Off-Nominal - 142 - Multivariate Disaster

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, to talk about the latest on Mars Sample Return, JPL layoffs, and everything space policy.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 142 (with Casey Dreier) - YouTubeHow layoffs at JPL can be traced to a stalemate in Congress | The Planetary SocietyThe path forward for Mars Sample Return | The Planetary SocietyThe U.S. Senate threatens to cancel Mars Sample Return | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary Exploration Budget Dataset | The Planetary SocietyThe 2024 Day of Action | The Planetary SocietyFollow CaseyCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyFollow 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 AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, Jake, freezing your camera with your thumbs up right before we're live. I'd like to do a little bit of Apple stuff. No, you're still within the timeout. It only lets it to do it every once in a while. See what I can do. There we go. I got some balloons.

You gotta turn this off. This has been a running bit on the show for like a month now. Then it freezes your camera. Casey Dreyer is here with us, and this is how you're starting the show. What the hell? I have standards after all. You're back to Casey. You're back.

I feel like the last time we talked to you was before the event horizon of life. Literally, right, before my daughter was born? Quite actually, yes. Yes, yes, yeah. How are things? You doing all right? Doing great, really wonderful. She's about six months old now. It's been interesting.

I was just at a workshop for The Search for Life, and I feel like I'm watching Life develop, you know, kind of like present itself to me and intelligent, right? The search for intelligent life is like actively developing in front of me. It's a wonderful experience. She's a great baby. Before, before you were a parent, you were like, the search for life involves looking for biosignatures and all this sign. And now you're just like, you just look for the mess and the tired people. That's where life is. Yeah, life is pretty presented. It is nothing subtle about this experience. Plenty of biosignatures, though, if you'd like them.

I throw them out multiple times a day. I just welcomed a new puppy into the house, and so I'm also feeling the biosignatures thing, yeah. I had a little discovery under my desk this morning that I didn't know. It's like, oh, cool, a sample. A wow signal. Yeah, wow signal, yeah. Wow signal, yeah.

An earth sample, that's for sure. All right. Yeah, so, you know, that's what we're here for. I assume I'm here to show baby pictures for the next hour because new dads will do that. He was in the pre-show. So, yeah, we're in the right direction here. Yeah. Yeah.

No, no, we're going to talk about, um, I mean, other topics. We are going to talk about biosignatures. There's more sample return. That's biosignature-ish related, right? Adjacent at least, if not more. A major role. That's a major role. Talk about messes.

I was thinking rarely. thinking, rarely is the topic of this or the name of this show so apt for the topic today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. We're just staying on brand. Just looking for all the off-nominal storylines. So, of course, yeah, Casey, we're excited to talk to you about that. Drinks.

What have we got going on today? Who wants to start today? Oh, boy. Well, I forgot. So I just have water in a no walla thing. Yeah, tell us the story of the water bottle. Casey. Give us some context. He's barely remembering it to drink water.

This is why people tune in, I assume. I can't say that I didn't have a, right after the baby was born after the, you know, in the first couple of months, I would have half a, half a beer and I would fall asleep. So it's definitely a slightly different relationship. I'm up to one now, but that's about where I stop.

My 23-year-old self would be quite surprised, but my 40-year-old self says that 23-year-old doesn't know anything. So I'm not too worried about it. He was out to lunch. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. I'm well hydrated at least.

I'm rocking some wine today, Anthony. Yeah. That's different. Some friends brought this by. So this is a Chilean Cavanéardine Sauvignon, Concha and Toro. So. It looks nice. I don't drink a ton of wine, but I do like it.

It's nice to have everyone's a little bit. When you do, you drink Reservado. That's a big glass. too that was real full this is how you can tell I don't drink much I don't really know where you're supposed to stop I'm like it's the glass is this big why wouldn't I go to the top that's put well Jake oh yeah yeah I have I have some props today I think it was the fourth episode of this podcast that was it the fourth sixth when we got Ninkazi brewing sent us beer yes yes yes I think it was literally like the

first half a year of this podcast. We thought we were so on to something. We thought we're going to get so many beer sponsorships with this show. It's amazing. Right? And that was the hops that had flown on a suborbital rocket or something. Yeah. I forget what the bit was. After complaining about this,

Jake, we have a new beer sponsorship. Okay? Okay. Good. And this was, this took a while to get to me because it was sent to my PO box, which is in Pennsylvania. And I'm pretty sure the reason that it took a while to get to me is because you're not allowed to send alcohol to people in Pennsylvania.

And so I think the first box that was attempted to be sent eventually got destroyed. And the second box, the second box got through. Okay. So we got a bunch of beer from Star Base Brewing, which is in Austin. And it seems to have a mysterious backstory, because I've invited these fellows on the show. And they were like, can't yet, but maybe soon. So I'm very intrigued to have them on the show. because it used to be called Boca Chica Brewing

and now it is called Star Base Brewing. So I'm trying not to do too much math about what the backstory is here, but here's where we're at. And so I've got I've got like eight t-shirts, maybe six, I don't know. I got this sweet hoodie.

So the trick is I just have to complain on my podcast that no one's sending me beer. Loudly. And people will send me beer because I... And apparel. Yes. And apparel. Well, let it be known.

It's like a presidential campaign. I got everything. Let it be known on the space policy edition. I will also accept shipments of space-related beer and spirits. And I don't live in Pennsylvania.

It's much easier to get it to them. I'll just put that out there at the Space Policy Edition podcast. We're available on any good podcast network. I will also happily drink submissions. I didn't know you could do that. I'm out of touch.

Listen, I've got, I've got t-shirts for all the beers. I've got, like, I've got so many t-shirts, Jake, okay? And so I've got a bunch of beers to drink over the next month or so. But today I'm drinking, per the topic, the Terraformer. There you go. And it's got a nice little marscine. There's some rovers up in there. Is it a red ale?

It is a Martian-style red ale, is what it's called. There you go. So, I got those. Are the rovers? Why don't I dole these beers out over the next month? because I've got four different beers. So we'll just, we'll choose one per show. But today, it's the terrible one.

That sounds like that was their plan. Yeah. So then the other part, we'll just do this live on the air, Jake, is that to whatever extent we want to entertain it, they've said we would like to be the official beer sponsor of Off Nominal. I said, we don't know what that means, but we're probably in. So we'll sort that one out. We don't know what that means, but yes. Okay. So that's what we got.

Star Base Brewing. All right. Cool. Yeah. Love it. You have the show while I put all these t-shirts away. Okay, sounds good. Okay, so I'm trying to think of where I want to start with this.

