Main Engine Cut Off - T+92: Marcia Smith

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Marcia Smith of Space Policy Online joins me to talk about the recent meetings of the NASA Advisory Council, the status of Commercial Crew, Space Force, and more space policy goodness. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 184 other supporters on Patreon. SpacePolicyOnline.com - Your first stop for news, information and analysis about civil, military and commercial space programs Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) | Twitter SpacePolicyOnline.com | Facebook Gateway Gets Good Reviews from NAC Committees - SpacePolicyOnline.com NASA Announces Nine Commercial Crew Flight Assignments, More to Come from International Partners - SpacePolicyOnline.com Trump Continues to Talk Up Space Force As He Signs FY2019 NDAA - SpacePolicyOnline.com Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. Got another special guest with me here, Marsha Smith of Space Policy Online. How's it going, Marsha? Things are terrific. Thanks for inviting me. Policy Online. How's it going, Marsha? Things are terrific. Thanks for inviting me. This is a great week to have you here because we've been filled with riveting teleconferences from the advisory council. Yes, indeedy. Has that been your main focus this week? I know there was a lot of other things going on that you've been tracking the last couple of weeks with everything going on with Congress, but was that kind of the main focus this week? This week? Yes, it's been a very busy August, which is unusual. Yeah, it's typically not very busy at all. August is usually when everybody sort of catches up on everything, at least here in

Washington. Normally, Congress is gone. But of course, the Senate stayed for part of the time this month. And so it's been a very unusual August with the vice president being very busy and NASA being very busy and Congress being very busy. So were there any particular takeaways from the advisory council meetings this week that you thought were notable? There was a lot about Gateway, which may be surprising. Bridenstine had some presence there. What were the top highlights for you? Well, I actually thought that Bridenstine did a great job. I've listened to an awful lot of NAC meetings and it was fun to see a new administrator come in and he's obviously very excited about what he's doing.

He's got new ideas and, you know, he wants to throw them out on the table and see where they go. So that was actually the highlight, listening to his talk, although I've heard him give an awful lot of talks. But seeing him interact with this new crowd, his advisors, because they all report to him, he's chosen these people to be there. And introducing Mike Gold as the chair of this new committee. And I'm a big Mike Gold fan, and he's always got new and interesting ideas. So that part of NAC to me was really very interesting. But overall, I think it was good to hear their current thinking about Gateway, especially with the vice president standing up and saying we're going to have humans on it by 2024. And I don't think a lot of people know about Gateway. And of course,

its name keeps changing. But it's in this sort of weird state. I think people within the NASA community know about it, but it's not really a program yet because I think it's still in a budget request and the request hasn't been approved. So NASA can't actually go out there and start banging the drum about it. But they have to get moving on it because Vice President Pence wants people aboard by 2024. So they've got this program. It's conceptual, but they've got PowerPoint slides. So people are already getting in their minds what it's going to look like and who's going

to be doing what, because they had that slide that showed some of it. Uh-oh, I think I lost you for a second. Hmm. Let me try not FaceTime audio, and I lost you for a second. Hmm. Let me try not FaceTime audio, and I'll call you right back. Okay. Hi, Anthony. Are we connected now? We're back. We're good. Okay. Sorry about that.

No problem. Okay. So NASA put up a slide at the NAC meeting that showed its current concept of the gateway. And so I think people are now getting an idea in their minds of what it's going to look like. And this slide has some modules that were color-coded to show that they might come from international partners and the like. partners and the like. So, you know, on the one hand, you have visual representations of the gateway that people are still trying to get to learn about, and Jason Kruzan, who was giving the presentation, stressed that it's just a concept. They've actually put out a request to companies to come back and tell them how they would build the capitation module, for example.

