Main Engine Cut Off - T+296: Jim Bridenstine on Space Policy

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Former Congressman and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine joins me to talk space policy, then and now: CLPS, Commercial Space Stations, Artemis, international partnerships, and more.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Stealth Julian, Kris, Heiko, Pat, Jan, Warren, Josh from Impulse, Ryan, Lee, Joel, David, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Matt, Pat from KC, Will and Lars from Agile, Joonas, Donald, Bob, Frank, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Steve, Theo and Violet, Better Every Day Studios, Fred, Russell, The Astrogators at SEE, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsHome | The Artemis GroupTouchdown! Carrying NASA Science, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Lands on Moon - NASAFirefly’s Blue Ghost 1 lands on the moon - SpaceNewsBlue Ghost Mission 1 - Firefly AerospaceFalcon 9 launches second Intuitive Machines lunar lander - SpaceNewsHouse Committee Backs Moon-to-Mars, But Changes May Be Needed – SpacePolicyOnline.comThe 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 FireflyWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. Got a very special guest with us today. I've got Jim Bridenstine, former congressman, former NASA administrator under the original Trump administration here on the show to talk about space policy then and now kind of. I think I meant to, I was originally setting this up for around the election to talk about some of the potential outcomes there. Jim was traveling, I had a baby,

holidays happened, chaos ensued. Here we are a couple months later, but I do think it's a good time to talk space policy with him. So I'm excited to talk about some of the things we've seen happen, what might happen in the future. So without further ado, let's give Jim a call. Jim, welcome to Manage Cutoff.

It's the first time we had you on here. We had you on off nominal years ago at this point, but never had you on this show. So glad to finally have you on here. Thank you, it's good to be here. I think I intended, when we started emailing about this, to have you on around the election time, but then you were traveling, I had another kid and then chaos ensued towards the holidays. So

we have leapt into another generation of space policy, I feel like from the last time that I wanted to talk to you to now. There you go. But I think it's good. It's kind of an interesting moment. A couple of years after you've left NASA, things have shifted. Some things have now that were either you put in place or actively underway when you were there have now, as we saw with Firefly yesterday, fully succeeded in achieving their goals. So I think it's a good amount of retrospective to get into, and I thought it'd be cool to

just talk generally about some of the things that were under your administration, things that have changed since, what you're looking at as like the outlook of today's space policy. So that's a lot, is there, we don't, you know, all the time in the world, so like, do you want to start on Artemis? Where's your favorite to start on?

No, I love the fact that you started with Firefly and the Eclipse program, you know, that was my first program that I started at NASA. The idea was how do we get to the moon and how do we do it super fast? And not just fast, but how do we do it differently? How do we how do we drive down the cost, increase the access? And this was, of course, born from the, if you remember, the Google Lunar X Prize, which got canceled. And of course, I was devastated as as the NASA administrator, I wanted to do something about it. So I was my thought was NASA will just pick up the prize. It was a $25

million prize, you had to land on the moon, you had to do a hop for like 500 meters or something like that. And so my thought was, NASA will just pick up the prize. And so we started working with our legal team for NASA to make it the NASA lunar X prize or whatever we could do to make it. And the reality was there's no legal mechanism for NASA to do prizes. So we had to do something else. What can we do? How do we make this continue? And the answer was we'll take payloads that NASA has an interest in taking to the moon. And instead of NASA purchasing, owning, and operating the hardware to take the payload to the moon,

NASA will just buy the service to take the payload to the moon. And of course, that became the CLPS program. And we came out of the gate with like nine different suppliers to the CLPS program. We on-ramped a number after that. And now we've got a number of them that are demonstrating success, including the most recent one with Firefly. Intuitive Machines has landed on the moon softly. There was a lot of news about them tipping over. I want to be clear landing on the moon is not easy. And their landing softly in essence was a success. Firefly has now been successful. Others are coming down the pike. Intuitive Machines just launched again.

iSpace is making a play with Draper and others. So there's so many good things happening as it relates to taking payloads to the moon. And again, the idea is if these companies are competing against each other on cost and innovation, and if they're getting customers that are not NASA, we can drive down the cost, we can increase the access, and that is now underway. Multiple providers are now landing on the moon, and they're taking payloads that are important to the US government, including the Artemis program.

