Off-Nominal - 108 - Super Secret about Plutonium

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Jake and guest host Casey Dreier are joined by Paul Byrne to talk about NASA’s planetary science budget and the trials and tribulations that it is experiencing today.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 108 - Super Secret about Plutonium (feat. Paul Byrne and Casey Dreier)Follow JaimePaul Byrne (@ThePlanetaryGuy) | TwitterFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow CaseyCasey Dreier (@CaseyDreier) | TwitterThe Space Advocate NewsletterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Go at Brattle Home Eco. Welcome to space. Hello, welcome everybody. We made it. We made it after some interesting technical difficulties. It's always fun doing these. You'd think that we would have got like really, really good at this by now and we would have, you know, figured something out. But here we are still working out in 2023. I'll take the blame. I'd made the mistake of putting myself in a new situation without testing at first. So I was frankly asking for it. So you can blame me for the five minute delay here. Sorry, folks. Testing in production. That's how that's how it's got to get done sometimes, right? Test as you fly. That's right. Yeah. So as you can see, Anthony is still away this week.

So he left me to run the show again. And so we're going to see how that goes. And so of course, with my full purview on it, I'm going to jam as much planetary science into it as the audience will let me. So I've got a good rag tag crew with me. Casey Dreyer from the Planetary Society, chatting about space policy. I'm sure it's going to come up lots today. And then Paul Burns. So Paul, you've been on We Martians before

and now we're finally getting on here, which honestly, so I've had a couple beers with you. I feel like this show actually might be where you belong. And so I'm excited. I think it might be. I will say, I will say, this is a gigantic mug of tea. Okay. Because it's literally here in St. Louis to hit the hard stuff.

But after the podcast, and particularly as we talk about the state of NASA's planetary program, I absolutely will be reaching for the liquor. Yeah, good, good. Awesome. Well, maybe, yeah, tell us about your tea. You got anything interesting going down there or is this just like lipped in black tea? Is there something worth? No, this is Barry's tea.

This is Irish tea imported. Okay, okay. And it turns out that, so I used to be a terrific coffee drinker. And then when lockdown started, I didn't have any coffee at home, but I had lots of tea. So I just drank about eight liters of it every day. I was needing the same amount of caffeine and I wouldn't get headaches. So it's working. A lot of tea.

It's a lot of tea. Yeah, and I assume I'll die if I stopped drinking this much. But, you know, I'm okay with it. I can make it work. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good, good. Casey, anything good going on there? Yeah, I guess it's time.

It is early. So, but this is a non-alcoholic kulsh. Nice. My wife is pregnant right now. So we're really exploring the non-alcohol options of ways to still feel engaged in society. And I'd say there's some real improvements being made in non-alcoholic beers. This is from Best Day Brewing from Northern California. And it's actually quite refreshing.

Really? You would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. And it looks like and smells like beer, it tastes like beer, but it just doesn't make you have fun in the same way. Yeah, that's always the... But it's actually quite enjoyable. But, you know, we were in Spain recently. Spain has made this huge push towards non-alcoholic beers. You go to a small restaurant or a cafe, and it'll be three beers on tap.

And one of them almost inevitably will be a zero, like a seen alcohol. Cine alcohol, Cervesa. And it's because apparently Spain has zero tolerance drunk driving laws that passed in the last 10 years. Oh, nice. And so as a consequence, they're the largest consumer of non-alcoholic beer in Europe. So that's an interesting kind of policy consequence of such a low tolerance for drunk driving, which is probably a good thing. Yeah, that's like, it seems sort of maybe inconvenient in sort of changing your behaviors,

but probably good in the long run. Yeah, not great behaviors to encourage, right? The essence of policy, of public policy. Awesome, yeah. I went very straightforward for me in Mexico today. I just got a nice margarita. Nice. I'm just going to be tipping into that because like you, Paul, I think I will need this after what we talk about today.

So here we go. So cheers, everybody. Thanks for coming. Cheers to launch it. So, yeah, so I was saying before we started, I don't have much of an agenda. I don't have like a list of questions here because, you know, I figured this is a topic that is consuming a lot of brain power for me. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll just assemble like this dream team of planetary science enthusiasts who aren't a of the sound of their own voice, which is us three. And so I'm sure we can fill an hour with something. But, you know, what I'm kind of thinking about is like we've got Mars sample returned.

It's like it's a thing now. It's like really happening, you know, like it's full project. Money's going into it is on the way. And there's been some, I don't know, it's like, consequences. There's been lots of like turbulence in the rest of the planetary thing. I'm thinking about inflation troubles with like the money and the budget really coming up short, especially compared to like the Decadal survey. We got psyche being delayed. We got veritas being more or less canceled. And, you know, there's all this kind of like stuff happening. And I don't know if it's like all because of sample

return or if there's like, you know, just normal supply chain stuff. because of the you know the COVID ripples are still sort of echoing through the economy and I don't know is it just JPL doesn't know how to manage stuff anymore like what's you know what's the cause here is it some mix of both that's my my hope that we can unpack that today I don't know who wants to start with that and am I am I seeing it right or am I missing something what do you guys think I'm gonna let Casey go first because I I was gonna I have my own views but I don't know how well they're grounded in fact that I can point to versus sort of intuition, which is a little risky, right?