So they're still getting all this input from people. And he said that what ultimately gets built may not look like this at all. So the point is that NASA has a gateway idea, but the vice president has stood up and said, humans on the gateway by 2024. So they're in this difficult situation of trying to explain what they're building while the vice president is out there making promises about it. So it's kind of a difficult situation for them. But I did find their presentations very informative at the Mac meeting. So given that weird circumstance where they can talk about it, that meeting. So given that weird circumstance where they can talk about it, but there's not an official program yet, what is the roadmap over the next year to get that from the drawing board

to a funded program? And how do you see that shaking out, especially given the fact that we're heading into a very weird time of politics where at the midterm elections, makeup of Congress could be fairly different by the end of the year. So what does that roadmap look like for them? Well, and that's the challenge. I think you pointed it out. And so not to get into the details of budgeting, but there is a budget request that's before Congress that would give NASA money to do this. It's for fiscal 2019, which begins on October 1st.

They're probably not going to meet that deadline. But setting aside fiscal 2019, NASA programs go on for many years, as do other agencies like DOD and DOE that do research and development. And so you're always having to look to the future. What are the future budgets going to look like? Are they going to support it? What are the future budgets going to look like? Are they going to support it? And beginning in fiscal 2020, we're back to having those budget gaps that were imposed 10 years ago.

And Congress seems to waive those gaps for two years at a time, but they kick back in in 2020. And whether or not they get waived again will depend on who's running Congress, at least in part. And we don't know who's going to be running Congress because we've got the midterm elections coming up. So you have this great situation right now where Congress, the key people in Congress who you face, are very supportive. And NASA has not always had that. But three of the key people are up for reelection. John Culberson, Ted Cruz, and Bill Nelson. So we don't know if they're all going to be there.

We don't know who's going to be running Congress. We don't know whether or not they're going to be able to agree to waive these budget caps again. NASA is getting gobs of money from Congress, more than I've ever seen, above the president's request, because they keep waiving these budget caps. So it gives the Appropriations Committee more flexibility to put money into special projects like this. And if the day comes, I don't know if it ever will, if the day comes and they actually get serious about the deficit, these kinds of programs, which are called non-defense, the defense, I think, is going to keep doing fine, but the non-defense programs are where a lot of Republicans want to make the cut.

So it's so hard to tell what the future holds for NASA to get any of this done. in commercial and international partnerships to both provide more funding streams into this kind of an effort, but also to bolster their case for doing the mission in the first place. And one of the things that I think keeps getting brought up is the whole ISS decommissioning date and all that kind of stuff. I don't think it's any strange occurrence that the decommissioning date lines up with the major ramp up of funding for Gateway. Do you see it as a zero-sum game in that way between ISS and Gateway where one funding has to come down for the other to go up? Or is, given this crazy budgeting situation where they're getting more money than they are asking, is it viable that the gateway could have enough funding, even if ISS stayed on until 2028 or something like that? Well, anything's possible, because you just don't know how much money

Congress is going to appropriate. So yes, it's possible to do both. But I think that, you know, at some point, if you want to get people to really understand that the ISS is not going to last forever, no matter what, you know, it's up there in space, it's getting bombarded by meteorites, and we don't quite know what happened to the Soyuz, but people are speculating it was a piece of debris that hit it or whatever, but, you know, it's not going to last forever. Something has to come next, and at least by setting a date, even that date never happens even if it's 26 or 27 or 28 or 20 30 which is what senator nelson and senator cruz want at some point you have to move on and so it gets it gives everybody an opportunity to focus on what is going to come next and the

date may just be you know a line in the, and it may get brushed aside by the waves. We'll see about that. But it is a way to focus people's attention. You mentioned Bridenstine at the beginning when you were talking about the gateway, the way it was talked about at the meetings this week. Something that's been notable is his departure in speeches from previous administrators even what people are calling like you know the old guard at nasa the things that they tend to talk up in speeches he tends to get into you know we need a sustainable reusable architecture the things that all of the

