This Week in Space 164 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Coming up on this Week in Space is the space bromance dead between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Also, iSpace fails to stick its landing on the moon and the NASA budget request is out. And it is awful, and Casey Dreyer from the Planetary Society is going to explain it all. Tune in.

00:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tweet. This is this Week in Space, episode number 164, recorded on June 6, 2025. Goodbye NASA. Hello and welcome to another edition of this Week in Space, the Goodbye NASA edition. There's a question mark after NASA. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Bad Astro Magazine, and I'm joined by my fellow distressed NASA observer, tarek Malik, editor-in-chief at Spacecom. Hello, my friend. Hey, rod.

00:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Slow week. Huh, Slow week. Yeah, it was a real snoozer.

00:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Good God.

00:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's it Show over no space news this week.

01:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
In a few minutes, we will be joined by Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, who has some thoughts on these recent happenings and has had some thoughts for quite some time, and they're good ones, so we're looking forward to that. Before we start I know you haven't forgotten please don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like and subscribe to our podcast, because we're counting on you, and if you're here, you probably already have, but if you haven't, shame on you, you're going to the wood house like shame, puppy shame.

01:34
And now a space joke from daniel hart and I had to find one that was neutral this week, because I just couldn't bear to do another nasa basher. Hey tarik. Yes, rod, do you know what's making waves across the earth and space news?

01:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
um, I don't, is it? Gravity waves, gravitation, the moon? Oh, I get it, I get it.

01:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's a tied joke, it's a tied joke, I get it it may be tied for our worst joke now.

02:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know, is it with your sense of humor? It ebbs and it flows. My, my friend, that's another tight joke you said.

02:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I've heard that some people want to defund us when it's joke time on this show. But you can help Send us your best work or most worst or most of different space joke at twist at twittv. Until then we're gonna just carry on. So you know, I almost don't want to touch it with a finger, but let's do some headlines, yeah.

02:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Headline news. Oh, I was early.

02:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, according to some of our loyal listeners, if you come in early, it might actually be on time. So you're probably right in sync, gosh. The bromance is over. Yeah, musk and Trump have experienced a rapid, unscheduled dis-a-friendship Dis-a-friendship. So where does one begin? Who? Could have predicted it, oh yeah.

02:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Who saw this coming Right.

03:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, amongst all the other, trauma of the last few weeks, trump and musk have a a break in their bromance, which results in trump saying and correct me if I get the order wrong, hey, if we really want to save money, we just cancel all the expensive contracts with elon musk and his dumb companies. I don't know why biden didn't do it, because everything is Biden's fault, with Musk saying fine, I will decommission dragon and parenthetically although he didn't say it you could walk to your damn space station and then then throw a little more dirt onto it. Musk said hey wonder why you're not seeing the Jeffrey Epstein files. It's cuz Trump's in it. Yeah, what are you doing? Is a turn man. After that, actually, trump kind of took the high road, which surprised me well, so it actually started early.

03:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So this, by the way, we're recording this on a Friday and all of this happened, like within the space of like four hours like yesterday, like on Thursday it was.

04:04
It was like I was sitting there watching japan land on the moon, which we're going to talk about in a bit, and meanwhile, and meanwhile, like this whole, uh, like the, the richest man in the world and I guess you could say the most powerful man in the world, uh, the president, uh are going at it on their different social media things. And it started actually in a press conference with German Chancellor Rod, where there were questions and Trump said that he was very disappointed in Elon Musk because Elon Musk had seen his big beautiful budget bill, which, of course, musk has been criticizing all week long since he left government on Saturday Saturday, it was like less than a week man and Elon said it was false, called him out right away and said that Trump was ungrateful because it was him that got it, was Musk that got Trump elected. And then that's where it all just kind of devolved in spectacular form, uh, uh, in front of like the entire, like twitter verse and and like internet world well and honest to god.

05:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean, it's not intended to be a politically charged statement, but it was a bit like watching a couple toddlers throw oatmeal at each other. You know it's like nah, nah, you're a stinky pants. No, you're a stinky pants, two times over.

05:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
A lot of people thought it was great, Like a lot of people were like look at how fantastic this is. Look, they're finally fighting.

05:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We all were hoping, yeah, but I mean it's still not good for the Republic, oh my gosh, it's just like.

05:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is the face we've chosen to show to the world about how we work, but it raises a lot of questions, because I was just talking about it with the spacecom team today and where we ended up last night.

05:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that must have been an interesting pre-press conference you guys had.

05:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh my gosh.

05:56
Well, so consider the purpose of the commercial crew program that led SpaceX to develop Dragon for NASA's crew transfer.

06:05
It was NASA, in the wake of the Columbia accident, realizing that they had only one assured way to get to space.

06:13
That was the Russian Soyuz. And even then that wasn't very assured, and so they would like to have their own US independent access to space, not just one, but two vehicles. So that's where Boeing came in, and, and that's why you know, we would never be dependent on anyone again for anything, because we would have our own way to go and cut forward five years, which is, you know, we actually just hit the five-year anniversary of SpaceX's first crewed flight with Dragon, the Demo-2 flight, and SpaceX is right now NASA's only US independent access to space, because Boeing is off back trying to recover from the Starliner flight and get ready for, I guess, the next one, which is sometime next year, and we're in the same place where he could take his toys and go home. And then what do we have, right? So we don't have an Orion that we can launch whenever. So it was a very big illustrative issue that we're kind of back in the same issue where we were way before.

07:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and my two favorites from today Trump I'm not even thinking about Elon Musk and then putting up for sale the red Tesla he bought that's right.

07:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
In March he just bought that car. So yeah, you think it has a. You think it has a bumper sticker on it that says I bought. I bought this Tesla before Elon went crazy. What does Elon do with the key to the White House that that Trump gave him last week?

07:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't know't know, drop it from orbit, perhaps? No, actually I think you should weld it to the side. If it's metal, you should weld it the side of starship and use it for a re-entry test all right um, yeah so I don't think the story's over.

07:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Everyone keep an eye on it, because everyone's mad about that bill, that the budget bill, which we're going to talk about in a bit too, I think so.

08:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Hmm, ispace strikes out again yeah, this is disappointing, so you know we're going to talk about in a bit too. I think I-Space strikes out again.

08:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, this is disappointing.

08:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you know we're watching this. I thought they put together a pretty good media show for the landing. This is the Japanese company who's trying to land a private lander on the moon.

08:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Not to be confused with China's I-Space. They both spell them the same.

08:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, except China has a capital S, but yeah, oh, there you go. And except the china says a capital s, but yeah, oh, there you go. And um, this was a company that started as a group that entered the google lunar x prize competition that's right which went along until 2018, wasn't able to give an award because nobody could make it. Oops, a little hard and we thought and there went 30 million bucks. But a handful of companies, including japanese ispace, continued on and this was their second attempt and doggone it same thing twice, right?

08:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, same same but different. I guess I'm not trying to make a joke there. It is very disappointing. And they were very upset but Resilient, which is kind of the name of their spacecraft.

