Main Engine Cut Off - T+235: Artemis I, 2022 Midterms (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society joins me to talk about Artemis I, where the Artemis program goes from here, and what the 2022 midterm elections mean for space.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 44 executive producers—Simon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian, Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler, Sean & Daniel Hart, Steve, and seven anonymous—and 831 other supporters.TopicsCasey Dreier (@CaseyDreier) / TwitterCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society (@exploreplanets) / TwitterNASA’s Artemis I mission has successfully… | The Planetary SocietyWhy we have the SLS | The Planetary SocietyArtemis I | FlickrWhat the 2022 midterm elections mean for NASA | The Planetary SocietySo long Senator Shelby: Key architect of SLS rocket won’t seek reelection | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by NASA

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and here we sit in the, uh, I guess mid-Artemis 1 era would be the case, so we're about halfway through Artemis 1, uh, a day that we've been waiting for for a long time. And I could think of no one better to bring on to talk about that and the 2022 midterms than Casey Dreyer of the Planetary Society, someone I absolutely love talking to, love the way that he thinks about these kind of issues. So I was hoping to just talk with him about Artemis 1, 2022 midterms, and we went a lot more places than that. I think it's a really fun conversation. So without further ado, let's bring Casey on to the show. All right, Casey,

an extremely long overdue welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It is embarrassing that I have not had you on this podcast yet. So first, sorry. Well, I humbly accept your apology, but we'll get through it somehow, I'm sure. Yeah, just considering the topics I'm covering, it's embarrassing that you have not been on yet. But this is the perfect time. And in full honesty, I feel like I'm bringing on a ringer here because half of what I want to talk about is Artemis I, half I want to talk about the midterms. I've really been struggling to figure out what to even talk about with Artemis I because we have talked about it so much that I don't really know what there is left to talk about.

Honestly, other than if we just want to sit here and look at photos together and go ooh and ah. Like that's where we're at with it right now. I have a take. I'll pitch my take on this. Which is we, I say collective, the space community, for whatever that is, yes, the royal we, have focused so much on Artemis

in terms of, I think, failure and problem. Right? As cost, delays, it's relative outdated technology. But I don't think we've really focused enough on what happens if it worked. Which it did.

It seems to be, right? I mean, we could say the SLS worked flawlessly at this point. Like, that job is done. And it did it seems to be right i mean we could say the sls worked flawlessly at this point like that job is done yeah and it did it and i don't think people really i think that that was the key test right that i and i've talked about this a lot and i've written about it a lot and i'm i feel like sometimes i'm this lone voice out there saying, people don't understand how deep the support for this program is. It's not going anywhere. And it succeeded.

It is here. Get used to the SLS. That's, I think, the take we can have from this, which is it performed flawlessly. The role that it's designed to fill, which is assured access to deep space as a U.S. national priority, it's served, right? And this means that these potential, these contracts that are being drawn up and finalized now to deliver something like, what, at least 24 SLS cores, right? That takes

you through 25 years, 20-ish years in the future. This is our program now. And human spaceflight programs since Apollo, once they have happened, once they've kind of tipped into operations, they've lasted decades, right? The shuttle was signed until, well, not signed in law, but approved by Nixon in 72, January of 1972, right? So just over 50 years ago. And it went until 2011, its last flight, right?

So that's an almost 40-year program. The space station was announced in Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address. A couple of times, but... Well, the initial pitch for the station was approved by the administration, Space Station Freedom, and then it turned into five different things.

Survived a one vote vote in 93 in the US House, and now it's just been extended to 2023. And probably if they can, will continue to be extended. So that's another 40-year program. So SLS, now that it did its first successful launch, started 10 years ago, following those trends, 40-year program. So SLS, now that it did its first successful launch, started 10 years ago, following those trends, 40-year program,

30 more years of SLS launches, right? So I think that's the takeaway here, is that this success all but guarantees to me the sustainability of this program. Even more so than you've been writing about all these years. So you had this recent article about how we got, and I don't think your take is kind of like a ride along with what my take ends up being.