So maybe, Casey, do you want to, like, should we do like a, what is like the two-minute rundown of what is happening with Mars Nap return? Because that feels like the right, that feels like the base layer of context that we need to have to talk about anything else in the show today. So should we do that? What do you think? Yeah, you've got some articles that have come out recently. it feels like a smart thing to cover.

I can do my, yeah, in two minutes. I mean, we could try to do it real short, which was, you know, Mars sample return. I mean, everyone knows what Mars sample return is, right? It's in the name. Do we need to touch on that? I don't think. This is a learning audience here.

I mean, you're right. It's three words that explains the whole thing. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of in the name. I mean, the really quick summary is like, Mars sample return had everything going for it, and then it didn't. And now they're trying to figure out what to do. I mean, that's basically the story here, right?

Like they were cruising along, getting all the funding they needed, you know, had all the partners they had signed up for it. And then suddenly it looked like they had an independent review, analyze the project, and saw you actually have no chance of making your plan dates. Your costs are going to be $10 billion or more. You don't have a viable pathway technically at the moment, and your management is just a disaster. And that was done then in the context of a shrinking NASA budget for the first time in 10 years. And suddenly Mars Ample Return has a very uncertain future and is actually suffering a lot right now.

I mean, this is why we're seeing people laid off at JPL. It's all related to this. So it ran into a political landmine based on a... series of internal mismanagement and technical challenges that hit the project very suddenly, at least visibly very suddenly. I was trying to figure out because it feels like, I mean, there's definitely some like, we drop the ball happening here, like a lot of it, frankly. But I feel like it's also coupled with a really bad stroke of luck.

And that like this happens right now in this year's budget scenario, which is like kind of a nightmare. I guess like there's it's not like great to be trying to figure out what's going on with the government funding right now. And I'm trying to figure out where is it like 50 50, 70, 30. What's going on with that? Because that feels like an interesting kind of context to try and unpack, but I don't know where to go with it. The odds are that we'll have funding or the odds for MSR continuing. I think those are two different questions. I mean, yes, you're right. I mean, fundamentally though, your your context is correct. It's hit a series of really bad luck situations. politically speaking. That also there are other major projects explicitly called out as being threatened by MSR in NASA's own budget, which was not a smart or savvy, well, it depends on who was doing it,

but not a smart or savvy political thing to do. In districts led by, there's also a full changeover of congressional leadership in the appropriations committees, these committees that fund NASA. And for the first time in a long time, there's no leadership position of those committees that has a NASA center in their state or district. So that's a huge shift as well. NASA lost a significant number of long-time

stalwart political supporters. You have a shrinking budget. You have other priorities. You have no commitment from now. I mean, the other big thing is here that MSR hit a major roadblock or road bump in its design. NASA said, Okay, we'll take this independent. We had an independent review last year, right, that said all these problems, gave a ton of recommendations. NASA in response rapidly assembled a committee to look at the independent review, right? So that committee has not released anything.

And it's been almost six months, and it looks like that committee is pushing further out, like it's not answering. So there's actually nothing to coalesce around. We don't know what NASA wants to do. And it's a bit of a cat. catch 22 because from what I understand some of the people inside NASA say, well, we can't decide what to do until we know what our budget is. But then I can't argue, NASA can't say we

need this budget because NASA hasn't said what it wants to do. And so Congress is reticent to fund an amorphous thing, right? Have you fixed it? I don't know. It's just a number of bad things happening all at the same time. Added to, I think, probably kind of a COVID hang still that we're seeing in the aerospace industry in terms of lingering inflation. I mean, if you think of it this, like inflation happened. It happened in the aerospace

supply chain. In, you know, salaries, costs go up for people to accommodate the cost of everything else in life. So you can kind of think like everything got about 8% to 9% more expensive just to build a spacecraft, but NASA's

budget didn't grow to accommodate it either. So every project is suddenly facing a pinch by inflation hitting it. So every other project is also running into problems at the same time. And so this is a multi-variate disaster. I think it's even worth. It's like 20%. I thought it was like 20%.

Well, it depends. So NASA's own... Based on you're saying like because it was $22 or whatever that... I don't know. You know, you know, it does math in different dollars. So it's 8% based on whatever the hell of baseline you've got in your Excel sheet. It depends what you're measuring it from. Yeah, it's NASA's own

inflation index says it's like it's like 4 and 5%. So it's around 9%. And then it's kind of like, is that relative or absolute, you know, kind of depends when you measure it from. I'd say maybe in these years to say 10%, give or take.

But that's a lot. So every project is just running into a lot of problems. And all this is a big mess. As a budget, that's $2.5 billion, right? That's what that 10% is, right? So there's not an instant to be in a amount of money. That's right.

Yeah. And you didn't even mention, Casey, that it's an election year. And so... Oh, that. Yeah. Oh, that. Is anybody willing to solve anything right now? Also, with a really clear election result, no mystery as to what's going to happen this year, right?

Like, no, everyone knows how this election is going to go. This is pretty straight forward. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, it's the presidential election. a third of the Senate is up for re-election and all of the House of Representatives is up for re-election, right? Yes, to your point.

As we go closer to that election, less and less legislating will happen. And we're seeing that, right? So we're in, you know, we're five months into the current fiscal year. We don't have a final budget for this fiscal year yet. We have these two potential budgets for NASA floating out there. This is one of the reasons why JPL had to, to lay off so many people. It's not actually because they ran out of money because we're on a

continuing from last year. MSR actually has $800 million tech on paper to work with this year. But the problem is at any point, they could go with the Senate's budget and have $300 million. So NASA turns like the NASA accounting, and not just NASA, the White House accounting office, turns down the knob, turns down the flow of funding to every project to match the lowest of all possible outcomes being presented by the political system. And that's why. So they're spending as if the Senate budget is in force, even though it's not, because it might be. Right? So I wanted to do a full year-specific resolution.

Yeah, like, so that's a thing. Is that a policy set by this current administration, or is that a typical way that this happens in this process? That's just how the money works, right? You know, it's not either. It is, I mean, so it's not the law. It is typical. This is an accounting decision.

and it's basically a risk posture. So the issue is because the budgeteers in the Office of Management and Budget, don't know what the final outcome is going to be. They're conservative. They'll say, would you rather, at the end of the, if you get a budget with four months left to go of the year, would you rather have a much more money than you thought you might, or would you rather have suddenly have to find hundreds of millions of dollars you already spent?

And the answer is always going to be you need to play. the conservative portion because they can't then have to how do you claw back money you've spent how do you claw back money from contracts you can't you have to like pause projects or like lay people off immediately or whatever right yeah so like i guess when i say it's like the law what i mean is more like when you get that much money that's how much money you have to have already spent and so like you you need to plan for that and try and anticipate and be build as much flexibility into your your operation as you can so that whatever becomes the real appropriation, you can hit without too much disruption, right?

