was walled off from budget cuts. So if there were going to be budget cuts in NASA, they had to come from not the human spaceflight program, but the rest of the program. Planetary program was kind of offered up in an aspect of NASA playing hardball to try to

basically call a budget cutting bluff. Is that correct? That's correct. There's something called the Washington Monument Game, where somebody that That's correct. There's something called the Washington Monument game, where somebody that wants to preserve something offers to kill it, knowing that killing it would be unacceptable. So the new NASA administrator, Jim Beggs, offered to OMB, if we have to take a budget cut, let's shut down the planetary program, clearly thinking that would be unacceptable. Problem was, Stockman said, oh, okay, we'll do that. Well, and again, I think this is fascinating, too, because at the same time, you had this, the science advisor to the president, basically say that there was nothing really that much more valuable to be learned from planetary science at this point. Well, not only the science advisor, George J. Keyworth, but also the number two person at NASA, the Honorable Hans Mark,

had written and put into practice the idea that for the shuttle era, it was things that could be launched by the shuttle, like the Hubble telescope, that were the real scientific payoffs. Missions that required upper stages to send them out to the planets were second priority. So there was even skepticism of the continuing value of the planetary program within NASA. I mean, that's just amazing to me. And I guess, is part of this because of the perceived, maybe public perceived failure of Viking to discover life or anything very compelling in that sense on Mars? Would this have happened if there hadn't been such a public negative result of that search, do you think? No, I don't think so. I think that in a sense,

Mark was correct in his assessment that the next ripe target for fundamental science payoffs was likely to be in astrophysics, in missions like Hubble and the other great observatories. You have to remember Voyager already had flown by Jupiter and was on its way to Saturn, and that the next steps in planetary exploration were such a leap, particularly a second landing on Mars or the Holy Grail of Mars sample return, that they had to wait for a while. And that priority within the science budget should be given to astrophysics. So how close did we come to actually ending the planetary program? And you kind of alluded to this earlier, JPL without any planetary missions wouldn't be useful to the government anymore. So they would spin JPL off to either defense or intelligence, right? So how close did

we come to this outcome? Well, it was in the final budget proposal, the zeroing out of the target was the Galileo mission, plus a new start on a Venus orbiting radar. Both of those were zeroed out. I think we should put in this discussion, Casey, that one key to the survival of the planetary program was the activity of the Planetary Society, which organized, first of all, an unsuccessful campaign to have a Halley's Comet intercept or some sort of Halley's Comet mission during 1980 and 81, and then a campaign to influence the California influencers of the Reagan administration not to cancel the planetary program. So Dr. Sagan, Dr. Murray, and Dr. Friedman were very active in this fight and ultimately won. And I always think that's just amazing to me that he could get away with this. But Dr. Bruce Murray at the time was also the director of JPL,

in addition to being one of the founders of the Planetary Society, which was trying to help save JPL. Indeed. Well, I mean, but Bruce Murray, you know, who I knew fairly well, did basically what he wanted to do. Yeah, I get that impression. And so again, you started to bring this up. So how did they eventually save this? This is, I think, a wonderful and insightful story into how politics actually works sometimes, that they went this kind of direct route for Halley's Comet of let's send a bunch of letters to the White House. The White House didn't know what to do with them. They forwarded them to NASA unopened. So how did the campaign to save the planetary program in Galileo differ from that? And what was this pathway to ultimately save the planetary program in 1901? Well, the key, I think, was the relationship between JPL and California

Institute of Technology, Caltech. A number of the Caltech trustees were intimates of the, after all, Southern California Reagan and his closest associates. There was a trustees committee on JPL. It was chaired by a woman named Mary Scranton, wife of Bill Scranton, who had won former governor of Pennsylvania, who had hoped to become president unsuccessfully. But Mrs. Scranton had very good connections in Washington, in particular on the Hill. And she went to see a bunch of the senators and kind of indirectly reached Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. And Baker wrote Reagan and said, your folks are doing something that should not be done. Stop them. Somewhere along the line, whether it was Reagan or the letter got intercepted by Reagan's immediate advisers, that work in a wonderful 165 degree flip.

The science advisor Keyworth said, well, you know, we can put enough money in to keep the program alive while it reinvents itself. So they got the money for Galileo and that's a whole kind of different story, but from pretty much here on out throughout Reagan's term, planetary science kind of fades into the background. Is that accurate? That's right. It didn't become a political issue. There was a thing called the Solar System Exploration Committee that did what we would have called a decade later, faster, better, cheaper approach to the future planetary program. And it worked on its own dynamics and really didn't get to be a White House level issue. Is this a good example of why, maybe from a real politic perspective, that we should have more federally funded research and development centers as opposed to federally run and managed NASA centers so they can have more connected and aggressive political constituencies to fight on their behalf? Well, I don't know. I mean, certainly Johnson Space Center

and Marshall Space Flight Center, Kennedy Space Center, have had pretty influential political allies. I don't think the form of organization is all that important. That's true. They've done all right by themselves, I guess, over the years.

Indeed. Okay, so survival crisis of planetary science. And again, maybe just to clarify here, this kind of largely happened not at Reagan's necessary level, right? This kind of happened behind the scenes through Congress. And really, it seemed to be more through an OMB and NASA debate rather than a high level White House debate over this issue.