space nerds out there who are rooting for a new way of things tend to say um i sensed he got a little bit of pushback from some of the questions he was getting asked. But how do you see that? Does he have the support around him to actually institute any of those changes? Is he just merely the first person that's been in that position to have that viewpoint? Or is this really platitudes that he's talking up that might not have anything behind it? Well, sustainable. I think everybody wants sustainable. I'm not sure that's really new. Reusable. The space shuttle was reusable, so that's not really new. So I don't see this as new. I'm not quite sure why others would think that this was new. I think reusability and sustainability

have been part of what NASA has been wanting to do for a very long time. You know, the shuttle, it was shut down. Now we're taking those reusable engines and making them expendable, which seems sort of different and confusing. But I think what Gerstenmaier talks about all the time about Gateway is that it is reusable. And I can't remember if it was him or Bridenstine that called it a reusable command and service module.

But, you know, his whole point is that many crews can go back and forth to the lunar surface from Gateway, unlike the Apollo era when they just were sending a command and service module and the lunar module out there together. So I think that this reusability is something that has been around for some time. And I think that Bridenstine is articulating it perhaps in a different way. And some people are a little bit worried because of this whole conflict between SLS and commercial vehicles, and they feel that that means he's not supporting SLS. But I think he's made it clear that he does support SLS.

Yeah, and that was definitely laid out in that roadmap that we saw where, you know, that's the first time that they've put real renders of commercial vehicles on the launch, you know, plan for the Gateway, interspersed between the four

crewed launches that happen to support Gateway. So that was good to see on that graphic. Another thing I noticed was Wayne Hale is on the council and he was even talking up this week that in the past, he's been very critical of Gateway. I've read a lot of his writing on that over time, but he's

coming around to the program. I'm not sure if you've picked up any of that crowd of people who were skeptical, you know, a year or two years ago, but are coming around to it now and why they may have had such a shift in their mentality. Is it, you know, maybe that they're seeing the momentum behind it or they're seeing the fact that NASA is ready to embrace a different way of thinking about how to even acquire the parts of the Gateway? What do you think that is that's changing the tide there for Gateway? You know, I'm trying to remember what Wayne said about why his views had changed. The gateway has changed because until now it was a gateway to Mars, right? It was the deep space gateway with a deep space transport. And it was going to be part of this architecture for getting to Mars and back. And Gerstenmaier did talk about that at this

NAP meeting. And again, this whole idea that you don't need a spacecraft that's going to go from Earth to Mars and back to Earth. You may want to come back to the gateway because you can use the Earth's gravity and the Moon's gravity to slow down to get to the gateway. And you don't have to find some way to build this miraculous heat shield that's going to protect you if you're trying to make a direct return from Mars. So I think that it still is part of this architecture of going to Mars, but the focus of it on the moon, I think, is what's new since the Trump administration came in and made the moon part of the program again.

And I think the earlier presentations that I've heard about Gateway focused on, and Kirsten Meyer still talks about it a lot at the SNAC meeting, is that orbit can change. And so it can support operations on the moon and all these different places. It's not just in one fixed orbit. You can move it using this solar electric propulsion system. And maybe that's what people are coming to understand now that it can support lunar missions very effectively. It's not just something for deep space. So I've got some other random topics on the list here.

Unless you've got other gateway thoughts, I was thinking about moving into some commercial crew questions for you. So we've seen now, we've got crews announced, we've got tentative dates for at least some of these launches coming up. It does feel like we're getting to the point where we're going to start seeing these launches happen, but I'm curious if you think that there are any knock-on effects of the delays

that we have seen up until this point. Obviously, they're fixed-price contracts, so it's not extra money, which is something that Congress keeps forgetting in some of these hearings. They always ask, what are the additional costs? And yeah, there's ongoing costs because there's a budget every year, and it's another year of no launches. But do you think there are any political effects of those multi-year delays

that we've seen with commercial crew, especially as it relates to future crew transport to the ISS or even Gateway and things like that? Well, I think that people in Congress and elsewhere have become accustomed to delays in not just NASA programs, but DoD space programs. So the fact that it's been delayed, I don't think it's any big surprise. I think the pressing issue is the fact that the contract with Russia is running out. So there is a deadline for getting these systems online. out. So there is a deadline for getting these systems online. And I do think NASA could be more transparent about what its plans are because you do hear that even after commercial crew is flying, there's still going to always be one Russian and one American on the U.S.