09:01
I-space in Japan had built their second Hokuto-R Moon lander and they tried to land one of them in April of 2023, and they failed during the descent because of issues with the laser range finder, the thing that says how far the ground is to the spacecraft and so they thought that they had learned from them and incorporated fixes in this vehicle. And also yesterday, when all this stuff with Elon Musk and Trump was going down, they were trying to land in Mare, pardon me, mare Frigoris, in the far north of the moon, the cold sea yeah, the sea of cold, that's right. And they got down to about 192 meters during their final breaking burn when something happened. They believe that either there was a lag in the data from the laser rangefinder Again the thing that's telling them how high they are and because of that lag, the spacecraft was going faster than they thought it was going, and then it just augured in and hard landed right, which means crashed in the surface of the moon, or the space draft was going faster than they thought and that caused the rangefinder to lag. They don't know which came first in that and they're trying to figure it all out. And they hope to figure it all out fairly soon because they want to follow this up in 2027 with not one but two missions using a new type of lander called Apex One, which is actually twice the size of these ones and much more capable.

10:32
Meanwhile, lost on this flight was a small rover for the European Space Agency called Tenacious. It had a shovel on it to scoop up lunar regolith in a demonstration for NASA. So they probably won't get that eclipse money because they lost the spacecraft and there's an investigation underway to really try to pinpoint from the final telemetry what went wrong, how to avoid it on these future missions and how to proceed. But to your point about them being sad, the CEO of the company said very specifically when asked the question that it was not a time for crying. They actually have to buckle down and figure out what happened, because they want to succeed and they are committed, if not for just themselves, for the 80,000 investors and supporters that have helped make the mission possible 80,000. Wow, that's what they said.

11:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, that's almost a quarter of the people that were, uh, boosting for Apollo back in the day. Okay, let's go to a quick break and we'll be right back. So Jammer B has weighed in with an interesting thought. He said can't Trump just nationalize SpaceX? And I suppose he probably could, but I can't imagine Musk not sabotaging it if that happened.

11:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Steve Bannon wrote last night while all of this was going on. Steve Bannon right that's the guy, right the old advisor that they should see SpaceX immediately to secure the space thing.

11:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's like it just got, and then, of course, elon backed off. They'd get to Hawthorne and find an empty hangar, right.

12:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't touch on this. But at the end of the day, elon said yeah, yeah, everyone calling for cooler heads. They're right, we won't decommission SpaceX. You know? It's like I don't know you know, so this is a piece I thought was kind of interesting.

12:29 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
It's not a big news item, but the launch act yeah, I'd like you to talk about this because you seem more familiar with it.

12:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I just learned about this, about like a half an hour before you did so. Senators john cornyn, ben ray lujan I don't know if I'm saying that right rick scott and mark kelly of arizona introduced a bill that would streamline licensing processes for commercial space companies, opening the way to a boom and rocket launches. Get it Boom and rocket launches.

12:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, let's hope it's the good kind and not like the bad kind.

12:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you know, people in the industry, especially launch providers, have been complaining a lot about the regulation of red tape that they have to go through Loudest. Amongst them SpaceX, although you know, given what they did at Boca Chica, which is going, they're saying, yeah, we're just going to launch little Falcon 9s here. Oh wait, we're not going to say it, but we're going to launch Starship and oh wait, by the way, it blows up with the power of a moderate yield nuclear warhead. And oh wait, by the way, by the way. By the way, so I can understand why people they're a little disgruntled. Uh, on the other hand, we support what elon's doing there from a distance, because it's easy for us to say so, because we're not living there with the smells and the bangs and the crowds and all that. But it's important work. You know, I just you kind of wonder why they couldn't find like a really crappy little island off the coast of florida and say, okay, we're going to, we'll just buy the whole thing. But they didn't. So they're in South Texas.

13:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think it's really go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

13:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So what? I don't know whether this would have any. I don't think this would have anything to do with the other problems they have, like with fish and wildlife, which are some of the hangups, but it would streamline, presumably, faa clearance, which has been an ongoing problem for them.

14:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, it's interesting because actually the Senator, john Cornyn, also put out a blast actually right before we started taping. That was kind of picking out the big beautiful bill and like saying how great it was for space exploration, which was also kind of weird. So this seems to be like a dueling narrative that's's going on. Uh for this, because at the same time are we going to talk about the, the, the senate reconciliation bill that ted cruz put out oh yeah, well, we should.

14:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I didn't put it in here, but we absolutely should because, you know, finally some pushback and I suspect it'll be gentle, semi-apologetic pushback, but pushback it is because there's districts that lose a lot, for instance, if SLS gets canceled, when they're suggesting, which is after the first moon landing, whenever that put together, at least to start discussing as an answer back to the House Big Beautiful Bill that includes the NASA budget request that would gut the science, which is kind of what we're going to be talking to Casey about today.

15:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And that reconciliation bill restores funding for Space Launch System. Increases NASA's budget by $10 billion. Includes funding for Artemis 4 and Artemis 5, the missions that were canceled in the Trump NASA budget request.

15:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
The missions were canceled, but the use of SLS.

15:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, that's right. The use of SLS pardon me was canceled.

15:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Includes the Lunar Gateway, the space station which was canceled, and other things. And you know, excuse me, but I'm not sure I know of anybody at the moment other than Ted Cruz that might be crying over the loss of Lunar Gateway. I mean, obviously, the contractors, but it's always been a bit of a force fit. Yeah, lunar program. You know they've built a rationale for it which to some extent, was built around the fact that the initial upper stage for the sls is too weak to get into a proper lunar orbit. And, oh well, we'll build this station and we got parts left over and blah, blah, blah, blah.

16:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Um, you know, it's a bit of a little bit of a square space station into a round hole and it does give all the flight controllers that work on the space station a place to go after the space station is retired well, something to do, I'm sure that's part of it, right, so maybe not all of it so um, all right.

16:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, let's move on to the a. It's the 60th anniversary of the first us spacewalk, which was ed white spacewalk in history, astronaut Ed White, who sadly died in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. In 1965, during the flight of Gemini 4, was it 4,? Yeah, I think that's what we have here.

16:54
Gemini 4, commanded by Jim McDivitt, opened his hatch in that very small space capsule, stood up and drifted out. He had a little nitrogen powered maneuvering hand gun jet and, uh, it didn't. It didn't work very well, but he was out there for I think 15, 20 minutes, something like that, um, and just having the time of his life. And ed was a big athletic guy, you know. So getting out of that capsule was a treat because he had actually to pass astronaut qualification, had spent hours the night before jumping up and down to compress his spine because he was too tall for.

17:32
Gemini. But anyway, he got out, had a great time and towards the end of it Chris Kraft, who was the head of flight control, was getting a little agitated and said, okay, okay, tell him to get back in. And it took them another, I think eight minutes, ten minutes to get him back in. They kept calling up the orders. Uh, for the first couple of times I don't think mcdivitt was receiving him. Then he was and he said, hey, ed, it's time to get back in. And he's like huh, I can't hear you what I mean, I'm in a tunnel I'm in a tunnel, yeah, and then in a tunnel, yeah.

18:04
And then finally he said this is the saddest day of my life. So he was clearly digging it. He was floating out the end of a long tether which both kept him attached and carried electricity and air to his Gemini suit. Now the big question about this? Of course, amongst space aficionados one of the big questions has been if the suit ballooned up too much, as happened with the Soviets and their earlier attempt.

18:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
With Alexei Leonov.

18:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and he had trouble getting back in the capsule. Had that happened with Ed White, what Leonov did was release some air from his suit, which is a very dangerous thing to do, but it worked. But had it happened to White and the gemini being as small as it was, what do you do? And so the story has been circulated for decades about. Well, they had a pair of uh snippers stowed away and mcdivitt's instructions were to snip the the line and leave ed. Wow, he had to run his own and close the capsule and come home. I've read a lot of accounts of this. I've still seen nothing definitive. You know, this is a bit like the kennedy assassination conspiracy theories I see nothing definitive one way or the other, absolutely. But I tend to fall on the side of probably not. But it's an interesting story because the historian yeah, well, quote unquote.

19:27
But it would suck if you were the guy in the driver's seat and you can't get the passenger back in and it's like, well, I guess we'll just orbit until we re-enter as a unit I got a question for you about jim mcdivitt uh.

19:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Based on the fact that the gemini hatch was open and therefore the entire capsule was exposed to space Right, was Jim classified as the second American spacewalker, even though he never left the capsule Because it's all vacuum inside and that's what the SpaceX. Polaris Dawn. People were talking about.

19:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, don't get me started on who's an astronaut. I mean, they were definitely astronauts.

20:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're talking about who's a space walker. Does it count as a space walk if you?

20:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
never leave. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Okay, I'm a space walker now. Yeah, it's kind of like the who's an astronaut Because you held your breath. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, sorry, that was a very bad thing for people on audio. Only let's move on. I don't get it either. Let's move on because I don't want to get hung up on who or what is an astronaut. You have an item here about Marc Garneau.

20:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should buy it no-transcript on. To talk about you talking to jerry griffin.

20:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, he was at, uh, uh, he was at neef, oh okay I spent the weekend with him, yeah, um, yeah, it's an, and he he, among many others at nasa, have been very kind about this conversation. An astronaut, somebody flies to space. What space? Well, anything higher than 60 miles. Wait, no, 50 miles. No, are you taking the international definition, or the us air force definition, or nasa's definition? Yada, yada, yada. It goes on at dinner the debate was saying, just be saying.

21:27
Astronauts when I was growing up were heroic people who trained hard, tended to come from the military, knew how to be pilots, had survival training, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know that's really I had missile people.

21:42
Well, if you remember no, you wouldn't. But when I was a kid nobody else in the room will remember this and I was a kid, on comic books they used to have a picture of this big, muscular guy flexing his arm, charles atlas, saying I'll make you astronaut tough in just six weeks. So we all set away for his little booklet and it told you to attach a string to a chair and yank on it and stuff.

22:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
To become astronaut tough didn't work in my case, but that was kind of the the image we had then it was all male all white not the right way to do it, but yeah let's slot that in for an episode, because we had a good debate at that dinner about contributions to society and the body of science. That is all as as as merits and I think that we could we could easily pack an hour or more into that.

22:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and we're giving an award at the ISDC to two researchers, one of whom flew on a Virgin galactic flight and took an experiment up. Now, it's always a little weird to read about these experiments because it's like what kind of zero-g experiment can you do in six minutes? But it was a biology, a plant biology experiment, where he took a number of vials loaded in his suit, almost like one of those alchemists in tolkien land who you know throws little bottles of stuff, and during the flight he activated them and apparently that's actually enough time for them to do whatever kind of germination or what they were researching to do so.

23:06
It was a valid experiment, so I call him an astronaut. But anyway, let's talk about this astronaut who died in 76.

23:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, canada's first astronaut, mark Garneau, has died, and you know, the first astronaut for any country is always someone to celebrate, and Mark Garneau is no exception by far.

23:30
I mean, he was a career astronaut for CSA, he went on to be a foreign minister, but he died this week at age 76 after an illness, which is quite sad.

23:40
But he flew in 1984 on his first flight on the Space Shuttle Challenger as, I believe, a mission specialist, if memory serves, measuring atmospheric pollution and water vapor, according to the New York Times here. And then he flew two more times on Endeavor, and I think they were both in 96 and 2000, both on Endeavor. And then he ended up leaving the Canadian Space Agency in 2001 before shifting into politics for the country, which is actually something that other Canadian astronauts have done too. And we thought actually it was one of our listeners here that reminded us that he had passed and we just thought we would take a minute just to recognize Garneau's contributions not just to Canadian spaceflight but spaceflight as a whole and international cooperation as well, because without the Canadian Space Agency, much of what NASA and other partners have done in space would have been much more difficult, because they helped build the literal tools that then went on to build the space station and used on many space shuttle flights too, with the original Canadarm.

24:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's right. It wouldn't have had arms if not for them, and Ed Garneau was featured in probably the best film ever made about the shuttle. In my opinion, the Dream is Alive. Yes which was an early IMAX uh show that was released just before the Challenger explosion, so it was very it was Walter Cronkite narrating very optimistic, oh, routine access to space. How hard could it be? So it's a little unrealistic that way, but visually if you get to see that in IMAX anywhere and it doesn't play very often anymore- and his autobiography.

25:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, just came out last year, so that first launch is a real tearjerker. No, oh, I apologize, I did not mean to step on you there it's okay, I'm used to being stepped on. You can't scare me um but yeah, his, his autobiography a most extraordinary ride, space politics and the pursuit of the canadian dream.

25:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you can learn more about him there, okay let's go to a break and we'll be right back. And we are back with Casey Dreyer, who is the Chief of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. So, casey, before we go anywhere, and great to meet you. I've been following you for years, but I don't think we've met face to face. What is a Chief of Space Policy and what do you do?

26:05 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
I'm the guy who has to figure out how to get all of our space policy goals done or at least advanced at the society. To get all of our space policy goals done or at least advanced at the society. So that means the search for life, supporting planetary defense, things like promoting space science and exploration. I do a lot of the strategy. I'm the data guy too, so I do all the budgets, analyses and try to figure out why things work the way they do. And then I work with colleagues who are based in Washington DC to execute on that plan, so try to push that forward. So really trying to carry forward the goals of the Planetary Society and its members in a strategic and functional way in the guise of a nonprofit right. So all we have really working for us are our words, our members, our ability to persuade, and so, yeah, it definitely keeps me busy.

26:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and I'll say from the position of a person who's moderately highly placed in the National Space Society we admire your work and envy your budget.

26:57 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Well, thank you, Sorry go ahead Really quickly.

26:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should probably ask Casey just to give our listeners like a very quick idea of what the Planetary Society is. And then, casey, I usually ask people how they got involved in space. And then Casey, I usually ask people how they got involved in space. So if you've got like a little bit of a window into where your interest got into that and for Planetary Society to give us a primer, that'd be great.

27:17 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Certainly so. Planetary Society. For those unfamiliar, it's a nonprofit organization founded by Carl Sagan back in 1980. Since 2011, I believe Bill Nye science guy, Earth Well, Science guy has been the CEO. I've worked there since 2012 and we are a public membership organization. That means pretty much anyone in the world can be a member of the planetary society and that keeps us independent.

27:42
So we don't take government money, we don't represent professional interests. We don't take big aerospace money. We are, in a sense, that try to be the public representation of space in this arena, and advocacy and policy is one of the ways in which we do that. We are, in a sense, try to be the public representation of space in this arena, and advocacy and policy is one of the ways in which we do that. We do a lot of outreach, education. We do projects. A few years ago we designed, built, funded and launched the only, I believe, only successfully crowdsourced satellite, LightSail 2, which demonstrated solar sailing in a CubeSat. So we all do a variety of types of things.

