Main Engine Cut Off - T+242: NASA’s FY2024 Budget Request (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society joins me to talk about the NASA FY2024 budget request and what it means for Artemis, the ISS, and planetary science.Correction: At some point in the show, we said DAVINCI is managed out of APL, but it’s actually run out of Goddard. Sorry, Maryland!This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Pat, Joonas, Bob, The Astrogators at SEE, Fred, David, Kris, Joel, Dawn Aerospace, Jan, Matt, Robb, Warren, SmallSpark Space Systems, Frank, Ryan, Lars from Agile Space, Donald, Moritz, Simon, Theo and Violet, Benjamin, Chris, Pat from KC, Russell, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Steve, Jorge, Andrew, Lee, Tyler, and four anonymous—and 831 other supporters.TopicsCasey Dreier (@CaseyDreier) / TwitterCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society (@exploreplanets) / TwitterT+235: Artemis I, 2022 Midterms (with Casey Dreier) - Main Engine Cut OffPresident’s Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Strengthens NASA, Space Economy | NASANASA's FY 2024 Budget | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary Society Welcomes Continued… | The Planetary SocietyCasey Dreier on Twitter: “Here is the ugly truth in the NASA budget proposal”Biden Requests Another Big Increase for NASA, Wants Space Tug to Deorbit ISS – SpacePolicyOnline.comThe Space Station Decision | Hopkins PressThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo and I brought an old friend back, Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy at the Planetary Society to talk about the budget request that the White House submitted. Casey and I had a great conversation after the midterms just a couple of months ago, so I could think of no one better to bring back to talk about the budget request, how we should read it, what it means, and dive into some of the details. So he's one of my favorite people to talk to about space policy, so I'm really excited to talk with him. So without further ado, let's give him a call. Casey Dreyer, welcome back. It hasn't been too many episodes between the last time I talked to you and now, but thanks for coming back on short notice. Oh, of course. Anytime a budget is out there, I'm there too. That's exactly right. And if there's anyone who can help me parse budget math,

it is you. The only person who goes out of their way to make google docs uh spreadsheets of historically accurate inflated numbers of budgets and it's it's pretty incredible i was in there today i was in your google doc today and it's just continually amazed by what you're what you're trying to wrangle in there so you're doing a real service uh appreciate that i i made that for. And I assumed maybe one or two other people. So to hear anyone use it. Yes. But I mean, I think it's to the honestly, though, to the point of it, looking at the numbers, that's one thing you can't fudge in a way, right. And it just allows you to see narratives and trends. I've made arguments for this both in papers and in verbal sessions like this, where no matter what your rhetoric is, if you look at

where the money goes, since you can only spend a dollar once, that tells you the real priority at the end of the day. And that's why I love looking at the numbers and evaluating those over time, because it tells you this narrative about what is important and what is just said to be important. Yeah, and that's a perfect place to start too, especially with the fact that this is a budget request. It's not even really filtered into Congress at all. I haven't seen a ton of congressional reaction or I just haven't sought it out because why would I do such a thing right now? I'm just having a good week here. Um, but it is, it's the budget requests are always a statement of intent from the administration. Uh, certainly a lot of, of NASA input on that.

Um, and there's obviously messaging around a budget rollout. Um, last week when it was kind of the top line budget rolled out, uh, Biden flew over my house. He was like dangerously low in my opinion for flying Ospreys over a very, very densely populated city, but it like rattled my whole house. I saw it out the window in my house. He was like dangerously low in my opinion for flying Ospreys over a very, very densely populated city, but it like rattled my whole house. I saw it out the window in my office. It was pretty sweet. Uh, because he was rolling out the budget and a lot of the messaging, uh, was really, you know, Russia oriented and specifically in the space world that the two things I saw highlighted were, uh, our cooperation with Europe on the missions that Russia had

pulled out of and the ISS and the state that it finds itself in. So just looking purely at a messaging level, was that what you expected to see? Did you read anything into the way it was rolled out? It's probably what I expected. I think the implications and what we're seeing here is civil space, exploratory space, science-based space being wrapped up into this larger national purpose and geopolitical moment as this is a tool. You know, it's not, we have national security space, obviously, but we can use what NASA does best. And that is really engaging with our allies, engaging with partners, soft power, and peaceful cooperative efforts. It's not seen in isolation anymore. And ultimately, I think that's a pretty good thing if you're interested in NASA having the resources it needs

over time. And it's positioning it again, as this available opportunity to say, we're going to use all of government to address needs here on Earth. And one of those needs is kind of this new geopolitical competitive world we're moving into. And NASA will be a part of that. And absolutely, that makes sense to me that we then talk about the ISS, which is the largest single international partnership in space. which is the largest single international partnership in space and positioning NASA as itself to tighten alliances with the European partners to the U S not just through ISS, but through Artemis through Mars sample return through this broad scientific engagement.