Yeah. That's why it's bad to operate this way, right? This is why it's nice to have a budget on time, but also not to have too lingering completely. I mean, most of the time, the House and the Senate aren't completely at odds. Maybe there's some, you know, variation, but we have really a bifurcation where the Senate says $300 million or you're canceled. The House says $950 million. That's a difference of $650 million dollars.

It's wild. It's a whole mobile launcher worth of money. Not even, right? If only. That'd be a slightly and cheap ML. Yeah, mobile launcher. In Apollo dollars. In Apollo dollars.

Yeah, so it's a, I mean, this is what happens. Uncertainty has consequences, right? And this is the most visible, and as you point out, this is hitting at a particularly delicate time. JPL had been staffing up to manage a massive, massive project. And other places, too. We don't have as visible. There aren't as many press announcements.

It's slightly different because it's a NASA Center versus JPL, which is a federally funded research and development center, of course, as everyone knows. But Goddard had... Obviously. Goddard was building out the containment capture and return device, the CCRS, that was going to fly inside the European Mars Orbiter, hold the samples launched into orbit by the Mars Ascent vehicle and then keep it ultra-protected inside its planetary protection box.

That was a huge project. That was anywhere between half a billion and a billion-dollar project. And NASA, as for all intents and purposes, shuddered that project right now. And so Goddard is also suffering from a sudden loss of income, in a sense, or revenue. And they don't have the ability to lay off people the way that JPL does. because civil servants, you have to go through what's called a reduction in force process. It's a whole bureaucratic mess. JPL employees are actually Caltech employees.

They're more like a standard organization rather than a civil service appointment. But a lot of contractors are losing their job at Goddard. And Goddard's having a hard time too. And we believe this is happening at contractors around the country that were depending on this MSR contracts. They had billions of dollars for the contracts that are basically being tuned down to $0 right now. So these are wide-ranging implications of which the JPL layoffs are probably the most visible. But this is just a huge mess right now. And again, ironically, as we spin MSR back up, you know, the Senate wanted to keep the money down.

They said, you need to save money by, you know, we're going to cut your funding if you can't do this on cheaper budget. By causing this huge, huge disruption, you're almost going to guarantee the project costs more, right? Because you're laying off so many people and then what, you have to hire them all? back, you're delayed, you've lost all this. Hiring is very expensive. So yeah, yeah. Literally the Mars rovers on the surface of Mars, the day that JPL was going through its layoffs, sat idle. They did not run that day because everyone at JPL was not working because no one knew who was getting laid off or not. The whole lab stayed home. No one went

into work that day except for absolute minimum personnel. So I think there's a powerful symbol there of literal, just like, the exploration of Mars stopped dead in its tracks due to this insane uncertainty, which again, utterly self-imposed. Sorry, I've been on the soapbox a lot recently about this. That's why you're here. Let me know what questions you have. I did invite you. Like, that's true. You know I talk ad nauseum about these issues. So how, like, what's the, what's the line right now on, on getting a budget? Like, are we in anywhere close or is it still like like are we looking at a full year CR is that a possibility that we're going to just do that and not pass a budget? I think that is still the most likely

outcome. I mean just to zoom way out right? The Republicans run the House of Representatives, Democrats run the Senate with the Democrat in the White House. As we particularly again, as you point out during election year, the differences between the parties start to become more salient as an electoral issue, right? So you want to define yourself against the opposing party in order to say this is why you vote for me, even if kind of get nothing done as a consequence, if it becomes a visual statement. There has been some progress. So the current funding expires in two weeks. Well, it's a staggered funding in March 1st and March 8th, the two deadlines. I think NASA's the March 8th deadline. That's when the CRX. So they either need to pass.

another continuing resolution or they need to pass all 12 spending bills. Congress has gotten, you know, is like this week rolled up their sleeves and has gone on break for two weeks. And so no real work is really necessarily happening on that. There's staff work obviously happening on it, but they're back in their home districts. I am not super idealistic, but again, it's very hard to make money predictions because the inputs are so critical. right now. You have Mike Johnson in the House as the House Speaker who basically kind of came out of relative obscurity and does not have a long history. It certainly wasn't in leadership in the House at all. We, there have been some progress. The House and Senate have at a high level agreed on

overall spending levels now. They were both coming from very different places before, even with last year's debt deal. And what we understand is, that the committees, there's, again, everyone I'm sure is familiar with the 302B allocations to the subcommittees of appropriations. It's basically the, there are 12 subcommittees all cover different parts of the U.S. government in terms of how they have their jurisdiction of what they tell them to spend. Each subcommittee basically gets us, you know, let's say just for argument's sake around a trillion dollars, it's a, the committee divvies that up among the 12 subcommittee. So here is your slice of this pie. And that's what you have to fund all of your

agencies under your jurisdiction. And that's a through a 2B allocation. So if the House and Senate have a different size of that slice, they then write a different funding bill based on them. I think we have, our understanding is that has happened or is happening this week,

that an agreed upon level is being distributed to the subcommittees. At the subcommittee level. Okay. So that's a, you know, sorry. This is like the level of progress happening. What year dollars are we talking?

Casey. You always got to give me what year dollars. This is 2024, right? This is we have agreement of what the starting point is. I mean, and obviously each side is kind of presented out their priorities, but it's, you know,

that's how far apart we were that both House and Senate weren't even starting from the same position. Right, right, right. And so we think that is there now. Whether or not they can pass a budget, I mean, anyone else can look at particularly the House of Representatives now, which has a Republican majority now of two,

one of the tightest majorities in recent history, and see how difficult it is to pass stuff. There used to be, I believe it was called the, oh my God, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name. There's kind of an informal rule that you always pass something with the majority of the majority. So even if like a bill could pass with the majority of the house, you only pass things that have a majority of the controlling party to pass it. Otherwise, you're not pushing your agenda forward to pushing the other party. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's a function in the last 30, 40 years of an increasing polarized electorate.

But that's been, particularly in the last 25 years, basically, how the house has been run. There is no functional majority in the majority party of the House of Representatives right now. I think we've seen, right? There's some deep schisms in the House of Representatives that make it almost impossible for all of them to vote in block to run the House, which means any budget will require some democratic votes, which means Mike Johnson is imperilling his own leadership if he passes something through because he can be deposed any moment.