28:11
I think it's a pretty fun and unique organization to be a part of and we really believe in the scientific side of exploration. So scientifically driven exploration that expands, not just finds and does exciting things, but really pursues that kind of Sagan-esque vision of a enlightened and kind of emotive feeling, right, Almost a spiritual aspect of going and discovering something bigger than yourself. And that's been, I think, a really important perspective to present at this point in time in space history. You want my story?

28:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm just curious how you got involved in space. Yeah.

28:51 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
I mean, I was certainly the kind of kid who would like scribble. And when I was three years old and call things a rocket, and my parents say they never knew how I even learned that word, uh, but I never. I thought I want to be a scientist until I tried to do science in college. I have an undergraduate degree in science, but I realized that was really hard.

29:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Um, he's one of us, one of us, one of us. So One of us, one of us.

29:11 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
So I did the next best thing and I married a professional scientist and I got involved on some of the Mars missions. I went and saw my first launch, the Curiosity rover in 2011. And you know, you know what that's like. I mean, tariq, I've seen you, we've met there. But for anyone who hasn't been to a launch, right, you're at Kennedy Space Center. You're surrounded by rockets, this hallowed ground of all these. You know past history of spaceflight exploration highlights and it almost again it feels like hallowed ground and all of these old feelings as a kid started coming back. It's like, oh my gosh, this is like the most amazing stuff.

29:49
And then I saw the rocket launch and nothing prepared me for it. Right, for all of you who've seen it in person, compared to what it's like on TV, where you have the state, nasa now saying, all right, now we have left off on successful mission, going to go. You know they always are so like monotone and. But you're there in the crowd and I was sitting with all the scientists and engineers on this mission and you could feel, as we're counting down, it wasn't just the countdown, the tension was rising right, inversely proportional to how close we were to zero in terms of this countdown and so sick in the air. And then suddenly it launched and it just like shoots up right off the ground.

30:25
This is an Atlas five, uh, uh, five four one. So it had a lot of these solids that really pushed it off the ground fast and the whole crowd just lost their mind, completely lost All that stress and tension, just exploded out of the crowd and it just it was the you know very close again. It's like to a spiritual experience. You have this transformative moment where you just feel something so powerful and profound and all of that what to to like, go to this little red dot in the sky, what's going on there? And that was that night. After a couple of tequilas, I was like I'm, I need to work for the planetary, I want to do something for the planetary society, and that kind of started my journey to that.

31:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, very different story. Kudos on having a much smarter in the TARC and I did. Marrying a Mars scientist or a space scientist is smart. I wish I had thought of that.

31:18 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Yeah, she gets to do all the hard work, right?

31:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, you get to tag along for the good times. I've seen a couple of shuttle launches, which were also big and noisy, and then I took my kid when he was about eight to see a shuttle launch. We waited and waited and we literally sat in Kissimmee for a week waiting for this thing or Titusville to take off and it just wasn't happening. So instead I took him to the beach in Titusville that kind of curves down closer to Kennedy for an Atlas launch, and you know it's a smaller rocket right with much smaller solids. I thought, well, you know it, it's a smaller rocket right with much smaller solids. I thought, well, you know, it'll be kind of a pale comparison to the shuttle, but that's okay, at least you'll see a launch. I think it might have been because it was a cloudy day, because that changes the acoustics, but it was so loud he was terrified.

32:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It was Because the sound bounces off the bottom of the class.

32:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm looking at my kid feeling bad for him, thinking I should comfort him. But I was enjoying the launch too much, so I just said suck it up kid.

32:14 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Um well, I mean it's an overwhelming, it's a physical experience. I think this is like why you get so many people who watch, who you kind of make these pilgrimages to starbase or or, uh, spacex, and you know you have these almost like shantytown encampments now that are watching these daily launches, and it's just a really physical aspect, it's the most physical aspect of it and it's overwhelming, right, that sound hits you and it resonates in your chest and you think it can't get any louder. And then it does and you realize how much work the cameras are doing with a dynamic range adjustment on the flame coming out of the back of the rocket. In person, you almost can't look at it. Coming out of the back of the rocket in person, you just you almost can't look at it.

32:54
And I think that visceral experience is such an important aspect of balancing out with what has generally is such an abstract experience because I mean, you know, for the most part one does not go with the rocket into space and so that is your physical connection to the entire endeavor is watching something launch, something that goes and it's maybe and maybe it's something else that like really deep about being an some evolved animal on earth with some intuitive sense of you know, newtonian physics, right Things. You know we can all anticipate arcs and catching things in the air, but to see something that goes up and then doesn't come back, right, that's a really deep, profound level it's like, and then doesn't come back, right that's a really deep profound levels like and that doesn't.

33:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's not supposed to happen and to a similar extent like if you, I was gonna say to a similar extent if you see like the space station overhead, if you're like one of the spotters, you know people see it and they're like, oh, pretty dot. And then no, you think there's seven people living in that dot right now. Yeah, and then some people I might have met, that kind of thing.

33:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And I'm the only person in the room who can say what it was like to look at the moon and realize there were two guys walking around up there. That was truly transformative, ok, but all of that was done.

34:05 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Do we have to talk about the unknown stuff?

34:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
now, I was going to say I mean that's's great stuff, you want to go to a break, or I want to go to a break.

34:12 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So he can talk about the budget, because that's what I was going to say. I was going to do like a lead-in and a big thrower, but okay go to do a throw to the break, because you never have to do those oh, I was gonna.

34:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was gonna say I mean like so all of that great stuff that we've talked about, that inspirational part, no, that's wrong sorry, go ahead wow, casey, thank you very much.

34:32
You know, I think you've put the wonder right up front, but it all came from this effort of international exploration, a national focus with NASA, and of course, that takes funding for both the science, for the spaceflight, for all of it, and that's what we really wanted to start getting into, because there's some stuff I think our listeners and your supporters need to know, and we're going to do that right after this break. Yeah, so, like you said, Casey, now we brought you to talk about probably like one of the less fun At the moment, for sure, at the moment, things and that is just kind of what's going on at NASA. In fact, I saw that you and the team at the Planetary Society called this the dark age of NASA science. If this budget request that has come from the White House gets realized and of course, a lot of this was released in detail we had a skinny budget before late last week, so it's still extremely fresh and it's really bad news Cuts NASA's budget to, I think, the lowest since the 60s. Is that right, casey?

35:42 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
do you want to kind of?

35:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
paint the picture for why we're in a bit of a danger zone for NASA science right now.

35:52 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Absolutely so. The budget that was proposed. We knew the top lines about a month ago and what we got was the full what's called congressional justification. So the detailed here's what we're going to do with this money and as you go through this, and this is the full kind of mission by mission detail. So this is all the grisly details now of losing a quarter of your budget in one year, which is what happens to NASA overall, and then with, of course, it's not applied evenly, it's half of that or the primarily paid for by cutting science in half. And so, yeah, you cut science in half. A lot of bad things are going to happen. So, yes, the big picture thing. So this we can look at. A couple of big and smalls, right? So this will be, if this we'll assume this goes through, or at least in terms of proposal, this will be NASA's smallest budget, adjusted for inflation, since fiscal year 1961. Fiscal year 1961 began in July of 1960., so this would predate human spaceflight Spaceflight yeah, oh, my gosh yeah.