So again, it fits perfectly within, excuse me, if it's perfectly within this new pathway that you know again global kind of competitive situation we find ourselves in um the list that you just provided is probably the list of topics we should talk about artemis iss planetary um let's go with artemis first because i honestly don't think there's a ton to break down here the biggest news item out of this budget rollout was that they officially

delayed artemis 4 from 2027 to 2028 and there's now this like three-year gap between artemis 3 and 4 which is not surprising by any means i think my reading of this is this just a way to say that artemis 3 is delayed without actually moving artemis 3 on the calendar it's like it seems to be kind of what they're indicating there in my i was going to say assuming artemis 3 goes as planned and artemis 2 and they're pretty up front in the budget with artemis 2 that currently it's slated for november of 24 but probably won't yeah and that was i think more the key of the upper exploration state so this is I think more the key of the upper exploration state. So this is upper state,

this new upgraded aspect of the block one B SLS. And you have issues there with the mobile launch system too. So you have a number of delayed projects already in that critical path. That's likely the source of that delay. And generally probably won't be getting any smaller. Those things tend not to be. And it's one of those things where we look at this, it's like, ah, man, the fourth launch of Artemis to the moon is going to be slightly delayed after we have like two on one on the surface and one in orbit.

It's still stunning to me. And reading through this budget, I've been doing this for 10 years. That's not as long as some people, but it's long enough at this point. And I already have these old man vibes of back in my day, when I was reading the budget, we had no destination, there was there was no lunar program, much less a delayed one. And it just strikes me every time of what that this is the only other time I've read through budgets and seen stuff about lunar landers was 1967 1968 right it's just right it's just amazing that this is still there and this is happening even if it's not at the pace we necessarily would like to see yeah that the criticism of artemis 4 is there's too much

jammed into it it's not that they don't have anything to do it's that we are waiting on too much hardware for that one mission right and it does feel like a junk drawer in the manifest where it's like oh everything else will go there right gateway surface habitat the uh logistics vehicle the other lunar lander the spacesuits we'll get to it and so yeah it is it is a good thing that there is so much to draw in that little box on this calendar um it does feel i don't know like part of me is just like all right what of these things are actually going to be pulled out of artemis 4 at some point is it going to be gateway is its own thing uh or you know i don't know the whole thing about the upper stage you have to co-manifest a gateway payload to fly it that really starts to stick out of uh jake is

asking well do you think there's going to be some more ius orders here coming for ula because you know if we have a lander and we have the ability to fly down to the lunar surface and that delay keeps pushing back because everything for artemis four has to hit at the same time are we going to fly some more block one sls's and do some more lander missions seems plausible to me oh absolutely i i would not be surprised to see the four manifest change and and also again depending on what starship is doing at the time and all the not to mention blue or the the other like notable kind of consequences or even what we're seeing with china and russia and and their activities at the moon a lot of this is still tbd

and i think i wouldn't read so when we see these, you know, a NASA budget, in a sense is unique, a budget request that it's not just asking for next year's budget, it's asking for the next five years, or it's at least projecting out, there's not many federal agencies that that do that. And we always take this with a grain of salt in those long term projections. It's obviously there'll be a different president by the end, you know, no matter what, but well, actually by 28, it could still be Biden, but obviously a lot changes in five years. So this is more of signals intent and policy. And I think that's always the right way to read a president's budget request for NASA is that even if Congress doesn't necessarily come through, or even in this case this year, do its fundamental job of funding the government, this tells you what

the administration's policy is. This is what they value. This is what they want to do. This is the official stance on these various types of programs. And that tells you a lot. And even, again, at a smaller level, the below the headline level, Congress rarely tinkers with the small stuff. And so most of the stuff, even though people like to dismiss the president's budget as dead on arrival, you know, and in some ways it is, but Congress, unless it

addresses every tiny little bit, the president's budget becomes the default administrative stance in terms of how NASA executes its program. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. And I think applying that to the ISS program is a good thing to do in this state. So the two things there that are worth watching are this new deorbit tub, tug, that is being deorbit tub. That's a different, that's a different thing. I don't know what that is.

