Main Engine Cut Off - T+311: Phil McAlister on Commercial LEO and NASA’s Human Spaceflight Budget

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Phil McAlister, former Director of NASA’s Commercial Space Division, joins me to talk about the Commercial LEO Destinations program, the budgetary issues facing NASA and its human spaceflight programs, and to share his perspective on the last (and next) few years in these areas.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Joel, Pat, Will and Lars from Agile, Joakim, Jan, Warren, David, Fred, Better Every Day Studios, Josh from Impulse, Ryan, Natasha Tsakos, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Stealth Julian, Donald, Joonas, The Astrogators at SEE, Russell, Kris, Frank, Steve, Heiko, Lee, Matt, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsPhil McAlister | LinkedInThe Dreaded Gap | LinkedInYou Can’t Reach the Stars While Chained to Low-Earth Orbit | LinkedInNo Changes Allowed | LinkedInVast backs new NASA commercial space station strategy - SpaceNewsT+205: Phil McAlister, Director of Commercial Spaceflight at NASA - Main Engine Cut OffThe 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 NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome in it to cutoff. I'm Anthony Galangelo, and I'm excited today to have Phil McAllister back on the show. He's been on the show once before, a while back, when he was still working at NASA, but he has since retired. At NASA, he was the director of the Commercial Space Division, and since retirement, he's been writing some posts on LinkedIn. sharing his thoughts and perspective on the situations in front of NASA, especially with regards to commercial space stations, which I've been particularly interested in over the years, but more generally about the way that NASA's human spaceflight budget has been going

and how some of the prioritization gets worked out there. So I brought them on here to talk about all of that, to hear some insight, insights on how these things go, what Congress and NASA leadership have to do with some of the decisions that have been made over the last couple of years and how they approach the near future of human spaceflight, balancing Artemis, commercial space stations, the end of the ISS, a lot of interesting stuff to dig into here with Phil. So without further ado, let's give me a call. Phil, welcome back to

manage a cutoff. It's been a while since you've been on here. Years? Maybe years? Probably. Probably. It's been a couple years for you. It's been a ride, it seems like. Well, it's not for lack of trying. You keep asking me, and I kept turning you down, and finally, you wore me down, Anthony. you've been writing all these posts out there you know there was a there was a little bit of like an op-ed battle going on under the commercial leo uh storyline lately and i'm like phil you got to come on uh but props to you you're you're one of the people that did say yes eventually i'm still working on a couple others um but you've been you've been writing about the commercial space station storyline and in really interesting ways to me because it's also something i've been

having a lot of questions about critical of in many ways and you tell me that at least some of the things that I have to ask are probably things I should and could ask you. So we could start from any angle, but I do think your recent LinkedIn post, I'll put it in the show notes so people can read it, because it's a really interesting walkthrough

of some of the dynamics at play when you look at end of the ISS, start of commercial space stations, and the way that that whole situation's been managed. So what I've been critical of just to lay my cards out and we can walk through how you think we should approach this, is that it doesn't seem like there's a level of seriousness from somewhere between NASA and Congress on what is actually after the ISS program. and I saw the situation presented to NASA in the era of Russia invading Ukraine, the ISS falling apart, it being evident that the hardware is limited and now our partnership is in a really strained relationship, that that was a really good geopolitical opportunity to go and actually get a serious

budget line for commercial space stations if what we actually wanted was to move to these new platforms. So the only way I could read it is that there wasn't really a, you know, everyone talked up like this is obviously where we're going in the future, but it didn't seem like that was matched with taking advantage of the situation in front of you politically. Now, that's my outside view. So I don't know if you have insight as to, and your recent post goes on about this, that like, you know, there are some tensions within the ISS program and man, the ISS program itself managing the end of the ISS program is a conflict of interest. I found that maybe more illuminating than the questions I have. So does that make sense to start on? I don't know which

angle here you want to go with. No, I think that makes, we can start there. And I think you should give yourself more credit, Anthony, because what you characterized and your conclusions that you made from what you viewed were accurate. I don't believe NASA senior management wants to retire the ISS. They didn't want to retire it back when it first seriously came up for potentially retired. It's probably been over 10 years now since OMB and the administration made a serious attempt to retire the ISS. And NASA's been resisting that.