As I said, it is a mess. And NASR chose a terrible time to run into budget problems as a constant, you know, as part of this, though, I'm sure that was not their intention. I was, I was thinking about the, the full year continuing resolution, right? Which is basically just copy paste last year's budget and run it again this year because we can't, we can't come to an agreement. And I think maybe in like, I don't know, in like November, December, I was like, that would be great for MSR because then they get the same, you know, 800 million that they got last year or

whatever the number was, you know, the full funding amount, right? They can get back to work. But I think as we get later into the actual year, that becomes kind of less true because like if we pass the CR now, yes, you get your full funding, but it doesn't answer the question of does Congress want to continue this program? And so then that same threat just looms again in October. Right. So like if you're JPL, do you be like, oh, we got the CR, staff back up again?

Or are you going to be like, no, we're going to try and pull it tight. Like we're going to spend the money as best we can, but we're going to go tight here because I don't want to fire everybody again in October. over, right? Like, that would be a pretty tough spot to be in. So I don't know. It feels kind of like crap now. This is a bad, bad time in the year to even be thinking about that, right? That's a very, a very well, well, how much? Cudos for that insight. That's very well thought through it. That's true. And that's a subtle point, but very important. So as long as you in a sense have this political uncertainty, even if you do get the money, it does become hard to what do you do?

And this is, again, why this becomes a very inefficient way to build a spacecraft, and particularly a massive project like this, that you're at, uncertainty creates inefficiency. And that is what is in a sense happening here. And we went through a similar in some ways process with this with James Webb Space Telescope back in 2010, where the House released a budget with $0 for JWST and the Senate funded it. and it was during a very tumultuous political time as well, during the Tea Party era and sequestration. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that was a really rough time for JWST to go through. And obviously that came through and then had, you know, eight years later or 11 years later, I guess, at launch. But obviously it's thriving now. It was obviously worth the investment. But created a huge amount of uncertainty. But once it got through it, and that's what I think is really,

notable. Historically speaking, and this is what I find encouraging, historically speaking, and you can look at the ISS to some degree that survived a house vote by one, right, back in 93, and other major missions like Cassini and things that flirted with cancellation. Once they get, if you can get through the threat, the political challenge is basically done. You've made it through. rarely do you go back and then have to fight for your life again. In a sense, like everyone says, okay, you survived. It's not worth going after this because someone tried to cancel it.

It failed. Clearly there's a political coalition there. Put your efforts somewhere else. And so if MSR can make it through this and have a viable path forward, but programmatically and politically, I think there's a good chance then it does happen. That we don't have to face this again. But a lot of big projects sometimes just have to go through this choke point.

And maybe not the worst thing if you step back and say, keeps NASA hyper-focused expectations at all levels of management. Like, we can't screw this up because there isn't, you know, and also for other projects. You don't have a blank check here. And if you do mess this up real bad, you could lose this, precious opportunity. So this is the big uncertainty right now.

This process that they're going through where they're doing this internal review of the whole program and trying to figure out what the, I mean, I guess effectively what the architecture changes will be. Or maybe it's the same architecture, but we're just re-baselining the costs and all that kind of stuff. I'm trying not to be asking too cynical a question, but like, how does this work? And when they come out the other end with like, oh, now we've cracked it, it'll cost this much money and take this long. Like, why should politicians believe that any more than the last time, which was grossly off? Right? Like, what is the different? How do they, or even if they believe it more themselves, the ones generating the port,

how do they express that difference to politicians that have to buy that? Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I think in a way that has to be done, that's the challenge for NASA to address. I think at this point, it's helpful that you've had NASA initiated the independent review, the second independent review of MSR that led to this whole issue. And I mean, that in and of itself, I think, is a really important step that NASA recognized there was a problem. And they asked people outside of NASA to evaluate it. And the people outside of NASA were not kind. I mean,

they were like cruel, but they weren't, they weren't genera. You know, they didn't give them any breaks. They said this program was managed. Yeah. Yeah. There's no clear lines of authority. they did. You had an independent review is supposed to do. Yeah, it was very, and they gave them a pathway. And I think that's the key is if Congress and other outsiders, like, I'm like my organization, frankly, you know, who are interested in MSR as a concept, but don't have a strong, you know, I don't have strong opinions with Planetary, doesn't have strong opinions or any opinions about how technically it should be done, right? Yeah, I want them to do it and I want them to do it well. And I want them to do it in a way that doesn't bankrupt everything else.

NASA is trying to do. And I think NASA demonstrates that by saying, how did we address the particular points raised in this independent review? How have we addressed the management problems? How have we streamlined it? How have we demonstrate? How can we show that this is a priority at the highest? I mean, that was one of the things.

NASA leadership was called out as not prioritizing this. This is the biggest science project NASA has right now by a lot. and it has not been, doesn't seem to be, it's been difficult apparently from them to reach the highest levels of NASA for that support. So the more they can... That was the thing. The more they can address that. No one came to the MSR's birthday party, right?

Get more holidays, more holiday parties on that calendar. You got to do one. President's Day coming up, they got to have a big blowout this weekend down in the West End. Lightly used Mav. demonstration parts. So the more I think they can show point by point how they've addressed those concerns. And there becomes a bit of a splitting of hairs here.

When we talk about cost estimates, NASA technically does not make a cost estimate, a formal cost estimate, until the program goes through key decision point C, right, and goes through formulation into implementation. They basically, which kind of makes sense. These things from that, most stuff of what NASA does never have been built before. You don't have any idea how necessarily going to build it.

It's all made up until you get like enough sketched out on Bairn. I've been to, I mean, I assume most people here have been to NASA's Cost and Schedule Symposium meetings every year. You can call into them. There's a lot of smart people who work very hard to try to get better at this. but it is a fundamentally very difficult problem because it's a function of internal, it's like a chaos function of internal and external

perturbations that can completely throw off these highly interdependent complex systems. And something as big as I had someone described this to me once was like once you kind of get over a billion dollars on a space project, you have some level of emergent complexity that is impossible to fully model

and plan for just because it gets so, there's so many inputs into this system. So something really big like MSR, right? Or, I mean, obviously the human spaceflight is, this is why human spaceflight stuff costs so much money all the time. But with MSR, it's very big. And so you have all these inputs. You have multiple centers.

