Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Special Planetary Radio Advocacy Report From Casey Dreier: A Good Week in Washington

Episode Date: May 13, 2014

Planetary Radio host Mat Kaplan learns why Director of Advocacy Casey Dreier is cautiously optimistic about the budget outlook for planetary science and exploration, so long as Planetary Society members and others keep making their voices heard in the nation's capitol.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Casey, there probably are a few people out there who have just turned to this longer conversation to talk about a pretty good week for planetary science advocacy who may have just come from Planetary Radio, so they heard our quick overview. And we've got a little bit more time now, five or six times as much time, to go into some detail. But even with that, we better jump into it because it's quite a story. The gist of this is if there's a theme, it's a good week to be in planetary science. It is a good week. And, you know, we should say just for space science and space exploration, too.

This is all in the context, I should say, of our good planetary week, of a good week for NASA's top-line budget actually being increased by the House of Representatives, up to $17.9 billion. Now, that's an increase of over $200 million from last year, and an increase of over $430 million from what the president proposed for 2015. So let me just jump back, because let's just set the stage again for anyone coming in, because this is a long process. And what I'm calling, we're in high budget season in the House and Senate right now. But this all goes back, this is a long process and what I'm calling, we're in high budget season in the House and Senate right now, but this all goes back. This is a yearly cycle that we go through. And this is why I never try to vacation in the spring because there's too many things

to do. So what usually happens, the whole process is about a month and a half ago, the White House releases their budget request for 2015. That's the request for the entire federal government. It's a huge document. Obviously, we're concerned with NASA's budget. So the president requests the full program, they break it down into all sorts of what NASA does. Congress then takes that request and generally tears it into a million pieces and then moves forward with their own. But honestly,

it does really inform what NASA is trying to do because it wants to fund NASA for next year, but also five years down the road. So it's saying this is where the agency is going. So it's a very important document. So what we saw this year from the budget request from the president was $1.28 billion for planetary science, which is a cut of about $65 million from last year, and NASA as a whole at about $17.4 billion, which is about a $200 million cut. So it was not a very great budget. It was a mediocre budget in a lot of ways. Congress then said, okay, the House took it, and that's why I said earlier, increased NASA's top line budget to a level higher than it has been in years. This is a big deal, very big deal. As I said earlier,

the House is not really known for willy-nilly increasing budgets of things these days. This is a very strong statement of support from the House of Representatives and something that we need to support as a space community, I firmly believe, because this is not a done deal. The Senate needs to go and do their own process of working through their proposal for NASA's budget, and then the whole federal budget needs to get voted on and own process of working through their proposal for NASA's budget. And then the whole federal budget needs to get voted on and approved by the House and Senate, merged together, come back, voted on again, and then passed into law, hopefully sometime in September.

The initial conditions we're seeing are very positive for NASA and for planetary science, where we see $1.45 billion from what the House is providing it, just shy of what the society has been arguing for the last couple years of $1.5 billion. So we're very excited about this. So it's not time to sit back on our laurels, no time to rest here. No. There's much more to come. There is a role for people listening to this program that we can obviously come back to because it hasn't the support of

our membership, but also other people who've joined the fight been very important to this? Oh, absolutely. And so a few weeks ago, right after the president's budget came out, we issued a call for everybody, our members and our supporters online and people on social media who follow us to write their representatives in Congress. We have a great form online at planetary.org.sos. Save our science. Save our science. And you fill that out. It automatically reads your address, sends it to your correct representatives,

senators, and a copy to the White House. And we've sent over 40,000 messages in the last month and a half. This is great. These are huge numbers. They notice these types of things. In addition, we've asked our members to send physical petitions. And I have online, by the time this is up on air, pictures of Bill Nye with those petitions in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. We delivered these to Congress last week. So we're getting all sorts of fronts.

And then on top of that, we build on these petitions. This is why I'm so tired all the time, because I'm traveling back and forth to Washington, D.C., and Bill comes down, and we walk into those representatives' offices, and we can look in our database and say, look, you just had 8,000 people write you about planetary science. Your constituents, by the way, care about this issue. And that makes our argument stronger, and we're building off of the support that the public is giving us on this. So if you haven't written,

you really are working, if you write, you're working into this larger plan, you're part of something very big and year round. And it's absolutely crucial that you do this, because it really does make a difference. And we hear that from every single staffer that we've talked to, your message is getting through. That's the next thing I wanted to ask you about. Talk about some of what you are hearing from these members of Congress, and in some cases, more importantly, their staffs, about the efficacy, the effectiveness of this effort. I've been told to my face from chiefs of staff, multiple chiefs of staff from various representatives' offices, who tell me, the Planetary Society, you guys are doing all the right things. And not only are we

being told that, we're seeing that, and that every year for the past three years, after the White House has tried to cut the budget for planetary science, the House and Senate have restored major portions of that, getting closer and closer to 1.5. We've been told by representatives in Congress, my goal is to get planetary to at least 1.5 in the future. And that message is getting through. A great example that I like to give is that a Planetary Society member forwarded me a response that they got from their senator's office in Massachusetts, Ed Markey. In that response, Ed Markey's office said, we fully support planetary science at NASA. We firmly believe it needs to be back at $1.5 billion a year. And we had never talked to his office.