commercial crew flights and one Russian and one American on the Russian flights because you always need to have at least one Russian and one American on space station. So I have not seen anything publicly, and I did not hear discussed at the NAC meeting, as to what the agreement is with Russia beyond the end of the contract. I think I heard Gerstenmaier say at a hearing or something that this was going to be a no exchange of funds agreement that Americans would keep flying on civilians and that they would fly on commercial crew. that the two sides are working on, then maybe this concern about not being able to get Americans up to ISS is not as worrisome as one might think. I would have wished that they had discussed more of that at the NAC meeting. But of course, there's only so much time to discuss things.

Yeah, and that maybe is getting into the weeds of what some of the people there wanted out of the meeting. But I mean, it does feel overblown because like you're saying, there's going to be Americans flying on that Soyuz. And I was talking up recently, you know, the UAE picked an astronaut or they're in the process of picking an astronaut and they have a flight booked on a Soyuz for next April. So it's very obvious that they can acquire a seat very quickly with sufficient motivation. So I'm I'm not, I still can't understand. And now obviously you want something to say like,

Hey, this is a, this is a big deal to get some extra attention at certain points in time. You might need that extra attention, but time and time again, I'm just seeing, you know, all these reasons why it's not actually that big of a deal.

And, uh, obviously not optimal, but definitely not like an, we're going to have to abandon the space station for six months at a time if we don't have the flights we need. It's very odd. Who do you think would even be able to answer that kind of thing?

Or do you think it's just a NASA strategy in general that we don't really want to talk about that until commercial crew is flying? I don't know what their strategy is. I can imagine that they are laser focused on getting our systems flying and not so much as to what comes next. But I do think it's an important question and I wish that had been discussed. Well, we'll have to find another Q&A session to bring it up on. Well, Matt's going to meet again in December, so maybe they'll talk about it there. Yeah. And some of those subcommittee calls, nobody really tends to push the button for questions.

So maybe you and I can be pushing the press one for a question or whatever it is. Well, no, no. That's the difference. It's not a question. You cannot ask a question. You can only make a comment. Oh, make a comment. Okay.

Well, we'll make a very well-worded suggestion. If we could ask questions, I think we'd all be calling in. Yeah, I got a question. But questions are not allowed, only comments. There was one thing at the NAC meeting that was interesting with the commercial crew. There was a little bit of hubbub around the Chris Ferguson situation and the fact that he's going to be flying on the first Starliner test flight. Do you have any sense what's going on there?

Because some of the NAC members were upset that he's flying at all on the flight, it seems. Boeing has this whole policy historically that they always have one of their own on a test flight. To me, that seems like why he's on there. It's a very curious situation, though. I was wondering if you've got any feelings on that. Well, I think it was not so you've got any feelings on that.

Well, I think it was not so much. So Jim Voss was very concerned about why there were three. But I don't think that he was concerned as to whether they were Boeing or NASA or whatever. It was just three. Why do you need three people instead of two? And then there was the other question about Ferguson training to be part of an expedition mission if, in fact, that's what they decide to use it for. So I think it – and I was confused about it actually because I didn't hear them talk about how the other – the two NASA astronauts were training for space station as well, but

NASA actually contacted me afterwards to make sure I understood this, that all three of them are going to do whatever they're going to do. All three will do a test flight or all three will do an expedition mission. But I think that this question as to why you need three is very interesting. And, you know, Jim Voss raised all the issues for your listeners. It was basically that you're adding human risk. You're having three people on a test flight. And NASA's response was you've either determined that the spacecraft is safe or

not and once you've made that decision it really doesn't matter how many people are aboard and the it's been designed for four people and Gerstenmaier also made the point that this actually is Boeing's vehicle it's not NASA's vehicle NASA has purchased six post certification flight from Boeing and they require Boeing to do a crew test flight but is Boeing's flight and the proposal from Boeing was originally was to fly one Boeing and one NASA astronaut and NASA agreed to that but somewhere along the line and I'm trying to find out when that was and why that was, NASA decided to add a second NASA astronaut.