You have international partners. You have this huge supply chain. And you're doing something you've never done before. And it's all highly interdependent. And that was one of the issues at the IRB, right? You make a change in the diameter of your sample return. orbiting cash bucket or whatever your sphere that you would call it and suddenly you're changing requirements in the CCRS that Goddard was making and you're changing requirements inside the

European mission you know all these other things and the man I read that part of the IRB and that was that was the one that like that keeps me up at night that was like this specific technical thing where I was like what are you guys thinking because like they described that of like the you know there's like that backwards cascade because it's like okay well ultimately what you want is the sample container container on the ground on earth like yeah that's what we're trying to get to and it's like okay so design that requirement and then you build the thing to build that and you build that and you build it and you just work backwards to the launch right and and the the process by which you like they change that diameter like you said they're like well if we take this many samples or this

many samples that decision like no one was in charge of it it was like jpil would send an email to marshal and they'd like ask as q and the hq'd call jpil and like what do you guys think of this like let me go, I'll call Lockheed and they'll find out what's going on over there. Like, no one had that decision. You get to like, what someone in Brussels is eating for lunch on Thursday. Yeah, it's like, where you're at too? Like, if we can support that change. Yeah, someone will call the, the ESA ambassador to NASA and we'll get their opinion.

I was like, I can't believe this. Like, how are you getting, like, obviously they're not getting any done. So, like, that must be, I don't know. Yeah. I'd be, I'd be yell about that one. So is this a situation as the non, you know, person in deep in these reports from either perspective of you too. Is this a case where it's like

the sort of like the Artemis situation where there isn't like the central program office? But isn't this one, doesn't this have like a more of a program office? It does not. It kind of does, but it's like it doesn't quite report into someone properly. That's kind of how I understand it, right? It was, well, because there's the Mars sample return project office. And then JPL has a Mars sample return.

program office. And there's also the Mars Exploration Program, which was previously the responsibility for all other Mars missions run out of NASA headquarters, but also with a subprogram office at JPL, that Perseverance is running, right? So Perseverance is being run out of the MEP, the MSR project was responsible for this project, but also, and supposedly supposed to answer directly to the, the, the, the top-level science mission directorate leadership. And it clearly had a hard time managing the interrelations.

Because JPL was executing the sample return lander. Marshall was developing responsible for the launch, Goddard for the CCRS, and then whose job is it to do the full integration? I don't think that they had solved that necessarily. And I wondered actually reading that was, maybe actually human spaceflight should have given some science mission director

and some pointers on how to organize this. Because you think about it, most science projects are the responsibility of a single NASA center. And this was a weird one that had so many NASA centers as major program inputs and not just subcontractors.

Obviously, human spaceflight does that all the time to mix results, obviously, but they know how to, you know, that's part of how they work. And I wonder if there was some inexperience on the SMD NASA Science Mission Directorate side of never really having a multi-directed project like this at this scale. Even not just multi-directorate, but just like kind of like multi-mission is pretty new for them too. Every other mission has been like a standalone launch. They don't need to.

Yeah, they don't need to really like. Or maybe it's almost. Maybe the closest you're talking about is Viking, right? Because Viking was Langley built the landers and JPL built the orbiters. and it was launched in a combined I think maybe JPL built the combined spacecraft to travel with but it's launched then out of a Titan 4th. That error doesn't matter.

No, but no, I know, yeah, that's 50 years ago. That arrow was so, like, we'll just figure it out as we go and we'll pull in whoever we need to, and I know the one guy who knows how that rocket works, so we'll call him in and he'll come in on a Tuesday. Yeah. But that was so Wild West. But it's also, Viking was,

and remains actually the most expensive planetary mission ever. Probably because of that. Not the example you want to follow, yeah. Well, and kind of also, as you look at the history of this, which I have done, you see a huge spike in spending for planetary and two-thirds of that as actually some of the highest it's ever been adjusted for inflation. Right, what it is now, around $3 billion a year, $3.5 billion a year. But it lasted for like one or two years,

and then it was just for Viking and then it completely clear. lapse and two-thirds of all of planetary money was being spent on Viking. And that's not what you want, right? It was a, you did not have a balance. There wasn't even really a program. I mean, it was Viking. The moon had all wound down by that point. And then it was kind of finishing up some mariner stuff.

And then squeezing Voyager in there somewhere. And then I think Pioneer Venus was the last mission that planetary did for 10 years. Yeah. If you have one mission taking up two-thirds of the planetary science budget, like that's just a way to say you can't afford it. to me. Yeah, Viking was baller. Like that mission was so wild. Like, they is like, well, we don't, we're not sure if all the rovers are going to work

like because of the systems engineering. So let's just build three viable. Yeah, we'll send two, but we'll build three. That's right. We'll build three. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. That's the one in the Smithsonian is an actual flight rover. Yeah. And then they were like, oh, the Titan four hasn't launched before. Well, let's buy. They actually launched an entire Titan four as a, demonstrator launch with a dummy payload paid by the Viking project just to make sure that

that rocket and those that's an expensive ass rocket that's like a half a million dollar rocket if you adjusted for today's dollars that's got to be top in the list like that was a wild rocket and that had so much stuff on it you want me to actually do have that in today's dollars yeah yeah yeah bring up the spreadsheet bring up the spreadsheet that's going to be on your gravestone casey i do actually have that in today's dollars That's what I need as a T-shirt. Yeah, it's... I actually have a chart of all planetary launches plotted by time

and mission-adjusted dollars. It's actually kind of crazy because what it shows you is how cheap the Delta 2 was. Delta 2 basically gives you Falcon 9 prices. That's like it's incredibly affordable mission or a rocket. Tori Bruno's like, hello, hello, friends. I'm back. I'm 34% cheaper than everyone else in the market.

Okay, so Viking, oh, that's well, maybe. be amortizing a little bit. Let's see. Viking was how much was that launch? That was close. Not as much I thought. Cassini was the big expensive launch. Cassini was like weirdly expensive. So Viking was about 310 million per launch for the Titan 3. Sorry, this is the Titan 3 E Centaur was the launch off of that. Titan 4 is what launched Cassini. And that was the big chunky expensive one. That was, let's see, where it was Cassini here. As opposed the 3. $300 million.

I'm here $300 million. You actually can't buy a $300 million launch vehicle today, Casey. It's not all in the market. Well, they used to until very recently, I suppose. But you're getting close, right? If you really wanted to spend $300 million, somebody would sell you a rocket for $3 million. Someone would, it's all the launch process to do it, but they have to buy new, build new fairings as part of it. Get ready for this, you guys sitting down.

Here's Cassini. Here's the Cassini type. And I've always actually questioned this number because it seems so big. And I've double-checked. This is what they report in NASA budget. Can we take guesses? Can we take guesses? Sure, yeah.

Give me your guess. Jake, what do you got? This is a Titan 4B. 2005? The only time it's ever launched, no, 1997. Oh, God. 2005 is when it got there or something. I don't know.