That message is getting through because so many people in Massachusetts had written. And actually, because of that letter, we went and saw Ed Markey's senator with Bill Nye. We dropped by his office. We met his staff. We said, thank you very much for supporting planetary science. We have a great picture of Bill shaking hands with the senator. And it's just one of those things. We're building a crucial constituency for space exploration, for true planetary exploration, also within the context of just a strong, healthy, and balanced NASA. And we're doing this because

we're getting such a great response. And that's why I say to people, it's this two-pronged approach. We need the kind of insight. We need to go and meet with the offices and the staff and push, push our message. But that just doesn't matter unless the numbers are there and the numbers are getting there. And we're, that's why it's so important for everyone to write. And I might add, continue to write when we, when we make these calls, because these are very strategically placed calls. And even if you've written twice before, write twice again, they'll notice that. There's no law saying you can't continually bug your representatives' offices. In fact, the noisier you are, the more your message gets through. And we're obviously seeing that. We're going to come back to that direct appeal to all of you who are listening to this. But

take us into the nitty gritty. What are we looking at that has been restored or that we can look forward to entirely new as we head around the solar system? Yeah, well, that's the fun thing. Again, I'm just not used to smiling when I'm talking about planetary funding. And you are smiling. Yeah, well, I mean, this is just a great number what we're seeing so far. And all the subparts of planetary science that NASA does, basically everything got a plus up of something. Very important things, the Mars program saw an increase of about $32 million. That means a little extra money for the Mars 2020 rover, which is in development and really needs to have those reserves right now to make sure the program is healthy and on budget.

is healthy and on budget. That money also covers enough to continue operating the Opportunity rover on the surface of Mars, which had not been funded in the president's budget request for 2015. So the money is there if it passes senior review, which we're still waiting for, obviously. But if it passes senior review, and I personally think it will, the money is there to keep that rover going on the surface of Mars. We're also seeing $100 million in this year's budget for a Europa mission. And that builds on the previous year's $67 million and $80 million that have been given to this still non-official mission to Europa, but helps buy down what they call technical risk. They're lowering the risk.

They're doing investment in technology development and instrumentation, refining the orbit and the structure and what's going to be on the spacecraft. It's very, very exciting to see these numbers. And I feel that we're really getting to this situation where we have this generational opportunity to explore Europa. Europa has been there. We've known about this for so long. It's been so interesting and compelling, but we've just not been able to push over the edge to make this mission happen. Now we're seeing this incredibly strong support coming out of Congress for a mission to Europa, mixed with these new discoveries of the plumes coming out of the South Pole, and, again, really focused advocacy from the Planetary Society

and other scientific organizations, representing and highlighting the public's just amazing amount of support and interest in this compelling mission. Oh, you bet. Yeah. In fact, I just came from the Space Fest event that we'll be featuring on an upcoming Planetary Radio episode, and I had several people on the floor, just attendees, talk to me about, so what are you guys doing for Europa mission?

And I said, well, you know, we're working on it. We're working, and this is why, again, I think this kind of confluence of separate events has never really quite come together like this before, and I believe that we're just so close. And the missing piece is what they call the new start, the administration officially requesting this mission in, at this point, the 2016 budget. And we're working on NASA, and NASA itself has really been coming around to this mission. We saw that in the initial request this year, which they wanted $15 million to study lower-cost concepts. But just that amount, they put that line in, that's a big deal.

NASA internally, we know, is really considering this mission. There's a lot of support internally within NASA for this mission. Just need to keep the pressure up. And I feel like we're very close to making this mission a reality, which would just be fantastic. We should mention that we are talking about the negotiations going on now with Congress and NASA and others for the 2015 budget. That's correct. The one that begins in October of this year, 2014. Yes. Yeah, that's one of the delightful things that I always have to – it complicates things.

Because, yes, it's the fiscal year which is three months offset early from the actual years of things. The federal fiscal year. The federal fiscal year, yeah, because other companies have different fiscal years. Federal fiscal year starts October 1st. I don't know if people noticed, but last year the government didn't get their stuff together in time for the fiscal year, and the government shut down. This year we have a deal.