And ultimately, this is gonna be a step change difference in how we access the moon compared to what we did in 1972. And to be clear, until intuitive machines landed and now Firefly has landed, we have not been on the surface of the moon since 1972. So these are exciting times and I think all of America can be proud. The CLPS program had a moment, you know, maybe leading up to the Peregrine launch or shortly after there that it felt like it could go another way pretty quickly in that, you know,

Peregrine had a lot of issues and student machines had many moments. I mean, they recently found this paper that they came in with a perilune of 1.3 kilometers. They were like sniffing the regolith on the way into the moon. So there were moments when it was very tenuous for those first two missions, right? And you could write the script that firefly doesn't go well. Some of these higher value targets start smashing into the moon. Viper canceled and taken off of Clip's Lander, which we'll talk about in a second. It felt like there was a moment where there was risk in the program generally if enough of these went the wrong way. So we have averted that, but I'm curious, there are some criticism I think that still

stands in that the early task orders had a bit of a race to the bottom mechanic of price and these put you know, put some companies out of business, it had others crumble under the pressure of that. I've seen the task orders grow in recent years and I don't say that in a way of criticizing it. I say it as a way of supporting the fact that the prices have got more realistic. But yes, was that something that you were concerned about in the early days of seeing like, could they really pull off a lander for 70 million dollars or was that, did you expect that in the early part? So you have to remember, if you're going to do something commercially, there is a budget

out there to land on the moon that is not the NASA budget. I mean, that is the reality. And that private capital that separates the United States of America from all of our competitors on the globe. That private capital had to demonstrate that it was willing to show up and support this program. And that private capital, of course, is driven by the fact that there are customers, NASA of which is one, but there are other customers as well.

And if we could pull this off, what it means is we're gonna have, again, more access to the moon than ever before with more providers, dissimilar redundancy. So if one of them fails or has a problem, we can go with others. It's just like commercial resupply of the International Space Station or commercial crew. And by the way, this model was designed after that.

So it's not unique. It's unique in the sense that it's not driven by the human exploration missions directorate, which historically was the case. We intentionally put it in the science mission directorate. But at the end of the day, I do think that private capital has materialized. Now that there has been success. I think what you're going to find is even more private capital. And I, you know, I think, you know, Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly, if he's not on the phone today raising money from private capital, he's, he's making a mistake, but I can tell you, he is doing that. That's the right thing to do. So, and I want to be really clear. Congratulations to Jason Kim and the entire Firefly team.

Amazing accomplishment, way to go. And America is again very proud of what you've been able to achieve. But I think you have to think of it as the NASA budget is a piece. And if it's not a piece, then it's really not commercial. If the NASA budget is everything, then it's not a commercial program and you're not benefiting the US government. What you don't wanna do is you don't wanna replace a government monopoly with a private monopoly.

We haven't done that here. What we've done is we've actually increased access to the moon, lowered costs for the access to the moon. And I think over time, this is gonna prove to be every bit as successful as commercial resupply, as commercial crew. And I think over time this is going to prove to be every bit as successful as commercial resupply as commercial crew And I think commercial space stations are gonna follow suit. I was gonna go there next because I think that's an area where I'm curious. Yeah, I've been very critical of the approach commercial space stations in the last couple of years and partially That's like I don't know that the same case is there because of the capital expenditure that you need to get up and running

same cases there because of the capital expenditure that you need to get up and running. But it's been an interesting five years, six, seven years even, of how to handle that program. It has been something that much as the way as commercial cargo and crew did struggled for funding in the early years. My biggest criticism of the Nelson era NASA was that they had the greatest geopolitical event happening to actually take advantage of and get commercial space station funding and that we were like fighting a proxy war with the other partner in the ISS, which was also having technical problems. It felt like such an opportunity to go and get, you know, a serious level of funding for that program in Congress that

