Main Engine Cut Off - T+320: NASA’s FY2026 Budget, the Isaacman Era, and the Eve of Artemis II (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society joins me to talk about the NASA FY2026 budget, the early days of the Administrator Isaacman era, and how we feel going into Artemis II.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Matt, Fred, Will and Lars from Agile, Kris, Lee, Jan, Frank, Miles O’Brien, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Ryan, Joakim, Stealth Julian, Heiko, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Better Every Day Studios, Joel, Steve, Joonas, The Astrogators at SEE, Pat, Warren, Natasha Tsakos, Russell, David, Donald, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyYou just saved NASA's budget | The Planetary Society2025 Impact Report | The Planetary SocietyThe 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 Blue OriginWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I've got Casey Dreyer of the Planet Terror Society here with me today. To talk about a lot that's going on, which is in his wheelhouse. The NASA fiscal year 2026 budget has been enacted by Congress and is much different than the budget request that we had all talked about for so many months. So I wanted to catch up with him on that and where things stand after what was an absolutely chaotic year for NASA with the ghost administrator that was there. we have Jared Isaacman as the administrator. A lot of people have left. The budget came and went, or went and came, I guess. So a lot to unpack. And then also, we're on the Eve of Artemis too here. You know, the vehicles at the pad, they're undergoing their tests before launch. We're getting close. And I want to check in on how we're feeling about where it sits in the program, what the vibes are going into it. What's the thought on, you know, there's been talk of the heat

Shield, there's been talk of the program overall and the landers. And again, good time to check in because this mission is on us, like we thought it would, be a lot sooner than we would have realized before. You know, all of a sudden, we got humans heading to the moon again, which is awesome, but also the program's complicated. So let's talk about it. Without further ado, let's get into our conversation. Casey Dreyer, welcome back to the show. Do you know that I haven't had you on this show for almost three years? I did not know, which is now I'm insulted almost. I know. It's been so long.

What have your listeners done without me? How did they make it through this? I hope to listen to the other show. The problem is Jake gets greedy. He's like, I want to talk to Casey too. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to be back. Yeah, you know, the last time we were talking about the fiscal year 2024 budget.

I looked up what topics list was. So what's old is new again, I guess. What heady times. Yeah. What a journey. We started out the request cycle this time around with an almost 24. percent cut apocalyptic on the planetary science side. We ended up very close to what was enacted the prior year within single digit percentage points, I think, across the board.

Basically back to that 2024 level, actually. Yeah, there we go. Right back to it. The old Biden budget. The last time Congress had passed a budget for NASA was over a year and a half ago. And that, I mean, so we've been in this full year continuing resolution that just carried forward the 2024 levels. And then, of course, we had this cliff of 2026 that just in the last few weeks Congress decided or finalized. It's that, nope, we're not doing that. And which is fantastic news overall. And we can go into the numbers if you'd like. Yes. Let's do a Casey Dreyer breakdown first because that's where every good thing start. There is a good post up on Planet Society, and I link that in the show notes because there's always the good graphs and charts.

But yeah, give us your top line rundown on this thing. Yeah. I mean, as you said, NASA was facing a 25% cut, 47% cut to all of science, right? The largest cuts ever proposed in terms of percentage values. That would have required turning off a third of science missions actively that are producing good data, just literally letting them tumble off or burn up into nothing. It would have stopped all basically future development of new initiatives. that weren't already pretty mature, and then it would have kind of shifted towards this ill-defined something, something humans-to-marse program after Artemis 3.