They don't want to retire the ISS. They didn't want to take advantage of the situation in Ukraine and get more money for commercial Leo destinations because they're very much. feeling was that ISS should just keep on going. Do you find that sourced from, obviously, the people that are working on the program, but some of what you're talking about is the congressional willpower is not there either, because having the ISS or having commercial space stations doesn't really matter at a fundamental level, that there's a political win to be had on keeping the current thing going, and

there's not really much of a political win to moving on to the next thing, and does that mean that there's no pressure being applied back to NASA? So there's just this kind of stagnancy from that? Yeah, I think that's true. There is pressure from the administration and the previous administration and the previous administration, but no real pressure from Congress. Like I said, in my recent post, they're happy with the status quo, I believe, some of the strongest space voices in Congress, you know, they come from Texas. And that's, it's sort of shifted over the years. It was, You know, it was Alabama for a while. It was Florida for a while. But now the big voices are in Texas. And the biggest program in the human spaceflight area is single program is the ISS. And I wrote this on one of my other articles. You know, having a big program at your field center is probably the best thing that can happen if you're the center director. And so that's something that they don't like to give up. And the ISS is currently safe for the astronauts. and they feel strongly that it should just continue, regardless of what an administration wants.

And in my opinion, regardless of whether that's good for overall space exploration. I believe some people honestly believe that, you know, the ISS shouldn't be retired. But if they've really stepped back and said, is that really the best thing for space exploration, it'd be hard to justify maintaining, you know, a program that we've been working on for half a century. and not moving on to something better, safer, more cost-effective, better suited for the country's current needs. And so I just feel like it's a real shame that we're kind of stuck, in my opinion. It's a great program, but it's past its time.

It's time to retire the ISS. It's time to move on to other things. And I think a lot of the senior leadership at NASA, certainly down at JSC, they will say they are following direction and there's, you know, that they want to move on to the CLDs, the commercial Leo destinations, but their actions take a different, it's obvious from their actions that that's not really true. And so that's what I've been critical of. Let me throw two things at you as if I were to steal man the situation at play, right? One thing is that, and I find this criticism,

or line of thought on the Artemis program as well, right, that a lot of times we look at the budgets for going to the moon again. And we say, well, this clearly is insufficient because it's nowhere close to the budget Apollo had back in the day. But at the same time, you know, those of us that like the commercial side of things are out here arguing how much more cost efficient we can be in these new models. So I find a tension between saying we have to have the budget that we had back in the day when we did this thing and also saying we could do it so much more

efficiently now, right? I don't know how to square those two things. Like, should it cost as much? Should it be half as much? Should it be one-tenth as much? What is the actual factor that we're claiming is the cost efficiency? And on the commercial space station side, we talk about how much it is to run and upkeep the ISS. So, you know, the, because if you ask the companies that are building commercial space stations, how much money do you need to build a commercial space station operate it the way that we want. It's a little bit hard to calculate because if you're trying to match NASA requirements that aren't necessarily things that also close your business plan elsewhere, that's tough math to do. So on one hand, it should be less to operate than the ISS because

the ISS is old and huge and, you know, a constituent of many parts or whatever. But how much less should it be? I don't think $200 million a year across several providers was enough, but I don't know if I'm good enough to say it should have been 500, it should have been 800. The only thing I'm really saying is I bet they should have went harder than Matt for getting more money, but how much more should it have been? Yeah, that's a, you know, there's really no one, excuse me, answer for that. I'll tell you, you know, you brought up the situation when Russia invaded Ukraine as a really good opportunity for NASA to get more money for the commercial Leo destinations. And I think that's probably true, had NASA wanted to do that.

that. It would have been a good opportunity. But if you remember, what was the narrative coming out of NASA when Russia did invade Ukraine? The narrative was, hey, everything's fine. Everything's fine on Space Station. We get along with Russia just fine. You know, the geopolitical tensions down on Earth or not affecting what we're doing in space. That's the narrative. So you couldn't then simultaneously say, everything's fine, but yet we need a whole lot more money to get off of this partnership and to get off of the ISS. So it was a narrative that Ness didn't really align with the other narratives. So that's not, you know, those are kind of the reasons we didn't do it.