did not materialize. And the budget is still relatively low for what feels like the most capital expensive program other than landing on the moon that NASA has in its, you know, under its purview right now. Is that an indication that that is just where we're at in that program, that we're not ready to spend that kind of money on it yet? It feels to me like we don't actually want to go do it because we're not putting the resources towards it. But from your view, does it feel like it's too early still or we should be trying to up that funding level?

So I think, look, I want to be really clear on a few things. Number one, the Biden administration, I want to be very grateful to them for the purpose, or I should say, because of what they did as far as not canceling programs that we started, just because we started them. I think that's an important thing for our country to be able to go from one administration to the next to the next to the next because what NASA does is in in fact multi-generational and if it is one party only doing it it's not going to be successful over the long term. So they didn't cancel anything. I would also say if you look at

the the NASA projections going forward for how to do the missions that we had set forth, we needed big increases in the NASA budget. While they kept all the programs, that increase in funding did not materialize the way we anticipated it materializing. The NASA budget under the Trump administration went from, I want to say it started around 18 billion, but when we left it was at like 23 billion, that's a pretty significant increase, because they really believe this was a big part of making America great again, that was part of that was part of the agenda, and the creation of the Space Force

and all of the different things that are happening on the on the national security side of space. So so those programs didn't get canceled, but they also didn't get the adequate funding that they needed. And Congress, you know, quite frankly, they weren't doing enough either, in my view. So the reality is we are going to need to do more. I will tell you, we cannot allow China to be the only nation that has access to low Earth orbit for microgravity because of all of the stunning discoveries that are happening

there and in fact manufacturing of pharmaceutical crystals. We think about treating diseases that have never had treatments before. You've heard me talk a lot when I was at NASA about, I love the idea of creating an artificial retina for the human eyeball, something that you can't do here on earth, but you can do in the microgravity of space. And ultimately that's gonna allow people

who have macular degeneration to not lose their eyesight. We've got an experiment on the ISS right now for an artificial retina for a pig. Now that's a pig, right? But that's the first step. The next step is in fact a human. And that's gonna be transformational for people that have macular degeneration

who historically go blind. We wanna make sure that doesn't happen in the future. We think about regenerative medicine, 3D printing of human tissue, 3D growth of human tissue, these types of activities are going to be transformational for regenerative medicine. These activities have huge economic consequences for whoever masters them and puts them into large-scale production. In my view, it should be the United States and our allies and partners. And if we see that capability to our greatest competitor on the globe, I think that is only a creative to their benefit and not ours, which is why we absolutely should

be there. And I will tell you, talking to members of Congress and senators, they're in agreement with this. I mean, they get it. The question is, how do you get it funded? And of course, we're in this era now of CRs, and maybe we'll get an omnibus every once in a while these days, but even an omnibus is not how you're technically supposed to fund the government. So these are real challenges that we face because of the partisan times that we live in.

But I would say on balance, keeping programs moving forward is better than canceling them. Funding them adequately is better than just keeping them moving forward. For some reason when you said on the bus and I thought you were going to say Doge, and then I thought of a comic of the Doge catching the omnibus, and now I needed to just will that into the world. So that'll be a thing that I'm setting aside for later. On the Artemis front has been interesting as well, right? This is the one that's, I've left for the end because it would take up the whole show

if we started with it. And also, it's probably the most speculative of these scenarios because we've got a Jared Isaacman in waiting, maybe, like, I don't know where the nomination has been submitted or not and when it's going to land. Very interesting for what that might bring. But there's also a whole congressional, you know, it's been a lot of hearings lately. There's been a lot of thoughts spilled out in public. There was one the other day with Scott Pace in front of Congress doing a reversal of his past statements on SLS Orion in a way that I thought some, you know, criticized as like, oh, he's flip-flopping, where I think