Paul, when does that ever stop someone on the internet for no pining? Honestly, never, but as a scientist, I'm constantly scolded. We're just going to see my pants. They're trying to train that out of me, so. So I actually wrote about this topic in my space advocate newsletter this month for the month of May that you can find on planetary.org. And I don't have a firm answer either. I think, though, it is primarily related to festering problems from COVID and all of the consequences upon consequences and downstream effects of it,

not just in a sense of direct kind of loss of productivity or being on site, you know, and some of the workforce issues JPL has endured, but really as a consequence of inflation. And I don't think we should undersell the consequences of all of your projects suddenly getting 10 to 20% more expensive. And your budget can grow. But if you can't keep the same buying power, and inflation doesn't just apply to materials. And there has been serious supply chain disruptions for aerospace materials. But skilled labor is just getting more expensive. And it's getting more and more expensive. You're in that price, what is it, that wage price spiral or things that more

expensive people's salaries go up, which allows to buy more things, which makes things more expensive, so their wages need to go up and so forth and so on. And particularly in planetary science or any kind of scientific-driven exploration where there is no such thing as an economy of scale to achieve. And what you're producing, you're creating these bespoke one-off, exquisitely designed scientific, you know, engineering masterpieces that are the function of lots of individual-skilled people's time. And if everyone's skill time is becoming more expensive, your projects are just going to get more expensive. You were seeing that downstream disruptions from COVID still, though, in terms of workforce, which I think was a serious issue with Psyche that is now spilling over into

Veritas and probably Mars sample return. And you're just getting at the same time significant, let's say, political uncertainty around the reliability of incoming funds. And so it's a number of factors all intersecting together in a very crazy way in, let's say this full umbrella, and then I'll stop here, this full umbrella of a wildly ambitious planetary program, the likes of which we haven't seen, maybe in half a century. Let's not forget. I was trying to count up there's at least half a dozen billion dollar plus missions underdevelopment right now.

You have a problem in any one of those, you're going to have spillovers and all the other ones. So that's just a lot of different factors crashing into each other. And then Mars sample return, we'll just touch on it. We can talk about it more. By virtue of its scope is just going to have a bigger footprint as a consequence of anything going wrong than any other project. So, so worst time to do sample return? Is that what you're saying? Not what I'm saying. It's a tough, I'd say it's by nature of NASA's ambition, they've bitten off a lot, and that includes sample return. Yeah. And so it just means that it's just, it's a lot to Lori Glaze, the Planetary Science Division Director at NASA, just has so much to manage.

And we should also note, sample return is a third of her budget that she does not have direct control over because that answers directly to the SMD, the associate administrator of NASA science. division, not planetary, and this whole entire lunar development exploration program, which is doing clips and the commercial lunar payload and the resource rover and all these other scientific instruments, that also doesn't answer to her. And it's in her budget as well, and that's a sixth of her budget. Thanks of what we're doing here, that are all experimental, that are all new, that are all wildly, again, what we want NASA to be doing, careening into the reality of the large, you're global disruption of, you know, skilled workers, labor, supply chains, war in Eastern Europe,

and an incoming looming debt ceiling crisis on top of it. So it's not a great time, but it's not March sample returns fault. Absolutely. Weather the storm, that's what we do. We have to just deal with the consequence of the reality on the ground that we have to deal with. Yeah. So Paul, end user side of this. You're on the other end of the negative parts of this as a scientist yourself. Is that accurate or you see it differently? No, I agree. In the main, I agree with everything Casey just said. So first off, let me propose that every time one of us utters Marisampa return, we drink, regardless of the thing, right? Just because it'll help us cope. Certainly, it's a bit like how you might say about having a kid, right? There may not be no perfect time.

But there are certain times when it's probably better than others and COVID has upended everything and it has really disrupted things. But what I think it is done is compound existing problems that the community and that NASA itself and the US government generally has faced. So for example, we've seen the issues, the workforce issues at JPL, which we're hearing are now apparently resolved and that generally they've hired people. They needed to do the stuff they need to do. The problem is that it highlighted systematic issues at JPL that we've also been told are also present at other NASA centers, perhaps not to the same extent. So we know that there are hiring pressures and issues at wage and retaining skilled workers at APL and JPA at EAA at Goddard, the other two big planetary centers in the US.

The other thing too is that Marysop Return, I think, really is. So I was part of the most recent Decaturl Survey, the Planned II National Biology Decatal Survey origins, worlds, and life, in which the importance and value of Marsa and return was affirmed, but the key recommendation of the steering committee on which I was not a part, was that MSR should be accomplished as quickly as possible, so it was to minimize the downstream impacts, negative impacts, on future planetary missions.

That's all well and good, but I think the reality of the sheer ambition of this is beginning to hit home for a lot of people. I see. And certainly, right? in a very tangible way. And one of the ways in which I think that's manifest, for example, is what happened to Veritas. So on the one hand, it made sense that if one of the two discovery missions currently in implementation, well, technically speaking, they're in formulation right now.

But if one of those two were to be somehow delayed or otherwise taking the money from it, it made sense that it would be the one at JPL where the workforce issues were most acute, rather than Goddard, where, by all measures right now, DaVinci is on track. However, we also know, in part because of the reporting that Casey's done and other folks who've looked into this, and what NASA has told us too, is that the money needed for the Psyche overrun is of order about 80 million. The money that was essentially desoped, if you like, from the budget to pay for Veritas was about 10 times as much. So Psyche is not the reason why Veritas is facing a three-plus year delay. The workforce issues we've been told are largely resolved at JPL.