Yeah, 2004, I think is when I got to Saturn. I'm going to say, are we doing like prices right rules? Like, uh. No, because then I'm going to say $1. whatever. I already have a number in my mind. If you have people in the comments, you can guess too. We already gave it away. It's the most expensive planetary launch ever. The number that came to my mind was $789 million for no reason at all.

Okay. I'm going to go a little lower than that. I'm going to say like $675 million. Okay. Well, you're both wrong. It's $834 million in today's dollars for the launch of of Cassini. That always seems high. I always wondered if there's an error that something seems to but that's what I double check that number.

If only we would fly your rope a clipper on SLS, we could best this, you know? That would be kind of a similar. There would be no way to calculate how much it costs, but it would beat it for sure. Like we know it's more than this, but we can't tell you how much. Yeah. Well, because obviously, yeah, this doesn't include all the cost of developing

the Titan 4 and the ground systems and things at that point. I think it was one of the last launches of the Titan 4 too, if I remember correctly. I wonder why. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, the fitting of its name, you know, Titan. That's it.

Yeah, so a mere $300 million for Viking, one and two. So they just spent $300-ish million, right, launching a dummy payload on a Titan 3 just to make sure it worked. Titan again. Catalac, the Cadillac of planetary missions was Viking. They were swimming back then. Yeah, geez. Wow, wow.

And then they didn't find, that's why I think people were so, you're pissed that they didn't find life with it. They spent all this money. I was just out of a workshop where people were quite vehemently saying that there was no. It's just the one guy, right, who's still on about? Yeah, well, the one who's instrument was. But a good point was that all three of the tests were all testing for metabolism. And someone pointed out you need orthogonal tests.

You need different types of ways in which you define life to test for that particular aspect of life. Because it turns out, I mean, that's the thing. We didn't know at the time, Martian dirt soil is reactive, right? It's full of perchlorates. So you pour anything on it and it's going to give off some exogenous heat. It's going to look like it's metabolizing stuff when it's really just highly a reactive chemical all spread around it. And that's a good example of why you do some groundwork first before you kind of make these broad. Or also just kind of how ambitious life detection is or how difficult.

it is because you have to know what the context context context that's a different discussion but i was just literally we just had a big search for life workshop at the planetary society this week so it's like my head is in astrobiology but there's but there's life on mars though right casey yeah sure that's why we need to do mars anther return right now yeah we got to get the little microbes back yeah you know me my thing is like that shit's everywhere like we we're going to react the same to life in like 2030 whatever how many years it's going to be like what the last 10 years have been about water like water is only on earth and it's like well i know exactly we found water on everything that we could possibly look at in the solar system everything as once we

get those new space telescopes that are finding biosignatures and like every other exoplanet right it's like oh like more photosynthesis yeah yeah well there was again reminded in this topic and i actually have a clipping from the New Yorker in like 1956 or something during one of the close approaches of Mars, right? We're slightly bigger in the sky. And it was just, you know, the New Yorker has a little like talk of the town blurbs sections. It was like this, it was all it was, a little talk of the town, like a paragraph long as a scientists are excited about the upcoming close approach to observe with their telescopes because Mars changes colors with the seasons, probably because of vegetation or some type of algae. Scientists aren't quite sure. But this is, you know, it's just like very

nonchalant about Mars having vast seasonal vegetation. Huge forests. My God, it's like, and that's kind of like, will life change everything? I don't know. They seem pretty chill with it back in the 50s, right? This isn't even like 1820. Actually, I'm firmly in that camp that it's going to be that not notable. It kind of depends.

If it's waving back at you, I think maybe the implications will be bigger, right? But it'll be like an interesting, notable thing. kind of like, hey, how can we fight each other again? Like, what are we angry about after all? What resources are they sitting on? You know? Yeah, exactly. All that good rust and Mars.

Before we get to the end of the show, I thought of this like 10 minutes ago as you were talking, and I would like to bring it up because there's very few things that Jake and I like doing on this show more than assigning homework to our favorite people in space media. And I thought of a really fun assignment the next time you're looking for some work. Okay? Okay. I would love, and I can help you out and work with you. I know you're not very busy in your life, Casey.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is a great time to take on extra projects for me. So, and this one, I got to be honest, sounds like a shitload of work. I would like to figure out what was the most accurate assessment of cost of a planetary mission of all time? Who did the best homework to end up front at the most reliable budget? And that doesn't mean they came in the lowest budget. Like, if they estimated it was a billion and they were like, we only spent 400 million,

they're out. I want people that called their shot and we need 800 million and we spent like $7.99. Who is the best? Who is the goat? It may not be as hard as you're thinking because I think I have all that data already. Well, congrats. It's just kind of making the comparison. But no, the follow on is who was in charge of that?

Please put them in charge of the MSR reviews. Well, there's, so the reason why that makes. not work in the same way is that probably the things that are most successfully predicted are the most meat and potatoes type of missions. Kind of ones you've done before. A camera. One cube sat on a on a transporter mission. Yeah.

An orbiter mission. Mr. Joseph Potter Stewart, I'll know when I see it. Like give me the ones that are, you know, equatable. Yeah, it's like what you would call the high heritage missions, right? ones that don't really push the envelope in terms of engineering needs. And that's not necessarily, I mean, that's the inherent problem, right? Is that you also the structure. And this is actually, I don't want to say this, an interesting way to put it.

It was an interesting question. What interests me about this type of problem is how you organize missions in terms of the internal structure of organization. So in general, competed missions. in NASA Parliance, right? The missions that they put up like a new frontiers or discovery class missions

where they say, here's a pot of money, pitch us your best idea that's going to do the best science. We'll have an team evaluate it. We'll kind of select a handful of you. We'll then put you through the ringer. We'll choose one and that's what we'll do.

Those tend to actually have the best performance. Really? Just because they tend to be smaller, they tend to be smaller, so they have to be more straightforward. They're not flagships. But in the actual organization, they have a,

form, they have a core team formed by a single principal investigator who selects themselves. They self-organize their science team. That means all the instruments they select are known from the very beginning of the effort. They tend to be aligned and supported by a major industry partner. They do a ton of work in advance, maybe upwards of five to ten years of work to get selected. So they know the problem really well. They know the potential engineering challenges. They've done probably a lot of testing and development of types of instrumentation.

The entire instrument suite is known in advance so they can design the spacecraft knowing exactly what types of observations. You look at something like New Horizons, which went to Pluto for $750 million with plutonium. It's an astonishingly affordable mission. I think it's because you bring from the beginning. Flagship missions, on the other hand, they're directed. That means they're assigned to a NASA center. the NASA Center puts out a call for instruments, and they themselves, and NASA themselves,

select an instrument package. They basically randomly assemble a team. Does that team work well together? Not a function of the choices they make. Does a team aware of what other instruments that are being proposed? No, not really. And then the engineers say, okay,

bolt these eight instruments onto this spacecraft. Europa Clipper had a hell of a time with this, trying to get all the instrumentation to not give E&M radiation onto each other, to like all fit on the same thing, right? And so they're doing this all kind of after the fact, and then it's really expensive. You know, that adds complexity and cost.