OMB and the science advisor's office and Congress. Yeah. Getting issues in front of Reagan was a pretty tortuous process. His associates knew that his inclination was to say yes to things like the space program. And so they were very careful not to let him decide on things until they thought it was something that he should decide on. I want to talk about that towards the end, because I think that's a really fascinating insight that you have in your book. This concept of this idiosyncratic processes that each individual president comes to and how they organize the White House to the point where they actually get the information presented to them. How that process happens can be really important to the ultimate outcome. Who controls the leverage points? Right. We're kind of done with planetary science. happens can be really important to the ultimate outcome. Yeah, who controls leverage points?

Right. We're kind of done with planetary science. Let's move back to the shuttle, which again, really dominated particularly the first, well, really both terms of the Reagan administration, but really in different ways. So the first term, you talk about this a lot, even when he was running for a second term, he really seemed to align himself with the shuttle as part of his image. And again, he had kind of the fortuitous timing to assume the presidency just as Americans were returning back into space. But let's go back to this idea of, again, this promise of the shuttle as it was becoming operational. NASA declared it operational after what, two or three, four test flights? Four flights. It really wasn't, as you point out. But there was this enormous pressure. There never was. Yeah. I mean, there was this enormous pressure to up this flight rate. You mentioned with Nixon, 40 to 50 times a year. I think by this point, they were promising, what, 24 flights a year, one every two weeks?

24 was their target, yeah. Beggs got there. He said, these big numbers are ridiculous. Let's be relatively, publicly, he said, 24. Internally, he said, we'll be lucky if we make 12 to 18. The max in one year, I think, was what, nine in 1985? Nine, yeah. The issue here with the shuttle, let's talk about just kind of two primary ones here. One, we talked about a little bit, which is the policy first described in the Carter administration, then adopted ultimately by the Reagan administration, which was the shuttle would be the one launch vehicle for all government payloads. That's science payloads, Department of Defense and national intelligence payloads.

And then also, of course, for commercial payloads, it would try to compete to launch commercial satellites. Why would it be a truck? Yeah. What was the amount of thought put into this process? Was it universally accepted among his subordinates in the White House, or was it a contentious decision to adopt or to readopt this Carter policy? The real dissidence to the policy was the national security community. I know as someone that followed the program pretty closely, I never thought about it, but they did, which is that the shuttle was a wonderful target for a Soviet anti-satellite weapon. And there were only four of them. So if we depended on the shuttle to launch

our national security satellites, the right thing for the Soviets would be to shoot it down. And they were very large targets. So there was that concern, which, frankly, you know, would we have launched a shuttle in the middle of armed conflict? Fortunately, we never found out. But the other was that the national security community did not control the shuttle. It was a NASA vehicle. And as it started flying, it became clear it was a difficult to operate vehicle, that it couldn't quite meet the performance standards that had been set out for it at the start of its design, therefore not

carry out some of the more demanding national security missions. So from almost the get-go, the national security community opposed the shuttle-only policy. It took them four years to get it changed, ultimately totally changed after Challenger. So they were one source of opposition to the shuttle. The other one, and I don't know whether you, in your logic, want to get to this later, are those who wanted to commercialize the existing expendable launch vehicles. Right, yeah. Let's touch on the commercialization issue as a separate topic. So there was some debate, I guess, is what I just wanted to emphasize.

I don't quite understand, or it's hard, you know, it's easy, I'd say, let's say this, I don't quite understand or it's hard, you know, it's easy. I say, let's say this, to look back at this decision and it almost seems ludicrous or it is the product. Yeah. And you say, were they able to believe that? Why even just from a strategic point, a single point of failure seems like a problem, particularly for a national security focused administration? self-delusion that happens in certain circumstances, and I think this was one of them, that there was so much focus on the goodness of the shuttle, that it was an example of America's leadership in technology, that the astronauts were such ideal young people. By 83, there were women flying, Sally Ride first, that the myth of the shuttle persisted. I mean, you know, we've lived with these sort of myths, the king without clothes. The idea of large groups of people coming to believe something that isn't true is a very real phenomenon. Somewhat ironic, given the professed technological engineering rigorous focus of what we consider the science and engineering side of NASA, you had to buy into the idea in order for the shuttle to not fail, right? It had to serve everyone's needs. And so even though the people closest to the shuttle knew very well all its vulnerabilities.

So when you talk to folks like Hans Mark now about the shuttle, is there a reflection on that? Because Hans Mark, as you said, the deputy NASA administrator at the time, this incredible, almost like a prophet of the shuttle and how the utility of it and how it would change things. Is there an acknowledgement that that was wrong at the time or that they were mistaken? Yeah, they look back and Dr. Mark wrote a book as he left NASA in 1984 and even before Challenger, therefore, in which he raised some self-doubt about whether he had been right in his advocacy of the shuttle. some self-doubt about whether he had been right in his advocacy of the shuttle.

