Main Engine Cut Off - T+282: Space Policy and Presidential Transitions (with Mark Albrecht)

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Mark Albrecht joins me to talk about the state and future of space policy in a very dynamic Presidential election year. He shares some stories from the past, talks about his experience in presidential transitions and on the National Space Council, and ruminates on what we may see in November and beyond.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Stealth Julian, Joel, Lee, Kris, David, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Donald, Jan, Harrison, Will and Lars from Agile, Josh from Impulse, Matt, Steve, The Astrogators at SEE, Bob, Russell, Frank, Pat from KC, Joonas, Pat, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Better Every Day Studios, Warren, Fred, and four anonymous—and 816 other supporters.TopicsMark Albrecht (@MarkAlbrecht68) / XFalling Back To Earth: A First Hand Account Of The Great Space Race And The End Of The Cold War: Albrecht, Mark: 9780615447094: Amazon.com: BooksEpisode 99 - Open-Box Protons - Off-NominalEpisode 160 - Cut That Shit Out (with Lori Garver and Loren Grush) - Off-NominalThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ESAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I'm very excited for today's show. We've got Mark Albrecht with us, a man who is very familiar with the kinds of political seasons that we're heading into. There's a lot of space policy talk to be had over the next couple months with a highly dynamic presidential election going on. In either case, we're going to be getting some sort of transition, and with the state that the space policy of the U.S. is in right now, with budget issues, with programs under review like Mars Sample Return, with decisions to be made about the ISS and Artemis. There are so many ways that this stuff could go that I thought it'd be cool to

talk to somebody who's been through this kind of thing before from all sorts of different angles, has had positions on the Space Council as you hear, positions in transitions. I will let him explain the roles that he's had over the years because it'll be enlightening to understand why he's got the right perspective to make sense of these kind of times. So without further ado, let's give Mark a call. All right, Mark, welcome to Managing Cutoff. Thanks for joining me. We've had we had an amazing conversation on Off Nominal, I don't know, a year ago or something like that. But I somehow did not have you on this show yet. So thanks for hanging out with me today. Happy to be with you. We should start because I'm going to pick your brain on two primary ends of space policy that you're familiar with both, which is one, a potential transition between the same party and how that goes.

The other side is what policy might look like if Trump wins the election. So we just turned into a very interesting scenario uh, scenario because now there's two interesting sides of what happens if somebody wins rather than like, if it's an incumbent, oh, well, it's the same thing. Um, but before we get there, people may not be familiar with you and what your relation is to the space policy world. So a little bit of orientation would be, uh, I think good based on, on what we're going to talk about.

Sure. You know, my relationship with the space community goes back to my time at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica back in the late 70s, took a PhD, and then went on to the intelligence community director's staff, which was an interesting perch because on the IC staff, intelligence community staff, this is long before the DNI was formed. It was kind of the virtual DNI, the IC staff. But we had an overview on all the various elements of the intelligence community, which is an interesting way to break into that.

My area of focus when I was on that staff was primarily on space capabilities. So that was the first time I really had a very deep dive into the space world at the classified NRO level. Then I went to the Senate to work for Senator California, Senator Pete Wilson in the 80s. And he had assignments on the Armed Services Committee. And he had an assignment on the Science and Technology Committee. And I handled both of those for him. All of his national security stuff, but also his science and technology stuff.

And at the time, in the 80s, hard to remember, but California was absolutely the mother load of all aerospace technology. Everybody was in Southern California. So everywhere from Rockwell with the space shuttle to TRW and the work they were doing, Hughes Space and Comms. Anyway, it was Lockheed Martin out in Burbank. use spacing comms. Anyway, it was Lockheed Martin out in Burbank. So we not only had committee assignments, but we had constituent access and knowledge. So I got pretty deep into things in the 80s when I worked in the Senate and then was asked by Vice President Quayle to run a re-energized, reinvigorated, 20 years in hiatus National Space Council from the White House, which I did for four years. And we can talk a little bit about that, but

it was really in a very interesting time to do so when you consider that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. And it turns out that both on national security space and our civil space program, the animating force in both was the Soviet Union and either our desire for public relations and international affairs to demonstrate our technological superiority in the civil space program, the moon race, but also in national security. I mean, the Russians were very aggressive in ASAT technologies, etc. So there we were in 1990. The Soviet Union had gone away. We had what was called a peace dividend, almost a 40% immediate cut to all DoD spending.