The Congress has a deal on the total amount of what they call discretionary spending, anything that's not mandated by law. So discretionary spending is basically everything you think of as the federal government plus the defense department. And they have a deal on that cap. So we're hoping that this means that we can actually have a budget in place before October 1st of this year. And the House is really moving along on this. The Senate is moving along. They're going to have their details out within the next few weeks. And, you know, things are looking pretty good so far. And so we're hoping this will come through

and we'll have a budget in place that really gives NASA the money it needs when it should have it by the end of the year. So back to the planetary science outlook, there are a few missions that people may be wondering about that we haven't brought up yet, like Cassini, which is, it's not in immediate jeopardy, right? Now, Cassini can go until 2017. It has the fuel to continue orbiting Saturn, and they have this kind of what they call proximal mission. They're actually holding a contest to try to think of a great name for this end of mission for Cassini. We actually saw very good news in the president's budget that Congress is going to fully support, which is Cassini is going to now be funded through the next four years, three years.

So Cassini, at the the moment seems to be safe. The money is there to keep it operational. That's all great news. Messenger is going to be fully funded through its end of life in 2015, I believe, when it runs out of fuel. And then we also have now the big question was lunar reconnaissance orbiter and opportunity. And the budget is definitely, in the House version, robust enough to continue operations of both of those. Let's quickly review a few things which may encompass pieces of planetary science, but go beyond that and find out how they fared in this

plan from the House. Once again, this is not an approved budget yet. I'm thinking of, for example, commercial space development. So commercial space is one of the less positive areas. It's better, but it's not great. So they're giving, in the high 700 millions, I forget, I don't have that number right in front of me, which is about 60 million or so less than the White House had requested, enough, what the House says, to support one partner to develop a commercial crew. NASA really wants to have two to maintain competition.

And right now there are three. There are two and a half. Two and a half. Yeah. There's SpaceX, obviously. Boeing has one in the running. And then Sierra Nevada with their Dream Chaser kind of shuttle-like mini shuttle. Yeah.

And they're in competition right now to select down to two to continue the additional development. The money for this program, that's always been a battle with Congress is the administration has always wanted to fund this program at about a billion a year. Congress has given them significantly less than that over the last years. The House version of this would be the highest that the House has ever funded commercial crew. the highest that the House has ever funded commercial crew. The Senate, my gut tells me that the Senate's going to come in at a higher number on commercial crew because of this whole issue, as we talked about last time with the Ukraine and Russia and Crimea. Right now, obviously, Russian rockets launch U.S. astronauts. If political issues keep deteriorating, we don't have another way to launch into space. The NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden, has said very vocally that we need the commercial crew program to launch American astronauts from American soil. And that's the quickest way to get there. And honestly, that's true. There is no other way. SLS is not an option really to launch to low Earth orbit. That's the space launch system, the really big rocket that's under development. Yeah, it's far too powerful, essentially.

And just not, we don't really, it hadn't really been planned to dock with the space station. So better number from the House. I personally feel that we really do need to retain competition. So it'll be interesting to see what the Senate comes through with that. How about SOFIA, that big infrared telescope that's in the side of 747 that Bill Nye and I climbed around once. Yeah, so SOFIA and the president's budget had been absolutely zeroed out in 2015. They essentially canceled this mission completely, strangely, the year after it hit full operations finally. So SOFIA has just had an amazingly troubled history.

It was a troubled program, but they do seem to be getting good science now. They're getting science now because they're able to do science now. And actually, strangely, I believe we're in a phase of recommissioning the spacecraft as we speak. The aircraft. The aircraft. Yes, excuse me. Yeah, I'm used to talking about space. So the problem with SOFIA is that it's a surprisingly expensive telescope to manage.

We're talking about, in the past budget, it's about $85 million a year. That puts it roughly as much as it costs to operate the Hubble Space Telescope. And that's because you need to kind of maintain a standing army of mechanics and pilots, plus you need to fuel and fly a 747 all across the globe. And it's just, that makes it this big juicy target in the budget to cut out for other priorities. And that's essentially what the White House did. Now, the House has proposed giving $70 million back to the SOFIA mission for next year. I don't know how much you can do with $70 million. Does that mean you can maintain and fly but not do science?

I'm not sure. But it's not what they have needed in the past to do a full science program with SOFIA. But it's also enough to keep it operational to some degree. So that's what the House has done. Again, that'll be interesting to see where the Senate comes in on this mission. All right, so what else have we missed? We went by SLS, Space Launch System, pretty quickly, and Orion, that big new capsule that's under development. Those both get significant

increases in the house budget, which is pretty consistent, actually, with previous years. I believe we add a little over $200 million to Space Launch System to get about $1.6 billion a year. I think about $47 million to Orion, up to $1.1-ish billion a year. Those are both obviously major, major programs. They have very, very strong supporters in Congress. I imagine we'll probably see something similar to those numbers by the time all is said and done. We're also looking into details that we should mention, back to planetary, if I may, is the low-cost Discovery program saw a significant increase. Discovery is a competed class mission for NASA.