Regardless, the shuttle policy, the primacy of the shuttle as the launch vehicle for government payloads moves forward, NASA struggles to increase the flight rate. And then, of course, you have the Challenger disaster in January of 1986. Yeah, I think one point to make, and it goes back to a point we made earlier, was the fragile condition of NASA as the Reagan administration came into office. And so there was kind of, oh, God, let's not admit any problems, because we're in kind of risky condition anyway. And so we've got to move forward as if everything is fine. So I think that contributed to the collective buying in of the myth. Do you think that was a product of that they hadn't been able to launch humans into space for a while? And there was this perception that if they couldn't deliver on this promise, that could be the end of the, at least the human side of the space program? Well, I think it was more the impact of Jimmy Carter's relative sourness vis-a-vis the human

spaceflight program and NASA being made to feel very vulnerable under the Carter administration that created this kind of nervousness about admitting problems. The self-conception of the shuttle with NASA, I think, is one thing. Even as they are starting to deploy it in the first few years of Reagan's presidency, and it's not reaching the flight rate, there's still just the immense commitment to it, right? So they're refining it, they're launching it, they're trying to up the launch rate. You start adding citizen astronauts, They're flying congressmen into space. And then, of course, you have the Challenger disaster. And so I'd like you to talk a little bit.

The one other element in all of this is the commercial competition. So they wanted to price the shuttle. So the shuttle was in order to help pay for itself or to lower its costs. Well, not only that, these damn Europeans, and particularly the French, had the audacity to compete with us for launching communication satellites and other commercial payloads. And so the Ariane program began in the early 80s and was beginning to win contracts in competition with the shuttle for launching commercial payloads. And there was a very chauvinistic response to that of how dare they almost. And so advocates of the shuttle argued you had to keep the price of the shuttle low enough to compete with Ariion, whether or not it had

anything to do with the costs. I thought that was fascinating reading about those very heated debates about how to price shuttle launches, because the first launch contracts that the shuttle or NASA signed with commercial companies were just extraordinarily low back in the late 70s, right? They were tens of millions of dollars to launch something into space with a bunch of humans on board. The idea being, again, kind of serving this myth where if we admit the actual operating costs of the shuttle are so high, then the shuttle is not what we promised. So we have to artificially insist that the cost is lower, even though it won't function to pay for itself the way it was originally?

Well, you know, again, this is part of this collective myth. The argument was, as we get experience, the cost will come down. And so over the shuttle lifetime, revenue from the shuttle will exceed the cost of the program. So just be patient. It actually might be interesting to discuss how Ariane kind of came about. Was it related to, basically, wasn't the U.S. trying to sell Europe on the shuttle being the way for them to access space in the 1970s as well, that they could serve all their needs? I mean, again, there's a whole long story there. I'll try to do it in short form, which is that Europe in the late 60s began to see that communication satellites were both strategically and economically important things and wanted to build their own communication satellites. The U.S. had created Intelsat and ComSat as a global monopoly on

communications, basically dominated by the United States. So Europe wanted to get into that business, didn't have a launch vehicle, and asked the U.S. whether it would launch European satellites if the Europeans built them. And the US fiddled around basically wanting to say no. And France took the lead in Europe and said, well, then we'll better build our own. And then that's where Ariane came from. And so Ariane debuts in the early 80s and starts signing contracts to deliver communication satellites into space, undercutting the price of the shuttle. And so how did that impact the discussions for setting the price of the shuttle? I mean, what are they using as a basis to try to set that price point? What were some of the

debates happening there between various people? I think pissing into the wind, basically. As you saw in the book, there were endless analyses of various forms of costing the shuttle to come up with an answer that gave the right outcome in terms of shuttle price, all based on three or four or five launches. I mean, the launch rate did not go up very fast. So it was all kind of artificial until enough experience could have been gained to have a realistic assessment of how much a launch costs. It's still a fairly esoteric art to, in retrospect, even to give a price for a shuttle launch. Right. Because how do you incorporate the overhead and the- Not a price, a cost. Right. Regardless, so there were some actual commercial satellite

deliveries by the shuttle in the early years. You highlighted a couple where they rescued malfunctioning satellites and boosted them into orbit. Some of those classic early images of the shuttle releasing satellites into space. I think I very viscerally remember those. I would want to stick in here because I get criticized for it, that my criticism is shuttle policy. The shuttle itself was a remarkable technological achievement and something that the United States can rightfully be proud of having built. over-promised and over-hyped and had really no chance of living up as a first-generation space plane to all the anticipations and promises that were burdened on top of it. Oh, yeah. I'd love to do an entirely separate episode about the after Apollo and the Nixon shuttle decision and how that impacted this. I think there's so much to talk about there.

But you're right. And I think that's an important distinction too, that the, we're talking really about shuttle policy and the actual activities of the shuttle were just spectacular. That's what I grew up with, with NASA was the shuttle. That was my childhood NASA experience. I had the Lego shuttle set, so I love the shuttle. But at the same time, for what it was trying to be promised to do here, it had, as you point out, it's kind of a hopeless situation. It was something that I had seen before, but I was reminded in your book that NASA had actually published this. They were trying to commercialize themselves to some degree, right? Or commercialize the shuttle. Indeed. You know, they had marketing

plans, marketing consultants. They tried with a fair amount of reluctance to turn themselves into a trucking agency and really got kind of skewed away from being an R&D and exploration and science agency. What was the phrase? We deliver, right? That was their remark. We deliver, yeah. I've actually looked and I haven't found a digital copy online, at least, of that brochure. I don't know if you have any of those sitting around. They had this big full-color, what was it, like a 13-page brochure that they would distribute to try to build up?