I mean, what do we need it for? The Cold War is over. There was a real question in the civil space program at NASA of should there be a NASA? After all, it was created to oppose the Soviet Union internationally, etc. So there was, of course, an enduring U.S. interest in exploration and science and all that. But at that point, the question was, do we really need to have a NASA? So we were there right at a critical juncture. It's hard to remember now, it's so far back. But we had some big choices about where we go in the future. So, you know, we, President Bush

was very aggressive about continuing exploration, trying to create a new rationale for doing it, namely rebuilding and energizing U.S. technology base, using space and space exploration as an initiative to keep our technological edge, etc. On the national security side, we found that there were already by the 1990s beginnings of new challenges and threats in space. So our national security space was re-energized and refocused on seizing what we would call the high ground. on seizing what we would call the high ground. So that takes us to the 90s where I then worked in industry and ended up running the space launch business for Lockheed Martin for 10 years. In terms of the questions you asked initially, I was involved in the preliminary transition for the McCain campaign, campaign, the McCain initiatives, Romney, and then Trump won. So I've seen transitions. I lived the transition from Reagan to Bush inside the White House. So that was a really quite unusual. There have been very few vice presidents who have succeeded after a presidency and Bush was one. Right. And I did want to ask about that because

I think I had not really considered what level of transition there would be in those scenarios, especially having grown up, you know, in the modern era of space where presidential transitions are these big moments where a project will get canceled or revived or changed or tweaked, or it's the moon, it's the Mars, it's back to the moon. There's been all this like chaos that happened around, you know, different party transitions, but same party transition, same administration transition. At first I thought, well, it's not really going to be much of anything. And then last week on off nominal, Lori Garver was like, thought well it's not really going to be much of anything and then last week on off nominal laurie garber was like no it's it's gonna be more than you think it will it's it's gonna be a legit transition team absolutely can you give us like how that

actually goes down in those scenarios yeah it was really interesting um you know there there was a present let's put it this way and the bush reagan which is a friendly i guess you call a friendly transition uh there was a presumption on all the members of the Reagan team, everybody will stay in place, everything will just go forward. But on the other hand, you know, Bush had his own ideas about things in national security and space. And there wasn't an absolute, so everybody in the Reagan team assumed all the jobs would remain the same.

And it wasn't. The Bush team regarded it as a full transition. They wanted Bush team members in their positions. Again, the president has every absolute right and expectation to believe that everybody that works for them should be in line with the president's view. And while George Bush and Ronald Reagan were in agreement on many, many things, most things, almost all, but when it came to the point of a baton change, Bush had his own views. Again, I'll give you an example, like on Strategic Defense Initiative, Bush and his team, I'm trying to think of the guys, who was the National Security, Brent Scowcroft, they were a lot less forward-leaning on Strategic Defense Initiative

than was the Reagan team. It turns out that in the course of the convention, when the platform was being worked out, and it was a lot different back in 1988 than it is today, the platform, the Republican platform was kind of a committee markup with a large document. I think people have realized that for a variety of reasons, that having a lot of documentation about policies in an election is not a really great idea because oppositions will thumb through the 700 pages, 900 pages, 200 pages, and find something somewhere to make a big deal out of. I think nowadays presidential platforms are really brief and concise. Not so much because they don't have lots of ideas, but because in today's age with internet and social media,

you could, anything, there's nothing that's 200 pages long. It gives a lot of material for politics to occur gives a lot of material for the politics to occur. A lot of material for other people to grind at. But that was not true in 88. And so there were a lot of fights at the convention in 1988 in New Orleans. There were a lot of fights about the content. John Tower was a Bush guy and Brent Scowcroft, but then you had the Reagan team that was already in place. So it is different. There will be new people, even in a friendly transition. There will be policy changes, although they're not going to be as overt as they might have been in years past because, again, the more there is, the more there is to find fault with. So I've seen it all. In the Romney campaign,

we believed we were going to win the night before the election. We were all badged and ready to go in and start grinding. Turns out that President Trump did win in 2016, and we did transition. So I've seen it all, and it's an interesting process not surprisingly but again consistent with what I just said it's a much more sensitive closed process than it used to be precisely for the reasons that before all the ballots are counted and winners are declared you want to be very circumspect about

how much detail you provide. That's sort of a long winded answer, but I've seen a lot. They're just really interesting moments too, because the context of all of the transitions are going to depend a lot on what's going on in the world. And one thing I've thought about, you know, since Laurie kind of opened my eyes to it being a bigger thing is that since Lori kind of opened my eyes to it being a bigger thing is that campaign wise, I think between now and election day, it's likely that Harris will open up a little bit of space between her and Biden's policies, because I mean, look at the polling, he was not very popular. To say the least, it was did not look like it was going his direction. He did step down from the reelection campaign. So you would assume that there's going to be some space opening

between those and that there would be areas where, and maybe like SDI was an example where the Bush team wanted to move away from something that was getting hype and recognition in ways that were not always positive. And so in that regard, right, space is way down the priority list in 2024 where we are now, but in every area that's that might be an initiative of like let's let's create some space here and move in the direction we think is right but also try to find our way towards what is more popular and more likely to be embraced in the space world you know the when you're doing one of these transitions is this like a kind of zero-based transition where you're going to look at the fundamentals of each

pillar of NASA and go through or do you do you identify areas that feel like they need to be fixed or changed or tweaked like things that aren't working like which which direction do you approach it from yeah well that's a good point well first off uh it's you you've got some tough choices when you're on the transition in teams um it's coming at you at 500 miles an hour the time between the announcement i mean the time between roughly mid-august when they sort of stand up the transition teams uh and january 21st when you're And January 21st, when you're in, it's speed of light. You know, the federal government is gigantic. It is simply gigantic.