Different project. That one's not getting $180 million like the deorbit tub that's a different that's a different thing i don't know what that is different project um that one's not getting eight one hundred eighty million dollars uh like the deorbit tug is um and then the other line item is the commercial leo development line item which the the news there is really that there isn't any and that to me is the news that that they are kind of just keeping on with that trajectory that that has been the case for what was projected about this program so um both of these i look at the statement there that and this is the alarming part to me is that the nasa and the administration's statement on the current state of the iss is everything's fine except when it comes to the iss deorbit and in my view i'm like everything else is not fine and the d orbit is a problem i'm

willing to figure out down the line at some point so you know the i went back and looked at the fiscal year 2022 budget request to look at what those out years were for commercial leo just to start there um because i was still at the moment where we had a couple years where they requested like 15 million dollars 17 million dollars fiscal year 2022 was the first year they requested over 100 million and they had projected 186 out for the next five years they basically just dragged that sellout and it was like i don't know 186 um we are sitting at a 228 million dollar request now for fiscal year 2024. And they project that to climb, basically climb starting in 26 onward up to like almost half a billion dollars. So it is a little higher than what it started out

at two years ago in the budget requests. But it doesn't look like it's high enough for my eyes that that this commercial Leo effort is honestly being given the importance that it should if NASA is serious about transitioning off the ISS at some point. Am I crazy? Is this enough money to fly space stations? I guess we're going to find out. But I mean, this is exactly my point in that despite the rhetoric, look at where the dollars are going.

And exactly, yes, if they're spending at most a quarter billion a year on what will be like, we absolutely commit to maintaining permanent US, you know, access to low Earth orbit and presence in space. And so we're going to achieve that we're going to devote point oh 1% of our total budget to ensuring this future. Yes, that's then you can see, well, what's the rhetoric versus the actual dollars at the end of the day. And that tells you something. And I think just a small correction. then you can see well what's the rhetoric versus the actual dollars at the end of the day and that

tells you something and i think just a small correction i mean the nasa had asked for i believe 150 million at the beginning for they were asking for it and they only got so they were always asking the hundreds of millions ramping up over time and it was congress who was the real they put the brakes on this right very similar actually to how commercial crew uh progressed where nasa immediately initially asked for something like a billion dollars and they got hundreds of a couple hundred million with great reluctance from congress and then congress would always kind of cram them down until this tipping point happened where they're like oh wow we this

is a real problem what was that tipping point casey out of curiosity it was a boeing entering the uh competitive uh being selected as it was that and then it was also russia invading places it always always seems to happen right around those years yes right the the first uh invasion of the first crimea situation well not the first crimea situation but the first of the modern era modern yeah and the 21st century yeah and and i think realizing that but you know, you know, I, I wouldn't dismiss the Boeing factor too, frankly, and also realizing that there wasn't really any good options here. Um, I think we're probably going to see a similar situation with commercial Leo. I honestly have

no idea if that's enough money, every report. I don't know if you've ever read through the official you know nasa uh reports or requested reports from like stippy and other institutions about commercial space stations that said there's no way to make these work financially and they're going ahead with them hopefully to make them work and i just don't know i mean at the end of the day you just don't have that much budget room to work with when you are trying to go to the moon again on a relatively austere budget do all the science stuff also invest in aeronautics space technology and continue to run the international space station and build a billion dollar deorbit tug you just start to run out of space and a quarter million a year that you know that's not nothing you know we're talking about billions of dollars over a few years and if there's money coming in from private industry to match that maybe you know that's

it's going to be a fascinating experiment to watch yeah and i mean i would not be surprised at the end of the day if we see iss extended to 2035 you know i i don't think anyone would be that's probably what's going to happen just i would be more shocked that iss can make it than i would be that there's political will yeah right it's one thing to to policy like to legislate thou shalt go to 2035 then actually extend extend a 40-year-old spacecraft. But that's, you know, that's literally what happened with the space shuttle. And these human space flight programs that have become deeply entrenched, and this was always my argument, I think, that we talked about with like SLS. Once these tip into this entrenchment, they're very hard to stop.

You had the space shuttle after Columbia. You had George W. Bush say, we're going to end this. And then they kept adding missions. Congress kept adding missions for the shuttle. And it was real. And even at the very end, they were still pushing for more missions, even when they needed to stop this. It was no longer safe to fly. We have completed our mission with the ISS. And it was just, there's so much inertia behind these things. And even then winding it down, they had the Congress dictated these massive payouts for pensions and other things for the shuttle workforce. And it's not an easy thing to spin this down when it's been running for 30 years. And theoretically, that big wedge of money can

flip towards space stations, commercial stations at that point, but it will be a completely different relationship. I was reminded, you know, commercial space transportation runs about 1.6, 1.7 billion dollars a year. And that's just to buy these commercial launch services to the International Space Station. Those will need somewhere to go. Those companies will want to keep launching to something. And you could easily direct those to a commercial station on top of whatever operating costs you want to supplant it with. And so will we save any money at the end of the day? Who knows?