And the one thing that I've thought coming out of this, we'll get into a second, but you had this why we have the SLS post. And I just want to read this one sentence about, you were talking about the appropriations from the House and Senate from both their bills. And you go back 10 years here in the record and you write the trend is clear since its inception in 2012, both the house and Senate have added additional funds to the SLS program, not just

in some years, but in every single year of the programs is this existence, regardless of which party controlled the chamber and regardless of financial or scheduled performance of the project. That is a, a fact that we gloss over all the time mostly because i think it is it's it's just thrown on the pile of hand-wringing of like oh no matter what sls gets more money and these other things get less money um but you're right that now that we're at this spot like you have to you have to think about that differently if you're somebody interested in the program overall the artemis program uh as it as it stands you know however ill-defined the the Artemis program, as it stands, however ill-defined the Artemis program itself is. But the only thing I've been thinking coming out of this is like, finally, we're at this part where we can stop talking about paper rockets and hypothetical architectures and all this.

And we are firmly into the operations phase. The only thing that matters from here to like regular landings on the lunar surface is now how well did the landers work do they work do they exist can we field them on time and really the focus if you're interested in this kind of architecture development needs to be on the landers because if you are an sls critic like this matters for anyone if you're if you're an sls stan you want landers so the sls has people or can do things to take people to landers and actually get them to lunar surface. If you're an anti-SLS kind of person, the more momentum the landers will have behind them, the easier it is to tack on however humans

get there. If you're in a world where we can land on the moon every other month, we'll figure out how to get people to those landers, regardless of what's going on with SLS politics. That kind of becomes the easy part at that point. Yeah, I would add one rub to that, which is we're neglecting the gateway, right? And this is the key aspect of the gateway, is that the gateway provides an independent destination to the moon whether or not we have functional landers. And if you notice, everything in terms of international partnerships that are signing on

to Artemis, particularly Japanese space agency, ESA, even Australians and others, they're focusing on the Gateway. And the Canadians, excuse me. Thank you. The Canadarm 3, right?

Where is it going? It's not going to the lunar surface. It's going to the Gateway. Gateway is the core. That's the backup. That's the guarantee. That's the no matter what, you're going to have a place to go and things to do. And what they've done is actually leverage the International Space Station

operational agreement and extend that out literally and figuratively to the moon. And that's the core aspect of the international partnership, right? And so that presents you as this alternative, no matter, you know, whether or not we can figure out the human landing system, the SLS can always go to the Gateway and is designed to send Orion to the gateway, independent of all this. And I think that's why you have the gateway. You see how all these pieces, I think all the pieces in Artemis

actually fit together very elegantly as long as you step back from the pure technical analysis and look at the political, geopolitical perspective of this, that you need things where people, or people, where nations can contribute

to levels that they're commensurate in terms of technology and funding. So it's a lot harder to land on the moon than it is to orbit it. Not that it's easy to orbit it. But you give these entry points where every nation is able and you can almost start with Artemis Accords being like entry point zero.

Because it costs you nothing to sign on to the Artemis Accords. It's just an agreement. A nice dinner and a plane ticket, maybe. That's the cost. Right. Yeah. And then you go up to Gateway and then to the landing system and then to whatever, like making your own moon village or something like that.

But you have these entry points for all broad levels of national capabilities and interests and financial commitments, or even clips, something like that. You can pay for a lunar delivery service on clips coming up, right? Just build a scientific instrument. And so it's this very elegant, it's designed, again, this is why we talk about sustainability in Artemis is, again, this underappreciation. We talk about how it's people, it's too expensive to be sustainable. It's sustained for 12 years at this point, right? This is already almost an Apollo-length program.