he's accurately assessing the state of the industry. And it's okay to have a person out there that is like able to say when things change, it's a good marker to have. I should ask at this point in the conversation up front, on the other end, I've heard your name associated to the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration and either some can describe it as different ways, whether it's a lobbying position or some other position with that group, you can say yes or no or no comment to that, but I need to ask upfront since I've heard that from at least one or two spots. So I'll just be clear. So I am the managing

partner of what is called the Artemis Group and we are a group of consultants that help on space industry. And in some cases, we help commercial companies that are coming out of the ground for the first time. In other cases, we help mature companies. But in all cases, we want to see space be successful. And more than anything, we want to see the United States of America be successful in space. That's our overarching philosophy. And so you could say the reality is it's an all of the above. I am affiliated with lots of commercial companies and lots of your traditional, I shouldn't even say lots, there's not that many, but a good number of traditional space companies. But at the end of the day, I just want America to be successful in space. And that's the objective of the Artemis

Group. If your listeners are in the space business, I'd be more than happy to have you come visit our website, ArtemisGroup.space. I think if you go there, you're gonna find lots of good stuff. So given the pieces in play, I think like what Scott Pace said the other day, maybe is more reflective of your view or less, but he's like, we've got to find an off ramp for SLS Orion at some point, but switching it before we get to Artemis IV is not a good idea. And that's the middle ground where I've kind of landed myself that I'm curious where you're

at these days on which pieces need to stay or go or be shifted. But I look at Block 1B, SLS, I look at Gateway as giant budget wedges that could make the program more efficient by them not existing because all of the other partners on Artemis, international and many commercial in that case, have already stated an intent to get to the lunar surface. I don't think there's any surprise that when you were in the room talking to international partners that they're pumped about flying to Gateway, but come on, everybody wants a little bit of moon dust on their boots.

That's really what everyone is in this for, right? Aren't we all? Right. And I felt like that was always, I don't know if that was just communication strategy or what, that always felt a little bit like, no, no, no, we're really here for the gateway. And when we get to the moon, that'll be great. And it's like, come on, just say the thing. We all want to land on the moon.

So I would say a couple of things. I didn't hear Scott Pace's testimony, but when we think about Starship and what it is and what it's capable of, what you're really trying to optimize for is how much mass can you get to the surface of the moon and how do you reduce the cost per unit mass to the moon? Or if you're going to Mars, how do you reduce the cost per unit mass to Mars? And given the volume and the capacity of starship, that's going to be a transformational change for the United States of America in a very good way. And I think that's a very, very positive thing. I would also say that if we're trying to beat China to the moon, like on a, on a short timeframe, we need to use SLS.

We need to need to use Orion and the European service module. And if we use those things that we know already work and are flying and have gone to the moon once and are soon to go to the moon a second time if We use those things. I think that gives us the best shot of beating China to the moon So I think it's in all of the above strategy. We need that transformational capability of Starship 100% We also need SLS and Orion to get us there before China And I think at the end of the day You know as time goes on, what we're going

to find is that cost per unit mass to the moon, or cost per unit mass to orbit or cost per unit mass to Mars, those are the things that we have to solve for, for long term sustainability. And I think a lot of space companies across the spectrum are working on solving that. How do you see the international partnership aspect here? You know, given the Trump 2.0 era is, you know, it seems like there's a shakeup coming in some policy objective of NASA and elsewhere, obviously, plenty, but in the NASA perspective, you know, if there's there's a lot of talk of, you know, we're going to focus on Mars more, we're going to focus on shifting things away from SLS Orion is a big thought.

Do you see an environment where a focus on, like, you know, my pension is get to the lunar surface faster, but, you know, if that doesn't become the thing that's true and there is more of a focus on Mars, do we shift, like how do we shift the international partnerships? I can write the storyline for shifting the surface more and away from Gateway, but I don't know what happens if it's more of a Mars focus. What do you do with those partnerships and how do you make sense of that? So again, I think a couple of things.