You have to think about people you want in the places. And what happens, Anthony, is it's kind of a cascading effect in terms of personnel. I mean, people are, everybody's got what I call sugar pump for areas dancing through their head right now. Ah, I could be deputy assistant, blah, blah, blah. The reality is, um, you have a presidential candidate, big deal. Then that person has a team of people that, um, uh, work for them are close to, who may or may not have domain interest in the area you do. Then there'll be the vice presidential nominee. And that vice presidential nominee in our space world, again, will have their own team of people that may have interest, let's just keep with space, that may be more or less interested or knowledged or experienced in space, and they will have their

own team of people that might be a very heavy team or a very light team, depending on who they are and what they do. Then they will be very influential in naming the key people in things like Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, in our case, in this case, Administrator of NASA. Always a highly contentious, fought over position. Usually late. It's not one of the big five. I mean, everybody, again, thinks, oh, that's going to be so important. They're going to name a NASA Administrator on day one.

Go back and look. It's like May, July, August before they get it right. It took a while. Yeah. So, but then they will have their own team of people, depending on what their experience and background is, that they will want to do these. Same it is with the Secretary of Defense will have a lot of say about who he or she wants as a secretary of air force for example and that person will have their own i mean you know again frank kendall knew the building he had a team of people in place that that he knew who he wanted so men and women that are sitting

out there like in july or august going as i say sugar plum fairies dancing through their head. Gosh, I think I'll be the undersecretary for acquisition. I think I'll take the Cal Valley job. You know, I'm a good, loyal person. I've worked hard. I've got the cred and credentials. Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what happens above you. But personnel is policy. So everybody has in their own mind, even on a friendly transition, their own mind about what needs to be done. As you know, everybody in government will support what the president and the leadership decides, but they may have their own views about, well, that was a bad decision. I would have done it another way. And now they may have an opportunity to do it another way, but you don't know what's in their head. I mean, again, if you know their associates and you know them well, but it's just like right now, we could have anything from a governor with no background in space to a

potential, to a former astronaut who probably has fixed, I have no idea, but probably has extremely strong views about how to run the civil space program and perhaps the national security space program and associates and teammates and friends, friends, people that have worked for them that they're eager to play since. I mean, so it's a real wide open field right now. The only thing I think you can say is at 10,000 feet, really not knowing anything more, is that a friendly transition will be more likely to be generally supportive of things done in the prior administration, although in no way bound,

you could have some very strong dog legs that nine months from now or a year from now, you and I might go, wow, I never saw that coming. How'd that get there? Well, the other funny part too is that, you know, in the recent years, there's been a convergence on a lot of big space policy topics and certainly the embrace of Artemis from one, you know, from Trump one to Biden administration and the embrace that, you know, Bridenstine and Bill Nelson both had for it was notable in that there wasn't a lot of major churn. There were areas that are going to get turned up or down, but on the, you know, it wasn't as dramatic as, as the 2010 era when all this stuff was thrown up into chaos.

So projecting that forward, I think the real big variable here on either direction is the budget situation that NASA and the whole federal government is in at the moment. And then when you look at NASA specifically, there's obviously huge problems to solve with the science programs like mars up return i think the iss program is at a really kind of really weird inflection point in that we've now funded a deorbit vehicle we haven't yet really

funded their commercial follow-ons and we don't know when iss is going to end so there's major decisions being made there and all of those budget wedges are hitting at the same time as we have this whole Artemis program. So it's, you know, something does have to give if you just look at it on a realistic level. And prior to, you know, Biden stepping away from the election, I was like, well, in one of these cases, something is going to change because there's going to be change that occurs. In the other case, we would just remain in the budget quagmire that we're in at the moment.

So now we're at least in this era where I feel like something is going to get changed because it needs to be fixed. And this is, I mean, the writing on the wall to me is like, this is the last moment that we're either going to go ahead and do the whole Lunar Gateway situation or this is getting canceled

because it's the one that you can remove from the stack that kind of frees up space. So if anyone calls me about putting me on any transition team, just know I'm coming for Gateway from a personal level. So I guess that's where I'm at. What it occurs to me, Anthony, is this is very similar to the transition I experienced on the way out. So Reagan had space station freedom and turned it over to Bush. And there was a big decision because there was space station freedom looks a lot like Artemis to me today. Just tell you, it's a good idea, it's credible, etc., but it's being managed in the most complicated way, which is exactly what Space Station Freedom was. Each center had its own

piece. It was done as much to satisfy constituencies and centers. It couldn't be run out of headquarters. Just too big to be run out of headquarters. Well, if it's not run out, who's the systems integrator? And if the answer is, well, NASA headquarters is not capable of being the systems integrator of a multibillion-dollar, you know, all these pieces are going to have to come together and work. So this is exactly where we were with Space Station Freedom. And the Clinton-Gore administration, when they came in, did something really amazing. They said to Dan Golden,