Will it be enough to keep those? Will they be safe? What will they be doing? For what purpose? I don't know. You can hear commercial space stations to me always sound like it's it's one of those things where i feel like we're running a number of experiments based on an extremely sex uh successful single data point of commercial transportation services to to low earth orbit and And NASA and the US policy

is extrapolating that outward to say everywhere. It's like, why not commercial? You know, just slap commercial in front of it. Is it appropriate to have a commercial space station? We don't know.

Is it appropriate to have commercial landers on the moon? We don't know. And so we're running these experiments, but historically, we shouldn't expect them all to work just because commercial space transportation worked, particularly in an environment. As the reason, right.

Financially, yeah. And also in a financial environment where suddenly high risk, you know, when interest rates are no longer zero and money isn't free to throw around and crazy risk-taking ventures, people may just want to put their money in a three and a half percent bank return and not invest in a long shot commercial space venture. But we'll see. This is the exciting part in a sense about the next 10 years. Yeah.

So I had this one week where I totally, I had Lori Garver on the show, on this show, and we had a long conversation, actually backing off a lot of what we talked about, the midterms. And then Eric Berger came on off nominal a couple of what we talked about the midterms and then eric berger came on off nominal a couple days later and i had a like i don't know i went on like a a vision quest or something and i totally changed my feelings on commercial leo development um and i no longer think it's something that nasa should be putting money in because they're half-assing it and if and i i understand why it's getting the the due that it's getting in the budget requests but i'm also alongside nasa and the administration half-assing it i'm getting really bad vibes from all the companies that are involved in commercial leo development at all and

if if nasa is the only customer or only substantial customer i just don't think that's going to close out for us. And the thing that Lori Garver had to do with this was that she convinced me that commercial space stations aren't racing the ISS and it's decommissioning. They're racing being on the surface of the moon with Artemis. And I think she convinced me of something she didn't mean to convince me of after talking to her more.

But I just find it in this really weird spot that it can't get the development budget that it needs to to actually exist on the time frame that we need it. So I just find it in such a weird spot. And then the statement to come out and say, we're actually going to put almost as much money into the deorbit tug per year as we are the commercial space stations. into the deorbit tug per year as we are the commercial space stations it's like okay is that low-key a way that we could replace the russian segment to provide propulsion to keep the iss up if because russia hasn't extended to 2030 yet so that's not even clear that that part's going to be needed either so i don't know i understand the need for the deorbit tug but i don't know do you believe the writing on the tin that this is just about deorbit services? No, clearly it's a multipurpose system. And they say that implicitly within, they say like, and for other reasons that this

is useful, you know, it could be useful for commercial stations too. Maybe it just stays up there and it tugs and moves things around, right? There's all sorts of ideas with these. And yeah, I think obviously there's a multi-factor it you wouldn't get 180 million suddenly in the budget if it was you know for if it wasn't for a number of potential things including boosting the station potentially for the russian uh pull out you know and that's not saying it will happen but certainly covering their butts in case it there's a need for it in my in my view i'd rather all the money go to that and not worry about the commercial LEO stuff

if it is going to be half-assed both by NASA and the industry. And that's my worry. I don't know. Is it really half-assed? I mean, NASA's putting a good amount of ass in there in the sense that no one knows how much a commercial space station would cost. How much a full ass would be. Yeah, I mean, this hasn't been done before, and they're kind of guessing.

And maybe they could have done it more to have more partners with it, but it's not clear to me what the requirements even are. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that is the other problem, and this is where I get worried about commercial LEO for space stations, is that what are they trying to do and if you don't even know what they're trying to do you have no way to constrain

design and then you have no way to even guess what your costs are going to be beyond are you going to just have someone sit in a slightly larger dragon capsule and just float around for a while are we talking about like solute level space stations do you want to do research on them still if so you have a bunch of conditions that are incompatible with other types of manufacturing goals they went through all of this in the 19 a great book howard mccurdy is the space station decision if you've ever read that or if your readers want to listen to this um i have one called the space shuttle decision but i've not read the space station it might also be space

station decision and it goes through this whole era in the early 80s of nasa's like all right we built the shuttle it's operational now we do the space station like we always wanted and and people say okay what's it going to do it's like well what won't it do like we'll be able to have people up there we'll do research we'll do medical research we'll Like, we'll be able to have people up there, we'll do research, we'll do medical research, we'll construct things, we'll repair satellites. And they started to actually try to implement this. And it's like, oh, well, the vibrational like modes of a large space station make it impossible for scientific observation of the Earth because you're just you're not still you're docking with things all the time, the environment of like spacecraft coming to and fro will destroy delicate optics. If you're doing medical experiments or delicate