And it seems to be no sign of slowing down. When does it become sustained? Yeah. How many years in do you need to be before you're like, yeah, that's sustained? That's pretty good. I kind of want to pull my hair out. I saw some New York Times article,

someone saying like, well, we just don't know if Artemis is sustainable. It's like, dude, it's lasted 12 years. Like it's not like shrinking here. Two recessions. Yeah, it survived. It survived the test

that no other lunar program or even human exploration program has survived since Apollo, right? Which is it switched presidential control. It switched in party control. You went from a Republican president that proposed it, the White House to propose it, to a Democratic White House that

continued it, functionally unchanged, right? Like that is huge. The last time that happened was in 1968 from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon. And you can even argue that Richard Nixon barely accepted it. He just signed off on every moon landing and then canceled it four years later. It's no other effort like the George H.W. Bush vision for a space exploration initiative did not survive that transition. George W. Bush's vision for space exploration did not survive that transition. And Obama's, you know, whatever humans to Mars exploration effort-ish program, whatever humans to Mars exploration effort-ish program, Pathway to Mars, did not survive, right? So this is, we always talked about we, again,

royal we in terms of space policy. This whipsaw effect happening between presidential administrations always changing the direction of NASA. And here, the first time it doesn't happen in 50 years, and people still talk about it being unsustainable. It passed the test. Yeah. Especially in a very contentious time. years and people still talk about it being unsustainable like it passed the test yeah i mean it's a very contentious time like that wasn't like the smoothest transition in the world

no one would say that you know what else would the biden administration agree on with the trump administration yeah for goodness sakes right like but space was the one thing the human space program sure and so i think we underestimate we're so used to looking at it through this critical eye which is fair right to emphasize like there's no so used to looking at it through this critical eye, which is fair, right, to emphasize. Like, there's no reason not to look at this with a critical eye. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that this is the most successful deep space human exploration program since Apollo. And that's not nothing, right? Yeah, and the gateway thing that you're getting into is interesting to consider the way that it was proposed

and talked about in the early days. And then what we've seen recently, where there were, you know, Artemis 3 was kind of thrown off as, oh, we'll do this mission that goes down to the surface, almost as like a little intermission from the gateway infrastructure focus, where it was like, we'll build up gateway from 2024 on,

we'll have all these different parts coming to it orion's going to be the tug that brings these things to the gateway artemis 3 is going to be not using the gateway we're going to do this lunar landing and everyone's like okay so we're going to do a landing and then wait four years to do another one that's kind of strange but recently it's like nope uh actually the option b in spacex contract that's going to be for artemis 4 and this was what I was always suspected. It's like, if the lander works, if it exists, and they can fly to the gateway,

and you're at the gateway, you're going to go down to the lunar surface when you can. It's not a level one requirement or whatever in the architecture, but like, that opportunity still exists. No one took that off the table by just saying the basic planning for this was like, take, you know, whatever I forget, is it IHAB on Artemis 4 or whatever it is that's going to the gateway no one said

you're not allowed to get in a lunar lander from there it just wasn't part of that plan so you know to my earlier point of of how much momentum can these landers build if they're able to have a lander ready to go every time someone rolls up on the gateway we'll have a lunar landing every time there's a mission to the gateway. And that was never disallowed. And to me, that seems much more likely than that that will be the case in the future. So, and even to your earlier point about all these missions or nations signing on for these different missions, in every announcement of that, from the Canadians to the Japanese announcement that came out last week, they mentioned, you know, we'd love to have one

of our astronauts go down to the surface sometime in the late 20s or early 30s so i don't i don't have any sources within these meetings but i would find it hard to believe that that did not come up in the meeting of like yeah and we can hitch a ride on one of these landers at some point it's like yeah yeah they'll be there like don't worry about it we'll figure that out we don't know what the hell's going on with these landers yet but once we've sorted them out for sure there will be plenty of seats i don't know if you've seen how big these things are but like you'll fit you know're going to hide in a suit in the airlock and we'll probably be fine. Yeah. And I think there's an inherent flexibility, again, that the Gateway gives you in terms of mission architecture design that I think, again, Gateway tends to get