And, you know, cancel SLS, cancel Ryan, cancel Gateway immediately, and a very dramatic budget. And what Congress basically provided was none of those things. It was almost, I'd say there's one exception, which is Mars sample return. It did not survive. But everything else did. And that's pretty astonishing when you think about it, that for such a, this is Congress run by members of the president's own party, right? This is Republican-controlled House and Senate. They said no. And they kept NASA roughly, as you said, within one percent, one and a half

percent for science and one percent for the top line. And on top of that, they have this shower of extra billions from the big, beautiful bill back in July. That's additive. So if you kind of do the math, it looks like NASA actually may have its largest budget since 1997 or something like that, adjusted for inflation. So really big turnaround of fortunes. And again, it's just a resolute rejection of these dramatic proposals. And we got that indication from the Big Beautiful Bill, which was that summer? Am I remember correctly that that was like... By fourth they signed it.

The amendment that paid... So the amendment was $10 billion over the next to be spent, very directed, you will spend this or obligate this over the next seven years. That came out, that amendment came out within a week of the budget request dropping. Pretty much the fast. I mean, and that was only, just to be clear, that was only addressed Artemis stuff, right? So that was only for SLS, Orion Gateway, and then some infrastructure money sprinkled around to the Republican caucus because it only is for NASA centers in Republican states. Right. But you almost, I've never seen a faster outright rejection of a plan because it says you will spend at least a billion dollars of this a year on SLS through to start building Artemis 4 and 5. You will build gateway. Here's money. You will spend it this much per year building gateway. You will be, you know, you will do X, Y, and Z. All these things. And I will circle back and take just a little, Casey knows somewhat about policy kind of lap on the.

which is never underestimate the SLS political coalition. And that held very true this year. You should not have underestimated it because it is rock, solid. And again, that was solved before all this other stuff was, right? That was done within weeks. So SLS will continue, Orion will continue, Gateway will continue. Yeah, I mean, if you kick back and listen to your rocket road trip from however many years ago, I bet that thing holds up, dude.

I bet that's like untouched by the passage of time. It is, I mean, there's a reason, and you know, this would be our six-hour discussion at some point, is the I see SLS sometime. Obviously, it's hard to defend as a efficient program, certainly not a cutting-edge program. But if the interpretation is without SLS, I think it's arguable we would not have a moon program right now. That's a tax I'm willing to pay, right? And the worst that comes out of it, oh, dang, we get great union jobs in Alabama and Mississippi and California and Florida and everywhere around the country. I'll take that. That's not a bad deal, right? And that's the type of thing that happens when you have, parochialism is the dominant,

remains the dominant force in politics driving NASA in the United States. And as long as we have geographic representation, there's always going to be that as an incentive structure. And so SLS is big enough. It has that deep connections to the shuttle workforce, right? I mean, this is the shuttle workforce, basically, continuing to be preserved starting from the 1970s. And it's not like the shuttle itself was selected, in part, because Nixon wanted to win California, and they were worried about aerospace job losses back there, right? So this is a deep and long connection to all these things. How do you read the major discrepancy that there is there? I mean, because the Trump era of the Republican Party has a long list of Republicans that have been bounced out of the party because they had a huge fundamental disagreement on some policy area.

You know, you can choose your favorite fighter, whether it's Jeff Flake or Marjorie Taylor Green, right? There's like, there's so many that you could list that are not in politics anymore or are not in the party anymore. This is, like you said, I mean, you know, I don't know if you would describe this 100% to Ted Cruz, but Ted Cruz was certainly was a huge figure in the. in the big beautiful bill aspect of the artis program. And then, you know, you can tell me other names that you might apply more to the science side that we're seeing in this budget. But I think the Republican Party gets a lot of credit for, like, having a good space policy or having a coherent, you know, vision on what they want to see out of space.

But there is clearly huge divergence on which things, which direction we're going here. But then that's, that's, the tension there is not really talked about. We kind of just, we don't really, and maybe that's because space isn't in the headlines. It's not something that, you know, Trump's going to go do what truth social about or whatever, like, you know, Lion Ted Cruz wants the gateway to, that's never going to come up in truth. He said that people go like, what? But is it purely because that isn't the case that we don't, we don't hear about this fight? That's absolutely. I mean, space is a people like space, but it's not a driving.