who was the administrator that we had put in, and they were looking at with a gimble eye about whether they're going to keep him or, you know, a gimlet eye, pardon me, of whether they're going to keep him or not. So he was always on the hot seat every day. You know, every time the phone rang, he goes, is this White House saying thank you for your service? Or no, no, just kind of curious what's going on today. But they canceled space station freedom, but they didn't terminate the space station. They said to Golden, you've got a week to come up with a credible space station program that fits within this budget framework and is going to be deployed in this time framework. And basically, it just cut through all the riffraff. It cut through all the BS controversy and complexities inside,

and they basically said, what pieces of hardware do we have right now? What pieces of hardware can we put our hands on? What are the launch systems that are capable of doing it? No imaginary. What's on the ramp? And what can we assemble? And what kind of capability will it give? And it allowed them to just cut through all the noise. I mean, again, they were facing total cancellation. I mean, and the Clinton administration was serious as a heart attack. We're ready to sign the paper to cancel it. And guess what? They came up and said, well,

we could use Russians. And again, at that period of time, we were trying to bring Russia into the community of nations. We were hoping that they were going to be a liberal democracy. We were hoping they'd have free and fair elections, et cetera. So there's the Zvezda module, a power module, and that's already on the ground, ready to go. And they go, we got a proton rocket and we So there's the Asvestia module A power module That's already on the ground ready to go And they go we got a proton rocket and we can put it up there Lockheed Martin Was way ahead on its freedom

Commitment for For solar panels Gigantic solar panels for space station freedom They exist Scoop them up So they put it all together and tinkertoited, and out of it came ISS, and it was launched within three years, or the pieces, and it started being assembled. We had the shuttle. It was real. It worked. We could do pieces of it. Admittedly, Columbia didn't

have the power to get to the orbit because the Russians weren't going to put their power module in anything other than an orbit favorable to them for launch, etc. So some of the space shuttles could get to that orbit, and some of them couldn't, and one of them couldn't, Columbia. So anyhow, that strikes me as an example of not absolute cancellation, but a really substantial redirection. So anyway, that's a possibility, or we could just muddle along with what we have and let the continue. You know, this is just so reminiscent

of space station freedom. You know, the estimate of completion. That's interesting. I've never heard that analogy, but it really does track. Oh, totally. Especially when you think about, you know, the relative states of hardware and what is out there for Artemis right now and what's happening at the same time as this Orion heat shield issue is happening as well, which is a little bit of a kicker.

Yeah, and again, each one of these things in the development and design phase can be run somewhat independently. But the closer you get to go time, all this stuff, you know, you can't have guys working on the gateway making changes, and they're making changes every day that impact, you know, the lander. You've got to have a single integration team that can make yes-no decisions at a moment's notice. No, you can't do that. No, you can't do that. Yes, you can do that. If you do that, then you must do that. This is what it takes to bring a mission like that to absolute completion. And my reading of where we are right now is that's just not, I don't see how all that actually converges to an actual go day where you have somebody has to be able to say, no, you can't do that. Sorry, that change is not acceptable.

You've got to figure out how to accommodate whatever it is that made that happen to you. You've got to figure out how to do that. Anyhow, complexity ahead yeah it's funny too because they're they are the same program but they feel like parallel paths right now where the gateway has been unhooked from you know the initial landing it has nothing to do with the gateway it is entirely orion and starship going to do its landing the later landing vehicles are said you know stage out of the gateway and we'll go down from there um gateway is tied to the new version of sls and the new mobile launch

tower um so again they're like parallel tracks right we need a new upper stage a new mobile launch tower for the gateway missions but we're doing the first one with the old sls and starship on its own and this parallel tracking is very odd because, um, I think the reason that gateway is vulnerable, even beyond my, my go to the surface bias is that they are delayed much further than they had assumed that they would be or, or assess that they would be. And the longer they delay, the closer the time gap is between gateway and landing. I don't know which one comes first, but the get the time gap is going to be much less. And once you've got enough forward momentum on lunar surface assets,

you already have all of the partners who also come into the gateway wanting to do things on the lunar surface as well. So there's going to be a rapid, you know, interest loss in the gateway. And I guarantee you today, every day, there are hundreds of critical design decisions that are being made independently

by the piece parts that assume something's being, and I've lived it. I was on the GPS advisory board when we were doing the GPS 3, the new user equipment, and OCX. Classic. And here was one single program. And OCX was making decisions that were impacting GPS 3 spacecraft software integration designs that they obviously were taking the hard things and moving it off their plate because what do they care about? I've got a cost, schedule, and performance box that I have to fit in. So if I make engineering changes and decisions that offload some of the real hard parts of my job and assume that they'll pick it up on the

other side, it just doesn't. And the closer you get, the more those decisions are being made every single day. And then the gateway guys, so the Lambda guys opened up and said, whoa, there was a huge software change and requirement that was made. We're not prepared. We don't have any money for that. That was on your side of the interface. No, no, no, no. Then all of a sudden you made design changes so that it's on my side of the i mean really unless you've got a ruthless ruthless central manager who can literally

so with that that will come to you my next observation is i think regardless of outcome it's time for nasa to go back to old school and get an administrator who's technical and technically knowledgeable. Enough of this up and out junk. I mean, it's, you know, that's not what NASA needs. NASA doesn't need a gland hander. NASA doesn't need an internationalist. NASA doesn't need somebody who can walk the hills of Congress and get extra money, etc. somebody who can walk the hills of Congress and get extra money, etc. What NASA needs now urgently is a technical leader in the old school model who actually understands the details and will spend their days and nights deciding what the five things NASA ought to be doing and will ruthlessly manage to get them done. I mean, that's my personal opinion.