Number one, the leadership didn't want to do it. And number two, you know, it would not have been consistent with NASA's position on what was going on on the ISS. And so I will tell you, you made a really good point. How much should it cost? And so, you know, when I got the program in 2020, I think back then, you know, you could sort of look at it. It depends. Not every space station is the same.

Some of them are going to be more costly and some of them are going to be less costly. And it'll depend on who's doing it, right? So if you look at commercial crew, we had the same requirements for Boeing and SpaceX. And yet Boeing's answer to commercial crew, their hardware was significantly higher. that's a fact I'm not saying anything that people don't know so to address the same set of requirements different companies are going to come at this differently right and you don't know who's going to win so how much do you really need so I will tell you that as soon as I got the program I was advocating for more funding but the problem was at that time we didn't have anybody really working on space stations

when I got the program in 2020 other than axiom and they were doing this port module right they were going to attach a module to a port on ISS. They were going to add a couple more, add a couple more, and then ultimately detach. It was, in my opinion, it was an expensive, technically difficult operation. But that was the only one we had. And I was like, we need actual, we need industry actually working on these things so that they can come up with better cost estimates. I couldn't just go to OMB or my management say, hey, I think I need more money. Right. That's, that's not going to work. You need a really, really compelling case for why you needed more money and exactly how much you needed. And back in 2020, 2021, we didn't really know because people,

industry hadn't been really working on space stations. So they didn't know either. And that was one of the reasons why I made the awards back in 2021 for the free flyers to Nanarax, North Roman, and Blue Origin. It was really important that they start working on these things. And we get a better cost estimate. So I'll just give you a little bit of sort of a primer on how budgeting works at NASA. At the beginning of the year, we give all the programs guidelines, say, okay, this is how much money you've got. And they work on that, and they come back and they say, okay, for that amount of money, this is what I'm going to do. But every program has risks. And what almost all the program managers say is, this is what I'm going to do with the amount of money you're going to give me.

But what I really need is this additional money. It's called an overguide. because you're requesting money that's over the guidelines that you've been provided. So, overguides are really hard to get. You need a really, really good case. And I will tell you, this will make you laugh, but it's true, Anthony. I think in 2018, the Keo budget, the human exploration and operations budget, I don't remember exactly the numbers, but the overall budget for the mission director was $5 billion, something like that.

The program managers came in, and the amount of override was more. more than the actual budget. So that just gives you an idea. You know, every program manager comes in and says, I need more money. So you need a really, really good case when you go in and ask for an over guide. So my plan was to sort of hold my powder and wait until I had a really, really good cost estimate where I could go to my management and go to OMB and say, this is what we think it's going to cost. Industry's been working on these things for a few years now, and we have a pretty good idea.

And so that was my plan. I didn't want to just go with a bad overguide request because it would have just been denied. So I had to wait until the time was right. And in my opinion, the time was going to be right in 2014 last year is when I was going to make my run. It was going to be before the procurement started. So everybody was going to know that we were going to get more money. And that was the plan. But it got derailed because Kathy leaders retired as the AA.

She was consistent. We were in alignment on what we were going to do. She wanted to retire the ISS. I did too. We wanted to move on in a commercial direction for Space Station. So I had the support of at least my management. When she left, she was really the last person in my management chain who really knew anything about commercial space. And so then I was fighting an uphill battle.

And I was never going to get an over-guide request, even out of SOMD, space operations. much less to the administrator and much less over to OMB. So you've really got to have a good case. That was my plan. And that's why we didn't ask for more money all the time. I wanted to kind of have a really, really good case. And it just didn't work out. So how much of that is drawn from, I'm trying to figure how to phrase this.