37:02
So this is a NASA that, before you know Shepard's first flight, before even Gagarin's first flight, this would be the in terms of big. This is the biggest single-year cut as a proportion of spending ever proposed by a White House, and that includes the years after Apollo in which they were ramping NASA's budget down. Another, the smallest. This also fires a third of NASA's civil staff, service staff, which would leave NASA with the smallest workforce since fiscal year 1960, which began in 1959. So it's, this is a NASA budget of really again shrinking and kind of narrowing of capability through both. Just, you can just look at the top line numbers and putting it into historical context, um again.

37:57
So let's talk about science. Science is cut in half. Uh, nasa has five science divisions uh, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics, right, sun science, earth science, and then, uh, microgravity and biological science is basically pays for all the stuff they do on the space station, all the experiments. The cuts are not applied evenly but functionally. They're all cut anywhere between 80% in terms of microgravity science to a mere 30%, which is planetary science. But astrophysics, in particular, loses about 60.2 thirds of its budget in a single year, which is kind of astonishing when you think about how successful. It's been right. That's your Hubble, that's your James Webb Space Telescope, that's everything. Yeah, right, it's astonishing.

38:41
I mean again, this would be NASA's smallest science budget since 1984, which was a very, very different time for NASA science. It was a much smaller program. Earth science didn't even exist as an independent branch of science back then. So this would cancel 19 missions that are currently active in space and producing good science. It would cancel about 18 NASA-led development projects for future space missions across all of those divisions, led development projects for future space missions across all of those divisions. And it would cancel, you know, multiple all told about 41 active projects in development or in flight, which is roughly about a third of NASA's entire science project portfolio, in a single year. Right, and then even you extend it out. You look at some of the future projections. There's a lot of other ones that get turned off next year or the year after that. So this is a calamity, right. It's hard to.

39:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I was going to say I mean, I've been playing catch up, casey, since this budget came out. I went on a family trip, I came back, this was here. I've been trying to understand it. From what you described, it sounds like a catastrophic budget proposal for NASA. 41 okay.

39:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So excuse me for a second, but look at this. If you're watching the video stream, look at this chart. We have anything red is bad. Okay. So, and I just want to point out and you kind of alluded to it but oh my gosh, you know there are people that will look at this and say, well, it's a good thing, we're saving money. There's a lot of sunk costs in these programs. Whether they've flown or not, there's a lot of money spent on them. And then you talk about something like Juno out of Jupiter. That's paid off. All we're doing now is minding the store and keeping the thing going and bringing the results down. So it's really a false economy on so many levels. And then you get into the conversation about killing SLS after Artemis III, assuming that actually lands in this decade. Yeah, it's $4 billion to launch, roughly estimated. That's a bad thing. Maybe Boeing can work on that a bit and the other contractors. But we've spent how much on SLS and Orion to date?

40:56 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
A lot, I think it's edging up to 18 billion dollars. Yeah, uh, more than that, I think it's. It depends on which, and it depends on when you start counting. Uh, yeah, yeah, tens of billions, let's say well we start counting when Constellation started.

41:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Honestly, that that's fair, sure so two, so 2004.

41:11 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
So that gets you up. Yeah, exactly, is it for some of those and I have those numbers somewhere just off the top of my head, I can't recall them, but certainly tens of billions, yes, I mean, I think. And we can talk about the Artemis aspect and SLS and Orion, I'd say those are arguably the most defensible. At least you can defend it from a policy perspective, right, just putting aside kind of the other stuff about it you mean by saying the word china to the administration?

41:36
well, no, in the sense that they are very expensive and clearly nasa has options, um, with, uh, with launch that and you can. Maybe can you reformulate certain aspects of artemis that way? Probably right, and it's certainly very expensive, yeah, um, but you do risk going into, you breaking this code, what I would call the consensus that that is enabling artemis to survive, and you know. But let's put that aside just a second. So I do want to talk about just let's focus on the science aspect, because again, that's all happening in the context of exploration actually going up in this budget, with this ambitious new mars program being added onto it which, again, without this context, would be generally exciting but has functionally no real clear implementation. But again, so science, let me just finish on the science thing.

42:23
Your point about operating missions when a spacecraft launches, and generally any spacecraft, but particularly a science spacecraft on average, and generally any spacecraft, but particularly a science spacecraft on average that spacecraft and its entire life. Of what it will cost the taxpayer, 90% of that expenditure has been made by the time that it launches. Right, building it is the difficult and expensive part. Operating it that's when you get all your benefit from it and that's the cheap part. So you're right, things like Juno, new Horizons, which is out in the Kuiper belt, missions like MAVEN at Mars you're talking about at most 10 to $15 million per year often quite a lot less and so you're saving very, very little money. You are going to end an irreplaceable or a unique asset that, if you want to replace it, would cost you a lot more money to build, and, at the same time, you're you know, there's to me this deeper, symbolic part of your, something about us turning off these missions of exploration and letting those tumble into the blackness merely because we have asserted some tautological statement of, well, we can't afford these because we no longer are giving money to afford them. It's something very sad about what we're. It hits me kind of a deeper level. Right, that's a. That's not smart policy. It's not and it's not smart budgeting and in the context, it's.

43:42
You are also, I should say, in this you're breaking a lot of joint projects with particularly European partners Um, I don't know the international partners in this budget, right, so you're, you're actually abandoning a number of efforts that we have made commitments to as a nation. The one that really gets me is the XM Mars, rosalind Franklin rover from the European Space Agency, which we had already broken a promise to the Europeans on 15 years ago. We pulled out of that one already in 2012. And that's what drove them to work with the Russians. They were getting ready to launch it and then Russia invaded Ukraine.

44:16
Europe pulled out of that agreement and was searching for how do we launch this thing. The US came back and said we will provide you a rocket, a Falcon 9, some landings, some system support, maybe help you build a lander, and this budget cancels that commitment again. Right. So it's like it's something about this, this like the second time pulling the rug out from under the Europeans on that project at a Mars mission for nominally Mars as being a goal. It's just again. It's just a it's. It's bad policy, it's a short-sighted decision and it undermines a lot of these goals.

44:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So this is a human Mars mission, right that plan.

44:52 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
For their new human Mars initiatives. Yes, they say that they want to do that, while at the same time they're saying, well, as a consequence, we need to build telecom relays and all these other infrastructure at Mars, while they cancel MAVEN, which is a telecom relay spacecraft at Mars, right now that you're getting pennies on the dollar to operate. So again, there's a lot of self-contradictory stuff in there which I think belies the fact that this budget was not not thought through um at all and for the most part we know that this was. The dollar amounts were set arbitrarily first. Nasa was not part of the decision or in their input was not requested when this came together.

45:26
And nasa is now frantically trying to figure out what to do with these new initiatives that they're being told to do. But the money they do even request for this human initiative to Mars, no studies have been done for that. No trade studies, economic studies, no industry input. Two months ago they were going to them and so they don't know if even the money they're asking for is enough to do anything, if there's a market to support these types of things. Again, it's a profoundly bad strategy and policy, even if you want to do these things they say they want to do. You would not do them like this if you want them to succeed.

46:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And to your point about human spaceflight to Mars. Among other problems and we've talked about on the show before we have things like life support systems that are expected to last at least seven months before shutting off and killing you, and radiation mediation. I've seen no work out of SpaceX even approaching that and and that's going to add a lot of weight to that spacecraft and refueling flights and so forth. I also cancel.