And so I think there's something to this idea of a core team selected early driving the science from the beginning, limiting and controlling your engineering, so it's really focused, and then not having to fix it later on in the process. So that's a potential purpose. As we have one flying to the moon right now, as we speak. Now, Clips is interesting because it's like the exact opposite of that, right?

Because there's like, who wants to ride? It's the freaking Kmart bin of science payloads. Yeah, we'll just like stick that here, stick that here. Well, I call that there's a really fascinating philosophical difference with Clips that I think a lot of the science world hasn't really internalized yet. Which Clips is way more of the type of science. I think of like some old British merchant ship from like the 19th century would be. It's like, all right, we're going to be going here. We're going to be trading some spices.

You know, we're going to be going to Indonesia. Yeah, we'll take a natural. Let's sure. Yeah, like, but they're like, okay, yeah, we're going to be at this island to restock. Yeah, sure, walk around, pick up some birds or something for a couple hours. But, you know, that's it. That's all you get to whatever we're doing, you get to ride along and take the opportunity. You know, do that stuff that way.

That is not how science has worked in this country since the post-war, post-World War II era, where the scientists get to define their own questions, and then they propose the missions to answer their own questions, and get to designate to those missions exactly how they're going to solve those questions through their own instrumentation. So science is the driving priority that then everything is designed around. Whereas Clips is back to this opportunistic science, right, of like, hey, we're going here.

Sure, stick something on it. If you think that'll be interesting, see what you find. But it's not why we're going there. It's useful to you. but it's not the purpose. And we haven't done that. Space science, really, and Apollo, arguably,

at least was maybe that for a geologists. But it's a different way of doing business. And I think scientists themselves may find it to be less satisfying or frustrating because they're used to kind of, in a sense, calling the shots. But also, you know, if it's a lower cost and you get more shots on it,

you're learning something. And the question is, are you learning the most, important stuff. And if I had to critique, and not necessarily even critiquing clips, because it's just part of a larger portfolio now. But for those of people who I think think that, oh, we'll just do commercial everything and science will just kind of happen as a commercial byproduct, you can answer things that

way. You can learn things that way. But you probably aren't learning the most important things that way. You aren't probably pushing the boundaries of the biggest questions that way, because by definition, they're going to be hard to achieve. And that's why we're doing. In the sense, all of this hubbub around, is that even a real Mars sample return?

Why is this all of a hassle, right? Like, why don't we just have Starship pick up some rocks or something when it comes back? It's because the samples that are being collected by perseverance are being very purposely and carefully and precisely collected in order to answer very specific, huge questions about not just the history of Mars, but the history of the solar system, right? The implications of these go way beyond Mars. It's like you're trying to, ideally out of the sample return, you get to a second place beyond the moon to locate in time major areas of solar system pass, like the bombardments, to ground your estimates of the age surface of Mars, and then you can tie it to crater counting.

You can basically reset the chronology of the entire solar system based on what you find on Mars. And that's if you don't find, you know, if you don't find history of life. And that type of stuff, you don't necessarily answer those questions if you just randomly pick up a few rocks, right? This is why perseverance has taken already two years to collect the samples and we'll be collecting very, you know, I know people on the team, they're arguing for months and years about which exact ones to do. And they all have to trace back to these fundamental questions. And that's why this is we've got to make it harder for ourselves than we have to because we're trying to answer very hard questions. and I think that's at the core of all this, I think before people get too frustrated at NASA

for messing everything up. We are taking the hardest way to do this in order to actually try to answer to swing at these big questions. Nailed it. Nailed it. I finished. Did I land the plane?

Democracy is slow and messy. That's, but it's better than the alternative. I've changed my homework assignment. What factor, how how do I even phrase what my new homework assignment is? I need the factor of wrongness

for new starts, right? Like when it was a when it was a fresh mission so none of your like don't sandbag me with like while we flew this Phoenix Lander before fresh mission, new designs, new instruments, what was the factor of wrongness

for all the missions and who had the least factor of wrongness? And what was the average factor of wrongness so we can calculate it on everything else. Like Viper. How far off is Viper going to be? Yeah. Two-X, three-X?

Yeah. And assuming it makes it in one piece to the surface, too, like do you have to rerun a Viper? The data, I think, is in my, this is a plug for those of you who, maybe this is a great homework assignment for the audience to go to my planetary exploration budget data set, open and accessible to anybody for free at the planetary society. It should be in there. So the

question would be, where do you draw your comparison line? Because again, NASA won't make a formal budget estimate until it enters phase C after it spent tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And that's when they will publish it. So in my data set, I published the initial life cycle cost estimate, which also includes launch and includes operations through the prime mission, which can vary, right? So you're talking about cost through operations, you're talking about just development cost. All those numbers are in there. You can tease them out. Or do you want, like, the initial kind of best guess cost when they announced the mission, right? This is what got James Webb into hot water. And this is what's getting MSR into hot water now. They put $5.3 billion

in the planetary science to Cato, probably a bad idea in retrospect, because that was not the true estimate. They didn't know even how to estimate it, right? That was just a number. That sounded reasonable and that's what the Senate's throwing back in their face. James Webb, same thing. James Webb, they always say, oh, it started out as a billion dollar project and it was 8.8. Well, no, the actual lifecycle cost estimate of James Webb was something like four and a half billion dollars back in 2006. So it doubled, not great, but better than a factor of eight. It just depends where you draw the line for it. The less NASA, I don't know, people always just, they put out a guess, it's always wrong, profoundly incredibly wrong. An interesting thing,

you could even say like Europa Clipper, right? So a $5 billion mission now. Remember, that was the cheap option, the clipper, from the Decadal survey estimate in 2011 of a Europa orbiter, which was $4.7 billion. Right? So actually kind of came out, the estimate came out for the cheaper option

to be what the too expensive orbiter was going to be. This is what I'm saying, though. It's really hard. If we establish a baseline factor of wrongness, we can at least do math. When one of these, like, off the napkin numbers is thrown out, we can apply the average factor of wrongness. Go to the next NASA's Cost and Schedule Symposium. I'll do the homework.

Do the homework. Seriously, you could go to the Cost and Schedule Symposium. I presented there once on the budget data set. I'm going to present my factor of wrongness theory at this symposium. Factor of wrongness. Write a paper. The factor of wrongness. There you go.