The case that you're putting up, right, is if, we look elsewhere in the agency, there's a huge case being made for let's turn the screws in the Artem's program and figure out how we can actually get back to the moon before China gets their first. That is a huge push in Congress and elsewhere, that that's a talking point at least, whether or not that's really how people feel internally is different than what it's being used as talking points. On the commercial space station side, you make a good point in this post that it was something like 80% of the research, it will be completed by 2030 that is being done in the ISS right now.

And so there's a massive difference in what would be left beyond that as to what they're actually serving now. Now, is that figure indicative of the importance of this Lower Earth orbit? Is that the human research or just all research? Maybe you can illuminate that stat. That's the human research side.

And also some technology development. There's like environmental control. We want to enhance our understanding of various ecosystem. So we've got a project that is part of a tech development. But most of it is human exploration. And then secondarily, human exploration research on how the human body is going to adapt to long duration, zero gravity. And there's also some tech development. And so when you, and they all have roadmaps. And so when we laid out all those roadmaps, most of that, most of that research was scheduled to be complete. Now, it doesn't always play out, right?

You do an experiment, it doesn't work out, so maybe you have to extend some of that. But that's what the roadmaps we're telling us. And you're right. And NASA, Artemis is the big priorities. So I would, you know, when you say, why don't you ask for more money for CLDs? Well, you know, you've got to pick and choose your battles. And even if I had gotten my management to ask for more money within NASA, I would have run up against the wall of Artemis. And Artemis, you know, in my opinion, it's like the plant from the little shop of hers.

It's like, feed me. You can never give Artemis. enough money. It just always is going to need more because it's the traditional contractors under cross plus contracts. It's just going to always need more money. And when that's the priority, that's another reason why it would have been difficult to get more money for commercial Leo destinations. But to get back, I think, to your point, you know, the ISS is between three and four billion dollars a year to maintain. A lot of that is spares. A lot of that is cargo. that you need for EBAs, and we do a lot of EBAs on the ISS.

So you wouldn't need a lot of that for a new space station. All the companies building these new space stations are deliberately designing them so that you don't need a bunch of EBAs because that's a huge driver. And I think there's probably about 2,000 people working on the ISS program. There's no way you would have anywhere close to that if you were doing that, a private company were doing that same mission. And it's going to be a lot smaller. So in my estimation, after they got built, my estimates at that time was we could go from about $3.5 billion, which was the ISS budget, to about a billion.

And I felt like if we could spend, if NASA would spend a billion dollars buying services from commercial space stations, then they could close their business case. And I don't think they're going to get a billion dollars. So now the question is, well, can we afford two? Can we only afford one? We have to see what the proposals are going to come in at and what their business cases look like because all this stuff has changed. But in my opinion, that would have worked out really good.

It would have saved NASA $2 billion a year. It would have been a very good anchor tenancy for the commercial Leo destinations. And it would have been a great thing for NASA to do, right? They enabled this great capability. It's just exactly like commercial crew, right? We continued to buy. We were the anchor tenants for,

commercial crew. And now the United States has the best human space transportation capability on the planet. And I wanted to do the same thing for destinations. I just ran out of time. I think I'm taking your point on that you want to see that market seeded and flourish. What I struggle, though, is that the way this timeline comes together, where you've got the ISS, you know, deorbiting, and let's just say it's 2030, 2032, whatever. At the same time that if plans go well, the pace of Artemis landings is picking up

because the landers are together and the spacesuits exist. And I think if we had those things, we would figure out our way around launching crew once a year. Like, I don't know that we would just let landers sit up there vacant for a long time. Yeah. So when I look at that roadmap, and I think from a human spaceflight perspective,

and you're saying, you know, we're scheduled to be done 80% of the research, is that other 20% or whatever is the follow-on to that? Is that something that is uniquely suited and can only be done on a low Earth orbit space station? Or does the human research angle say, well, now we're flying a bunch of humans out towards the moon. Like, let's adapt all of these research items to, you know,

on or around the moon and do the research there. Yeah. Like, does that... I'm trying to suss out the actual why of why go for the commercial space stations. Is it just a CETA market, or are there purposes that NASA has elsewhere that also increased the importance of those existing? Yeah, I think it's, I think NASA has a, you know, a legislative duty to help commercialize space.