a lot of gruff about why do we have it? It's pointless, blah, blah, blah. But again, I think it's a really critical aspect of this. It a it's the security deposit on this whole concept but then once you're there i think nasa in the past has shown extraordinary flexibility with its commercial partners as new capabilities have come up right in terms of how they've allowed spacex and and others to operate with the space station um and not to mention then on their own, ones that goes beyond the basic NASA requirements, right? And having that parallel track, right, gateway and landing system that are kind of independent of each other really gives you these flexibility and also allows you, no one else I think

has really, really noted this, but in the latest NASA authorization bill that passed into law last year as part of the big chips and science bill, it directs NASA to really ramp up SLS launches to twice a year. And so this is law now that NASA needs to be focusing on this. And as part of that, they've directed NASA to upgrade a second bay in the vehicle assembly building to process a second SLS at the same time. And so as you can ramp this up, if you can ramp this up, right, big if, given the money that they do have, you can also see, again, these more flexible approaches

to how often you're able to land if you have this reusable lander hanging out there in lunar orbit ready to go. And that will be, I think, a really, again, we're starting to enter this new territory here in terms of how we conceive of lunar operations with this commercial component and this large kind of like classic style orbiting space station iss like component in parallel at the same time yeah and i i would just hope that you know as and it seems likely that you know 10 years down the line like the industry will be significantly different and the choices in front of us will be significantly different the stuff we're talking about is going to change

entirely so if everything's going super great and it's feasible to fly people up on a starship and fly them over to the gateway and then get ready to go down to the moon like that we'll just do that as well like that's not i just i feel like the the pitch battles that there were five years ago because we were at a moment where we're choosing between architectures and like it felt like the time to kill one program and anoint another that that interaction is going away uh because like every time there is now a starship launch nasa can say artemis program and every time there's an sls launch spacex has to be like artemis program so there is this weird sense of of everyone's heading in the same direction now so you can't really fight in the same way we did in like 2015 and 16 and argue about particular money going where it just doesn't matter when you're

into this new phase of the program which is relieving to me if nothing else that like we can we stop doing that part at least because it wasn't going anywhere it wasn't we weren't making progress on killing sls as a as a community like that was not a thing that was ever in the cards per your article showing how much money was flowing other directions there's been no greater failure in space policy than the anti-sls crowd failing to kill the sls or even damage it congress has only ever added more money which again it shows you that it's more than just one senator from alabama right supporting the sls which is sometimes how it's i think you know simplified too it's it's much bigger than that um and again you saw i don't know if you have covered the nasa economic impact report that just came out uh last

month but you have quantifiable numbers like they break out nasa's moon to mars program from just nasa in general and you see where all these jobs are being created and it's literally every single state some jobs are you know there And it's literally every single state. Some jobs are, you know, there's like, no state is free of impact from NASA's Moon to Mars program. And that's how you build these enduring coalitions, right? That you see, you know, California is a huge recipient. Washington State's a huge recipient.

Colorado is a huge recipient, right? It's not just places with NASA centers. It's not just Alabama and Florida and Texas. And that's the key. And I think that's the, again, as I phrased in my article, the political, if you want to kill the SLS, you are left with a political problem. What's your solution to?

What do you do with that workforce? It's the shuttle workforce, basically, from 72, which is partially, you know, one of the reasons the shuttle came into existence is that Richard Nixon wanted to win California and Rockwell was based in Southern California. All the aerospace layoffs were happening there. So the shuttle helped stymie layoffs happening

in aerospace in Southern California. That was a purposeful political decision and that's one of the reasons why we have the space shuttle as we had it. My fundamental argument here is that that's not a bad thing. That's how democracy is structured to work, right? And it doesn't give you efficiency by design. That's not democracies are not designed to be efficient.

They're designed to have lots of people weigh in and have the opportunity to, to make things relevant and immediate engaged to them. And I think the, you have this fundamental thing with the SLS, it's responsive to the democratic system we have, and it's to those coalitions that are engaged in it. And if you want to get rid of it, what do you do to solve that political problem? And that's why that anti-SLS coalition has failed.