scientific experiments on board, the vibration consequences of building stuff or manufacturing aren't going to work. You ever try to solder in space? You have all these sorts of little pieces of metal and hot things flying everywhere and floating. Because they said it would do everything, they

realized there's actually a mutual incompatibility due to the just brutally inhospitable nature of zero g and and space and so that's one of the reasons why they had to cram down and even now iss is obviously an imperfect platform so what's a commercial station going to do that's even more constrained and cost effective but also do something we need and i think that to me has to do all that and make money which is and make money yeah well yeah and so i mean i can see maybe if they say the only purpose for a commercial space station is to do direct practical tests for long duration space flight to mars maybe or something and what's that

going to do that gateway can't do then? Or how, you know, it's just I don't, I've never and I still feel me personally, right? I'm speaking on my personal perspective that I've never seen commercial space stations, or the need to maintain a permanent presence and layout fully justified. Like what, what, what has the ISS not done that we still have yet to do after 30 years? There may be good answers to that, but I haven't seen those elucidated. And so to your point, I think people are just kind of guessing and there's this inertia behind it. The most practical benefit of the ISS is stimulating our commercial launch industry.

In this budget, I was struck by this number they they proudly proclaim nasa has paid out nearly 26 billion dollars to its commercial resupply partners since the inception of the program mainly in operational costs which is just stunning how much money that is and that's the big motivation and impetus i think that and obviously we've seen a huge practical benefit from it, but is that enough then to keep doing this for 30 more years? Are we, have we gotten the juice out of that fruit and is there something worth doing with that money further out?

I don't know. But again, I think to your point, we're going to, there's kind of this inertia carrying this that's not fully justified so they don't know how to quite what to ask for yeah that makes sense um i don't want to keep it too long so we should talk about planetary stuff we barely even scratched the surface i know we should probably go about four and a half hours but neither of us have that much time today

planetary is a whole nother side and probably burying the lead this is where there is some i don't have the button for the alarm nearby but i probably should play the hot drama alarm uh in this instance because mars sample return is having some cost growth uh there's the whole isa component that we talked about up front with replacing some of the russian uh parts of other missions but venus is uh getting screwed yeah i think i don't know if i could put it better than that yeah that's a roughly well one of the venus missions very toss the orbiting venus mission that's the selected two in the last discovery rounds right these are competitively selected quote-unquote small missions which these days mean roughly a billion dollars one is going to

be the atmospheric probe that's da vinci that's fine. That's moving forward or seemingly fine. It's in the budget, just fine. But the follow on to Magellan, the new upgraded radar mapping orbiting spacecraft went down to a laughably. I mean, it's not zero. It's not canceled, but is functionally a canceled mission. 1.5 million a year is, I think, a comatose level life support level for the science team and no one else. They've laid off all the engineers, no more design, no more buying parts, no more getting ready. And it's interesting, NASA had characterized this in

last November, I believe, as a three-year delay to this mission. But this is an indefinite delay. This is not a three-year delay. You would see it popping back up in this five-year delay to this mission. But this is an indefinite delay. This is not a three-year delay. You would see it popping back up in this five-year budget run out. That is not what the case is here. Because there are four years listed past this one on the budget. Yeah, and they did exactly what you said, that Excel grab and stretch out to the right, the 1.5 indefinite.

And that's not a functional mission. That's not an actual mission that's not an actual mission that's a ghost mission is there precedent for this kind of thing happening um i probably have to constrain that in some some years because of the structure of these kinds of missions at this point but is this how it usually goes down or is this just like is this one of those things that nasa let me throw this one out there as an option i don't feel like it is because of the team's been told certain things but is this a case where like certain white houses would always zero out sofia and then congress would bring it back or zero at the education office and congress would bring it back

or is this this is different this feels different and i, they may be hoping for this to for Congress to put it back. But that it's a it's usually they just cancel it, which makes it you know, the real straight out the threat and to step back, this is unusual. I mean, they selected they had the opportunity through this discovery selection process in 2020 and 2021. They evaluated a bunch of proposals and NASA committed to two missions. They selected two. They made that commitment. Now, there's a subtle difference for the program development and systems engineering nerds among us

between formulation and implementation where you hit this thing called KDPC, right, key decision point C. And that's where a program becomes, in a sense, official, NASA officially commits to a schedule and cost for a project, then you are in implementation, you're building it, you're bending metal, you are getting ready to launch, all of your contracts are in place. Prior to that, which is where Veritas was, and also where DaVinci is, right after Discovery selection, you spend a couple years in what's called formulation. You're spending good chunks of money, tens of millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions, doing all the, you know, kind of crossing your T's and dotting your I's of designing the spacecraft, making sure all the technology is ready to go, maybe making test articles and making sure everything's going to work. And, you know, you're in phases B at that point is what it's called in formulation.