People are not single issue voters on it. It's not part of our kind of culture war motivating issues. You don't get a lot of juice out of that squeeze, right? when you go for space stuff. And as a consequence, you have flexibility. And this is where this, you know, this tension between parochialism and nationalism, where, you know, over the last 25, 30 years, a lot of issues are becoming nationalized and not becoming local issues anymore, but national issues.

And people vote along national party identification and cultural alignment rather than direct kind of immediate economic interest or local interest. spaces so far, and again, this year continues to buck that, I think because it just doesn't engender that level of heated political rhetoric. And if it did, it just wouldn't seem relevant to most people. And so it's just, it doesn't have that kind of rhetorical ability to make it about this issue. And as consequence, you get kind of more of this old school politics about showering my district with sweet, sweet government money for these things. And which again, frankly, I'd rather have that than the alternative. I also think part of this was the problem

of the 26 budget request itself, which was, it's not even clear who was responsible for it. I think obviously a huge part of it was Russ Fote, the head of the office management and budget, the accounting office, who prior to his appointment in that role had during the Biden administration called out his shot of desire to cut NASA science by 50 percent years in advance. But there wasn't a clear policy process behind this. There was not, you know, Elon Musk was seen as an influencer in this, right, with the Mars directions that kind of came out of it. But he was gone pretty much the week after this budget dropped as well.

A lot of the political appointees at NASA who are responsible for kind of implementing this budget proposal are all gone themselves now as well. And so it clearly was not the, and I think because of its unpopularity with members of Congress of the president's own party. And also, clearly it was not a production of some studied or stayed like policy discussion and process within the White House. It was kind of whatever factional coalition got its numbers in at that moment. Because they never bothered to argue for it. I think that's the other astonishing thing for this. They just dropped the budget. Fired it out into the universe and then moved on. And it's like, all right, whatever. You know,

and so it's not like the White House was going around trying to convince Congress. We need to cut these things. No one bothered to do anything. And so now you actually see, and this is what I think is also fascinating, back in December, you saw a new executive order, basically reasserting Artemis as the priority. So you saw suddenly a more like Obama era journey to Mars kind of language. You know, now it's now Artemis is on the path to Mars again. It's not pivot towards humans to Mars as fast as you can. It is like, uh, something, something Mars. Right. And that's pretty amazing too, right? You had this radical, I mean, I wrote a op-ed about this in space news. It was a radical proposal to redirect human spaceflight towards Mars after Artemis 3 and basically

completely give up and at best make the future of Artemis uncertain. And that's just, it's like pretending it's never happened. And so what is the role of Mars in future exploration with humans? Well, we're going to demonstrate stuff at the moon again. So we're kind of back to where we started. And so whatever process finally did take hold. And I think you did see Kratzios, who's the science advisor head of the Office of Science Technology Policy. And they formally ended any pretense about having space advice,

a national space council. Yeah. It's all under the Office of Science Technology Policy now. So you have some sort of structured process now, at least someone in the White House owns the space issue. And of course, now you have Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. So you have much more of an internal structure to advocate for, at least represent the interest of this stuff.

And I think that's what you didn't have at the beginning of the year. And you saw this kind of chaotic, strange, contradictory proposal put forward that then wasn't defended. And so it was easily overturned. There wasn't any political price to pay for cross-the-prud. Yeah, it's cheap. You can fire it out there. You can do whatever you want to budget.

It's nothing. Right. You know? We're not. Just like stir some stuff up. and, you know, like, yeah, it's, it's a weird process. Funny thing you mentioned, it wasn't, under the Obama administration, wasn't OSTP, like, the, didn't I have the same role in terms of its guidance of space policy as well?