They have not presented a clear solution to what you do with that political problem. All right, good transition into the makeup of, of Congress at this point. And I found it interesting how little midterms were talked about in space circles. And, and I find, you know, even with there's, you mentioned, uh, in, in some of the stuff that you've put out about how like retirements are the biggest headlines for, as far as space community is concerned but i actually i i find it interesting that there are no gigantic uh issues that we're looking at of like what's going to happen to x y or z proposal or or movement uh now that congress is you know it's going to be split and the leadership has switched in some cases

you know artemis has been embraced fully by this administration we're still debating like where space force headquarters is going to be or space command headquarters is going to be but like there's not that many big monumental decisions that are left in the balance right now so how do the midterms actually affect what's going on is it on the margins or is there something i'm missing in terms of like, oh no, there's big things getting shaken up here? I think to the degree that you see consequences will be second order effects from the combative divisiveness of the House of Representatives being run now by Republicans and the Senate being retained by Democrats. And so there's, particularly with the president being a Democrat,

the House of Representatives will have strong political incentive to be combative, right? To define themselves against the predominant Democratic control of the White House and Senate. And that will probably just slow down the pace of legislation in general. It will probably slow down the pace of just getting a budget out there, annual budget that funds NASA, so you're likely to see more what they call continuing resolutions, just extensions of the previous budget agreements,

mainly not because anyone's against NASA, it's just a bystander in this broader kind of political combat. And I think, again, there's two real reasons why you don't see a lot of things with space and first of all i think it despite us here you and me and and your listeners here who all obviously know space is one of the most important and inspiring things that there there is unfortunately a lot of other people just don't it tends to not be a major political no one votes on space issues unless you live in like the space coast and even then kind of questionably right like they vote florida voted out bill nelson who could not be

a stronger supporter of space right as we remember in 2018 for rick scott who much quieter on space issues right and that's florida all right there's a lot of space in florida yeah i don't think desantis won by 20 because of his stance on nas Like, it doesn't seem like the reason that he took the state by force. Yeah. Yeah. And same reason, it's just not a massive, and never has been, right? Even during Apollo. I think one of the first papers that I assigned to students who want to learn about space

history is Roger Launius, he was the chief historian of NASA. His paper on public attitudes towards space exploration showing during Apollo even, it was not even that popular. People did not think it was worth the expenditures, except for the one month after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the one month in July of 69. It's a great summer. And it was like 54%, and then it went back down. So I think that's obviously one of the reasons

space is kind of a marginal issue. It seems abstract, which it kind of is, right? It all seems out there. And the other one is just, I think, there's not a huge division. There's no partisan asset. There's no partisan platform for space, for the most part, right? Generally speaking, there's some edge cases we can talk about. But there's no Republican space exploration platform, and there's no Democratic space exploration platform. And so there's no way to, if you're looking to define yourselves against each other, which is what the Senate and House are going to start doing next year, because they're controlled now by different parties, space is not a good way to do that.

no clear partisan association, which to be clear is good, right? This is one of the few precious areas where we don't have to go against immovable partisan attitudes, right? Which you cannot use generally, you cannot rhetorically argue your way into someone's heart if they are partisan set against your position to start with. So space is one of the rare areas, it's like you're still, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington level of idealistic democracy, where you can go and convince a lot of people still that space can be important and meaningful without running into that buzzsaw of partisanship. And so you just don't have the incentive as a partisan actor to say space, to use it as a symbolic way to kind of beat up your political enemies. You know,

so I think that's why it just kind of fades in the distance. So there's a few things we will see though. I think where you tend to see the differences are on the generally the more idiosyncratic interests of the members who do assume leadership positions, right? So Congress works by committee, right? There's committees all over the place in Congress, and each committee has a different jurisdiction and set of areas to provide oversight. For us, we're concerned for NASA, that's going to be your House