And until you finish this, you haven't made it. NASA has not made a formal long-term commitment to the mission. This is what happened to Neo Surveyor a couple years ago. They got delayed in phase B and then NASA came back, implemented it. It's in phase D now it's phase C. Now it's in the budget and everything has a launch date and it's all committed to. So it's always a bit of a delicate time for missions. It's rare for a discovery mission to have competed through that been selected and then be cut because

a discovery missions just tend not to cost very much and so even billion dollar ones you're not going to save a ton out of your budget to to slow one down but also you've gone through this competitive process and nasa had the chance to say can we afford one or two and this was a year ago two years ago yeah yeah multiple years ago yeah wasn't like this was multiple years ago. Yeah. And they blame Psyche, NASA does to a certain extent, of saying the review board from Psyche said JPL can't handle the work it has ahead of it. JPL is the main contractor or the main institution building Veritas. But as the team points out, Veritas is functionally, it's being built at Lockheed Martin. There's only something like a dozen or so JPL engineers directly on the mission. Most of it because it's an orbiting spacecraft. Lockheed makes those buses.

Lockheed's made a ton of those, particularly at Mars. It's not a huge pull on JPL. They were otherwise on schedule. They were otherwise on budget. My impression is that they were just the politically weakest mission at this phase in development. Da Vinci is based at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins in Maryland. They only usually have a handful of planetary missions at a time. And the relative size of APL within Maryland is much bigger compared to the relative size of JPL within California, which is itself something like the sixth largest economy in the world. There's also within JPL, their top goal is Mars sample return, which we will soon talk about, right? Is that 5 billion and plus mission? Then Europa Clipper, which is itself a $5 billion mission. billion and plus mission. Then Europa Clipper, which is itself a $5 billion mission. And then you have NYSTAR and these other earth science missions and Neo Surveyor now, which is now

mandated by Congress. And so Psyche, and then Psyche, of course, to finish. And in a way, Veritas, I kind of imagine it's like on the flock, political flock of herd animals, the budget cutting wolf looks for the weakest looking member and goes after that to really push him and your explanation that there a lot of the team was not at jpl and it was actually lockheed martin working on the hardware like that that as well makes it easier because it's less disruptive to jpl over if there's fewer people at jpl impacted so what what looks like a strength when you're looking at it, you know, as just a mission is a weakness politically when it comes to moments like this.

Yeah. And it's not to say that JPL doesn't want to do it. I want to be clear about that. But when their back is against the wall, they have their priorities, and it's not going to be at the top of that list. This is Alan Stern, who led new horizons to pluto very explicitly chose and he wrote about it in his book he he took new horizons to apl as opposed to jpl because he knew because of apl's smaller size that new horizons would be their top priority and they'd go to the mat to protect that mission which they did they had to multiple times in a way that JPL just wouldn't because of the relative scope of it. And that's kind of this weird level of insider politics for how these things work.

But it's just wind pushed up against the wall. Clearly what happened here is that Mars sample return was growing. Neo Surveyor is now growing in the budget. And there was just an internal pain point about what the white house was willing to put towards planetary science versus other nasa sciences and other priorities and veritas was the thing to give and and the good news is that it's not fully canceled you know even though it's it's very bad, it's not gone. And so they can revive it if money comes back pretty easily.

The science team, as you might imagine, is not happy. It's to work as long as they did, decades, trying to get this mission to Venus and to have the rug pulled out from under them is just profoundly dispiriting. And to see that we have a huge interest in venus both from from china and the european space agency private companies like rocket lab and then to have such an important piece of that exploration sliced out it's it's not great so we're i think what we really would like to see and this is in the in the statement we made consulting with partners and other people Yeah, it's painful. they've already laid off most of the engineering team they don't have you know they have to start over again but as we do a two-year delay to 2029 and this is something congress can do they've done this with new surveyor they've done this with other missions they can write it in an authorization or they can write it in their appropriations language saying you know nasa shall give us something along

these lines thou shalt provide congress with a budget plan that shows a 2029 launch. That helps if we set a fixed launch date that really says, okay, now that we know we need to launch by then, the budget kind of works backwards from that. And we can say, here's how much we need every year to achieve that launch date, because right now, absent a launch date, we're not even sure what they need to you know to move forward because we don't have clarity on the mission it also really helps we should note this mission had 90 million dollars worth of contributions from european partners including primarily the italian space agency they were already building these things and so this delay