That is one, that is, that is our mission. I don't think that's truly accepted by all the leadership at NASA, but I, you know, when people were saying, well, why do we even want to do this commercial space stuff? Just let them do their thing. I'm like, it's part of NASA's job. Yeah, it's actually in the commercial space. ASAC that establishes NASA, that it's our job to do this. It's just, it's a mission just like going to the moon. And so just on that part, it's important. But what I will tell you, so, so it's

part of the mission. And I would say it kind of comes together when you look, we still do need that 20% in my opinion. And it is optimized for a low earth orbit platform. Could you do it another way? I'm not sure. I don't know if we've ever asked that question of the remaining research. If we didn't have a platform, we'd figure it out, Anthony. But if you have a good platform, that's really cost effective, where you're only purchasing services, that's a really good way to do it. And it's a really safe way to do it. You know, space station is only 200 miles away. You can get down pretty fast on the dragon. And you can get a lot more data than you can on your once or twice missions to the moon. So we had a long-term need, in my opinion, for lower

orbit operations and that coincides with those companies needing an anchor tenant. It kind of was just a really good thing. But I will say that how much we spend in Leo versus how much we spend for deep space, there's no one right answer for that. I think we ought to have a discussion about that. And my feeling was we should keep spending probably about a billion dollars in low earth orbit when I looked at everything that we were doing and everything that we needed and the way it was going to help the commercial space industry. But that's just my look at it. Different stakeholders can have a different view of that.

And maybe it's half a million, half a billion dollars, or maybe it's two billion. But, you know, I don't think we've had a real fulsome discussion about, you know, if NASA's going to get $25 billion a year, how much of that really should go to Leo, how much of that really should go to Deep Space to have a really. good U.S. civil space program. I think that's a great debate that we should have. I don't know if we've really had it. The other aspect to the commercial space station readiness question was like, you know, if you and I had our way and we aggressively went for more funding when given the opportunities, were these companies ready to spend that amount of money right then?

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, maybe not that second, but, you know, it's easy to staff up. You can start buying long lead items pretty early, and those things are expensive. But, you know, they delay those things because they don't know if they're going to be the final winner. Right. But, yeah, it's, you know. I think that's, do you think that's, the trouble I have is that you look at the budget, like, graph, right?

and the commercial Leo graph as put out there has a funding ramp that has shaped like other NASA programs that have happened in the past and so you it's easy to be like well it looks like the ramp that we had elsewhere when you leave out the fact that you know you and others were fighting aggressively to get more funding earlier for commercial cargo and commercial crew and it was slow rolled until we had another geopolitical situation with Russia when it then escalated

so you look back and you're like like, well, it looked like that ramp. It's like, yeah, but that ramp was wrong too. We didn't, that shouldn't have been the shape. We can't compare to the one that we disagreed with. But that's, it's almost like an organizational inertia thing, right, that you compare to the stuff, like I said with the Apollo program. Like, well, we spent, you know, whatever Casey Dryer calculated $200 billion or whatever.

So, like, clearly we can't land on the moon for less than that. It's like, well, we should be able to, but we definitely need more than we have now. And it's like, well, it doesn't look like the other one. It's like, well, it shouldn't look like the other one because we learned from that time. and that's in the positive for Apollo that hopefully we're better than that now and it's in a negative when I look back at commercial cargo and crew that's like yeah that the first couple of years were really tumultuous of those programs and it we salvage victory from really bad congressional situation there yeah well I mean there's no right there's no one development curve for funding um for various programs it depends on how you're doing it it depends on a lot of things um and I'm I'm probably going to do a post on this at some point. The way NASA does cost estimating also is troublesome for me. We use this model.