Pretty much, yeah, it kind of goes back and forth. A lot of presidents have done it in a variety of ways. Reagan had these, like, cross-government working groups. Of course, a few presidents have had the National Space Council, inter-agency working groups, I should say. And then also, yeah, OSTP was kind of the responsible implementer, this in Obama. So it's, it's once again back to OSTP. They don't have space counsel for whatever reason, probably because Vice President Pence just doesn't really care and doesn't want to be

bothered with it. I think, again, a good lesson. And I remember thinking about this at the beginning of Biden. You said Pence, which is funny. That was a whole different. Oh, did I say Vice President? Yeah. Vance. A lot of the same letters. Yes, my Vice President Vance does not care about space. Vice President Pence did. But at the same time, you saw under Kamala Harris, a vice president who just doesn't care about space that much, still being kind of forced to do the Space Council. What's the value in that?

There really wasn't that much help in that either. So I don't think there has to be or doesn't have to be one necessarily. It's just what role is it works within the administration as it exists. So we'll see. I mean, I think the big test of this will be in the next couple of months when we see the 27 budget request and we start this whole game over again, whether we'll see them try to go back to the well for these massive cuts, or you'll see a more restrained and focused approach,

which I hope that will be the lesson because Congress is likely to reject them again if they try to do that. So why waste the time? So do you read the signing of the big space policy directive, you know, the same day or a week? Was it the same day that Jared Eisenman was sworn in? Next day. I think it was the next day?

Okay. So was that, should we read that as like the baton moment of like, all right, Jared, your turn. Like, go figure out what we're doing on this front between him and OSTP that. It strikes me as the point is. We'll see what the budget request is. Yeah, the timing couldn't have been accidental. And, you know, he didn't have a role in the administration before that. So I can't say one way or the other if he had input on it. But you would think that he would at least be aware of it. And it makes sense. I mean, his job now is to be the internal advocate. for NASA in this White House, and you see him doing that. No accident, he's giving family members of the Trump family rides on his jet all the time, right, and showing up on Fox News and really kind of pushing his relationship. He hit Newsmax the other day, too. Yeah, I mean, that's no accident. You saw this leading up to his renomination. I'll do it, too.

I'll go on those channels. I've been hitting CNN lately. I'll go on Newsmax, too. Sure. I mean, you saw him on the Sean Ryan show going up for prior to his renomination, and that was, I think, something like 5 million viewers. Some massive, you know, one of those podcasts that I'm not familiar with that has a huge audience.

And, you know, he learned a lot. It's kind of amazing how quickly, and maybe speaks well to his upcoming tenure at NASA, how quickly he could learn the game here. Oh, yeah. Because it is a pretty astonishing political comeback to go through the journey he did last year and be in the situation. So, you know, you see him positioning well, and the closer you are to the president,

the probably easier it is to win these turf battles within the White House. Right. All right, let's talk about some of the things that he's confronted with and how you might see this playing out. Because we're kind of in a weird, really, I think, convenient way that this schedule lays out is that we've got Artemis 2 on the pad right now. They're doing their testing. Presumably, that will launch sometime in the next few months at the same time that we're going to start seeing this budget request happen. And there's a series of things that NASA needs to figure out what they're going to do with it. So we've got the Artemis Lander Acceleration Plan. We've got that whole track. we've got Mars, sample, and how that even shakes out,

given the budgetary scenario that's in front of us. Those are the probably two biggest ones. There's some other painting around the edges of each of those that Jared has to, really is tasked with figuring out how this stuff all lands. But how do you foresee that stuff hitting schedule-wise?

Do you think that he has to get through Artemis II before he can really start, you know, positioning, whether or not they're doing the work, positioning for what this Artemis 3 plan is going to be? I mean, Artemis 2, I mean, I think Artemis 2 is kind of this, I mean, it's the biggest profile moment. It's probably the only Artemis launch of this administration, the second Trump term, just in terms of likelihood.

And it will kind of set the path forward. I think barring any catastrophic outcome, it will be very successful in high profile. It would be a great opportunity to kind of do a rah-rah around the program itself. And it will just give him the wind at his back. And I don't think anything else is going to be taking up his attention. really until we get through this. This is one of those situations. I mean,

if we know humans have been this far away from the earth in half a century. And I, you know, I keep planning to point this out. It's like, it's not like, we say space is hard, the moon is hard.

