Off-Nominal - 172 - Culberson Always Talked About Shrimp

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Former Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and leader of ETH Zurich Space, to talk about some of the big stories in science at NASA—Mars Sample Return, cost growth in missions across the board, and more.Note: Dr. Z cited the Europa Clipper solar arrays at 100 yards across, as in one football field, but clarified via email that they are actually 100 feet. He is European, so the football field mix up is understandable. Go Birds.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 172 (with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen) - YouTubeWe’re finally going to the Solar System’s most intriguing but unexplored frontier - Ars TechnicaNASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached its final destination. Let's celebrate the team that got it there (op-ed) | SpaceAs Psyche Mission Moves Forward, NASA Responds to Independent Review | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)Psyche review finds institutional problems at JPL - SpaceNewsBridenstine to Lead NASA Mars Sample Return Strategy Review – SpacePolicyOnline.comFollow ThomasThomas ZurbuchenThomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) / XFollow 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. Jake, that's a big Thursday, buddy. How you doing? Big Thursday. Big Thursday. I'm great. I'm fantastic, actually. I'm so excited.

We've got Dr. Thomas Rubkin with us today, which is a guest. Thomas, I've been trying to imagine the day when we can have a really good, meaty conversation over a beer for a long time. So I'm, like, super excited to pick your brain about, I don't know, all kinds of stuff today. We're going to have fun today, I think. We were avoiding it until we had Simon on the show a couple of weeks ago. He was like, oh, you could totally pull that off. And we're like, yes, that's awesome.

So thanks for hanging out. Yeah, of course. So, yeah, we're going to dig into, I don't know, all kinds of stuff, planetary stuff, program stuff. I don't know. There's not a lot of topics I wouldn't want to chat with you about it. So we'll see how on bond plan we can stay today. That's going to be the tough thing, I think. This is all the plan, Jake.

This is a plan. You planned a drink before this show, didn't you? There, Jake. Yeah. Yeah. So my drink is a story. And of course, we just launched a rocket, right? So we didn't launch it on Delta.

But my favorite ice cream as a kid looks like a rocket. So when I became the head of science of NASA, the biggest magazine took pictures of me with that rocket. So as we, you know, we were just, we just launched, of course, an amazing. science mission. And before we launched, a hurricane came by. I actually traveled in and the whole science team was there and I was hanging out with friends. And the drink we drank is an old fashioned. So it's an old fashioned. And what I'm going to do, make it a rocket fashioned, which is instead of the syrup, we're going to put it in and the drink is going to get better and better as we go today with, you know, like the orange flavor and the citrus flavor as we go.

So it's a rocket fashion. So I'm really excited. That is a hurricane party event, if I've ever heard of one. All of you hanging out waiting for the launch. That's an epic Florida hurricane party. That's amazing. Oh, it's great. And I have to tell you, I mean, I sat there with friends and I basically watched TV for six or seven hours, literally nonstop.

all this to weather. And I have to tell you, I never felt more proud. I don't want to tell you why, because when I started my job at NASA as the head of science, the first launch we had was the first new spacecraft of the ghost series. And it's literally that spacecraft that provided the data that I looked at and helped make forecast there. So it was, you know, it was amazing. And, you know, like I never appreciated how complicated a hurricane is, how many

faces it has. And, you know, for 10 minutes, it was really, really scary because tornadoes came in off the water. Tornados that were just predicted from the radars on the ground. And because of the lightning mapper, which is a new instrument that was on the Gosa spacecraft for the first time. So we saw it on TV and, yes, it swept in and almost hit the hotel where most, actually it clipped the hotel where most of the Clipper Science Team was in. So it clipped the Clipper Hotel. It was right. Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. I recently moved, like, three years ago, I moved to Mexico. So this is, I'm like a hurricane neophyte. I'm like, it's like the new thing in my life is I have to learn how to deal with them. And so I don't, I don't actually have like the historical context of like what data used to look like. But as I started to research it, it's like, there is a significant amount of very new stuff that we get to have for hurricanes that was like not there 10, 15 years ago. Like it's, it's new enough that, that, uh, uh, We're not, haven't fully internalized the habits of having all this, like, awesome data from things like go satellites. It's actually pretty wild. There's, like, some cool stuff out there that you can see.

Yeah, you're like, new data as if this is a centuries-old tradition of predicting hurricanes. Like, that's tens of years old. It's not, you know, like, these just used to show up one day. I'll just fire up the National Hurricane Center website. It'll tell me everything you need. It's easy. Hurricanes, no problem. How many things in that sentence were from the late 60s to the early 90s? I think it's remarkable. Of course, there are two aspects to it. The first one is just a magnificent tool set that's available,

much of it from space, frankly. But the other piece also is how different things are now. The Gulf is just really hotter. That means that the storms are amplifying much faster. So everybody's like, wow, it amplifies so fast. The next storm comes is like, wow, it amplifies so fast. It's like, friends, get the pattern. It's amazing.

You know, the energy is. driving, you know, the temperature is, of course, providing the energy, which amplifies the storms. Yep. There happened fast now. Milton came real quick. It was a real, one day it wasn't there and the next it was. All old-timey names this year, though. Yeah.

Very old-timey. I've got a topical drink, I guess. I got a cloud walker that counts, right? I was thinking more like Jupiter clouds, but we'll go with both that and hurricanes. It's a good one. Cheers. Yeah. Super juicy.

I've got a local, local beer. This is a Yucatecan brewery called Seba. Seba is a very important tree to the Maya people. It's like a tree of life. And so they named their brewery after it. Tracking this one open here today. Look at that. Yeah.