That's interesting. I've been swayed to the politician administrator over the last few years because I'm not as much of a fan of Nelson. Bridenstine I thought was very effective. But where we're at right now is that we have so many programs going on that are all at critical junctures. So you're right that a different mindset

to get us out of that log jam would be really helpful not to get a lot of funding for new log jams. You know, we've got enough we've got enough log jams that we need to sort out exactly how we're going to handle all these. So that's an interesting, interesting consideration in terms of placing those individuals. I'm curious about NASA administrator and and, you know, your role in the national space council from, from your, and maybe the Scott Pace example too, like,

um, you know, in a potential Trump administration from 2025 on, is that, you know, is Scott Pace somebody, how did he get in that position in, in 2016?

And what is the process? How important is that role? Maybe some comparisons to the current national space council and how it's being run. How do these key people get in place? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll give you an example. And I guess I can say, break a little news here. You asked, I will answer. So I was on the transition team back in 2016, and Mike Pence, great guy, was in the end of ends running transition. He and his staff were interested in the Space Council. Well, I was right down the hallway. So we had many, many meetings about the Space Council.

And by the way, there were a lot of things we agreed about and a lot of things we disagreed about. For example, he was interested in the Space Council being kind of, I'll use this, up and out, where my view of the Space Council was, and again, it depends on your times and what the problems were, was down and in. You know, we had to figure out what the hell national security space was actually going to be like post-Cold War. We had to decide what NASA was going to be about post-Cold War. So it was like, and I said to him, and then he was talking about this user advisor group. It was in his mind early on. And I said, well, tell me about it. He said, did you guys have an advisory group? I got, absolutely. We had guys like Edward Teller and Pete Aldrich, et cetera. And he said, well, where do they meet? And I said, well, in the executive office building. And what was their agenda? It was whatever the vice president

wanted them to think about. Did they have meetings? And the answer was no. We called them in when we needed them. And we had some former heads of industry, but not current industry heads. These were formers. I can't remember who was the guy from. Anyway, so we had former CEOs of the big, some of the bigs. And we would ask them problems we were facing and said, we want your advice. And sometimes they'd go, give us three or four days. And we told the department or agency responsible, go brief these guys.

They're cleared for everything. You know, and then come back and give us your advice. So he was saying, well, I was thinking more of a user advisory group. And then we would have public meetings. And I go, why would you want public meetings? What up with that? You know, it's like, can you imagine a National Security Council meeting in the public? I mean, in an auditorium or something?

I mean, you know, you've got the pictures of the guys sitting in the public, I mean, in an auditorium or something. I mean, you know, you've got the pictures of the guys sitting in the situation room, everybody leaning forward and looking at the screens about do we go, you know, do we shoot them? Do I have a trigger authority? I'm going, what the hell do you want that stuff in public? I mean, you want a space council meeting if you really wanted to manage the space. Anyhow, so we have that disagreement. But here's the answer. You asked a very specific question. Well, you got the whole no public meetings this time around, manage the space for anyhow so we have that disagreement but here's the answer you asked a very well you got the whole no public meetings this time around so you must be thrilled with the era of the space council there hasn't been one i i yeah again i i so anyway so you asked about

my dear friend scott who i think is a great guy and i think he did a great job. So Mike Pence said, I want you to be the executive secretary of the National Space Council. And I said, oh, no, I don't want to do that. There are two reasons. One, I'm kind of done with government service. I mean, I loved it and enjoyed it. It was a great, great honor, et cetera. But A, I don't want to do that. And number two, I said, you know, I just worry about the optics, right? So we had a National Space Council 20 years ago. And, you know, I was executive secretary, proud to do it, happy to do it and proud of what we did. But 20 years after all that's happened in space, all the unbelievable things that are going on, you could choose anybody to run the National Space Council,

and you'd choose the same guy. I said, I just, it just, you know, it doesn't feel right. There's so many men and women that have really done amazing things etc so in the end of ends and and mike pence was calling my house my wife was picking up the phone he was going hey look you know enough is enough we really you know and she she got the party line said no we just don't want to go back into government blah blah blah and uh his uh josh i can't remember, Pitcairn, anyway, was his chief of staff at the time. Many have rolled on and off since then. And he said, he called me up and said, look, it's going to be Scott Pace. If it's not you, it's going to be Scott Pace.

And I said, well, Scott's a great guy. I don't have any problem with that whatsoever. He goes, but I just want to make sure you understand, if you won't take this job, we're going to name Scott Pace. I mean, not like a threat, but it was like, we're serious. We're not like, yeah. And I said, have at it. So you ask how Scott Pace, that's how Scott Pace got the job. I could have been the national executive secretary of the National Space Council.