It's like, yeah, yeah, but, you know, it really is. Like, no other nation has even tried to do this since Apollo era.

Not even gotten close to trying, right? We're saying China's clearly on some, like, path to the moon, but they haven't launched anyone. beyond Earth orbit yet, right? This is dangerous stuff.

This is all new, functionally figuring out how to do this again for the first time. And it's the first time Orion will have been in space with life support system, right? Notably, rather important for astronauts. I mean, when they flew Apollo 8, they had flown Apollo 7 beforehand, they had flown an uncrewed command module, right? And it was at Apollo 5 or 6.

Apollo 4, yeah. 4. 4 was the Saturn, yeah, whatever. Yeah, 4 was the first full Saturn 5. Right? And then I think they did uncrewed, Apollo command module launch. And yeah, they had done at least some basic tests beforehand, right?

And so this is, and that's the second launch of Saturn, of Saturn, SLS. And it's basically like a whole new launch, right? Because they haven't launched it in almost four years, right? And so it's, it's a lot riding on this. And it's hard to say, my guess is that it'll be delayed a lot

because it's a finicky rocket and they have humans on it the first time. But who know, I say that and it's going to launch, like in the first opportunity. in the launch window. I don't know. The crew 12 got accelerated to February 11th, so I think the February window

is probably out. But I mean, but I think they would probably bump anybody right for this, right? Like, this is going to take pressing. We're running out of space, people on the space station if we don't. Yeah, that's good point.

Whatever. It doesn't, I don't think the particular month matters. More, I think it's the, it's the gating element here, right? Like, yeah. Because you're right that, you know, the big beautiful Bill era, settled the congressional approach to the Artemis program. So I think that any...

Because I think if you had Jared choose, which of these space policies is more up his alley of like, you know, the... And just looking at the Artemis side of things, would the, you know, bail and SLS Orion beyond Artemis 3 versus let's fund four and five. He would pick the first one. You know, he might not say that today

because he's ahead of NASA, but if I asked him, you know, almost over a year ago when he was on this show, I think he ostensibly did pick the first option. Yeah. But now he's left out with this block of Legos that he's got in office and he has to figure out what to do with it. Well, I'd be kind of curious, though, if he still would stick to that, right? Because the other ones clearly are not going to be any ready anytime soon.

So if you want to win under this administration, this is the smart play. And it's always easier to do this stuff if you're working with a happy Congress and not an angry Congress, as we've learned. and so you can go ahead and pick a fight with them on this and then they come back and it's just worth circling back to the bill that was just passed and is at this point waiting to be signed by the brother I wish you would just sign it but it's very... It was auto pen out maybe.

Yeah, exactly. But it's very prescriptive. It says it's very clear. It's like you will spend the money on these things that we say. This is the intent of Congress. Everything written here and in the Associated Report is the intent of Congress. risk, you will spend the money, you cannot impound it, you cannot transfer it, you will spend,

I mean, it's very, very, like, kind of sloppy on the wristy, to point a professional phrase. But the, you know, they are not messing around with this. And so it is, you, you want them, space stuff always works better when administration and Congress are aligned on it. It's just much more easy to go through these fights. And if you just kind of get accepted as this thing, and it's great, it makes Ted Cruz happy. So when you go and ask for something else, Ted Cruz is more liable to give it to you than yelling at you about SLS contracts, right? I mean, the other issue with pulling Artemis 3 forward is that, you know, how much control does NASA really have on it, right? I mean, that's kind of the whole point of the private

fixed price partnerships that we have here. I did an analysis a few months ago. You know, there's the last time any company or organization in the U.S., I should just clarify, has gone from kind of start of a project, a human spaceflight capable or like rated spacecraft to actually the first launch of that. The only time that that's happened in fewer than five years was with Gemini and Mercury. So like nothing.