Competed means that NASA puts up this money every couple of years, and the scientific community can basically propose a mission that uses no more than $450 million. That does not include the cost to launch it. Messenger was a Discovery-class mission. GRAIL to the moon to study the gravity surface of the moon. Then also Dawn going to Ceres next year is a Discovery mission. So Discovery is very important. The original idea with Discovery is that they're so cheap and small that you do two every two years was the original frequency of these.

Now we're down to one every 56 months approximately, which was just a horrible, horrible pace to do. So this budget actually puts about $30 million to start working on the next mission. That means we have one coming up in 2015. They're going to select a new one. And Congress wants them to get back to a frequency of one every 24 months, which is actually the recommended frequency in the National Academy's what they call decadal survey for planetary science, the big kind of official consensus view of the planetary science community of what to do in the next 10 years in solar system exploration. So that's great.

Actually, small, completed missions generally tend to stay within their cost caps. They do great science, and they also keep industry and university partners engaged really frequently. So that's a really great thing that we're seeing in planetary science. Anything else that we should bring up before we draw this to a close? There are two things that I want to mention. One is the fact that the House

increased NASA's top-line budget is something that we can't dismiss. That's a very important event that really changes the conversations we have. Because previously we've, we've gone and asked for more funding for planetary science and they always inevitably say, where is it going to come out of? Where is it going to come? And we don't want to, we don't want to raid another science program. We don't want to raid human space flight or technology. We want the pie to grow bigger. You know, that's a hard sell to people these days in Congress.

But here, Congress made the pie bigger. They did. And suddenly, all science grew up a few hundred million dollars for all of NASA science. No one had to suffer for planetary to get up to its goal number. A lot of people like to be angry at Congress these days. And there's a lot of frustrating things. A lot of people like to be angry at Congress these days, and there's a lot of frustrating things. But in this area for NASA, the subcommittee chairman, Frank Wolf, really did a great job getting NASA up to a healthier number.

And we need to appreciate that and really hope that the Senate sees that. And I know that Barbara Mikulski, who's responsible for that subcommittee in the Senate, has wanted to increase NASA's budget. And so hopefully this gives them some bipartisan political cover to do so. That's just a great thing that we all need to recognize. And again, great work on that subcommittee by Adam Schiff, who covers parts of California, and also John Culberson, who's in Texas and who honestly just really wants a mission to Europa. He's a very, very strong space exploration supporter.

The other thing that I should mention, that this is why you join the Planetary Society, if I can just like toss that in. You know, we have more than 40,000 members. We're growing. We're engaging our members in this like never before. We're getting people noisy and educated and empowered and really to say, look, this is your space agency. You have a say in what happens. And if they try to cut some of the best-performing parts of NASA, like planetary exploration, you have the right to try to change that. And we're building this year-round program

that we've never really quite attempted before. We're not just involved once a year after the budget comes out. We're talking to people within NASA. We're talking to Congress at downtimes and uptimes within the budget. We're submitting testimony. We're writing white papers. We're pushing all these different levers to try to get the type of space agency that we all want to see, which is a healthy, balanced, active NASA.

And we're really seeing the results of that. And we're coordinating with scientific community, and we're coordinating with engineering community. That's really exciting. And to everyone listening, if you haven't done a little piece of that, if you haven't written your representatives, or if you've written, you haven't called them, try doing that. That really does make a difference. And we're really seeing the effects of that. And then the other programmatic thing that I need to mention is that it costs money to do that. And we're a nonprofit organization. We depend on the generosity of our members and other donors

to make sure that we can really influence the parts of the space program we want to see. And so the Society set out a goal this year of $85,000 to raise for our advocacy efforts. And we have a stretch goal of $125,000. We just crossed $85,000 the other day. I'm very happy about that. And our stretch goal, if we can get to $125,000, we want to put a big full-page ad in the Washington Post or something similar to promote this mission to Europa

and a balanced planetary program. Not many people can do that kind of a thing, but we can when we all work together. And so planetary.org slash SOS tells you how to donate if you can, and if you can't donate or can't afford it, just participating and writing your representatives, being that kind of noisy, educated, empowered

space advocate is what we need to develop, and telling your friends about it. So those are the two pitches that I have for everybody. And I love how this takes the Planetary Society right back to its roots, because this is really why this organization came into existence over 30 years ago. Our three founders saw a need for an outside voice, the voice of people who care about

planetary science, was needed in Washington, needed to be heard, and it was heard, and it's being heard again. Casey, thank you for everything that you're doing, and will continue to do to lead this battle along with Bill Nye, our CEO. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me on. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Advocacy for the Planetary Society, and he will check in with us again one more time. You can read more about this and learn how to get involved at planetary.org slash SOS. That's Save Our Science.