is already impacting this partnership model that at the high level, as we opened up with this topic, already undermining this commitment to support our allies and partners in other, you know, in these, through these endeavors by doing this. It's not a helpful thing to do. So we think Congress can really help by setting a 2029 launch date, and then we can start to work to fix this problem financially. Yeah, I got a link in the show notes to the statement. It was well written, and pretty cool to see that kind of stuff. Because, you know, not often there's this kind of hot drama in the planetary budgets. Back in the this brings back to me the the bad old days of the early 2010s when there was a lot of frustrating drama going back and forth with like europa and others i always try

to give myself planetaries at 3.35 billion almost 3.4 billion i mean that's historically very high but at the same time it is amazing what we're asking it to do. And a third of that is Mars sample return, which now has clearly become NASA's top scientific mission at a level of JWST, but exceeding it in terms of annual expenditures. It's just stunning. Yeah, so the notes about the cost growth there, not surprising, but was there anything to draw from the way that it was talked about yeah they said uh the notes were we're going to ask for 950 million this year and all of our future projections that we talked about earlier they're meaningless because we anticipate they're going to be higher they don't even know what to ask for at this point and that's

not that's not good at this stage because they're in phase B. They haven't hit that magic confirmation point either. They're trying to do that later this year. I think we just saw them announce a few weeks ago. And once they do that, they'll have a clarity about what they need to ask for to launch by 28. It's likely it'll be more than what they're asking for this year. And that total pushes up the entire project cost so beyond what the the planetary science decadal survey said is the absolute pain

point where if it's more than 5.3 billion or something like that we need to go to congress get extra money it can't take money away from other planetary programs this was always the risk. Just the, this is why we have not done Mars sample return before. It is an insanely difficult problem. And the complexity that we've created, they built a very politically resilient program that has added a lot of complexity in terms of engineering because of the very tight integrations with the european contributions and that there's almost every nasa center has a piece and is committing something to this mission so this

is the artemis four of planetary science it kind of is and you see how they do you know it's no accident and yeah they're they built a very solid political base and what we're seeing is this is reflected now and how they're even asking for the money. They're asking for $950 million. That is more than the entire heliophysics science division at NASA by a substantial amount for one project. And I want to be totally clear. Mars Amplifton is my top priority at the Planetary Society too. It's all of our top priority. It's the top priority of the scientific community through the decadal survey. I don't want it to become a JWST. But anytime you have this level of project, you have this emergent complexity, because of the ambitious nature of it, because of the integrations and because of just the practical political considerations of how you spread this

around to enable yourself to in a a sense, to get the permission structure to ask for a billion dollars a year. It will be a, and the other tricky part of this, and this is what I worry about is it is fundamentally planetary science in general. And Mars sample return specifically is a good example of this demonstrates this distinct nature of planetary exploration programs from astronomy programs and astrophysics telescopes. You build something like JWST, you spend 20 years and $8 billion to build it. It's a huge chunk of their ability.

They have to delay all these other missions. But at the end of the day, you have a space observing platform, beautiful, exquisite, that anyone in the field can use and propose time on. And it can do all sorts of different types of astronomy from infrared to pseudo visible exoplanets, planetary observations, stars, quasars, galaxies, you name it. Mars sample return and planetary science in general is not like that. You go to one place with your mission. You're going to study that planet. If you're a Venus scientist,

you get nothing out of Mars sample return. If you want to send a mission to Europa, and if you study Uranus, you're out of luck. You get nothing from that mission. Maybe some broad overall awareness, but every mission is very specific based on specialty and destination. Mars sample return takes that to another degree because you don't get the science back until the

end. So even though you can, every Mars mission has gone to Mars, you land and you immediately start taking pictures and the geomorphologist among people is like, hey, I know the shape of that rock. Let's do some science with that. Mars sample return, we have to wait until 2033 at the earliest to get the rocks back. And then among the people who, there's a subset of a subset of people who specialize in these types of geochemistry and rock analysis and things that will really feed into the science. So you're asking the broader planetary community to carry a very big lift for science that broadly will not impact them. And that's going to be tough going forward. That is beautifully put.

And this show has been filled with like this theme. I feel like, well, we don't actually know exactly how much that's going to be yet. So let's take a good guess. I kept you way over so let's just quickly talk about like one minute on like what what now the congressional situation as you mentioned is this is going to be a weird year it's essentially an election year already because there's going to be there's going to be primary stuff happening soon uh what happens now so we have divided government and Congress again, and obviously just cover some very basic politics 101, right? Republicans run the House of Representatives,

Democrats run the Senate and the White House, and they are already coming in. And usually after a midterm election, when you have divided power like this, the incentive, political incentive isn't to find compromise. The political incentive is actually to demarcate your distinctive ideas of politics and find conflict. And so particularly in the Republican led house, you're looking at a very strong revival of cost cutting, uh, austerity budgeting. And they are talking about returning to at least 2022 levels, but only for discretionary spending and only for non-defense discretionary spending, which in a practical matter means you are cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the pot of money available to NASA and every other non-defense, non-social security program. You're talking maybe a 30% across the board cut if that was to happen.