We've also heard from the Veritas PI at, for example, this year's the Lunar Planetary Science Conference, that the number of people needed to get Veritas to its next step where it is now is very, very small, compared with the number of people needed to say get the Nysar mission shipped off to India or the Europa Clipper flagship delivered. So, Psyche did not directly lead to what happened to Veritas. Or cost overruns in Europa Clipper were told definitely played a role in where some of that money went. And it's hard to see that some of that money didn't go to Marslam. return. And I think what that tells us is that when NASA made the most recent discovery

selections in 2021, where it picked Veritas and DaVinci together, and then the following week, committed to supplying the marquee instrument on a third Venus mission. And I say, as someone who is a Venus evangelical, I love that we have these missions. But the problem is, I think we've seen now, NASA could not afford two selections. Because what it meant was they had no margin for any of the other overruns, either induced and compounded by COVID, or just the kinds of things you get generally emissions that are ambitious, big like Clipper and Mars Alper Return. So what that means is that right now, and we heard a lot of this during the formulation of the decade that NASA's budget had dramatically increased over the previous 10 years and that things

on paper in a budgetary sense are really positive. But like Aes just said, if a whole pile of that stuff, if almost half of the money on paper to planetary isn't something that's actually supporting the planetary community's priorities outside of Marsup Return and all things lunar, Then it turns out that NASA is functionally, I think, Jake, this was your phrase, House poor because of principally Mars sample return. And we're seeing that negative impact vis-a-vis we don't know when the next discovery competition call is going to be a program that at its inception in the 1990s was ideally going to launch a new mission every two years. We see that the current New Frontiers class missions, so NASA's biggest PI or principal investigator-led mission,

that competition is underway right now. the proposals are due in April of next year, the cost cap that the PI and his or her team have to work to is materially about $115 million less than the cost cap for the last competition they held back in 2017. So in other words, the number is a little bit higher, but when you factor in, not the crazy inflation, the 2% or so compound inflation, it's a material cost cut. And I think all of these are just symptoms of the fact that NASA doesn't have enough money to run the program that the last last decadals that they should do, much less the ambitious program that the new decadal is suggesting. And I don't see a near-term solution to this problem.

I have to ask. So one thing I'm kind of seeing here, so I'm doing the timeline in my head, right? And so 2021, NASA picks two Venus discovery missions, which seems ambitious. We were all like, wow, two. Okay, that sounds great. Yeah, we'll say yes to that. That sounds great. And then later in 2021 is when, like, the psyche.

issues were starting to materialize real bad. We didn't really hear about it until 2022, but like, that's when there was like, like, I think it was December 21 when there, that's when the Christmas party was, right? Like the, the big thing. And, and, uh, that that's built over. And then 22, uh, that's when Decatal comes out, right? And so 2021 to 22 was, was this Decadal. And I'm kind of seeing that all these things sort of happened in, I don't know, was it like some sort of like post-COVID fugue where we didn't really kind of understand what was going on, right? Like, like, like, why, you know, why were they picking two missions when they knew sample return was coming? Why did the decadal, you know, the decadal budget, there was like two budgets that you presented. There was like a baseline and then like an

ambitious one and the like, like none of them are even close. Like not even the baseline is like close to what NASA can go after. So like that seems like kind of out of touch. And then, yeah, and then the psyche stuff where it's just like, yeah, we're going to launch in September. And there was just like it wasn't going to happen right and i don't know i'm kind of wondering if maybe there was just we just didn't quite have a handle on how bad things were in that period so now we're i can i can definitely tell you that as best i remember and this is all public knowledge in terms of presentations that were made to the steering group in open session the budget that the steering group worked to on the basis of advice from headquarters was considerably higher than the actual

enacted budget they got the year after yeah which is why Why to your point that there's the so-called level budget and then there's the augmented or enhanced budget? And we're not even at the level budget. Yeah, the wish list. And the wish list is a sort of – and let me come back to something in a minute about the cost of these things. But anyway, the point is we in the community were surprised to learn that when the decadal came out and we heard NASA's initial super preliminary response, about a year ago, that response was, okay, so the actual budget we have is considerably less than.

you know, by, by all, I've ordered a several percent, but enough to make a meaningful difference to to the dispelation. That was such a bummer NASA response. Like we were all waiting for NASA to come back with the decade. And it was just like, look, we love the decadal. Everything looks great. We just want to have some very clear conversations about the money's situation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. And, you know, we'll continue with that. And it is also, exactly. And, and it is also worth, I have very, very mixed feelings about Mars, up return for variety of reasons. I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it is going to turn into planetary's version of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is to say that it may

have potentially has the potential to have groundbreaking science results, particularly if we find something in those samples that is indicative of extant or fossilized Martian life. But it is to get those samples back to Earth, assuming we do it in one continuous measure, it will end up costing something of, I don't know if it's going to be the equivalent in dollars of JWST, but it is going to be the sort of thing that shuts out almost everything else in the same way that for about 10 years astro had a much reduced cadence of other missions that were not JWSD because astrophysics budget ratings it meant on that giant telescope so the issue is this could be something that turns that Mars Amher turn turns into and if that's the case the question is particularly because

we are looking at functionally two more flagships or close to it to actually implement the return of those samples to earth it's not even going to be this decade it potentially eventually go into the next one, depending on funding. And so the question is, at what point, if at all, does it stop becoming the priority that it has held in the community for the last while, if it becomes an enormous sink of money, and is inhibiting other targets from getting missions,

either because they're delayed, or because mission calls just aren't happening, or getting pushed back so far that the cadence of New Frontiers turns into the cadence for discovery? These kinds of questions, I don't think we have answers to yet. I want to add some context to that. So I'm a bit more of a Mars sample return promoter for a number of reasons. But I think some context in the budget is really important.

So it is expensive. I mean, in 23, they got $822 million just from our sample return. That's a little less than a third of Planetary's entire budget. Next year, they're asking for 940. Senator, administrator Bill Nelson now said it's actually more like 1.2. you know, that's a lot of money, but then if you take the whole planetary budget we're looking now, which is $3.4, $3.3 billion, and subtract Mars sample return out of it, the entire planetary budget that's left is still larger than the planetary science budget has been for the last

15 years. So it's not like there's a posity of funding available here. The Mars sample return so far has been additive. And I think that the consequences of the problems that we're seeing with all of these delays and cancel or cancellations and development issues are the fact that there's just NASA has bought in too much in that remaining amount. But we're still talking about a planetary, functional non-MSR planetary budget of $2.3 billion a year. That used to be a fantasy level, right, than even seven years ago. So there's not necessarily, I think, a real restriction.