Probably wouldn't have lasted long because i thought the whole user advisory group you would have hated getting your picture taken under the space shuttle discovery and wherever else they had all those meetings so you would have been you probably would have quit after the first public meeting so yeah i i just i would have a hard time so there's your answer to that question um i've let me simply say this. I spoke with several, and I won't mention any names, but I spoke with a couple of candidates or whispered candidates for Trump's VP. And I spoke with them on the issue of the Space Council. And I took no position. I said, look, I will give you, here's 10 arguments about why it would be good to continue the Space Council and 10 arguments why it wouldn't be good to continue the Space Council. And I can assure you that even if you care about space, the White House apparatus can really handle all space issues.

National Security Council is more than capable of having a senior director on national security space policy. OSTP is perfectly capable of having a person who can handle civil and so on and so forth. OMB is always ready to take the stick in the absence of it. So I said, it's not as though it's Space Council or there's no focus on space in the White House. And I said, for example, Al Gore decided not to continue the Space Council because he and Bill Clinton had a bigger assignment for him. He was going to reinvent government. And he said, Space Council, reinvent government. I think I'll reinvent

government. Yeah, what should you pick? Yeah. So I said, you know, it's up to you and what you want to do and where your interests lie. And then there were conversations about where do you think the big problems in space are? But that was just my personal opinion at that point. So I have no idea whether they will continue it. I could make the case for not continuing it, like I just mentioned, or I could make the case for continuing it. I told the people I spoke with, I said, I would only do it if you really felt there was something that needed to be done that you felt attention from the white house and focus for the from the white house could make a big difference and i recommended that you go down and in not up and out i that so uh i don't know what would happen in a another trump administration with the space council or not

similarly i don't know with kamala harris again it depends on who and then she also got a front row seat to like you know maybe this maybe she identified like i don't i don't really feel like there's anything to be done in this particular instance and i don't think i should spend the time with these meetings or whatever so that's a that's an interesting aspect but um i think there's from the outside always been a bit bit of mystery of the space policy under original Trump administration. How much of that was drawn from Mike Pence? None of us knew at the time, was super into space, but turned out to be somebody really engaged with it. Was that a major driving force, or do you feel like without him, would there have been as much of a focus on the kinds of policy we got in that administration?

That's an interesting and tough question, and I'm not sure about the details. I do know that President Trump, early on when we were even doing transition, was very focused on the idea of a space force and why. focused on the idea of a space force and why, namely that the United States, you know, it's space, national security space is not an adjunct to Air Force space. It's its own domain and needs its own focus and attention. And that I know came from the president early on, what, you know, again, the level of detail. And I don't know the internal workings. I knew Scott well and spent a lot of time with him. But we never really talked about how focused Mike Pence was.

I know he was very interested in the Artemis and the Artemis Accords and all that sort of stuff. That, I think, was heavily influenced by him. But more than that, I really don't know. Yeah. What are the things, and of course, Scott could rip off a dozen things, and they'd all be true and right about what they did and why. I'm not. So do you sense that, are there particular people that you have in mind that might be involved if Trump were to win the election that would, anything that would carry on policy-wise or things that you feel like were unresolved in that first term that they had that might get another look? I don't know. And like I said, when it comes to people, there are so many cascading personnel choices that will influence it uh at any given point i mean once

now we have jd vance i have no idea about his team etc so there are a lot of things that it's like a whole new branch of individuals the over unders through linkedin for a while we'll probably be able to you might yeah yeah uh so but then once the other dominoes fall who's the secretary of defense well that'll determine a lot i mean the over-unders on all the names that are potential air force secretaries will change once we know who the sec def is a lot you know and and so it is with nasa uh it change depending on whether J.D. Vance makes a commitment to doing the Space Council and who in his team are space people. You know, you just don't know.

So the answer is there's a huge stable of really talented and capable people that I'm sure would be more than happy and willing to go in and work in a new Trump administration, who they are and how they fit is really going to depend on as the dominoes go at a higher level. I'm excited for whatever happens in space policy, either direction of the election, because it is such a dynamic moment in terms of there being so many programs that are either you know in major strife budgetarily or technically or like mars emperor turned completely being rethought and that deadline happened to fall after election day shocker that they were going to get back to us after the

election was clear but you know like i said, with Harris, probably trying to open up space between her and the Biden administration policies in some areas, I think it, it creates some ground for like serious rethinking of programs that look to be issues. And, you know, if in my fanfic version, like I thought the Bill Nelson era of NASA underplayed their hand where they could have, uh, in an era where Russia's invading Ukraine and being an unreliable partner in the ISS, I thought they could have went after a lot more funding for commercial Leo, for even like this USD orbit vehicle before it came about. All of a sudden we have another $1.5 billion we need for this D orbit vehicle. I felt like there were areas that were opportunities there that they didn't take.