And that includes Falcon 9 crew. Sorry, that includes the crew dragon. That includes obviously Station. Orion, of course, is way out there. But Apollo, you know, Well, yeah, and Starlander is already basically beyond that point. So it's a situation where you, it's not saying it's impossible, particularly for Blue, who's kind of coming out on this slate. But it would be extraordinary.

Yeah, totally shocking. To get something that fast. It's almost... Super huge outlier in the history of space. Yeah. And, you know, of course, Gemini and Mercury were like very different risk postures and complexities. Right. I guess I was reading through that great Gemini remastered book that just came.

out and his reminder like, man, they all should have died every time. Like, they're just in these like tin cans. They're like, will this work out? Like, oh, should, do we need to think about how this door closes in space? Nah, what's the worst that could happen? You know, they'll just jam it shut. Should you have them spacewalk over very sharp metal and do it? Yeah, right. And back. Yeah. And it's like so many things go wrong. And there are just like the test pilots who are just loving it. But at the same time, it's just you realize like for our expectation needs today, like that's really you know this not acceptable um and so but even in apollo like with a command module like it took more than five years uh the lem took more than it's like seven years close for the

lem to be developed and that was with all the money right that they just were they were spending i think the lem itself cost like 30-ish billion adjusted for inflation um and so again it's not impossible for blue but i mean i think looking at SpaceX even with with crew dragon and and starship and and it's other projects, they're not magically not held to these development timelines of complexity. It takes a long time. Here's what I would throw at you, though,

is that I don't think the actual acceleration is the thing to key on, but I think the existence of that idea as an initiative. And the fact that it was floated by Sean Duffy, whoever was responsible for it at a lower level, I don't know, but the fact that it was put out there by Sean Duffy and embraced

by sections of Congress, at a time when SpaceX is politically vulnerable, that mix is a really interesting case that allows, like, any decision that is made there to get a second lander focused on Artemis 3 or to get additional funding or resources pointed at accelerating this timeline is hastening the thing that flies us out of the SLS Orion program. And at this point, it is proven time and time again that we cannot talk or policy our way out of the SLS-O-Ryan program. The only way to do it is to fly our way out of and to make Congress FOMO our way out of this program.

And so all of a sudden we have political capital to be spent on an initiative that speeds up the thing that will certainly replace SLS-O-Ryan, whichever one that is, right? I don't know if there's a blue origin stack or a SpaceX Starship stack, but I bet one of those is the thing that flies us out of this. Like, you know, huge New Glenn, 9x4,

is capable of doing all the SLS Block 1B secondary payloads, it's capable of putting an enormous amount of cargo out to the moon. So any of this, let's accelerate the program stuff, hastens the arrival of the thing that is the real threat to SLS-Rion. And so it's this backdoor way to like, you know, I don't care if they accelerate the schedule at all, but we just got a political capital to spend to do the thing that is most harmful to the SLS-Oryon program

that Congress really cares about. I'll go back to my earlier statement of NER, underestimate the political power. But that's my, I think that's, I'm agreeing with you. The only way to usurp that is by like, there's things that have landing legs that are touching down on the moon and like people don't want to miss that. Yeah. You know?

In this budget includes language saying that any commercial transportation competition for sending humans to the moon or Mars that NASA considers, they have to include SLS. So it's, like, as that. I mean, how putting a docket port on it is more than Orion will have. Artemis too. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, yes, nothing succeeds like success, and it's nice to have actual options. And I think

that's going to be that certainly and it's I think that there's a certain aspect and quality to this, though, that, you know, as an elder millennial, I'm stuck in Simpsons references, but for those of you who share that, there's like an episode where Homer, like, just works for

Hank Scorpio and becomes manager at another nuclear plant. And he just walks into his team and goes like, are you guys working hard? And go like, yeah, it's like, can you work harder? I go, sure, boss? And they just start typing faster. And it's like, there's like an element of that right now.