Science Committee, they have a space subcommittee, even more specific. And then in the Senate, they have the Commerce Committee, which is Commerce, Transportation, and Science. And then they have a space subcommittee as well. And then that covers NASA oversight. They set authorization. They set U.S. policy on this. And then there's the money, the appropriations, the doling out the money for space activities every year. That's your CJS, Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee, both one in the House, one in the Senate. So the leaders of those have extra special impact, right, onto where they direct funds, you know, where they focus their energies. And so what was interesting, actually, just yesterday, as we record this, you saw from the incoming, so the Republicans haven't gained control yet. That'll

happen in the next Congress, which starts January 3rd, I believe. The ranking members are basically the party out of power. That's their highest hierarchy of members. Those are going to flip over into chairman in the next Congress. So Frank Lucas from Oklahoma is likely going to be the chairman of this House Science Committee. And then Brian Bab Lucas from Oklahoma is likely going to be the chairman of this House Science Committee. And then Brian Babin from Texas is likely to be the chairman of the Space Subcommittee. They just released a joint letter yesterday to NASA saying, what's going on with NEO Surveyor, right? Which is the asteroid hunting space telescope that bafflingly had a 75% cut this year from NASA after just being huge investment the year before

that hadn't been coming from the democratic, uh, uh, house science committees. So this is, and there's not like a Republican stance on planetary defense and there's not a democratic stance on planetary defense. This is just the interest of, of those, that leadership. So I'm actually really excited about that. That's great. That's an example of good oversight because NASA has never, ever, despite multiple and ongoing media inquiries and articles in Washington Post and Bloomberg News and obviously from organizations like the Planetary Society, never explained why they slashed funding for that program because it's a congressional mandate, right, to find these things. So you'll see maybe things like that. They can do oversight and they can kind of press agencies

on certain issues that they are interested in. That's where you're going to see, I think, these real changes. One of the areas I'm really curious to see about is what happens with some of the ISS, you know, pushing and pulling around the Russia partnership, because that's that's one that just is such a wild card. Again, it's not tied to a particular party. It's just one that seems so ripe for I don't know, like, do you think do you think Russia's chilled out now? I don't know anyone that would bet on that, like, there's gonna be some more

chaos over the next couple years at that. And if there's one thing that I just would fault NASA for over the last like year or two is taking advantage of a geopolitical situation in front of them to ensure the future of commercial leo that's one that i just feel like they've swung and missed on of not putting pressure in that area so i don't know will the makeup of congress change that and the way they approach it probably not um but it does feel like one that that is there if they want to take advantage of it. Well, I think you're seeing some progress on commercial, Leo. In the 23 budget that has not yet passed, but has gone through a House and Senate version, you're seeing, I think, 230 million now.

The full request finally was met for the first time. It's kind of similar to commercial crew, where Congress underfunded it for three years, and after a while they just got on board and once they realized that there's no alternative here and they flipped to fully funding it, you may have just seen that transition with commercial LEO. And yes, we're behind now. That wasn't NASA's fault necessarily because Congress will only fund so much. You can't drag them if they don't want to be. In fact, if you try to drag them, they tend to give you less as punishment.

But I think the stark reality of seeing both the collapse of the Russian relationship to the ISS and the US, and I think the demonstrable success that the Chinese have been having with their space station makes, I think, finally, I think, political elected officials realize that this is something we need to be investing in if you want to maintain U.S. presence in LEO. For the ISS in general, I think what's interesting is I think we have seen the temperature notch down on that,

particularly since Rogozin left. And you've had this new Russian representative come in who's much more diplomatic, let's say. He doesn't tweet as much. Good lesson for everybody, I think. Clearly.

It doesn't seem to be a lot of value in that. And seems to have basically quietly walked back all the threats, right? And again, at the end of the day, and this is what I was saying from the beginning, particularly with the Russian setup right now, you have to look at their actions of what they're actually doing beyond the rhetoric.