It's called NAFCOM. It has all these previous programs that were done and how much they cost. And there's relationships between the mass and the percent of new development. And you can feed this model with your new spacecraft, and it'll spit out a number. But it uses historical data as it's estimating. methodology, okay? Well, almost all of our historical data are traditional aerospace programs that were, you know, mostly cost plus done by traditional expensive companies. And so when I was arguing for funding for commercial crew, we were saying it could be done for a lot less,

but I couldn't prove it because I didn't have a model that would spit it out. And I think it's the same way with CLDs. You've still got the same model. And so when we do our internal cost estimates, they turn out to be very, very different than what the private sector says they can do. And so you get a little tension there. I will tell you, when I took over the commercial Leo destinations program, it had previously been managed by the ISS, which I thought was ridiculous. And when I will tell you, when the program was first funded in 2019, I went to my boss and I'm like, well, I'm going to manage this, right? It's got commercial in the title, and that's what I do.

And he said yes, but then he reneged on that and he gave it to the ISS program because he didn't want to retire the ISS and he knew I would actually work to retire it. And so they came out with this five-point plan and none of it was to fund a follow-on space station except for this one axiom thing, which was actually to put more stuff on space station.

It was crazy. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, well, why aren't you funding? The solution to less space station is more space station. Yeah, exactly. Every part of that five-point plan was just putting more stuff on ISS, private astronaut missions, commercial use so you could do commercial things on ISS. It was just ridiculous. And Congress saw through that, and they cut the

budget every year for the first three years. But anyway, when I was advocating internally for us to go forward with, you know, actual replacements for Space Station, the answer I got was, well, we don't have near enough money that's going to cost $4 billion. And they could come up with a model using NAFCOM that actually showed it was going to be $4 billion. I'm like, no, you guys, that's not an appropriate way to do it. And I did some analysis that said, this is what we thought it was going to cost for commercial crew, and this is what it actually cost. It was half, or less than half, for SpaceX.

And I was like, if you apply that same, you know, logic to commercial space stations, we have more than enough money. But it was the right answer because NASA didn't really want to fund us follow on to space station. And then it took, you know, it took Kathy becoming a, AA, and then she gave me responsibility for the commercial Leo destinations program. So the first thing I did was retire that five-point plan. I said, I don't want to hear that ever again.

And we did the Free Flyer Awards to North Grumman, Blue Origin, and Nanorax at the time. So that's kind of the dynamics that occurred within NASA. And I think when you say, you know, how much money, it's a really, really hard thing to say. And it depends, again, on the company. We have very different companies. They have different configurations. They're going to raise money different ways or get money different ways. And their view of the market is different.

All that gets into the sort of the primordial soup of the business case. And NASA's got to evaluate that and see which one's got the strongest case. And that's how you make the awards. But there's a lot of – I guess what I'm trying to say is there's still a lot of unknowns, even after the awards, about how this is going to play out. you know, just look at commercial crew. When we made those awards, I would say the majority of people in NASA and probably industry thought Boeing was going to get there first. They had a lot more money, so you'd think, well, that's, you know, that's a pretty good situation for Boeing.

And here we are, you know, five years after Dragon did its demo two missions to the ISS, and Boeing's still not there yet, unfortunately, and cost a lot more money. So even after you make the awards, there's just a ton of uncertainty, and there's more with commercial programs because in some cases they have to raise money. They have to rely on non-NASA business. You don't have to do that with a traditional NASA program. So there's a little bit more uncertainty, and there's a little bit more risk, in my opinion, which is why you usually have to pick more than one to cover that risk. And that's why I've always been such a strong advocate for competition, particularly for these commercial programs. programs because things aren't going to play out the way you think. And the best way to mitigate that risk is to have more than one. And I, you know, I firmly believe that's why we need more

than one commercial deal destinations. Does it strain the business case? Yes, absolutely it does. But if you want to be successful on a commercial program, I personally feel like it's a necessity to have competition. Yeah, and NASA's role cannot be setting up a program where everybody succeeds because that is incongruous with trying to create a market because not everybody succeeds in a market. That's literally the process of markets. Exactly. So if the requirement is that everybody that enters this is successful, that is a failure of

requirements. Yes, yes, absolutely. We had to let, and that was really hard for NASA. You know, what's our motto? Failure is not an option. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a requirement of a healthy market, unfortunately. Right.