It's like, hey, can you guys just do it faster? And they're like, oh, yeah, sure. Why not? Like, maybe that works. I mean, I think maybe what you're seeing here is also the idea that you can release some of the requirements on NASA's side about where they're landing, right? And what constitutes a successful, you know, mission of how long of a sorty mission it becomes of just getting it's like literally this whole thing though still though and i'm starting to worry we're

trending back towards like literally just boots and you know footprints and and flags right and it's like it doesn't really matter honestly if we beat china back because we we already got to the moon first um and we should have a program independent of reactionary kind of things to other nations yeah um and if we start sacrificing kind of like the point of the sustainability aspect of artemus and we make it about a race, we are setting ourselves up for a very potentially difficult political calculation afterwards of like, okay, you did the thing you said you were going to do. Why should we keep funding you? Mission accomplished banner and...

Yeah, like, what... Artemis was explicitly designed not to succumb to that, but we're framed it in the rhetoric and the focus is starting to shift the other way. So that's what I'm starting to work. We're right back into Artemis applications. Yes. What if we fly past Venus on the way to Mars? Sounds rad, though, honestly. I would do it.

All right, I got to get out of here, but I'm pretty sure Jake said, hey, we should get Casey on again. So I think you're going to be on off nominal sooner than you realize. And we can. Always a pleasure. Maybe come back and do a three-hour episode one time, just to see if we could do it. I bet we could. Oh, are you kidding? Of course, we could.

Only three hours? We should do it. All right, man. Anything you want to point people to that if they're not a planet J-South science, satiety members or anything particular that you want to make sure they see? Yeah, well, I mean, just you can read the, as you said, the analysis by my colleague Jack of the budget. Check out our 2025 impact report that we published on our website just to show the extent and sophistication of our advocacy effort this last year. If you're not a society member, really consider

becoming one because I think you got your money's worth this year from the work that we did on this. This was a huge, huge effort. We put a lot of new resources. We're really investing in advocacy and policy, doing a, again, like a multi-front grassroots, insider campaign stuff, novel use of software and your data pipelines and really kind of doing some exciting things. And it's a steel. And we're the only organization really operates as, again, nonprofit and no real. There's no, we don't have any money in the game here, right? We don't benefit contract-wise or anything what happens. And I think we played a really important role. So I'll just emphasize that because I'm proud of the work that we did. And that happens.

because we have people who give us money and not corporations and not government, right, that allowed us to be dynamic, but also allowed to say what we thought without fear of reprisal. So we play an important role here. So planetary.org are all planetary society and all the social networks. Thanks again to Casey for joining me on the show. He's always the best to talk with here or on Off Nominal, where we tend to have him all the time. Thanks to the producers of the show. There are 33 executive producers who made this episode possible.

thanks to Matt, Fred, Will and Lars from Agile, Chris, Lee, Jan, Frank, Miles O'Brien, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Ryan, Joe Kim, Stealth Julian, Hico, Tim Dodd, the Everday Ashtonaut, the Ashton, Uness, The Astrogator's at SCEE, Pat Warren, Natasha Saccoos, Russell, David, Donald, and four anonymous executive producers. You all made this episode possible, along with the several hundred of you over at Managing Cutoff.com slash support. sign up there you get access to Miko Headlines, a different podcast feed where I keep you up onto the space news that's going on, filter out the stuff that doesn't matter, keep you in tune with what does matter. It's a great way to stay up on the news to help support the show. It's a win-win all around. So if you like this, you'll love that, I promise.

So check that out, help support the show. And if you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And otherwise, I'm hoping that we're going to start coming to you more regularly. I've got a handle on what the schedule is with the home renovation that's. happening just outside of my studio walls here and when I can record, when is a quiet time for me to record. I got a handle on that finally. So I've got some guest books for the next couple of weeks, and I'm excited for you to hear that. So we'll talk to you some.