And it's like, is this a moment to rethink that a little bit? Again, it depends on how this all shakes out of whatever look Kamala got. Hey, look, those are going to be problems. You know, whoever is the president on January 22nd of next year, they've got big problems in space. I mean, really, are they going to, just to take one, for example, is Donald Trump going to be satisfied going, oh, you know, you're going to, so, so you've got a, let's just stick with civil space and, you know, you've got a civil space program. So you're going to leave office. You're going to do another four year stint. And when you leave office, there'll be nothing flying.

We won't be back to the moon. We won't be in a space station is still there. So in many regards, you're just going to grind four more years of program progress. I don't know the guy that well. I mean, I can't imagine he goes, Oh yeah,

that's good. I'm good with that. It's going to go bullshit. The first time around, it it was like let's get to the moon by the time that the first exactly exactly yeah talk send me someone who says i can get you there in two years i'm all ears you know i mean i'm making that up i have no no but i mean knowledge but i can't imagine the positioning. When you take the tact that, you know, the 2016 mantras and apply that to where hardware is eight years later and what has been going on with the Starship program

and the first flight of SLS that went off how it did with the Orion heat shield incident and where the gateway hardware is at, not done. Like there are there are things have progressed in those eight years and when you apply some of that same mental model what comes out the other end is going to be vastly different oh yeah and you look at right now the dream dreamliner i mean i mean those guys are stuck up there i mean i i don't have any insight knowledge to that and my heart's's out to all people involved.

But that is not a good look. August 28th as a potential de-orbitalization. They're not going to come down in that. I guarantee you. You know the way the system works. They can't test it. You can't fire those things while it's attached to the, you know. There is some stuff that's definitely left out where they said they did this test firing and all looks good and i'm like the problem was

when it was fired for long durations and the heat built up so i don't know they haven't sufficiently explained the how this tracks to what they were seeing before no in my and you mentioned you mentioned the other little thing about the russian and iss we're gonna be on iss the other little thing yes you know and we a monday tuesday well you know that gets into politics and i know that's about the Russian and ISS. We're going to be on ISS. The other little thing, yes. You know, and a Monday, Tuesday, well, you know, that gets into politics, and I know that's not your podcast, but, I mean, a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, where Russia's the worst in the world, we've got to cut them off, we're going to sanction the hell out of them, they're never going to get another penny.

And then on Tuesday, Thursday, it's like, well, by the way, we're not going to do any fossil fuel production, so Russian's price for the oil they sell is going up, up, up. They're making more money now on oil and gas than they did before they went into Ukraine. And oh, by the way, they've got us by the huevos on Space Station.

I guarantee you, these guys are going to, either Elon's going to have to send another dragon up to get them all down, they're going to take the dream, going to have to send another dragon up to get them all down they're going to take the the dream i think it's dreamliner starliner yeah it's starliner it's confusing we've got starliner dream chaser and dreamliner all legitimate things in the in the same area so and and they'll detach from the space station and de-orbit it but i i've forecast it won't have people in it wow nice i love this prediction give me some other off the wall space predictions i love this well i think you know whether it's it's the russians that

rescue them or elon i you know i don't like i would not like the hand i'm being dealt at nasa right now right i mean you know we're getting to that point where you got so many people on board and so many exit seats and you got a real risk i mean just think about it anthony i mean having been there the government guys industry guys make this well foreign guys make decisions the russians go stuff a minute take it off if it doesn't work hey they're pioneers you know shit happens. If they were Chinese, put them in, send them out. But it's America, it's NASA. Oh my God, a national day of mourning. I can't do it. I can't handle the stress. I can't handle the risk. So the bottom line is what's my alternative?

The answer is fly it back without people. If works hale and hearty we then certify it and thence forward blah blah blah uh and then we'll get them down either we'll snuggle them up on dragons we'll bring them down on uh russian vehicles uh so i use whatever yeah yeah uh and they go well what's the cost well boeing's's going to have its hand out. That's for sure. They're going to go, wait a minute. We're contractors. So what does the government do? Government says, oh, so it's just a cash problem? The answer is, yeah, it's just a cash problem.

We can solve this with no risk of these people dying. Zero. And it's going to cost you another $10 dollar to pass around all the hands that are out and we'll get you out of this jam federal government are you kidding me i'll take it thank you i'll take two you know so i mean you're not there it's not it's definitely not it's definitely in the realm of possibility eric berger i know had a had a tweet last week or something that there there's there was he has sources that say there's work going on to fly the next dragon up with two crew members and some extra suits for butch and sonny so it's definitely in the ballpark of possibilities and by the way this is a political year do you just do you want

the head of the national space council running for president and in to talk about an october surprise two fried astronauts that's that's pretty dark and uh also very accurate i mean i mean really yeah i mean let me put it if i were on the other side i'd go oh this is too sweet so these guys fried because there was a problem with the thrusters blah blah, blah, blah. Didn't make it down. National tragedy. Gee whiz, who was the head? Kamala Harris was the head of National Space Council. And people go, like you, Anthony, who know things well, go,

oh, come on, man. What does she have to do with the thrusters? Doesn't matter. It writes itself. I mean, like you're saying about large policy documents being out there in the world. Exactly. This is even bigger than that. Major incidents. Yeah. So, and if she has influence over it, which I suspect is assuming she's still doing her

National Space Council day job right now, you know, somebody is going to run up by her and say, well, what is the risk? They go, we think we're ready to bring them back down. well what is the risk they go we think we're ready to bring them back down okay what's the risk well is it zero well no it's not so is it five percent well is it ten percent well it's certainly it's less than 20 one out of five chance it's less than one out of five and she's sitting there going uh no thanks yeah give me the one with Yeah, give me the one with zero. Yeah, give me the one with zero or very close to zero. I mean, you know, everyone has a non-zero, but I want to ground force it. But that's the world we live in. Or they get to stay there until November 7th.