So it really was not so much whether or not Chris Ferguson as a Boeing astronaut was going to fly or not because that was the deal. It's a business arrangement, and this is what Boeing wanted, and they wanted their guy, so that's great. The question is how did the second NASA astronaut get assigned to it, and should you have three people on a test flight? Yeah, it's a very curious situation. You know, SpaceX is going to just fly two.

I assume they're going to jam some extra cargo in there, because they've talked up flying both crew and cargo on these flights. Well, Gershenmeyer said there might be a similar agreement made with SpaceX. Yeah. I'd be curious to see who would fly on that, though, if that's the case. Well, SpaceX doesn't have its own astronauts. Right. They put Starman in there again.

They'll get him back, put him in there. Well, and again, Captain Luters and Bill Gershenmeyer were making the point that what they want is lots of people flying into space. So they want a lot of people to go. And, you know, there are four seats on these vehicles and NASA is going to buy some of them. And they're hoping that these companies are going to sell flights to others. You know, so it's not only going to be the commercial crew flights to NASA. There's going to be other flights. That was the whole point of the program.

Yeah. It would be good to see that. You know, obviously there's the outlier of all these extra habitats that they're hoping to attach to ISS that are in the development phase now, the Bigelow modules and some of the Next Step modules and things like that. Do you... have you heard anything recently on what the timeline for something like that. Have you heard anything recently on what the timeline for something like that looks like? I actually don't know what timeline there is for any decision on who might use that docking port. It's very curious. That'll be really exciting to see. I'm interested to see what gets added to ISS next. It doesn't seem like it'll be that Russian module,

as always, but that's always a year away. It is. One other topic I just wanted to get you quickly to talk about before we get you out of here is Space Force. Everybody's been asking all their questions about it. Things go on these waves where we hear a bunch about it for a week, and then it settles down to the back rooms of policymakers, and then it comes back up into the focus. Where are you at on it in general, given where it's at? It's had several different proposals at this point,

but right now, where are you at on that whole debate? Well, I'm confused, actually, as to what it is that... So I know exactly what President Trump and Vice President Pence want. They want a Department of the Space Force. But the Shanahan report didn't really say Department of the Space Force. It said Space Force. Space Force. It didn't say Department of.

And, of course, what Congress was originally talking about was a Space Corps, which was within the Air Force. which was within the Air Force. So I think that some folks still have all these things on the table, even though the White House may have decided what it wants, that there's still all this mix of different iterations of what a Space Force or Space Corps might be. The one thing everyone seems to be agreeing on is that it's a U.S. Space Command. And of course, we used to have a U.S. Space Command. So that's not really a big deal. And Mattis is completely behind that. But it'll be very interesting to see what is the new budget

proposal that goes to Congress in February. That's where DOD says it's going to have the cost estimate and it's going to lay out what it wants to do. And once it gets up on the Hill and you actually have something that holds you in the hand, this is what I want to do. And I think Pence may be a little optimistic because it's going to happen by 2020 because it's only in the fiscal 2020 budget request, but that's his goal. And so I'm sure that they're going to be working the Hill and trying to get people to agree to this. And Senator Inhofe is probably going to take over the Senate Armed Services Committee. And I've already read some stories about how they're already lobbying him because he's not exactly won over yet. And people want to know how much is it going to cost and where's the money going to come from.