Some of that obviously is a lot of us going to the lunar development. exploration program, which is an Artemis-related initiative. That brings it down maybe to 1.8, 1.7. And within that, then, they're doing Europa Clipper, Psyche, Veritas, Da Vinci, Dragonfly. But part of the problem is, too, is that what used to be low-cost missions, you were talking about the cost cap on New Frontiers, I kind of was like, do people even honestly take that seriously anymore? Dragonfly is now at least a $2 billion mission.

Both Psyche and, or sorry, I should say, well, Psyche was too, but varitas and da Vinci were both selected as new frontier discovery class quote unquote half a billion dollar missions both of them are looking at life cycle costs more than a billion dollars and so can we mean and i actually contributed to a paper to the decatal survey about this issue with elizabeth frank as the lead on this looking at the cost growth of so-called low-cost planetary missions and at a certain point if we can't do a low-cost mission for less than a billion dollars you know this is going to There's fundamental problems in how we're approaching these types of projects. And if we could save, if we could have done DaVinci and Veritas for 750,

suddenly we wouldn't be having this potential challenge, right? And so the question is, where is this overall cost growth coming? Is it possible to go back down to a risk and development position where we can do missions cheaper? I don't know if you can get away with something like that for something like Mars sample return or Europa Clipper, but these are your low-cost missions should maybe consider that as well. So I think there's, this is why, again, to me, it's more of us like that NASA is doing all of these different things at once with zero margin for error. And then we add inflation and everything just became 10 to 20% more expensive.

We're seeing the consequences of that too. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. Last week or so, there were some panel. I'm not going to remember what panel it was or who even said it now. So you have to just, this is going to be the story of some people said. But there was some panel when they were talking about the plutonium for the RTGs, and they were worried, like, this, we're not going to have enough plutonium to have an RTG ready for the Uranus probe in 2031.

And it was made out to be like, oh, no, like we've got to get that. And I was like, there's zero. Don't worry, yeah. That's going to launch. There's literally, like, there's negative percent chance that you would need to make it 20 percent better just to get zero percent chance that it's going to launch. 2031. So I kind of was very sad when I heard that. Paul, what was your sense of that plutonium? That thing surprised me and frankly kind of really irritated me because NASA has been paying the Department of Energy for this plutonium restart for 10 years. And they keep promising to get

up to this 1.5 kilogram annual production rate. And every time they just keep pushing it further and further back. And there's no other, you know, NASA can't shop around for plutonium 238 vendors. No. But they are paying for it. And so I just like, how can they not at this, they've been doing this restart for 10 years now, 10 years and they still cannot, I just don't understand. And the DOE tends to be super weird and secretive about plutonium for some reason, but it's really hard to get a sense of what, you know, what's happening here. And if they're, you know, we're looking at this. This is why I felt like this omni crisis when I was writing in my newsletter the other week is that it was just all of these things seem to be hitting

the fan at the same time. Or we're just aware of this, right? I think, again, it's like, with the New Frontiers 5 competition and the fact that there is a huge cohort. So this leads to another reason I'm going to come back to, which is the cost of things which we sort of danced around. But there is a large cohort of the planetary community who sees New Frontiers is the way in which they get a mission funded. And it's the Outer Panthers community because the contention, whether accurate or not, and there's some evidence to suggest that it's not so clear cut.

But the thing is that if you have any hope of doing a long-lived mission, you need a radio power source out to the distant part of the solar system. And if you have, say, Clipper requiring some, well, Clipper's going to be carrying solar panels. But if you want to sort of put an expensive, ambitious, out of planets flagship, if you want to do a discovery mission that wants to do a flyby of Trident, like what the Trident concept did last time, there is not going to be enough of this material to fuel all these missions. That is going to limit NASA's ability to implement them, regardless of whether or not these things could be good proposals. It could be that none of these gets picked because the proposals aren't good.

but they can't even begin to propose if there isn't enough potential fuel to drive these things. So it is a mission that I think for the last while Mass has been able to largely, not largely ignore or avoid, but it hasn't risen to the level of priority. I think it's going to have to because for the last while, they've largely been focused on solar powered missions, Clipper, Psyche, Lucy, Beritas. They haven't had that pressure. I think we're going to see that change soon. And it is a thing that's called out specifically the new de gaitle as a point of concern to make sure that DOE and DOD get their act together and actually start producing more of these things.

So let me just swing back to the whole cost-size thing, right, which is an issue that is an interesting one to scientists in terms of the set of science we want to do and what we propose we want to do. I think Dragonfly was a bold choice and I don't think it would have been picked by the previous administration that had a history of picking relatively safe. or technically known things. There's an awful lot of unproven tech in Dragonfly. And I think, case it's your point, when all of a sudden, the classical cost of this is going to be comparable to a flagship. And it will be the first PI-led flagship, functionally.

It won't be run that way, but it's in terms of like dollar amounts. Now, here's the thing. I don't know, to this day, if Dragonfly was the best choice in the Frontiers 4. The alternative, the two missions that got to Phase A, which is sort of the second step, was a mission called Caesar, comet sample return. And it was technically less risky and it was cheaper.