46:25 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Mars sample return because it was too complex and over budget and what was driving one of those cost increases in that project was that it was trying to. It had to land a lot of mass the largest mass ever put on Mars and so your entry descent, landing edl stuff was novel and new and couldn't be reused. This budget cancels MSR and then calls for hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on a human rated edl demonstration project in the next few years and says that humans will pick up rocks anyway. Right, adding humans to space flight does not make things easier or cheaper, I'm sorry to say, is the reality of it. So, again, it's that kind of internal contradictory system. But also maybe they could have been more clever, right?

47:05
Can Mars sample return and this human-Mars initiative? It seems like those can actually fit together if you think about it a little bit. So it's again a lot of this doesn't make sense and it's because it was rushed and it was not led by a standard process. It's just the budgeting office saying you get this and the budget numbers, particularly for science, were called out years ago. The current budget director of the White House, russ Vogt, released his own alternative budget in 2022, where he said we should cut NASA science budget by 50%. He's the budget director. Now, lo and behold, what a coincidence NASA's budget is cut by 50%.

47:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And this does feel like budget by women tantrum. We're going to go to a quick break and then we'll come back with Tarek's next question. Stand by everybody.

47:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Casey, you know one of the things in reading kind of all the analysis and like the coverage about this budget rollout and the cancellations and some of the things that we've seen in the past, because in Trump's first term there was a big cut, I think, on like five or six different earth science missions, for example, and whatnot. Some of those ended up getting reversed and I do recall during the prime missions for spirit not prime the prime lifetimes of spirit opportunity, there was a call to cancel those missions, even though they were. They were working just fine, they hadn't gotten stuck in the dirt yet on mars, they were just long in the tooth and it was like, well, we could save that money and put it somewhere else. And there was an uproar from both the public and the science community about just those two rovers from one mission, the Mars exploration mission rovers at all. And then of course, they went on. They made more discoveries, maybe even some of the biggest ones.

48:47
Well, after that point, and the rest is history. And so I'm looking at this list and it's only a partial list. You mentioned 41 projects. We talked about Juno already and Mars sample return, but New Horizons, that extended mission which just barely got re-approved Last year. We had Alan Stern on the show to help call for that and then it just seems like immediate backpedaling from that. The OSIRIS-APEX extension, you know for planetary defense, that wasn't an Apophis flyby, right, I mean, that was it is.

49:23 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
It is, yeah, like the scariest asteroid out there right. Yes, it is NASA's only Apophis mission. Again that we're leveraging a pre-built spacecraft to do right, that's the essence of efficiency. Right, we're using it's there, it can do it. We don't have to build a new one.

49:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You mentioned MAVEN, of course, and then Mars Odyssey, one of like the longest lasting planetary missions we've had, going forever, absolutely.

49:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, the two Venus missions too.

49:53 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Yeah, all of Venus. All of Venus is wiped out, including us contribution to europeans.

49:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, envision venus mission as well well, and excuse me for breaking into arc, but but your points about the european space agency are well taken, because what part of their budget we're wasting with our waffling is a much bigger percentage of the money they get to spend than the? U budget. I mean, their space programs are tiny compared to ours, so when we back out of something and say, oh sorry, yeah, we were just kidding about that launch thing, that's a huge hit for them. It's huge, oh yeah.

50:27 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
And Europeans they miss. They lose out more than just on the science missions. Right Like the end of Orion is the end of their contribution for the European made service module on Orion, the end of Gateway, which is canceled in this. Europeans had a major commitment on Gateway, including planning for their astronauts to be parts of those crews. They lose contribution opportunities on some of their missions, like Euclid, some future space telescopes, future earth science missions.

50:58
It's really again treating our partners very poorly in this process and not enabling, you know, does not really get filling our part of the bargain. These types of situations are going to make it harder for these, our partners to trust us in the future and to enable these types of joint activities. Which is one of your big soft power. Um international benefits, if you want, a very practical, real politic benefit of space flight is to make your alliances stronger with your, with your allies, and to demonstrate to your adversaries how strong and integrated your economies and alignments are with your supporters around the world and to build new allies right by doing these types of joint projects.

51:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's again. It's just very cool. Pursuant to what you're saying, this also, especially with the europeans, tends to to pivot them back to china as a partner, because china tends to follow through on what they say they're going to do in 10-year increments, and there's a lot of people concerned about the geopolitics of that, not the least of which is the current administration. Who's basically saying to those partners yeah, go work with them, because they'll follow through John Greenewald.

52:05 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
China is absolutely leveraging this opportunity to reach out to Europe and other developing space nations around the world to say we are the reliable partner you can trust us.

52:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is there just like a brain drain risk that you see here at the Planetary Society, just about where you have a generation, I guess, of scientists that would come for these missions that have been canceled, right, or engineers and whatnot.

52:33
And then the ones that are working now who, like you were just saying, if not just these other countries, will see uh, uh, china or or others as a, as a more reliable partner. But you know, the are the, the scientists that that you know nasa would need to get kind of the basics done, would find maybe like better prospects and more reliable, more exciting uh, a science to pursue there. I mean, we just had a story at space about how the uh, the most recent china moon samples, for example, uh, are being shared outside of nasa, right, but, but scientists and in different universities are figuring out ways to be able to, to study them, uh, but they have to go around NASA because of some of the political things there. But this seems like it would take that and just ramp it up to like a bajillion, because there would not be, as it's a huge opening yeah, oh man, huge opening for them.

53:27 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
And in addition to that, you have a number of corresponding initiatives within this administration, obviously hitting science in a much larger context as well, right? So this is a broad, omni-crisis for American science, and you have fewer opportunities for new students. And even within NASA we haven't touched on this yet NASA's entire Department of Education and STEM outreach is eliminated in this. That provides the very popular space grant program. Each state has a space grant office that gives thousands of dollars level of support for students to do summer internships, for rocket clubs, for people to really start doing these types of scientific work. Again, I've seen this firsthand. My wife, again as a planetary scientist, works at a state university. Being able to offer opportunities to work on active spaceflight missions is like a magnet for talented, ambitious students who have never seen a role for themselves maybe before in space or in space engineering or in computing, and whether they stay in that industry or not, you're pulling these people. You know, again, it's like this lighthouse effect it draws people to you.

54:43
So, again, this is where, as we've characterized this, this idea that this is, even despite this claim that it's a big, ambitious effort to go to mars.

54:53
It is a narrowing, ultimately, of ambition and scope of what we expect our space program to do, and, in the consequence, this is a very short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive long-term process to abandon this and to close off so many opportunities for people to do it, and most of us have grown up in a world where we've had this kind of broader, not just science, but again this kind of public minded NASA that is trying to represent the best part of ourselves in space.

55:22
That I see, obviously, is doing these unique activities, but it's also a potent symbol for a culture to project itself and its idealized values into the literal heavens right. The symbolic value of that is really powerful and this is why I think NASA has always been so serious about what it wants its astronauts to be, and it's a spacecraft and opportunities for for everyone in the in the nation to to be offered to. That it's more than just a business doing this. It is a again, this the self-identity of our culture, and, and so what we do in space matters, and what we don't do in space also says something about this well and to follow up on that.

56:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I spent I was telling people before we started I was at a gathering of Apollo veterans over the weekend and I was sitting with Flight Director Jerry Griffin and his daughter, who runs a space PR agency, and there are a few other people from that time and place there. That time and place there when this news about Jared Isaacman came in, followed by the news at least when I got it that the recommendation was that they close the NASA field center public affairs offices and slim down the one at headquarters. To sliver and privatize it now. Is privatizing that effort something that it would certainly be different? I can't say that. I'm convinced it would be better. It would probably be less expensive.