They printed it in multiple languages and distributed it to Paris Air Show. And it had a kind of full-blown marketing effort saying you can't get a better price anywhere, you can't get better service. It's very strange language to read in retrospect. I remember reading parts of it, they had pitched that because humans fly on it, it's the safest launch vehicle. Your payload is insured. Yeah, that's kind of circular reasoning. Obviously, then all of this changes on January 28th, 1986 with the Challenger disaster. It changed before that. What was happening leading up to this then that began to change this?

There were two parallel things in shuttle policy going on. One you say you want to talk about later, which was the advocates of expendable launch vehicles saying we could never succeed as long as the shuttle is underpriced, given its costs, that we can't compete with a subsidized government system. And that got to be a very vicious fight internal to the Reagan administration. system. And that got to be a very vicious fight internal to the Reagan administration. The other also rather vicious fight was between NASA and the national security community. The national security community wanted an alternative to the shuttle for launching its largest and most important payloads and came up with the idea of something called the complementary expendable launch vehicle. They got Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger to write and came up with the idea of something called the Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle.

They got Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger to write Nixon and say the shuttle is a mistake. And ultimately, there was a treaty signed, basically, between NASA and fundamentally the National Reconnaissance Office, headed by Pete Aldridge, in which NASA agreed that there should be at least two-a-year compliments, alternative heavy launch vehicles available to the shuttle, called the Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle. Then, of course, there was a bidding on what that vehicle would be, and NASA entered an uncrewed version of the shuttle as one of the entries into the competition, which wasn't the idea at all. The idea was to get away from the dependence on the shuttle system. That's what ultimately ended up with the creation of the Titan IV heavy launch vehicle, which was the complementary expendable launch vehicle beginning post-Challenger.

And that's what took Cassini into space, I believe. Is that right? I believe so. Yeah. I mean, again, post-Challenger, there was a decision that you should not launch the shuttle unless it was absolutely necessary to have humans involved in the mission or otherwise that the payload could not be launched by anything except the shuttle. Now you can go up to January the 28th. And finally get there. So you're you're there's already a lot of internal bureaucratic pressure to move shuttle out of this prime position. Right. And to start expanding the amount of options, particularly for DOD. You have these issues with commercialization and competition.

Is it fair? Is the shuttle unfair competition to commercial launch vehicles that want to be developed that we'll talk about? And then we have the Challenger disaster. So you have this interesting picture of Reagan and some of his top advisors looking at the TV, showing the disaster.

And you just see the look on their faces. And obviously, this was a very emotional and traumatic moment for the president himself. Indeed. I mean, he had come to know some of the astronauts. He really thought highly of them. I don't know whether he had met the whole crew, but he certainly had met Krista McAuliffe along the way. I don't know whether he had met the whole crew, but he certainly had met Krista McAuliffe along the way.

His first reaction when he heard about the accident was to call his wife and say, oh, my God, Nancy, look what happened. So he took it very personally and then did a remarkably good job of consoling the country that evening. You have some really nice insights of putting that speech together, quoting that famous poem. They felt disappointed. Both the speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, and the president felt like they didn't deliver. Reagan said, I didn't do such a, yeah. But again, it's almost trivial. But he woke up the next morning to a flood of telegrams congratulatingulating and phone calls congratulating him on the speech. So he said maybe it wasn't so bad. Even Sinatra called, and Sinatra doesn't usually call.

What was that like watching the president address the nation that night? Well, you realize that something horrible had happened. And as a true leader, and he was a true leader, Ronald Reagan, I should maybe even put in a parentheses, I started this book with much less respect for Reagan than I ended up with at the end of the book. I think in what he did, he did pretty well. You could disagree with his policies, and I did, particularly his social policies, but he did a good job as president. That was a very strange day for me. I was sitting in my office at George Washington University, and one of my students came in and said the shuttle just blew up. media inquiries that I can't say made my career, but I must have done 50, 75, maybe 100 interviews

in the two or three days following. And I had two assistants taking phone calls. And so you didn't have time to stop and reflect on just what had happened. The amount of media attention, you mentioned this in your book, you said it was traumatic to the public. Traumatic to NASA, but also traumatic to the public. Why was that so traumatic in a sense? Obviously, the visuals was just horrific. But just to set the context of this, why was this such a turning point really? Because as far as the public knew, the shuttle was a safe system.

The public wasn't aware of all the development problems the shuttle had been having. So the expectation after, what was that, almost five years of operation, was that the shuttle was a safe system. And then on top of that, you have an awareness that school kids all over the country were watching because of Krista McAuliffe on the flight. So it was just an extremely traumatic event for the country. And, you know, it's chicken and egg whether the media helped create the trauma or reflected the trauma. But certainly there was a media storm in the aftermath of Challenger that raised, you know, what is this?

Why are we doing it? There was nobody that really said stop the program, by the way. Do you think, though, it fundamentally changed the public's relationship to NASA? Because, I mean, this is probably the most visible disaster that NASA had had to that point. It was only, what, 17 years after landing on the moon for the first time, less than that, for the last time, 72, when they landed on the moon. Did it show that NASA, in a sense, was fallible as an agency? Beyond that, was there something deeper to this in terms of the country's self-image? Certainly it let loose a stream of anti-NASA criticism. Is it time to break up NASA?

And has NASA lost its quality as a... There was a piece that came out right after the accident called NASA is a perfect place. And it was during Apollo, the best organization humans could create to get a job done. But it had lost that edge, that ability. So there was certainly much more questioning of NASA post-Challenger than there had been previously. What were some of the outcomes then of the Challenger disaster?