Galangelo at all. Yeah, maybe I finally get a lull named after myself. I do it. The data's out there. It can be done. You can have a unit of measurement for how far off you are, one colangelo. One calangelo. One colangelo is like, like, that's the average.

That's like what most units of C. You get under one calangelo, you're good. But if you're like two, three colangelo's, get out of here. All right. Well, now that we've envisioned this future, I feel like I need to take this project on. Yeah, yeah. This is great. Happy on when you, when you're ready to share it, we'll talk about it.

Yeah, yeah. Casey wants that co-author, get him on there. Yeah, that's great. Yes. Casey, you've written some great pieces about this whole situation, so a little bit about, you know, what's happening with MSR. And you also have some stuff about what people can actually do, at least in the United States, because they have influence as voters over this process.

Do you want to just tell us a little bit about that and day of action and all that cool stuff you're doing? Yeah. this is, I mean, putting on my advocacy hat, you know, taking off my policy hat, we do have ways to help. And we try to be very cautious, not cautious, but we want to be careful and conscientious of how we support this, right? Because our project, our goal isn't to have MSR at all costs. Our goal isn't to destroy other science programs to do this. Like we, we want, we need to push NASA to have a smarter implementation, obviously. And we need to have, you know, we can't destroy other projects or else it just politically is not going to work.

It's just, and it can't. And it's the wrong thing to do. So the way that we talk about it, that way that we talk about it is how we're reflecting in. So planetary.org slash action will take you to our action center. You can write a letter right now if you live in the U.S. for MSR and NASA science. And then if you really care about it, which I think we all should and live in the U.S., we are going to visit Congress on April 28th and 29th of the U. this year. That's our day of action. We will provide so you have to fly yourself out there. Unfortunately, we can't give everyone flies to D.C. But once you're there and registered with us,

we'll give you in-person training, talking points. We'll put you with a group of people who have experience with doing this. We'll tell you how to say it, what to say if you want, and then kind of let your passion shine through with that. And we'll organize even, and we'll book your meetings with your members of Congress. You'll get to have opportunities to drop in at other offices throughout Congress. And you'll have opportunities to hang out with other planetary society members and fans of space. Me and my colleagues

will all be there. It's always actually a really fun time. It can feel intimidating, but it's actually, and frankly, a lot of people come out of it with the renewed optimism about our messy system of democracies, which is always a nice little bonus too. And that's at planetary.org slash

day of action. Yeah. And I say this every year, but I'll say it again, but we have, you know, we have listeners that go to this and tell us how rewarding and fun it is. So I definitely encourage it. Makes me wish I was an American that could go to. Yeah, I feel like I should. I'm like dumb that I never came down and hung out and did this.

I feel like I have to look at the calendar. I don't know why I have it. It seems like a plausible time for me to make it down to D.C. Also, April and D.C. is great. Yeah, it should be a relatively nice time of year. And it'll be a good time of year, too. The new budget will be out. we're still six months away from the elections.

That won't be completely insane. New and old budget. Both be out. Yeah, I may have a dual. So maybe I can roll that out in the halls of Congress. You know, yeah. You can apply that to a political situation. I've had some articles out.

I'll have more articles coming out next week, kind of going into a deeper budget analysis of MSR. And I'll have an op-ed coming out in Scientific American tomorrow or the day after talking about MSR as well. doing a lot of outreach about this within this broader effort. But yeah, it's a big issue. And at the end of the day, this is the highest priority of the scientific community, planetary science community.

It's through this process of the Decatal survey, right? And if we just decide not to do hard things that are the top priority of the science community, it may be convenient for other projects right now in terms of opening up some money, but all science priorities will be threatened in the long run by this, because we start walking away from this process. So that's a larger thing. NASA has to figure this out. But we also have to muster the effort. Like, this is going to be a hard thing.

There's a reason no one's tried this before. And NASA has pulled itself out of worse situations. And I'm optimistic or at least positive with the fact that we can get through this. It just needs to, this is the choke point, right? And this is the big test. And this will hopefully whip everyone into shape. And we'll see this happen eventually. All right.

Well, from your lips to Congress ears. That's literally like on. And NASA's. Yeah. Get that report. Awesome. Wow, this has been so much fun. I'm really glad we had you on.

I needed this talk. I needed to have this conversation. I feel a lot better now. I feel like it was a little dicey before. Anytime. And, you know, I'm not an optimist by nature. Me neither. Me neither.

So that's good. I'm in the wrong business in some ways. We keep everybody uncheck. There's a role for us. Yeah. It's actually, this is a classic example of space being, it's like the antidote to cynicism.

Because you literally have to be optimistic to do anything in space. And then you think about the motives of why we're doing us at the end of the day and the ability that it does have to draw people and nations and efforts together. You're like it's it's like the most earnest and corny and beautiful thing that we do as a civilization. And it's good to remember that from time to time. So even I was, my wife chastised me because this is an absurd. I tried to write this down,

but it didn't come off quite right. But I'll try this here. You know how Aristotle's cosmology was the idea that we had all these like celestial spheres where like the furthest sphere out was the most perfect because it didn't change. I know and that's where the stars were. and then the earth was like this corrupted, mutable, you know, nasty, nasty place. And it's, yeah, and it's like, well, of course it makes sense, you know, that we, like, maybe we're a bit more Aristotelian than we think because all this messiness to create the spacecraft, you know, they're going to go out into the firmament, right? And it's, it's so pristine and beautiful and perfect that it raises out the contrast of our mutable, messy process of building the thing on Earth that we will send out there.

And MSR is doubly hard because we're sending it out into perfection and bringing it back to the messy Earth. So those poor rocks. But that was my picture that we have the pseudo-aristatalian cosmology, after all, at least in the process of space policy. We got to get those poor rocks stamped on one of the spacecraft that's doing MSR. Just minding their own business on Mars for four billion years. That's too good. Anyway, that's my overindulgent pseudo-intellectual nonsense that I took out of the loving piece.

Perfect way to end. Are you sure it's just water in that little thermos you have? It's a sleep deprivation. Water with, yeah, exactly, no sleep for six months. It's a little more. Too many biosignatures. Yes, right. Too good.

Awesome. Well, Casey, thanks so much for. coming on. This is fantastic. Love having you on the show. The best. We'll get you back again. Anytime. Always fun.

You're the only one that can deflect homework back to me, so I appreciate that. That's a skill you learn. That's me. You've got to learn that. All right. See you all. All right, everybody. Bye.

Bye. We'll see you. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, into death.