But Dragonfly has sort of like a holy shit angle, right? Because when you tell people we're going to fly a nuclear powered optocopter on tighten, they're like, that's cool. Now the decatal, the new Decadal survey says we recognize that the costs have ballooned for dragonfly because it's got a bunch of tech that's not mature enough and we need to put a lot of money into it. But it also says that the science you get from doing. that is commensurate with the dollar tag. Now, in parallel, and again, all this is public,

because we're not supposed to talk what happens in deliberations in the Decadal, but all this is in public domain now. There were a bunch of studies developed by the panels that worked on the Decadal Survey, and some of those studies were independently costed. And this is on every Decadal survey, as a measure for kind of helping the community and NASA understand what targets are feasible at what price point, essentially. It is worth noting that almost all of the new Frontiers-esque targeted mission concepts had independent costs that exceeding 2 billion and most of them were close to 3. And that reflects the fact that the community in light of dry supply selection got ambitious. And we're like, you know what? There's some really good science here. But unfortunately,

we've done a lot of the so-called low hanging fruit. And proposing to do another orbiter to Venus might not be all that appealing in light of Veritas da Vinci and in vision. Or another US, orbiter to Mercury having done Messenger. And so we might be at a point relatively soon where the really compelling science questions will actually not, I'm sure there'll be exceptions, but the really transformative stuff won't be doable as a low-cost mission. And that's the function of the size of the solar system and environmental conditions of some of these worlds. And if we are serious about doing it, then we're going to need more money. The Mars program is like really wincing when you say that because their whole like their whole

saving grace for the rest of Mars, not sample return is like, you know, what can we what can we like slip out the back door of JPL as like little like what can I do for cheap. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So to be fair, to be fair, to the Mars community, there is probably a lot you can do still because we have such because we have spent rightly or wrongly so much money at Mars for the last 25 years. We have science questions that can be addressed with relatively low-cost missions. That's fair. There are most of the places where that is not the case, probably a lot of minor bodies.

If we wanted to go and send dedicated as relatively, maybe not cube stats, but small stats, or relatively, you know, mariner scale built to print as opposed to get planetary. So here's the thing, actually. One of the questions that the Decadell was required to address was right now for discovery, the notional cost cap for the PI is around a half a billion, and for Simplex, it's around 50 million. And the recommendation in the New Decatur is that sit, right, is that Simplex should go to 80 million, but there's nothing in there around the $25,300 million mark. And I think it is a natural law of the universe that if NASA says, we are setting the cost cap at $500 million, but we encourage

you to be cheap. Not a single human being in history is going to say, oh, okay, I won't take the whole 500 million. Well, you won't get selected that way. Exactly. And so the thing about it, is that there may be a lot of scope for another class of mission that things like minor bodies, the moon and Mars. But if you want to go Mercury, forget it because of the cruise time. If you want to do the Venus surface or clouds, forget it because the environment. And if you want to the outer planets, forget it. And so what it means is we really are going to a point where I think we as a nation are going to have to have a conversation as to how much we value continue to transformative breakthrough planetary science with robotic spacecraft. And if we value it enough, we're going to

have to meaningfully increase how much these missions cost. Whilst being all careful about cost growth, and I think we need to make sure that we're responsible. But if there's no way of getting to a planet in less than 15 years, it's just going to be an expensive mission. There's no way around that. That's an inherent. I always kind of fascinated by this inherent consequences

of what it means to explore planetary bodies versus, say, astronomy. You know, astronomy, you just need to get above the, at least for space, you know, space-borne astronomy. above the atmosphere, park out, whether it's Earth orbit or a Lagrange point, and you're collecting photons at the end of the day, whether it's infrared or ultraviolet or X-ray. Planetary, everything you design has to be specific to the body you're going to, or to the environment you're going to, because there's such an array.

And what we mean by planetary science, it's just such a broad, encompassing field of study that it could be any number of different challenges. This is why it's always been functionally impossible to build even a common bus for planetary exploration if you want to do really kind of in this high quality science because everything is so different and the more we've done things to your point polish i think is really important if we want to discover stuff by definition the hard stuff will be hard to achieve and it takes more effort to do it and it's a it's a function of the success of the planetary program that we're starting to run into this point where the hard questions are going to be hard and

expensive to answer that's actually a function of you know that's a that's a that's a That's a compliment to the scientific and engineering community to this point. And I think, you know, we were talking about this. I think there was a reason why back in the day when discovery was actually cheap and frequent, that all the missions were to asteroids, basically, or small bodies or maybe the moon. And it was when we started going, you know, insight maybe is one that really broke the cost cap on discovery when you started landing on Mars. And now you're doing these bigger, basically New Frontiers class missions in the discovery budget, because you've kind of by Fiat written off half the expenses of a planetary mission as not counting

in the cost cap, your cruise phase, your launch, all of Europe, whatever, where you're just running into this. And we can do that all you want, regulatory or from a management perspective, at the end of the day, you have the money to spend. And we shouldn't negate the fact that planetary budget has grown by an extraordinary amount. And right now, is if you adjust for inflation equivalent with the highest it's ever been, which is roughly the early 1970s under Viking for one or two years, just and two thirds of that was for Viking. Because Viking was, you know, it was not a well-balanced program then. It was.

The Cadillac planetary mission is Viking, right? They just made, they're like, oh, we wouldn't need to do this lander. We don't know if it's going to be properly planetary protected. Well, we'll just build three landers just in case one of them doesn't work. there. They just did a, you know, the brute force, you know, what was it in contact? Why build one when you can build two at twice? Two at twice the price. Yeah. Yeah. First rule of government spend. That's the biking method. Yeah, for sure, exactly. Or like during the peak of basically the Apollo for lunar exploration. So again, we've made incredible strides. And so I, we shouldn't,

I'm worried that maybe we're dwelling a bit too much on the negative stuff here. Like, In a sense, all these problems, as frustrating as they are, are really good problems to have, is that NASA has committed, I think, functionally to too much. I can see the solution being basically moratorium or slowing down selections of new frontiers and discovery, as unpleasant as that would be, maybe the only real path forward.