Number one, earlier you mentioned Jared Isaacman. And just so you know, like I've gotten to know him personally, we've spent a lot of time together. And I think he is, he's going to be a tremendous NASA administrator, he's going to probably be one of the best, and if not the best. And I think the Senate should confirm him. I think he's extraordinarily smart. He's proven to be very capable in the business world. And I think he has the right philosophy on these things. I also think he wants to make sure that the United States of America is going to remain preeminent in the space world. Now, I don't think he's going to be interested in canceling international

partnerships or anything like that. I think he's going to want to strengthen those. By the way, I haven't had specific conversations with him about specific programs. I have intentionally avoided that because he needs to be the NASA administrator and he needs to make those decisions and he's getting lots of information from lots of people. If he asks, I will share. But at this point, I've really just been getting to know him and spend time kind of sharing with him big picture philosophy. But I think he is, and by the way, he's a he spent a good bit of time flying red air for the military. And you can see the plane behind me. We've connected over that as well. I think he's gonna be fantastic. All that being said,

I think the partnerships around NASA internationally are very important. They enable us to do more with spending less money. They enable us to have channels of communication around the globe that are very unique and positive. The NASA brand is the absolute best brand that the United States of America has. When Jared Isaacman becomes the NASA administrator,

he's gonna go to Europe and he's gonna find out how good that brand actually is. He's gonna go to Japan and he's gonna find out how good that brand actually is. If the NASA administrator does an event in the United States, you might get a couple hundred people. If that happens in Japan or in Europe, you'll get thousands. I mean, people are just enamored all over the globe

as to what NASA is up to and how it's going. And so I do think those international relationships are important. One of the challenges I think that we have going forward is as we move to this era of commercial space, we also have to think how do we go commercial where we're buying services and use NASA as a tool of diplomacy. And I think there are ways to do that. We're seeing that right now. For example, Starlab, which is one of the commercial space stations. Starlab has done a joint venture. It's got Voyager here in the United States,

Northrop Grumman, but it also has Mitsubishi from Japan and Airbus from Europe and MDA from Canada. And that's, that's, that is an example of industry to industry collaboration, where they can then go get resources from their governments and it offsets the cost. But remember, this is a commercial space station, so they can get resources from their governments and it offsets the cost. But remember, this is a commercial space station. So they can get resources from their governments, their governments are customers, but they are also getting customers that are not their governments. And that's how we drive down costs and increase access. So the philosophy, whether it's clips or commercial space stations is in fact the same, but the way to handle it moving forward as far as the international relationships goes,

that's going to be industry to industry, and then it's going to flow up. It's not government to government flowing down, it's industry to industry. Why? Because industry knows where the market's going and they're trying to solve for that market need. And as long as they're doing that, I think the collaborations and the international activities are going to continue. Perfect spot to end it.

Thanks so much. Obviously, we can go on. We could probably talk for like six hours and not run out of topics. I would love to talk. We'll do it again maybe. I'd love to talk CIS lunar. I think it's becoming a bigger thing and the national security elements there are going to be ever more important as time goes on.

Yeah, we got to do a part two. So, we'll wait a couple of weeks, like a couple things fall into place, see what see what other statements are made, what's happening in Congress, because then maybe we can get your take on the congressional happenings, given that that you were, you know, in those halls for so many years. So that would be awesome. Okay, my friend. Awesome, Jim. Thanks so much for hanging out. Talk to you. All right. Bye bye. Thanks again to Jim for coming on the show. It's always awesome to chat with him and get some perspective from someone who's been in

those seats before, both in Congress and also at NASA. So we'll have him back on to talk because I think he does actually have a lot to say on the national security side, given his history there and his thoughts on space policy, generally even beyond NASA, would be cool to pick his brain on. So we will look forward to that. But for now, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are almost 900 of you there, including 32 executive producers.

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