But Shanahan said he was expecting it would cost billions of dollars to do this. And it's not like DOJ has a lot of money, but it's not as though they've got a secret bank account where they've got a couple billion dollars to set up a new department. So, you know, Congress is the one with the money. They've got to figure out where this money is going to come from. So I think that until we actually have a proposal, a firm proposal that spells out exactly what they want to do, how much it's going to cost, how they're going to make this happen, because it's going to have to happen over a period of time. You can't just turn on a switch and suddenly it's going to cost, how they're going to make this happen, because it's going to have to happen over a period of time.

You can't just turn on a switch and suddenly it's the Department of the Space Force. I think it's just too early to try and make a determination as to what they want to reasonably not. Yeah, and that's kind of why I've avoided talking about it much, is just that there's so much uncertainty in it. The one thing I've been picking up from people I've talked to is that the people within the space wings of the Air Force right now feel like it would help their leadership at the highest levels to have some representation at higher levels than they do now, because the top levels

of the Air Force are plain people, for lack of a better term. And that space kind of representation hasn't made it up that high in the hierarchy. So that's the one kind of thing that I'm tracking as something that isn't talked about much. When you see any article about Space Force out there, it tends to be about budget and who's bickering with who within Congress and things like that. So I'm hoping when we get further down the line, we get some more of that nitty gritty discussion of what are these things that we're addressing with this proposal. But until then, you're right that it's just politicking, I would say, in general. Well, the Space Corps idea of having a Space Corps within the Air Force, like the Marine Corps within the Navy, really came from some of those concerns that you just expressed, that space does not have enough representation within the Air Force, and air is what's in the title, and that's what people are focused on.

So I think that folks in Congress, Jim Cooper and Mike Rogers and Max Sullenberry, the ones who are really pushing for Space Corps, saw that as the issue, and that's why they wanted to carve out this separate part of the Air Force. But they were not advocating an entirely new department. Right. This whole idea of a whole new department seems to have come from the White House. Yeah, you would hope it's not purely, you know, legacy building of some sort, because the 2020 date has a certain ring to it, as some other deadlines.

I don't know. Is there any other policy issues that you're tracking over the next couple of months as we head into midterm season that you think are particularly important to keep an eye on? Oh, gosh, there are so many policy issues, we couldn't possibly talk about them without putting your audience to sleep. Well, they can head over to spacepolicyonline.com, which is where I'm always hanging out, looking at all these policy details. It'll be a very curious fall. We've got midterms coming up in November, and then we'll see as that new Congress takes place how these space alliances shift.

It'll be a very fun couple of months to years with all that is going on that we're just talking about here to see how that shakes out with the new Congress. And I do think that the fact that these three key space figures, Coberson, Cruz, and Nelson, are all in tough re-election races, is something that people ought to pay attention to. There's no question that whoever gets elected instead of them would probably still be very favorable towards space, considering what they represent, but they won't have the seniority and the powerful committee positions that those three do. Yeah, that's the important one, too. I think people often are, or even I'm like, well, it's just going to be another senator in there from any

given district, any given state. But yeah, those committee assignments, the leverage that they have among other members of Congress, that's important stuff. And you're right, these races are all way closer than anyone would have predicted two, three years ago, I think down to single digit percentage points in Cruz's situation. So it's very curious. But we'll be following over at spacepolicyonline.com. Is there anything else that you want to plug for the listeners to check out? No, no. No, nothing to plug. And I thank you so much for inviting me to be on your podcast.

Thank you so much for being here. It's always great talking with you. Okay, thanks so much. Thanks again to Marsha for coming on the show. It's always great talking with her. Before I get out of here, I want to say thank you

to all of the patrons over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 219 of you supporting the show every single episode and this episode was produced by 36 executive producers chris pat matt george brad ryan jameson nadim peter donald lee jasper chris warren bob russell john moritz tyler joel yon david grant barbara David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous executive producers. If you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. And don't forget, $3 or more a month, you get access to the special headlines feed on Fridays. I do a little

headline show for you running through the stories of the week. It's a great way to stay up on space news. But that's it for now. If you've got any thoughts on what we talked about here today, email is anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com or Twitter at wehavemiko. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.