But we should also just maybe just toss out there, Jake. I just said I didn't want to be negative, but we should just maybe acknowledge that the House budget that passed the other week calls for a minimum a 22% cut all of NASA funding as part of non-defense discretionary spending out there in the budget scene right now isn't it yeah so this all is almost like uh you know we're kind of arguing we're fiddling while uh romeburn's kind of discussion here where it's you know it's like oh well we need 150 versus 300 million is like well you actually get negative 800 million next year isn't just like right about

the point in the Obama administration where this started to happen to like isn't this like just history repeating itself here there's a similar political dynamic at work And it's not a great match for doing long-term development of hyper-complex planetary projects. So maybe I'll ask that question next then. So, I mean, there's obviously some short-term levers that we can pull. Like you said, we can delay some missions. We can slow our role a little bit on some of these programs, et cetera, et cetera. But long-term, is there anything we can do to get ahead of, you know,

so if this is happening just like it did with Obama, whoever the next, next, next president is and then they're in their first term and then the you know some some democrat wins and then the republican house comes in after their their tea party style cuts all i mean this whole cycle repeats itself again is there anything we can do to get ahead of that one like is there technologies we're not exploring is there budgetary measures we're not exploring is there just operational stuff we're ignoring like what what's the if we could rebuild the planetary program from scratch is there anything like different that we would do to structure it in a way that would be, you know, more sound and resilient to something like this? Just toss that one out. A big, huge, giant question.

I can think of two things that NASA could do directly or indirectly. And a third thing, which is that over, say, the 20-year time frame, I have no idea how politics are going to go in this country. And whether or not this will be a cycle or will have been an aberration over two or three elections, I thought, or four or five. One thing NASA can do is continue, and I have to credit Administrator Senator Sennon and Alton for this because I think he's done a good job so far, and better than I think a lot of us expected for encouraging and ensuring bipartisan support for particularly Artemis. And I think everyone knows that, and we've seen this in a Mac, in a, I guess, there's a sort of a mini cosmic sense for Mars, that the more emissions you have

to a place, the more interest and sustained momentum there is to get more missions to the place. And that's something that I'm on record is saying, I'm hoping to work for Venus, because I think it is a expiration target. So I think Artemis I, going so well, has probably helped the case for getting sustained funding, even through the Daldrums. Because I think Artemis is probably more than Mars on for a return, the thing that is so vulnerable by its very nature. The other thing that might materially change things, which NASA can play a role in, is if we really do, we being humans, really do get a good handle on super heavy lift that's reusable, be it starship or New Glenn or someone else, if it starts to potentially lead to a paradigm

where mass is no longer the driving factor in spacecraft design, that makes things a bit easier. And you can imagine that that would help cut down cruise times, which is one of the limiting factors for all of these missions. And what I would really like to see is NASA go with something that's between Simplex and Discovery, because what I think is damaging, and I've seen this firsthand, is that if we have relatively few mission opportunities, but they're big marquee and you know, even discoveries, let's say, 700 and New Frontier's 1.4, if that means that those elections are once or twice a decade, that's a real the problem for early career scientists and engineers to work on mission formulation and mission proposals. It's also, it leads to material problems at the NASA centers too, because the people who

do implementation might be okay, but the people who do formulation and who do mission formulation stage will find themselves pulled onto flight projects. And so there is a loss of expertise for people who spend half the time breaking serving wacky ideas because every two or three years are getting to propose those wacky ideas. And importantly, they're getting the proposals on the review team. So I would like to see NASA increase the cadence at which they are launching stuff, even if they're small, even if they're to the moon or to Mars for low cost stuff or to minor bodies, even if we're even the really high-end science to new frontiers for the community to get practice

on missions and for the centers to continue keeping and flexing those muscles. I would like to see that happen. I don't know if it's going to happen, but I'd like the chance for it to happen. get that super heavy lift going and then yeah it's like you say i think about that too it's like it's okay so the launch is not that much like you know if you look at perseverance's budget the launch is like it's like you can see on the on the budget but it's not like a huge dent and in what the looks like 10% yeah yeah but you're right though if we could not have to build perseverance then we could just bolt a drill and a spectrometer to the side of an f-150 and send it to mars that

you know that might make a difference in how much these things cost right um because you're not worried about and also if you can if you know I mean like a big limiting factor in these things is delta V right it's how much fuel these things can take and if you can build a larger if you can have more upmass in that launch vehicle for relatively not that much money you can have higher delta V you can potentially get somewhere faster which means you don't have as long a cruise stage stage and then the actual operation stage or it means you could potentially do a more adventurous mission I mean there are concepts in the New Decaturable about doing tours of centaurs or even landing on a centaur, series out of return.

That all takes Delta V. It takes chemical, usually energy, to go there and come back. And if we can lift a bigger tank into space for not much more money per launch, that is a massive enabler because it will reduce the time it takes to see returns on these missions. I'm really fascinated by this potential because I'm actually not completely sold on it as a way to successfully save money. And the reason I think about that is what you're paying for feels like in most of spacecraft that the high level, you know, category one, whatever it is, must succeed NASA spacecraft is assurance that it's going to work, right? that it's engineering, resilience, risk assessment, reliability. So even if it was an F-150, we'd have to make sure it was a good F-150. Right.

It would probably look like perseverance. Yeah, well, and the way that we do science, too, and this is something I'm really fascinated about that we're kind of running this inadvertent experiment with clips, with commercial inter payload, which is the way that we've done science since World War II in this country and functionally every other similar type of country, is that the scientific community sets the goals and priorities. They set the conditions of the experiment, and then they secure the money from public sources

to answer those questions. Whether it's through the Decatal Survey process where you propose your mission, you have all of your science traceability matrix, the scientific community sets the fundamental contours of the goals and discussion. And then we work backwards, engineers say, how do we then solve this for the scientific questions that have been established? And that's great for scientists because you get to set the, you know, we're finding those highest priority questions.