Yeah. There's a creative destruction angle to it that has to exist for anything really great to be made, which is, yeah, okay, that's an angle that I haven't applied, you know, elsewhere. Because one thing I always look at is NASA programs that support development versus NASA programs that wish a market into existence immediately. Right. There feels like there's two different models, and the commercial Leo stuff is supporting development through these different phases, whereas commercial lunar payload service. is like jumping right to buying the task orders. Yeah, yeah. Is that something that you feel internally to NASA as well,

or am I looking at it incorrectly from the outside? No, I think that's right. I mean, it's an ethos of NASA that we don't accept failure. Failure is not an option. I mean, that is ingrained in our DNA at NASA. And I remember when Alan Lindenmore, he was the program manager for commercial cargo, we're like, hey, we got to, these guys got to be able to fail.

It was just like telling this to NASA people, they look at you like you're crazy, right? But it was a fundamental premise of how we were going to do this. And so you can see how it was such a struggle to get commercial cargo and then commercial crew. That's just one of many, many aspects of how different and how differently managed these commercial programs have to be. and it's still a very, very small percentage of NASA and the workforce. I remember I was talking with, oh, I forget, Marsha Smith, right? She does the space policy online. This was many, many years ago.

And she's like, Phil, it's got to be great at NASA right now. You know, everybody's accepting partnerships and you guys have really turned the corner. I was like, Marsha, no, it's not that way at all. It's this little pocket that's been successful. but the overall NASA is still doing things and still understands things and still has the same playbook for doing things traditionally. And she was really surprised because from the outside looking in, you would think NASA would be embracing this stuff and just running with it

and coming up with new program management techniques on how we would do commercial programs. And instead, it went the other way. Like I said in one of my LinkedIn articles, NASA kind of turned its back on commercial programs. and it was an uphill slog for me to get agreement on how we were going to do CLDs. I wrote up a really good white paper on how we were going to manage commercial Leo destinations. And little by little, all of the strategies that I wanted to use got knocked down by management. It didn't happen right away. There would be another meeting with the AA and then they'd say, no, we're not going to do that thing.

Oh, we're not going to do this other thing. And by the time I left, I'm like, man, it's not much commercial left here. And so that's another challenge. It's really not consistent with a lot of the sort of the ethos of NASA. And that's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. I don't want to keep you too long since I only put a certain time block on your calendar today. So hopefully this isn't a gigantic final question.

But I'm curious how you see this market in particular going, that we're wedged between a Schrodinger's ISSD orbit, an Artemis budget wedge that's, you know, about to shoot up pretty extremely when we get actually flying these missions and into more of an operational phase where we're, you know, hopefully the cadence is increasing. And you've got commercial Leo stuck in the middle of those two giant mountains on the budget graph. Yeah. At the same time, though, you have this, you know, vast. is sort of the outside influence that's instigating a lot of this in that they're taking a totally different approach than anyone else had and that they're doing it through different funding means

than others we're planning. So that's injected a lot of chaos. So what do you see coming out of that kind of ball of yarn? Oh boy, Anthony. Predictions. I don't have a good crystal ball on that. I wish I knew a couple people... I think, all right, let me put a finer point on it then.

Do you think that this is going to be completely fumbled by NASA? and it's going to get lost in the shuffle of all of this, or do you think that there actually is going to be some sort of commercial Leo-supported thing happening? The way it stands right now, it's hard to see a success path. But there's so much momentum now behind this.

I don't see it just going away. So we'll have to see how it plays out. It's going to depend on who the permanent NASA administrator is. that's going to be a big, I think that'll be a big variable that you will take out because he or she will have a clear, should have a clear vision for how they want to, you know, run the agency. And the administrator has a lot of influence and power on how this plays out, probably more than you would think. When, you know, when you don't have an administration that's like super, super involved, the administrator has a lot of, discretion on what things get funded, what things get prioritized. And so I think that'll be a telling situation when we get a permanent administrator

what he or she, his or her vision is. That will kind of dictate how the next three or four years are going to go. I do think NASA is probably headed towards a brick wall at some point. Something's going to, we've been able to sort of keep going with these programs that are not sufficiently funded multiple programs probably don't have enough money i think you said it many times on your podcast when you add all these things up you got 20 pounds of mission but you only got 10 pounds of money we've been able to sort of limp along but at some point that comes to home to roost and you have some sort of i don't know about crisis but you have some sort of thing that makes it apparent