56:59
But you're messing around here with one of the premier brands in history. Nasa has always rated in global surveys in the, the top tier, a brand recognition of people having. You know it's a feel-good brand, people respect it. The conference that the National Space Society does every year we generally get between 400 and 500 foreign students from both Asia and Europe and they are NASA crazy and it's because primarily of the public outreach efforts that NASA does through education and through their PAOs. So shutting that down and then having this gap while the private sector steps in and it could become something good, or it could become what happened in National Geographic when Fox bought it and suddenly we're having reality shows about you know, orange County, astronaut housewives or something, and it is not. I can't say I've got a great feeling about it and I feel like we're squandering you know. You're talking about soft power. We're squandering one of the largest soft power outreaches we've got absolutely.

58:07 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
I mean that's true about the international and it's true and nationally too. Here in the united states, nasa is often the top, or tied for the top, uh, uh, most approved, uh, federal agency, usually with the post office Right. So it's. It's even internally within the, the country, nasa is seen as a widely respected and supported for what it does and again, I think it's hard to mention it in the same breath as the post office, but okay. I think it's just.

58:34
I mean people know the post I mean for all the you know it sucks to wait in line sometimes, but you know you can send a letter for 50 cents or whatever it is these days. Right, it's the point of contact most people have with the government, and then something as frankly as esoteric seeming as what NASA does is kind of up there. At the same time, it's the opposite, right, most people do not have a direct point of contact with NASA, right, they take pride in it because of what it does and because of what it's doing on behalf of everyone, right, not just a party or not just a subset of people, and that's very easy point. It's a dangerous thing to play with and I always think it's kind of it's a luxury item to think that you can do that and mess with it so badly and it'll just continue Again, we've all grown up with NASA as being in this unique position and mediating this relationship of the nation to space.

59:20
Obviously, that's been changing with the growth of commercial space sector and private space, which I think is an interesting trend that we've been seeing over the last 10 to 15 years. That's probably an entirely different conversation, but this idea that NASA does represent something very positively seen by the, by the nation and the world. That is precious thing. Not many things pull that highly, right, I said I don't even know if kittens pull that highly in general. And I mean, like you don't see the department of the interior t-shirts flying off the shelves at the gap, right, people wear.

59:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
NASA logos. A really good point. People wear.

59:54 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
NASA logos right. What other government agency has its logo on T-shirts that people pay money to wear?

01:00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Bureau of the Budget you have to be paid to wear it, yeah. Yeah, let's do. We're going to do one more break and then we're going to come back. Stand by.

01:00:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well Casey. This has all been very disheartening but informative, I think, for our listeners. And I guess that gets us to what might be one of the most kind of important parts of our discussion is like what can people do right now? I know that you and the Planetary Society are putting up a massive effort to try to get people involved and spread, I guess, awareness of how serious a step back from science and engagement and exploration this budget really is. But maybe for our listeners at home or for people who maybe aren't in the United States but want to be involved somehow, what can you recommend that people should do to make themselves heard about, about this?

01:01:01 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Yeah. So this is, this is a budget proposal and and the U S Congress ultimately decides what is prioritized and spent and also, ultimately, what U S policy can be through through legislative vehicles called authorization acts. And so this is the time, if you've ever, to get off the couch and do something. If you've always been unsure, this is the time to do it, and this is why I try to put those big numbers at the beginning. This is not your annual oh, it's going down five or 10%. I don't like that. These handful of missions are cut. You know it's hard to be. It sounds hyperbolic, but hyperbole is appropriate right now. Right, this is why I've tried to. It's like we have the data showing this is the most, the most extreme, radical shifts and cuts to what NASA has ever faced.

01:01:46
There you go, and so at planetaryorg, we have a petition that folks outside the US can sign as well as people inside the US. If you live in the United States, we have a phone call scripts, we have pathways to. You can use our forms to write your member of Congress. You can. We have directions and tips on how to write op-eds for your local community. You can take my online space advocacy one-on-one course and get even better in learning about how the nuts and bolts of these processes work. And you know. So, again, this petition you have up there, we're going to hand, deliver that to the appropriators and submit it to official processes in order to have it entered into the record for the appropriations process, which starts in July. And so we are.

01:02:30
We have an opportunity to push back, and we have seen a lot of pushback from this. And so I'll emphasize too that this is not just the Planetary Society raising the alarm on this. We have, obviously, professional scientific societies the American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union and others raising that alarm. I think, really importantly, we have industry and not just prime aerospace contractors right, those are upset too. Commercial Space Federation, prime aerospace contractors right, those are upset too. Commercial Space Federation they have come out very strongly against this budget, right? This is because this is bad policy, there's a lot of bad policy in here. Even if there are a lot of initiatives to try to add more activities for the commercial sector, they see that through the scientific cuts there's going to be, it'll drive up costs of components. It'll drive up costs for there's fewer opportunities for these commercial companies to engage in, and I think and this is something that's really important this broader thing, that I haven't had a chance to touch on this idea of consensus.

01:03:30
You know, orbital mechanics do not obey or do you know aren't convenient for electoral politics timelines. So in the US, new Congress every two years and we have a new presidential election every four years. This is President Trump's last term, and so someone else and there's no way in which any humans will get to Mars by 2028. I think we can all be honest about that, even you know. I think, even if SpaceX hasn't been having their exploding, you know Starship been exploding, it's been getting space.

01:04:02
2020 is wildly, wildly ambitious. So someone will have to carry this forward and there right now is being zero effort being done by this administration to sell these radical changes, not even just for science, but for what they're shifting. They are functionally shifting Artemis to be boots on the moon, something, something, and then all everything going into Mars. Right, that is a huge change in policy. They are proposing lots of money down the line, after canceling SLS and Ryan, which is now popular with Congress for all this Mars stuff, and they're not doing any effort to engage, not even their own members of the party, much less Democrats, who are in the minority in Congress right now.

01:04:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, excuse me, and the signatories, the Artemis Accords. This puts them in a weird position. Certainly, yeah.

01:04:44 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
I mean like. This is the whole point of Artemis, why it was structured the way it does, is that this is a sustained effort to go to the moon, that we are not going to back away from this commitment. That was always seen as the key, not just for our international partners, but for commercial partners too. If you are a business trying to raise money to invest in this new cislunar economy, you need to be able to say to an investor the US is going to go here for the next three decades. It will cost you some money now to build up this hardware and capability, but we will have contract opportunities to deliver payloads in perpetuity. That's where you make your money back. That's how it worked with the space station. That's why SpaceX could raise money. That's why orbital sciences at the time could raise money, because they knew on the back end which ultimately was correct they could make billions of dollars servicing these contracts for years. Now we're moving away. We're breaking that promise to them too with Artemis, and so we're actually making it harder for commercial companies to operate and do what we want them to say. We say we want them to do, which is to offset these costs of the taxpayer, because we are waffling, flipping around and building no effort at consensus. No one believes the smarter stuff will survive this next term because, particularly if they're destroying all these projects that are broadly supported in Congress, but also making no effort to build consensus among Democrats or even, again, republicans in their own party if you have a Democratic president, they are not going to carry this March program forward. So how can you raise money knowing that this will not continue after three years? This is the essence of waste and inefficiency, ironically, right. So even in the context of what they want to do, how they're doing it here is self-defeating and wasteful. This is why I can't emphasize how bad this is enough. Even if you support everything they want to do, how they're proposing to do this is disastrous in terms of breaking this consensus.