And we'll have to go through these relatively briefly because there's two other major topics I want to get to, but just in terms of both shuttle policy and just broader space policy, how did this change the Reagan administration's approach to this? There was a lot of debate about the wisdom of the shuttle policy prior to Challenger. And so the accident provided the catalyst for a really rapid change in that policy. It took several months to implement, but you see in the book, the meetings in the immediate aftermath of the accident, the idea that the shuttle would no longer be the sole launch vehicle, that the shuttle would no longer launch commercial payloads, were there very quickly after the accident. Then NASA fought back, and there was six months of bureaucratic back and forth. But the fundamental premises of post-challenger policy emerged very quickly after the accident, that there needed to

be other launch vehicles than the shuttle for use by the U.S. government, an expendable launch fleet in addition to the shuttle, and that the shuttle should be withdrawn from commercial service because those missions could be just as well performed without putting humans at risk. It was also interesting in your book that there was actually a debate as to whether to build a replacement shuttle. but we'll build parts of it. So there were parts of it around that could be the basis for building a new one. Again, showing the way things are done in Washington. The issue was how to pay for it. OMB said, you know, there's not a justification for $2 billion to buy a new shuttle. Some congressmen, particularly Ted Stevens of Alaska and Jake Garn of Utah, who had flown on the shuttle, put their heads together and found a spare $2 billion in the Department of Defense budget and transferred it to NASA by a fee of congressional ledger domain. One of the people that did the actual transfer

was a young staff person named Sean O'Keefe, who, what, 15 years later became head of NASA. Also during a very interesting period of NASA's history for Sean O'Keefe. And I love that insight. I hadn't known that before, that the DOD basically just had a couple billion sitting around that they could just put over to NASA to build a new one. Yeah, exactly.

So we have this fundamental change of the role of the shuttle. It took a while to decide to build a new one. And so basically, let's say by the end of Reagan's term, the shuttle, I think, flew one more time before the end of his term, finally returned to flight in 88. September 29th, 1988. From there on, I'd say we kind of have covered at least the broad outlines of Reagan

as far as the space shuttle. He kind of handed that program then off to the next president, George H.W. Bush. Something else very important that is actually somewhat related to the space shuttle or very related to the space shuttle is this big project that he had announced during, you know, with I'd say some fanfare during the 1984 State of the Union address, which I will pose to you as the here as the next logical step for NASA after the shuttle was operational? Well, again, as we said earlier, when NASA put forward its post-Apollo plans in 1969, its highest priority was a orbital space station. And recognizing the economics of operating the space station would require frequent servicing

of both cargo and crew rotation, proposed a shuttle to go back and forth to the station. The shuttle was built first. And when Jim Beggs and Hans Mark came to NASA in 1981, they said our two top priorities are getting the shuttle operational and getting administration approval for the next logical step, which is the space station. So they began internally to NASA and then within the executive branch in the White House, what turned out to be a three-year campaign to get the station in front of Reagan so he could approve it. Right. And I think that's a really key way you just described it. They had to get through, we talked about this a little bit, the kind of protecting bureaucratic

staff around Reagan that presented the president with his options and outlines, but they had to be convinced first. And they tended to be far more skeptical of initiatives, at least in the space program than the president did. This was really, to me, in the space station decision, it's just such a fascinating example, again, of how these types of things come together. NASA, this was very much coming from NASA itself, right? Trying to convince the OMB, the intelligence community, the defense community, that this was valuable to them, and that this was the only option to move forward. They really didn't present any other ways forward. Is that correct? That's correct, which is a good bureaucratic strategy that says up or down, do this or do nothing. And doing nothing would be a horrible outcome. I spend a lot of time in the

book, four chapters, talking about this decision because it's a classic example of how a decision process works in Washington, or at least worked under Ronald Reagan. And NASA ultimately was unable to gather any allies to its cause, except those that believed that the station could be a center for commercial development in space, could be the research startup for billion-dollar industries like pharmaceuticals and high-quality glass and all the things that were promised at the time. So this is another set of illusionary promises that underpin the station decision. Yeah, I always find the station argument so fascinating in retrospect, because time after time, particularly the Defense Department ultimately said, we have no use for this. But from the very beginning of the concept of space stations, I think most famously with von

Braun, that was always this aspect of it. It would have all these uses at national defense usage, you could spy on people from it, you can drop your nuclear weapons from it, at least as opposed in the 50s. And then it would create all this new industry. And you would have long term studies of humans in space. But time after time, as I am a staging base for deep space missions. Right. Yeah.