that it's not going to work and then you get a blue ribbon committee like uh like we've had many times before and you can have a big, big change in space policy. But in lieu of that, you know, we're probably just going to keep limping along for a little while stretching these programs out until there's some really big, you know, situation that requires a lot of people to look at this and talk about it and have a good cogent plan for how we're going to go forward for the next, you know, five or six years. I'm not sure we have that right now. Certainly not one that's consistent with the budget. Yeah, some would say that the budget iceberg would be, you know, it being floated, that 20% of your budget was going away.

But that's a different situation than we're presented with. I unfortunately think that is really the only way that it forces a decision to be made. Right. And I've been, as you might have heard, I've been actively lobbying to be the NASA administrator this go-around. So I promise, I promise to you, I will change the USDA orbit vehicles management style. That's the one commitment I'll make to you. So I haven't had any meetings with President Trump As another potential nominee has been rumored to have lately

So I'll say that until I actually have find my way in You know, we'll see All right, I'm written it down You're not recorded You just put my name into some of those circles out there, you know? I figure why not? I could do it. I could totally get this out of the logjam bill

Definitely not As I've just openly stated, I don't know how much money anything should cost But Well, this has been awesome I assume you're going to continue writing, so maybe you want to plug where people can find that if they want to follow along. Oh, sure. Thanks. I hadn't thought of that. But yeah, just go to LinkedIn, and I think you can just put in my name and you'll see my posts. I'm up to 20 posts. I can't believe it. I really started this out just as like kind of a fun thing. And it just kind of grew. You know, the first, I will tell you, the first five or six were super easy to write because they were basically stories that I have told over the year. just verbally. So writing them down on paper and sharing them, it was just super easy. But now that I'm up to like 20 or 21, they're getting a little bit harder. I actually have to really think about these things. And the good thing is stuff always happens in the space industry, and that gives you a little bit more content. But my goal for these articles were primarily, it's not really to set the record straight. It was more to just share with people how things actually work in human spaceflight, how things actually work. work at NASA because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about all that.

And part of it was just to share that the window that I had into that community and my view of how things should be. Because as you know, I didn't grow up my entire career at NASA. I spent 20 years of my career at the private sector. So when I came to NASA, I could look at NASA critically and say these are things it needs to do better. And not all people at NASA do that. They just love the agency so much. And I do too that they feel like anything good for the agency is good.

And I was like, no, there's things that we can do better. And that's really what I want. I want the agency to do better, to be better. I think the United States deserves that. And as great as NASA it is, I do think we can do better. And so those are the sort of the goals behind my articles. And if you're interested in those sorts of things, go on to LinkedIn. and read some of my posts and send me a comment and harass you to come back on this show.

And harass me to come back on this show. You were very good at that, Anthony. I was like, no way I'm not doing that. But you wore me down. I knew. I knew you would eventually. So I kept sending the messages. Yeah. All right, Phil. Thank you so much for hanging out. We'll talk to you soon. All right. My pleasure. Thanks, Anthony. Take care. Thanks again to Phil for coming on the show. Always awesome to talk with him. Great insight and a willingness to share what his thoughts are, which is not something that a lot of people are doing out there in the industry today. So we appreciate that, as always. And this show was made possible by 32 executive producers who made this particular episode possible. Thanks to Joel, Pat, Will and

Lars from Agile, Joe Kim, Jan, Warren, David, Fred, Better Everyday Studios, Josh from Impulse, Ryan, Natasha Saccoe, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonaut, Stealth Julian, Donald, Unis, the Astrogators at SE, Russell, Chris, Frank, Steve, Hiko, Lee, Matt, and Four, Anonymous. executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support for making this show possible. If you want to join the crew, manningcutoff.com slash support. You can get access to meco headlines over there. Support the show that I'm doing here. It's a 100% listener support show. So if you like what I'm doing, support, and you help make more of it in the world. So for now, that is all I've got for you. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up

in email Anthony at manningtoncutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you. I don't know.