It won't because the Democrats run the Senate, but they're so far apart and likely unwilling to find a compromise. It's not clear to me politically how that path to a compromise happens. That in the ideal case, or let me phrase that the ideal case is that they find something and they maybe even keep funding flat or a small boost or whatever. It's more likely what happens is you can get something called a continuing resolution where they basically just it's the Excel spreadsheet drag method of last year's budget, where you just extend last year's 2023 money into 2024. And that usually happens

for a few months at a time. Anyway, it just because of the pace of legislating is very slow. But they can do these things. This happened after the Tea Party came into power, very similar dynamics with a Republican run house in 2012. And a or 2011 and a Democratic Senate and president in 2011, where they could not agree. And they just did what was called a full year CR full year continuing resolution. So they basically just, they just took a mulligan and said, we're just not going to do a budget this year. We're just going to keep it where it is from last year. That to me seems to be, it's probably the most likely outcome. That's still better than some of the more dire consequences of blowing the debt ceiling or just shutting down the government for months at a time.

But even so, the consequence of keeping it flat, it's going to be real tough. Mars sample return probably won't make a 2028 launch window. Veritas won't be canceled, but it'll go down exactly to that 1.5 because that'll be the proposal from the administration, they'll take the lowest of all possible proposals. You won't see growth in Neo Surveyor to make it launch in 2028 either, because the money won't be there. You'll see a bunch of consequences from that that are not good. I think overall, Artemis is probably okay in that situation, you probably can't ramp up a second commercial lander provider but that one is so kind of been working in and institutionally going forward that you're probably fine it's the

it's the programs that are at early stages that need to surge right now to to make their launch windows that's where you would really see a negative consequence of a continuing resolution yeah i had a thought the other day, and this is probably too cynical, that when we're doing the show and many presidents from now, that we're going to, the US is going to be in a phase where we have like a presidential election

and one budget and then four years of the same budget and then another election and then four years of the same budget. And I'm like, there are a lot of people asking NASA to get funded for five years at a time. So planning-wise, maybe not the worst.

So even my cynical take is like, yeah So maybe not the worst. It's like, yeah, maybe, you know, that's the monkey's paw wish or being funded at five years at a time. Is that's how it's answered. Yeah. Let me make a positive plug.

Cause I don't want to end on this dour note. If you'll allow me a positive thing. I would love it. This is, this is the planetary society. I mean, this is one of our jobs is to not let this happen to the degree that we can. And we're going to be doing April 18th, a day of action online, a digital day of action

where we get our members and people to communicate with Congress supporting these key missions, particularly Veritas, Mars Sample Return, NASA itself. And then we'll be doing an in person day of action in September, right when this budget stuff will be coming to a head in Washington, DC. The you know, so we have online petitions ways to take action. I have an online class called space advocacy 101. That's available on our new digital member community for our members of the Planetary Society. And it teaches you all the basics, makes you a better advocate and speaker for space exploration and supporter.

And so there are ways to do this. And this is tough this year because the overall currents are very strong, but it's nothing specific to space. are very strong against, but it's nothing specific to space. And the more we can make a positive case for space and to remind people that represent us that things like this suffer when they allow partisanship to stiltify and ossify the progress of government, then, you know, we push back on this.

And so that's, to me, it's really important. And generally there is a very opening and welcome attitude towards support for space in the US government, regardless of party. And the society and other organizations that do this really depend on people to participate in that process to make sure that's not lost in the noise. Stuck to landing on a nothing. So thanks again, Casey, for hanging out. Like I said, I got a bunch of stuff in the show notes. So people will be able to find you. But we always appreciate stealing some time from you to get some great thoughts. Anytime.

Thanks again to Casey for coming on the show. It is always fun chatting with him always enlightening. So if you like these kind of shows, this podcast is 100% listener supported. So head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join up there. Join the 866 people supporting the show every single month, including 35 executive producers. Thanks to Pat, Eunice, Bob, the Astrogators at SCE, Fred, David, Chris, Joel, Dawn Aerospace, Jan, Matt, Rob, Warren, SmallSpark Space Fred, David, Chris, Joel, Dawn Aerospace, Jan, Matt, Rob, Warren, SmallSpark Space Systems, Frank, Ryan, Lars from Agile Space, Donald, Moritz, Simon, Theo and Violet, Benjamin, Chris, Pat from KC, Russell, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, Steve, George,

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