01:06:33
Artemis was the first return to the moon program, right. That has ever survived a presidential transition, right? So you had Apollo barely survived, arguably, into the next administration. Any subsequent effort to send humans back to the moon died the next time a new president was elected. That trend ended with Artemis because, ironically, under Trump's first term, the people who implemented that policy knew this and specifically designed this to be a consensus-driven process. You had Jim Bridenstine out there building support among Democrats. You had Mike Pence and others in the National Space Council creating smart policy. Good policy that was widely seen as valuable has not been, was not rescinded under the biden administration. Um what else did biden and trump agree on? But biden continued artemis and handed it back to the trump administration.

01:07:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So which is they are not doing anything like that with mars if I recall correctly, that was the first time. Space efforts, bridged administrations, that success, that's what I'm saying.

01:07:36 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Yeah, the saying yeah, the first time return to the moon program survived a presidential transition, much less one to the opposite party, and that was not a foregone conclusion.

01:07:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and you just named out Jim Bridenstine, trump's NASA administrator at the time, as like the shepherd for that, naming the Artemis program, naming the Roman space telescope, which also got a pass surprisingly after being canceled.

01:07:57 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
You know, in a way, in a way, right, it's obviously it's not dead, but it doesn't have the money it needs to succeed. It may just hit a budget overrun and then that will be the justification, but, yes, it's better than being outright canceled in this budget.

01:08:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Right now, for all intents and purposes, this budget is somewhat a smash and grab put out when NASA has no firm leadership or a figurehead that could do that kind of bridge work between the public, between industry, between lawmakers to keep something alive, and so it seems like it's very much a target of opportunity rather than any kind of policy at all that people should know about and complain to their lawmakers about.

01:08:39 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Well this is important because this is we're risking something that we've taken for granted, and if we destroy it, if Mars even becomes a partisan issue, we are so screwed. For those of us like me who want to see people get to Mars, right, there is there's no reason why any of this has to be a partisan issue. This could actually be a consensus building opportunity, as it was in the first Trump administration, and there's a reason why we choose our metaphors in our language. Right, you said the Dark Ages, the Dark Ages you know generally. Right, you can say it's like when the vandals came and destroyed Rome and smashed everything and we lost that knowledge for generations and we lived in this dim subsequent existence of vague memories of what was, with no sense of what could be. And this is exactly what you said. This is a vandalistic activity that is happening here, destroying these incredible things that have been painstakingly built up over 70 years in the United States and elsewhere, in order to make a point.

01:09:40
I don't, you know, we can't even necessarily speculate, but but the even again, what they say they want will not succeed because they are not putting the work in to make it succeed, and so, at the end, you will have no moon program, no Mars program, no science program, no science program and maybe even, at this point, no commercial.

01:09:59
What's your commercial customer base going to look like when there's no NASA to pay for it? And you, you will have maybe a space will just be things that are sent up and then point back down and just talk to. You know our internet Great. We can like talk to each other on the internet more efficiently, joy. This is why this is like the big thing in the space for, and that's this is why we're so worried about this, and so this has to be rejected, and and we're seeing, and we're hearing from republican offices too, that this is dead on arrival. But obviously, as some of you, as you know, and some of your listeners obviously know, that the congress is itself a somewhat dysfunctional body now and through inaction, a lot of this can still happen, and that's why we're trying to push as hard as we can.

01:10:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, thank you so much, Casey, the Planetary Society folks, if you're looking for an, easy place to go planetaryorg. But, as Casey mentioned, many other agencies, American Astronomical Society, Commercial Space Federation just some of the places where you can look to try to get involved.

01:10:59 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
Yeah, tons of resources on our website here so you can learn more about this, go into detail, don't have to take my word for it, right to borrow a term. We have all of our charts, all of our data, all of our contacts and background FAQs and you can take actions.

01:11:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And I do want to point outik. I'm only monitoring discord, but this has been the by far the most active discussion of oh they're mad, yeah they're mad it's an abomination it's been a long couple of months, right, but this is a.

01:11:32 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
This is a taking something precious and and and just grinding it into the ground and and what a tragedy that would be and the excitement's not over well when this budget gets overthrown and a new and like sensible one comes in.

01:11:46
We hope, casey, you'll come back to explain that one and you know I'm happy to talk about fun space stuff too. Yeah, I always tell oh that people hear my voice in the media a lot like things be bad. I've been doing a lot of unhappy talks lately, but I also have fun things to think about space and maybe some other time as well.

01:12:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode one 64. Goodbye, NASA. Question Mark Casey, we should all be tracking you and your work at the planetary society, at planetaryorg. Is there any place else or anything else you want us to look at?

01:12:16 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
My podcast monthly podcast on space policy called the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. That's part of the regular Planetary Radio feed or you can just search for that online and it's a special monthly feed for that as well and Tarek, where can we find you rigging your hanky, as I am over all this?

01:12:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
yeah it's, it's like 90 degrees in my office, everyone if you're watching on the stream, so that's why I've been trying to dab a bit. You can find me at spacecom, as always, on the twitter, on the x, I guess, and blue sky at tarik j malik. Uh, in a bit of lighter news, you can find me on youtube at spacetron plays, because the big star wars live event is this weekend as we're recording it. But but that is a very, very far remote from the stuff that matters, like we're talking about in this podcast here. So hopefully chronicling this whole development and improvement. If your voices are all heard, everybody out there.

01:13:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Fiddling as Rome burns. And of course, you can find me at astrocom and check out what I'm up to at nssorg. And you can, of course, if you wish, you can come find Tarek and myself doing a couple of episodes from now. This show live from the International Space Development Conference in Orlando in late June, and we welcome the hecklers, because I already know there's going to be a few in the room. We should do it from the launch pad, it's in our we don't have time to get up there that Friday.

01:13:45
It's from June 19th to the 22nd and we'll be on that Friday, the 20th, and you can find more info on that conference at isdcnssorg. I encourage you to come. It's actually a lot of fun and we're going to drag Casey out there at some point, cause I don't think have you been to one.

01:14:03 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
I've been to the one in the Los Angeles a few years ago, but I do have a toddler now, so my ability to travel is limited, but maybe she can come with me sometime, cause she's my future space advocate.

01:14:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So bet, and we'll be back learning early we're back in la in 2027 and I'm chairing that year, while co-chairing with pascal lee, so we'll make room for you. And remember you can always drop us a line at twist twittv. That's twis twittv. We welcome your comments and at least I will answer your email, if not both of us.

01:14:35
New of this podcast publish every Friday in your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews and all those other things, because we want to keep doing this and, who knows, nasa budget cuts might strike us someday. No, that's not going to happen. Don't forget, though we're counting on you to join Club Tit in 2025 to help support the network and this show so we can keep bringing you great guests and horror jokes. These electrons aren't free. We got to pay some overhead for them, so sign up. Annual memberships are back, and I don't know what the price is right now, because I think we had a small increase, but it's still worth it, no matter what. You can also follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook, and Twittv on Instagram. Casey, thank you, thank you to everybody else for this.

01:15:23 - Casey Dreier (Co-host)
My pleasure to be here, thank you.

01:15:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Great and we'll have you back and we'll see you all next time. Thank you.