As they studied these concepts, they kept learning that it actually wasn't useful for almost all of them. But that didn't ever seem to make NASA stop and actually question whether this was a good idea. They refused to acknowledge that it wasn't useful in those senses. Was there ever a point of reflection like, is this really the best path forward for the human spaceflight program? Basically, no, I think. You have to distinguish Mike Griffin, when he was NASA administrator, gave a speech calling the acceptable reasons and the real reasons. as a step in economic progress. Those were the kind of arguments that the Reagan administration was likely to react to, respond positively to. The real reason, I think, is that the core people at

NASA are true believers in the space vision that human destiny lies in the stars. And so the so-called von Braun paradigm of step-by-step movement into space is part of human destiny. And so we should get on with it, never mind acceptable rationales. The real reason is the belief in the dream. Yeah, I was actually just going to bring up the von Braun paradigm. And I know there's some debate as to whether that was a real thing, but I think it works particularly well as a conceptual framework for how, I mean, from the very beginning, this idea of multi-stage rockets to a shuttle, space station, that's a staging point, moon, and then Mars. I mean, that has been pretty much laid out since the 1950s. The idea of slotting a station into this, you built a shuttle

clearly with the idea of building a station, using that shuttle. And once you had a shuttle, well, we might as well use it to build a station. And lo and behold, eventually they got to this space station decision. So from this point of, you know, this kind of long-term commitment to a station, I think that's almost an entirely separate episode, some of these decisions about it. But how did Reagan ultimately decide this? And how is this different from, I think, a lot of other decisions that Reagan made with the consent or advice of his advisors? Ultimately, Reagan made the decision because it was in the budget that he approved on December the 5th, 1983, because he had made it clear that for

probably a year and a half or two years that he wanted a space station, that it was a program he knew a little bit about and was very attracted to. And so he allowed the process to play out and all the pros and cons arguments, but nobody was able to make an argument, negative argument that was convincing enough to change his mind. The OMB basically gave up in early 1983 and started shaping a budget that included money for the space station, even over its better judgment, because after all, they worked for the president. That's what they sensed the president wanted. But then there was this whole conflictual process through 1983 that ended up in a presentation to

Reagan in the cabinet room on December the 1st, which was in a sense a dog and pony show. I think he had already made up his mind that he was going to approve the station before it was formally presented to him. And then a couple of days later, he had to give the final approval to the next year's budget. And in it was the down payment on station development. development. And so we said, let's do it. And that was it. But keep it quiet until I can make a big deal of announcing it in the State of the Union a month and a half later. It struck me as different because you highlight a lot in your book that he tended to agree when he had a consensus among his advisors. He tended to not override them. But in this case, I felt there was a lot of division among people advising him, and he went with what he wanted to do. Was this because he just romantically thought it was a great idea, or why did he let the process take so long, in a sense, if he was kind of in it from

the beginning? Well, yeah. Reagan's style was to give indications of what he wanted, but not make formal decisions until an issue came to him for formal decision. You had to go through, in many cases, a formal process of working through interagency groups at various levels of seniority until the decision came in front of the president. The one exception, by the way, and I should make the point, this book does not talk about national security space at all. Reagan's biggest space decision, perhaps, was the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars. And that was a top-down decision where he decided he wanted it and told his advisors. But that was very much the exception of Reagan-style decision-making. All right. So if a decision came to him with a consensus among his advisors, he would indeed usually approve it. But if it came with disagreements, he would decide. He had leadership in space were the arguments that he resonated to and all the counter arguments coming out of the budget people or the national security

people did not counterweigh his sense of this was something the country should do. I guess to a point though, right? Because ultimately what happened is, as we know, it took space station freedom or various incarnations of it kind of languished in design and planning and formulation for years before the first pieces launched in the late 90s. accompanied by resources adequate to get the program off to a vigorous start. And so there was a lot of movement around for basically the remainder of the Reagan administration. And on top of which, the Challenger accident diverted everybody's attention away from what was going on with station. And so the NASA headquarters in Washington wasn't paying attention. And the engineers down in Houston came up with their own design of the station, which was significantly different and more expensive than the one that Reagan had

approved. It took awareness of that in early 87 to get the station program back more or less on track. Howard McCurdy has written a lot about this. I think he called the station too weak of a decision. So it was a decision, but ultimately it wasn't really backed up by a lot of attention. And that's what I wanted to ask you. Was there any indication that after making this original commitment that Reagan himself was committed or interested or demonstrated oversight of this project, or did he pretty much leave it over to NASA and focus on other issues? No, no. Once it was called to his attention that the station was already way over budget and behind schedule, and that Congress was beginning, and particularly the Democrats took majority in the Senate,

and that put Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin in control of NASA's budget. Proxmire was trying to kill the station. So in 87 and 88, Reagan became a rather strong supporter of the station program vis-a-vis the Congress. Let's move on to the final topic I really wanted to discuss. Again, there's so much we could talk about in this book, but this is something so relevant to today that I think this is important to see what I, what you kind of identify as a lot of the foundation building

of what we're looking at now as the commercial space industry, or at least commercial space policy. To start with, going back again to the early 80s, where this was really kicking off, you started to see, is this accurate to say, maybe for the first time, people talking about an industry role or a private industry role in space exploration? And where did that come from at the time? Why was this happening at this point? Well, in the 70s, in the post-Apollo period, there arose various strains of a kind of people's space movement. I mean, one version of it was the Gerard O'Neill very large space colony at a

Lagrangian point. NASA was talking about space manufacturing. The term space industrialization came into widespread use. A libertarian segment of space-oriented people formed things like the L5 Society, who said the private sector can do this much better than the government, so the government should get out of the way. And those strains came together in a populist, if you wish, space movement in the early 80s, which some in the Reagan administration encouraged, coming out of that same Southern California background, not the country club elite of Reagan, but alternative ideology, libertarian ideology of Southern California. And plus, there were individuals who kind of said, I like space, I want to go build a rocket, you know, individual

or small groups of entrepreneurs that wanted to get into the space business. And all that converged on a Reagan administration that was open to these ideas because they were free market ideas and gave pretty high level access to people with the idea that there was economic, real high economic potential in space activities, and that the Reagan administration should take the policy steps to encourage that potential becoming reality. Ideologically, it was very seductive to believe in this, right? That you would have, this is a part of this broader context of Reaganism, right? That you would turn more parts of US industry over to the private sector, get government out of it, lower regulations. Again, sounds very familiar to where we are in a parts of U.S. industry over to the private sector, get government out of it, lower regulations. Again, sounds very familiar to where we are in a lot of ways.