And they just do not have clear options if they want to maintain. And I think right now, particularly with Putin's style of Russia, they're a very symbolic-oriented culture and nation, right? Like political culture, right? You want symbolism

even over direct results and so the symbolism of losing access to space for cosmonauts would be very it's just unacceptable right you clearly cannot and so they've acted that way that they beyond all the rhetoric they're still committed to the international space station because that's their only human space flight program and then you know i think they'll try to do something in the future, but I think they're facing a serious workforce issue. And not to mention all the sanctions now, the punishing sanctions on high advanced technology imports and materials. it's just going to be, they're stuck with the station, which is again, kind of how the station was designed, right? The partnership was to be so intertwined that even if you got, it's like a marriage, right? What's the difference between being married and being, just like dating somebody is like, you have a huge fight, you're still married the next day.

It takes a lot of work to get divorced. And it presents you with, it's kind of binds you by law in a way that just a casual partnership doesn't. And so I think that the ISS partnership was designed for situations like this, where you have, no matter what, you have a shared common goal between two nations that otherwise seem to have none others. I see the ISS as one of the reasons that it will keep kind of slouching forward with that.

But also, I think the future, it's always hard for people to think about the future. And particularly when you have all these needs in the present. And it'll be interesting, to your point, to see how continued funding for Leo commercialization will move forward. And also, whether it's viable. I think that's the big, wild...

It's actually kind of crazy if you think about it, how much of a risk NASA's putting on this working, right? That's like, we want to guarantee ongoing presence, US presence in Leo for humans. And to

do that, we will do a completely untested, never before tried commercial model for LEO space stations, which every economic analysis says will not work. And that's what we're going to spend billions of dollars on. And again, to be clear, I'm not against it. But I don't think we talk about enough like the fact that these are, we don't know the domain to which private public partnerships in space work. We know they work for transportation for humans and cargo to a big U.S.-funded, government-funded platform. But we don't know what else they apply to. And we're running the risks now,

and so it's going to be fascinating to see this move forward. Absolutely. Yeah, and the fact that this one now relies on a big market outside of NASA, whereas the other ones as we're seeing you know with the exception of jared isaacman kind of get away without really having any other customers uh and and yeah you've got a crazy outlier company in spacex and then like some cargo missions from north of grumman and that's the extent of it it's not this was not a huge market that that they opened up uh you know they opened up the potential for a huge market, but the market didn't open up, certainly, when these things came online. And that's the real

sticking point with the commercial Leo ends of things. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why, again, the economic analysis just does not add up. You could read these made by Stippy a couple years ago doing this independent analysis of this. And again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but again, I think we need to acknowledge the possibility for failure. And what happens if there is no viable commercial model? Does NASA just end up footing the bill again?

Do we end up saving any money? Maybe we do. We're still getting outside investment, no question, coming from axiom right but in particular but again is it it's not easy to run these there's a reason why no one else has done this before right if it was an obvious business case it would have been done by now right so it's it's honestly kind of the same argument as the what what the sls backers were for a couple years which is like well it's not a sure thing that the market will support one of these so the u.s has a vested interest in creating one of these things and you know i don't know if if now's

the right time to just look around the industry and say are there companies that are definitely reliable and not having any bizarre leadership things happening amongst them that we should hinge all of our human spaceflight endeavors on you know a small circle of individuals like now's maybe not the worst time to just look around and consider other options. The question for you, Anthony, do you think Starship is more or less likely to succeed now that Elon Musk is focused on Twitter? My only Twitter take is that if Boca Chico went really well

over the last year and a half, I don't think Elon would have bought Twitter. I think there was a window of boredom waiting for, I guess we could draw a straight line from the U S fish and wildlife service to Elon Musk buying Twitter is my main point. He's got to sit and write those reports by hand. And so he's like, I need to buy Twitter. Yeah, there you go. That's a good take. I like that else to do it. He's procrastinating on the book report. He's like, I'll buy Twitter. Yeah, there you go. That's a good take. I like that. Yeah, it's interesting.

Right, because they reorganized a bunch of stuff too, right? In terms of Starship management. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but is it clear enough that it can just go on autopilot? It's a mystery. It's a real mystery. Like Boca Chica itself, it sounds like, was pretty haywire for a little while with the ground systems. I think that It's a real mystery. I'm like Boca Chica itself. It sounds like was, was pretty haywire for a little while with the ground systems. I think that part's been sorted out. So I don't know.