We're pursuing the science, but nowhere in that does cost factor into it beyond the fact of feasibility. Clips reverses this a little bit, which says it's more of what science in a sense used to be, which is like, we're just going to send a naturalist to ride along on some, you know, sailing ship as it goes and does its, you know, port to port. And they'll just like, well, we'll just collect, hey, that's a weird frog. You know, let's write this and I'll publish a paper and give it at like the historic, you know, the naturalist society next time I'm back home. And that's more of an opportunistic science. And it's a science of, it's a much more passive form of doing science. And it's a lot cheaper to do that because you're letting someone else set the conditions of your experiment for you. And you're just there for the ride. But if you want hyper-specialized answers, if you want very good answers to hyper-specialized

questions. You can't just bolt something, even if it's sitting on a larger F-150, you need to have a very well-designed experiment. You have to have it work in vacuum. You have to have it work in high radiation environment. You have to still adhere to, you know, data restrictions limits for sending stuff back to Earth, power restrictions. You have to have it, you know, actually calibrated and understand exactly how it works and what it's going to tell you. All of these kind of fine aspects of doing science that you can't shortcut if you want to continue doing science in the same way. And so this is, I'm very curious to see what will happen, particularly with Starship. And we're seeing it maybe to a little extent with Falcon Heavy, but I think Starship isn't

just about lift capacity, but it's about volume and what it's going to be able to lift. And if you don't have to miniaturize everything, I think that can really help. If you don't have to keep everything tightly packed together on a 100 watt power source, that can help. But you introduce a whole host of new problems when you build big things. One anecdote here, and then I'll stop because this is kind of like my pet theory here. But back in the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet space program had a number of planetary mission failures, particularly to Mars, but other places as well, because they had these giant ass rockets that they didn't have to have the same, you know, the whole missile gap, they had

these very large rockets, they have a lot of throw capability. they had no reason to figure out how to do electronics that could work in a vacuum. All those early Soviet spacecraft had pressurized electronics compartments. They would, so they didn't have to worry about the weight and miniaturization, the way that the U.S. did. But as a consequence, they had this point of failure where they didn't have a perfect seal on their pressurized compartment in which a lot of them didn't. They would just slowly leak out and then the spacecraft would die on the way to its destination.

And you didn't have that drawing. for innovation because of the constraint of that small launch. Now that's not an argument for not having super heavy launch, but it's an interesting point where you know when you have just big things and you're just bolting stuff together, you still have other problems you have to account for. And that level of engineering, systems engineering, systems assurance, and ultimately, I think that maybe the big saving, Paul, would be not even just the fact that your operations cost, just having not to rate the spacecraft to survive for 15 years. If you can just rate it to survive

for five years, you save a lot of money. So again, I'm a bit skeptical on the overall consequence of it because space is just so damn unforgiving at what level can we just fail and keep repeating? And I think Simplex maybe be at that level, but not much higher. Yeah. And I think we're seeing that, like so one of the reasons or the rationale behind clips, right, the commercial payload service program is to to increase NASA's appetite for risk, which historically it is a highly risk-averse organization. I think it's inevitable that one of the first few clips landers is going to pancake, and that's okay because space is hard, right? But I think one of the things that I credit SpaceX is having, I think, largely, at least for those who sort of follow this stuff, socialize the idea

that something exploding isn't necessarily the end of the line. And it doesn't mean, I mean, I think SLS blowing up on the pad would send a much, much more. worrying message than say Eclipse sand or failing to touch down. But to your point of Casey, about the super heavy, yeah, I don't think it's going to reduce the cost as much, but what it might do indirectly is reduce the flight time. And that, like you say, will come with reduced requirements. If we didn't have to do, say, I know for example that a big thing that can drive some out of planet's missions is they may originally be planning to let's do a Jupiter flyby out to Saturn or beyond. And then let's say

something happens and they decide, well, we actually were going to do a flyby Venus, it's cheaper. But now because we're going into the sun, we have to sort of make it more resilient to the thermal environment. Being able to do, perhaps not a direct trajectory to somewhere, but at least make it faster, will probably have downstream effects. I don't think it's necessarily going to mean that like a flagship becomes less ultra expensive. But if it does mean that we can answer the science questions that we have of places like Neptune and Uranus that are just by definition really far uphill and really hard to get to, a little faster, that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a panacea, but it's an enabler, I think, of...

Yeah, I'd rather have heavy lift. I'd rather have heavy lift than none, right? Well, I think the risk thing is we're talking about, too, because the risk, to me, is just another fascinating consequence of institutional structure that is really hard to break out of, which is that SpaceX has really normalized failure, right? I think, to a really healthy degree. But SpaceX doesn't carry the national symbolism that NASA carries for the United States. And NASA, through its history, through how we conceive of it in our culture, and its actual self-assumed role, is that it's this kind of bellwether for U.S. capability. So when NASA goes wrong, when something happens wrong with the NASA project, it's not just a failure, it's a national discussion as a consequence. Congressional hearings are convened.

You say, are, is this country the capable of doing great things anymore, you know, so forth and so on? And obviously, NASA has internalized that consequence to say we can never, right? Like failure is not an option. And you pay for that in advance like we have with the SLS, which is designed, you know, and tested, simulated a billion times in advance to not fail because NASA just can't be seen with that. Where SpaceX, in a sense, has luxury. Or in NASA through SpaceX is kind of laundering its money into a company that can fail and take those risks.

Well, laundering its reputation. That's maybe not the strong. the right word. I love it. I've already in enough trouble with my car ship. But you know what I'm saying, right? You're, it's taking, it's one step removed. Yeah. From the failure itself. And that allows this kind of, yeah. And so in a sense, what you're trading, and I've written about this before, which is what you do with NASA with fixed price contracts in general, you're trading cost risk for a different type of risk, which is you're having the company itself assume all sorts of, not just, the engineering risk, but a business health risk and all these long-term kind of risks that generally NASA is not used to considering because it cannot fail itself, you know, not just as an entity and a philosophy, but it will not go out of business because it's a government agency.