And so you would have these people kind of come up and introduce themselves and say, hey, I could build a rocket or why don't you let us start to do this? And you actually identify some of these proto Elon Musks or proto SpaceX companies who would try to, was it the Conestoga? Conestoga was a Houston-based real estate developer named David Hanna, wanted to start a rocket building company. After an initial failure, he hired on astronaut boss during Mercury and Gemini and Apollo. Deke Slayton was the head of the company, and they built and launched a rocket called Conestega suborbital and launched it once more a few years later. It never went. The problem was they were launching things before there were payloads to use those things, that we hadn't gotten to the small satellite era. And so this was a build it and they will come and they being the market never came.

I think maybe the most important outcome of this, it seems like, was the process of trying to launch it revealed this bureaucratic, this morass of bureaucratic requirements for them to try to get a regulatory approval. I think you identified something like 11 different agencies or departments that needed to sign off on the Comisega launch. So that drove this desire to simplify the regulatory process through the Commercial Space Act that ultimately was signed into law in 1984. Can you talk about just a little bit broadly what motivated that and what they tried to do at this point to encourage commercial space? Let's start with the first failed thing. The Reagan administration came in knowing that Carter's folks had said we should privatize the Earth observation system called Landsat,

which had been advertised as having all kinds of economic benefits, was a NASA-generated system during the 70s. And they said, why wait a decade? Let's privatize it right away. And so from 1981 on, took a series of policy initiatives to turn the ownership and operation of the Landsat system over to the private sector in the face of warnings from the technical and economic community that there was no mature market for Earth observation products that could lead to a commercial enterprise. But they did it anyway, and it sailed spectacularly. At one point, they were going to even turn weather satellites over to the private sector for operation. And it was the

Congress that said, no, that's too important to our farmers in Kansas and Nebraska. And that has to be remained a government program. That was the first thing. And the second thing was, indeed, in face of the intent to stop buying expendable launch vehicles on the part of the government in favor of the shuttle, the manufacturers of the ELV said, well, maybe we can sell them on a commercial basis to launch communication satellites. And so let's see whether the government can commercialize expendable launch vehicles. And the immediate obstacle was shuttle pricing. That shuttle was being priced at a price that didn't reflect costs. Clearly, the private sector manufacturers of the ELVs would have to reflect actual costs. And they said, we can't make money as long as the shuttle is artificially priced. started a long and bitter bureaucratic conflict between Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce, and NASA over shuttle pricing. In the process, as you said, it was discovered that there were all these bureaucratic obstacles to commercializing EO, to a commercial EO via

operation. And so there was an analysis through 1983 of how to organize the government to promote commercial launch vehicles. And this was, again, a decision where there were conflicting views and Reagan made the choice. And his choice was to have the Department of Transportation and its secretary, Elizabeth Liddy Dole, be in charge of commercial ELVs, where the Department of Commerce very much wanted that role. So this was another example of a decision that Reagan made with conflicting advice. So that decision was made in late 1983. Again, the problem was with the shuttle. There was no market for commercial ELVs, so the first license wasn't issued until post-Challenger, I think in 87 or 88. The framework, which still exists today

in the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, was created in 1983 and was in place when the time for commercial launch vehicles finally came. Then there was the issue of actually commercializing what goes on in space. By now, communication satellites was already a pretty well-established business, so it was other things, other orbital activities, and in particular, the idea of zero-gravity materials processing and providing space services in orbit were the leading ideas. And so there was a whole year-and-a-half process, including a lunch of these.

There's a picture in the book of the leaders of the space industry lunching with Reagan to tell him about all these billions of dollars of economic growth that lay ahead if only the government did the right thing. That set up NASA, knowing which side its political bread was buttered on, created an office of commercial programs, which never was very effective. So all that happened with the idea that it was an appropriate government role to create a policy framework and a regulatory framework that said the government should encourage that industry started in 83 and persists till today. Yeah, I just find it a really fascinating debate at the time because you see that there's fundamental conflicts almost between what the government should be doing and whose interest it should be supporting. And it's not always clear. And the resolution of that doesn't even always clean, right? You have, should they be supporting NASA and usage of the shuttle? Should they be allowing private industry to actually compete and undermine the point of having the shuttle? shuttle. It's fascinating to kind of see this play out in the 1980s, kind of in the absence of any sort of mature market for this. It was all predicated on an ideological belief. There were a couple of ideology beliefs or there was the belief among the true believers that these economic payoffs from space were real. And so it was in the interest of the United States

to have the government facilitate their realization. People who weren't true believers of that point of view pointed out at the time, hey, that's industrial policy, and we're Republicans, we're not supposed to do that. Indeed, the policy framework was put in place. As I say, it never matched performance because of the access to space being cut off for future experimentation until the station was ready. Looking back at the policy debate and the implementation of this, particularly on the commercial side, regulatory side, do you think that was important to happen at this point in the 80s? Was it too early or was it critical to enable the industry that we're looking at today? What's the legacy of this back in the 80s? That's a good question. I haven't really