One or the other. Either they ain't leaving until November 7th or they ain't going on that vehicle. I love this. We got to get an odds site up where you set the odds for these things. This is excellent. We're're gonna have a whole you got to go off nominal again and we got to do a whole series of space predictions and by the way uh you know and on the other side um elon and uh president trump are you know best buds now president trump's had best buds that come and go and that's right yeah one of them you were talking about, telling you about the National Space Council.

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I was shocked, and again, I make no representation about what's in anybody's mind, etc., but you heard the same thing I did when President Trump was on a roll, and he was going, I saw these two beautiful rockets come down and land, and, you know, it's just unbelievable. It's like science fiction, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, you know, I was talking to Elon about it and said, that's just amazing. And he goes, said the magic words. I don't know where, just came out. He said, if that had been done by the government, it would have taken 10 to 50 years. And he's absolutely correct. I worked

on the National Aerospace Plane in 1989. The National Aerospace Plane was going to be a completely reusable method to orbit. I worked on the, what was it called? The Venture Star when I was at Lockheed Martin, X-33 at NASA under Dan. So we should be concerned when you start working on Starship is what we're gathering from this. And so it's like, wow, somehow that thought is in his head that if this had been a government program,

it would have taken 10 to 50 years. I don't know where that thought got into his head that if this had been a government program, it would have taken 10 to 50 years. I don't know where that thought got into his head, but I don't think it was a random thought and it will have consequences. I don't know what consequences. I don't know. I heard it just like you and everybody else. Well, this has been awesome. Really great to have insight and context from how these things match up to other moments that we've had in space that I was not around for. So I always appreciate learning from what has happened before, because I feel like that, especially in the world of space, definitely informs where things are heading. So anything before you leave, anything in particular you want to plug for people? I know you've got a book out in the world.

Maybe you want to plug that. Yeah, my book, falling back to earth first hand account of the great space race in the end of the cold war uh available on amazon uh uh and it's actually the more as time goes on it's even a better read because the big wheel is turned and what we were dealing with is kind of in obviously the substance is different but kind of what we're dealing with the issue of uh these political appointments i mean we fired a nasa administrator first time in history and it it it was not personal it was with a reason nasa needed a leader who actually understood the technical details and understood how to make big programs work.

I think my personal two cents is the time has come again. We're done. We don't need astronauts. We don't need politicians. NASA should have a leader who actually actually because that's the big problem how do you make all this stuff actually work that is definitely the problem for the next one to two administrations based on the timelines of everything so you've you've uh convinced me that i should be i had this whole harebrained theory that jake on off nominal hates that uh i thought john culberson was going to make a return to the political scene and be like a

breidenstein to nasa administrator have this weird penchant for europa clipper completely non-parochially and uh be a good fit but i don't know what i haven't kept up with him so i don't know what he's up to so that's just my off the wall prediction you know and all that could be true basically what it does is it'll tell... Anyway, I've got to scoot, Anthony. Yeah, we've got to go. I've got to shoot for too long. But thank you so much, Mark.

See you later. Bye. Thanks again to Mark for coming on the show. I can only assume it was one of the vice presidential candidates calling him up to offer a spot on the Space Council. We have to assume, with a key part of that show being about how he got a call from Mike Pence and many calls from Mike Pence, that that phone ringing was once again not mike pence but the people that are

currently in the vp candidate positions who knows maybe he knows who the other candidate is before the rest of us do but uh always appreciate talking with him and getting some of that historical context so i hope you enjoyed uh the perspective and and uh the conversation and uh let's see before we get out of here for the day, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports this show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 850 something of you out there. I say something because Patreon makes it hard to count,

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Headlines, which is a separate RSS feed. I do a show every single week running through all the stories that you need to know about. The things that you don't need to know about, I leave off. It is really me just trimming the news for you, keeping you up to date on space. You're supporting the show. It's a great win-win. So check that out if you're interested. And this show was produced by 31 executive producers. Thanks to Stealth Julian, Joel, Lee, Chris, David, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Donald, Jan, Harrison, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Josh from Impulse, Matt, Steve, The Astrogators SCE, Bob, Russell, Frank, Pat from KC, Eunice, Pat, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Better Everyday Studios, Warren, Fred, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. I could not do it without

you and hope you enjoyed the conversation today. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanageatgoddoth.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.