And so we're running a lot of experiments with this. And I think, Paul, to your point about clips, I'm, it's like after watching numerous entities try to land on the moon here in the last couple of years and being reminded how hard that actually is, I will be really fascinated. I have no idea what the public reaction to failure in clips is going to be like. I'm so afraid of that, honestly. Yeah. I mean, they're not cheap.

There's still hundreds of millions of dollars, right? I think it's going to be, everyone's going to talk a big, you know, like, oh, yeah, we're lit the holy shots on goal, shots on goal. This is all about. And then, and then, you know, the first you were going to crash and then to go, oh, that's not what I meant. That's not what I meant. In 1999, when we had better, faster, cheaper, which the whole conceit.

was that it's cheap enough that we can take more risk. Well, it wasn't cheap enough. Right? We had the whole, the whole Mars program we have today is a consequence of Mars polar lander and Mars climate orbiter double failure in the summer of 99.

And those were cheap missions. Those were like $250 million each, which is a steel. And that's roughly what clips are running at, right? And so will we tolerate that? I don't know. It says, I think I've been, one more thing, and then I'll stop.

I think we're reminding, it every now and then what happens when some event in space world kind of rises to some broad cultural awareness. We tend to be a bit surprised about people's reaction to it because it's just usually below the online eye of Soron in terms of what the social collective consciousness is focusing on. But we saw this with Jeff Bezos going into space and we saw this a bit with the Starship first test launch that a lot of weird stuff gets stirred up when something crosses the threshold into public awareness, which I don't know what that means

two clips failures would hit that, but we run a risk. I think it's just unknown. So again, I'll be very curious to see what happens. Yeah. Yeah, you and me both. And I think it's going to depend a lot on NASA

will, to their credit, have become really savvy in the last five or six years with how they managed stuff generally in PR department. But I think it'll be very important for them to get out in front and say, hey, this was a problem,

if something happens. But we're going to work on this. because we recognize that it's hard and ultimately, and really, I think ultimately the test of this, the proof will be in five or six years, if we have successful landings and we work at how much it cost versus how much we lost by the unsuccessful ones,

was this cheaper and better and faster than doing this the old-fashioned way? I hope the answer will be yes, because the old-fashioned way is, like we discussed earlier, it's, I think, more susceptible to the whims and vagaries of Congress and different administrations. And I would love to see a sustained human return to the moon. happen because it didn't after Apollo.

But yeah, let's stay tuned and see what happens. All right. Well, I don't know if we solved any of the problems today, but we sure did manage to talk about this. That's a good win for the show, at least. NASA maybe didn't get any good tips. We'll see. Maybe.

We'll see. Do we have to go now? Do we have like another hour or two to kind of finish discussing this? Yeah, yeah. We're going to turn the recording off. But yes, then we're going to. That's good. That's good.

I thought I will get the whiskey then. As we're closing it out here, tell us what the two of you are working on me. Paul, start with you. Any good papers coming out? How's your professional life treating you these days? What's going on in your world? Things are good.

So you may know that I've been involved in a balloon concept for a Venus mission, which is a different conversation we've had about that we're not proposing to this current round of New Frontiers. We have a lot of technology developed ahead of us. So in the next couple of years, we are going to be developing more flight test articles. We're going to be flying these balloon prototypes in different parts of the world. And so when we do them, I will be putting those on my social media at the planetary guy on Twitter, where I will generally be just talking and feeding this every chance I get. So that's

definitely one of the things I'm focusing on in Mission World for the next couple of years. Cool. That's awesome. Casey, what's up with the Planetary Society? What's your, what's your your job pedal changes all the time and I can never keep track of it. But your Supreme Not quite as bad as it's... ...of executive vice presidency of space advocacy and... Yeah. Galactic emperor just recently promoted. Chief of Space Policy is my current and hopefully permanent title designator, right, at the moment.

We are working... We're planning our in-person day of action coming back after COVID. If you have listened to what Paul and I have been talking about and want to help us do something about it, we are going to... to be holding that in Washington, D.C., September 17th and 18th this year. We will help set up meetings for you with your members of Congress. We will train you. You'll give you talking points. We will give you homework. You will come in as the best advocate you can be. And you can meet a bunch of other planetary society members who love space as much as you do and walk the halls of

Congress and just say what you love and make your inputs part of this discussion that's going forward. We have a lot of uphill stuff to do, but when you don't participate, someone else does, and you may not like what they have to say about stuff, particularly things like space. And so that's at planetary.org slash day of action if you want to register. We have a discounted registration through the end of this month. But otherwise, that's our big project plan that we're working on here. And we've got other things cooking to you that we'll be announcing here in the next few months. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, no, we've got a few listeners that participate in that. I would say this every time you bring it up, but a few listeners that participate,

and they've always enjoyed it and had a lot of fun and felt very, you know, they feel like they actually did something civically good in their life. Yeah, and they did. Most people, I think the vast majority of people have a really, really fun time. It's not just, it can be a little intimidating if you've never done it before, which I totally get. But we make sure you walk in with support, with confidence. And well, we lost you a little bit there, but I think you said you're walking with confidence. Has it.

And uplifting thing. It's like your energy. It's really positive. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So next week, Anthony's back. And I think we're just going to do a show him and I next. So to catch up on the news.

But my goal for it is to have a show where we catch up on the news where the news isn't just which companies went bankrupt and had bad earnings reports. So that's going to be kind of my objective. for it. So we'll see how that goes. But I want to thank both of you for, for humoring me for an hour on this subject. I love, you know, shooting the shit on this stuff. So it's been, it's really fun to have you both here. And I hope to do it again sometime. Yeah, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Even though I was on, you know, it was team. It helped. Yeah. Always the pleasure. Well, thanks, everybody. Have a great day and we will see you next week. Bye.

Thank you.