thought about it. So this is an off the top of my head answer, Casey. I think it's probably premature. It was a policy idea brought to the top levels of national decision-making before its time, not like good wine, you know, before its time. Would we have Elon Musk at all in this decade, in recent years, if we had not done this 30 years ago? I suspect yes. I think the forces that lead to the commercial sector wanting to enter space would have appeared and probably in a more mature fashion at some point in time. Ultimately, it seems somewhat benign, I suppose, that they spent, it's mainly just the cost of their time. It didn't seem to hurt anything throughout that period. And then, of course, Challenger just changed a lot of how they approached it. Reagan's policies in general, but particularly in space, is that from your book, I got this impression that particularly at the beginning in the early part of his presidency, it was very

ideologically driven. It was highly ideologically motivated, either in terms of the role of the space shuttle, the role of commercial actors. And, you know, Landsat, again, was a great story in there to see how that was pushed through because it should be true as opposed to having the practical reality of it. But ultimately, by the end, at least of his administration, it seemed that they really ended in pragmatism, some very pragmatic policies, even though they began somewhat ideologically motivated. Is that a fair way to characterize Reagan? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this town, of course, I'm sitting in Washington as we record this, has a kind of leavening effect on true believers. Reagan came to Washington with the people that had gathered around him in California in the 70s who shared his ideology.

One by one, they drifted away and were replaced by policy professionals who didn't share that same ideological convictions that had brought Reagan to office. And after all, he had a pretty tough eight years, first with the assassination and then with Iran Contra and some of the other scandals in other areas that surrounded his administration, his various illnesses during his time in the White House. So I think by the time Reagan left the White House, the pragmatists were in charge. So looking back again at his legacy now, and you mentioned that your opinion of him grew positively as you went and researched this book. You had this nice line,

paraphrasing somewhat here, but that in terms of space, he was John F. Kennedy in rhetoric, but Nixon in practice. It struck me because I could see you somewhat grapple with this in the book of calling Reagan a big supporter of space. But ultimately, I found myself asking, can you fairly describe someone as a supporter or an advocate of space if they don't actually come through with the resources necessary to succeed in it? That's a good question. And I think the answer is yes, because through his rhetoric, through his optimism, through his positive attitude, I think he surrounded the space program with a positive aura that gave it forward political momentum to keep going in the years since he left the White House. So I think his positive spin on the meaning of the space program is indeed one of his lasting legacies, even though he didn't provide, well, he didn't cut the budget. I mean, after all, he was committed to cutting the federal budget,

but the NASA budget was the same share of the overall federal total when he left as when he got there. So he didn't cut the budget. I quote, I think it's in the book, it's in my presentation of the book, his farewell address to the country and where he's talking in general, but I use it specifically. And he says, we did it. Not bad, not bad at all. And that's where I come out. Well, that's a good place to finish. So, Dr. John Logsdon, I want to thank you again for joining us. That was really fun. I look forward to having you on again to talk about all other aspects of space policy and history. And just for the listeners, I encourage you to check out his new book, Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier, available online on Amazon. Very fascinating book. So, John, thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Great conversation, Casey. Thank you very much, Casey, talking, as you heard, with John Logsdon. I was very impressed. Anything you want to add to that? Well, kind of looking ahead, I think this is a good time to remember we just finished up this last budget. We're in a situation, again, I think kind of very familiar to what we're just talking about under Reagan, where we have kind of these rhetorically strong statements about space, but the actual resources being made available to it are not matching that rhetoric. An example of that, something I'm looking forward to here, maybe not in a positive way, is that even though we just finished a budget process a month ago, the President's 2020 budget request is coming out in March. I don't anticipate that having

increases for NASA, let's say, but that's something that we will learn about in the next few weeks. Look on to planetary.org for some initial response to it, some advocacy actions, very likely, and then we will delve into that budget in the next episode here of Space Policy Edition. I suspect it is absolutely something that we will address in the next show. And something else we'll ask you to do is to recap the day of action, which as people begin to hear this program is only a couple of days away. You're going to be headed back to Capitol Hill? Absolutely. Hashtag fund NASA for anyone who wants to follow us on Monday, March 4th, as we have 100 Planetary Society members joining me in Washington,

DC from 25 different states across the union to advocate for space. It's going to be a lot of fun. We'll be all over the hill and we will let you know how that goes. And I know that a lot of people who haven't been exposed to this kind of experience may think applying fun, the word fun, to visits with members of Congress may not be appropriate, but actually, it's a blast. So I look forward to hearing how it went, Casey. Of course, we will be back on the first Friday in April with the next Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. In the meantime, if you're not already a member, planetary.org slash membership. Please become part of our society and help us continue to do and expand what we do with our advocacy and policy efforts.

Casey and I will be eternally grateful. Thanks, Casey. And again, have a great time in D.C eternally grateful. Thanks, Casey. And again, have a great time in DC next week. Thanks, Matt. We will talk in a month. I'll let you know how it goes. Casey Dreyer is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Hope you'll tune in to the weekly version of our show as well. With that, we will wish you a terrific March and beginning of spring. See you on the first Friday in April.