Hypothetically, we should be seeing some hardware take off in the near future once they finished the book reports. But I mostly am, I'm not that concerned about it overall, like memes and all, uh, I would never buy Twitter. It's a weird thing to buy but i'm not that worried about starship generally uh but it is it should weigh into your calculus of of things as you like look at what the best plan is yeah i mean spacex to be to be clear i think has demonstrated so much success and has so much engineering talent that it does seem more resilient

to the whims of any one individual. But it's interesting just to kind of think about whether that hurts or helps, whether his attention is elsewhere, given kind of the more open aspect. Though again, social media is nothing like building rockets, right? You realize, we talk about rocket science as being the hard things.

I don't know, maybe sociology and personalities are way harder. Totally different. we talk about rocket science as being the hard things like i don't know maybe sociology and uh personalities are way harder totally different you can't you can't model them you can't do first principles thinking on it is is you know there's no like singular right answer which is yeah and i think that's maybe the the other concerning part is like you know the the focus of it all and and how how laser focus they had seemed up until this point. And things just seem a little wandery. And that's the only part I would be concerned about. At some point, SpaceX is going to be the old crusty company in the industry.

They have maintained this upstart attitude for so long, but soon that will not be the case, and they will be the ones being disrupted so i try never never to lose focus on that aspect and it's hard to separate out are they crustifying or is there other chaos going on internally yeah i don't know yeah i don't even know what would even come to disrupt spacex at this point like i don't you haven't seen many other closest might be Rocket Lab, but even then, they're nowhere close to something like a Starship.

SpaceX is such an outlier that it's hard to... People tend to think that they're not unbelievably outlying the rest of the industry, but they are. They always have been. That scrambles your calculus. I keep wanting to write a paper called

Policy by Outlier, that the whole NASA policy to public-private partnerships is based on SpaceX being the example, where it's really the freakish, unusual 3-4 sigma outcome. And that's what we're going to be testing here, is whether there are going to be more SpaceXes, or are they really just the one-off, strange conglomeration of people. And five years from now, we'll have commercial cargo, crew, commercial lunar, commercial LEO, and human landing system. All five of them, some task order based, some this other kind of model. And we'll be able to say, what is the right path here?

Did any of these actually work? Or did it work in spite of itself? Right. Yeah. This is a very exciting day. I keep saying this, too. Very exciting decade ahead of us in space. This is crazy.

Well, this went exactly where I was hoping to, which was five minutes of Artemis 1 and a bunch of other stuff. So thanks for hanging out. Where should people follow? If they have not partaken in the Casey Dreyer experience, where should they be looking to follow along? Well, best way is planetary.org, my organization.

I have a monthly newsletter called Space Advocate that you can search for or just go to our website. And that's free. And I talk about all these things. And I also have the Space Policy Edition podcast where I talk about these at length and do interviews with nerdy space policy wonks. Those are two great places.

I am technically on Twitter. I just haven't been tweeting as much. There's no big thing about it. I just haven't been tweeting as much, but I am Casey Dreyer on Twitter. But otherwise, Planetary Society newsletter is probably the best way to follow what I'm doing. Awesome. Thanks again for hanging out.

Oh, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I won't wait another 250 episodes or whatever to have you back on don't worry all right i'll hold you to that 249 thanks again to casey for coming on the show and uh the planet society people are my favorite people uh most recently on off nominal we had matt caplin of the planet society so uh check that episode out as well. Of course, Jason Davis, Ray Paoletta, and so many others that we've talked to both here and on Off Nominal.

Really, really fun people that all have great minds for space, and that was exactly the kind of conversation that I was hoping to have with Casey. They went a lot of places, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to think about with where we are in spaceflight right now. So if you like that kind of episode, if you like Main Engine Cutoff, this is an entirely listener-supported show. Everything that I do is because of all of you out there supporting over at mainenginecutoff.com. There are 875 of you supporting every single month, and that includes 44 executive producers who made this episode possible. includes 44 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth,

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