Boom. We got to start with Clipper, right? Because, I mean, first of all, this is probably not your first Falcon Heavy launch, right? Dr. Z? I know. it's not. So I, of course, Saiki was a Falcon Heavy, and of course I saw one before with a NOAA spacecraft where we had, we were a secondary

payload, which was the first kind of government Falcon Heavy, you know, on the civil side. And of course, this one was especially in a sense that nothing came back, you know, usually things come back, you know. Like, that's weird. It used to be that the cool thing was to has you disappear into the sky. Now the cool thing is for it to come back down. It's like, you know, wait for the big, you know, boom that hits you.

But in this case, nothing comes back, of course, because we needed the whole punch. And of course, I remembered stories around the launch vehicle. I was just so grateful both for the orbit designers that came up with that Mars Earth Gravity Assist thing, which really enabled us to move off the space of LFSLS. which of course was initially foreseen by congressional directive. And then we figured out two things, A, there was none available for us. But the second one was that kind of the overall dynamic environment

just really wasn't okay for Clipper. So I was really grateful for the spacecraft disappear. I was, of course, no longer in charge. The difference was in this case, I did not have my two speeches ready, My way of preparing for launches was hiding two speeches every time, kind of in a stoic way, get ready for bad things, which almost never happened.

But, you know, sometimes you're bad, you have that speech, and you actually get asleep because you wrote the speech first. Your election night speech, yeah, basically, right? Of course, the science is incredible, right? It really going to Europe really brings those ocean worlds, kind of in the realm, of astrobiology in a way that, you know, Mars has been through a series of missions, starting with the Viking and then a series of missions kind of culminating in curiosity and then perseverance, you know, with, I think actually the instrument complement on a clipper

in every way as good or even better as the Mars mission. So, of course, dragonfly is going to be behind it, another kind of habitability mission. NASA has been very loud. Every time they open their mouth, this is not to search life. And in the back of my mind, it's like, but we put a really good mass spectrometer on, which would be, of course, yeah, I know, we don't have a camera for little man that might wave or, you know, shrimp or whatever. Culperson always talked about shrimp.

Like, yeah, you know, I always like, you know. Come on. Yeah, he talked about shrimp, you know. And I was like, well, and, you know, so, yeah, in his congressional office, like, let's go to Europe and land and catch shrimp. You know, and like, okay. I'm for it.

I'm not, I'm not going to fight against that. I should tell you. So my take has been, have you ever watched, Jake's heard this take about 8,000? We've done 172 episodes. He's probably heard this 171 times. Have you ever watched Blue Planet 2, this BBC series? All right, you got to watch.

I think it's episode 2 called The Deep. And it's just, you know, all the crazy stuff that lives in the abyssal zone. and every single time a new thing is on screen I'm like God imagine what lives in every other ocean in the solar system because if life exists here on earth in the worst environment ever and it looks like that I'm like I'm all the way in on there's maybe not shrimp because nothing down there really looks like shrimp

there is a shrimp that lives down there that John Culperson probably loves but it's just I cannot wait for I mean dragonfly is my that's that's the creme de la creme for me because I love Titan yeah I love Titan but I mean some of the, I would love to hear a little bit about like which particular parts of the, of the Clipper mission you're most excited for because it is unique, not only in that, number one, the environment it's going to is, is kind of weird because it's called Clipper because it kind of comes by Europa several different times during the mission, a bunch of different

times, but it's not a go and land on this planet or go and orbit this planet. There's weird stuff about the Jupiter system that you have to design the mission in a certain way. But what kind of stuff does that force on the mission in terms of the science that we're going to get back? You know, there's, you have like campaigns where you're going to come by the planet, or I call it planets, because that's our take on this, on this here podcast. You come by and you've got a campaign of science to do, but then you've got a little bit of a weight to get data back to try to figure out, you know, do you, are you able to tweak things in the next pass? How does that mission really play out? Yeah, so if you just look at the spacecraft by itself, you immediately see that it's

made for that kind of environment. You know, the first thing you see is as an in enormous solar array. And the reason for that is, of course, that it's far away from the sun. And it wants a lot of power. So it's, so it's, you know, it's almost a hundred yards from tip to tip, uh, extended. And, you know, after the launch, tell us, tell us how many football fields. Roughly one, right? Right. Good of a goal to goal. It's the only way we understand spacecraft size in this world. Yeah. So it's roughly a football field, right? And, and, and, you know, so, So you have that. I was just saying after the launch,

I went for lunch with friends. And I was really lucky because the European guys from Airbus who made the power system were also there. And of course, it took three hours to extend that thing. And I said, come tell me when it's out. And they interrupted my lunch. It's like, that's really great. It's like I was like one of the first ones to know,

even without my NASA badge. You need to know the right people. Anyway, so it's that. But if you look at the spacecraft, you see that there's a vault. So it's basically a tremendously thick kind of metal box. And if you look at that, basically all sensitive electronics is in that vault. Like I had nightmares about that vault, right? Not because I design it because it's kind of the ultimate critical path.

Like you have to like every electronic box from every instrument, kind of the avionics, everything goes in there. And so one board is late. You're not closing the box. And so kind of, but then it had to be tested. And of course, we all learned what moffets are, you know, like with, you know, these mosfets are kind of the switch, kind of the semiconductor switches that were less hard than they should have been. But anyway, it turned out to be just fine. But the point is it's designed for that.

So what you do is then still with all of that, it's still not hard enough to actually kind of go into orbit. around Europa. So what you do is you dive in and kind of what you do, the way you should think about each one of those flybays is kind of its own campaign that gets programmed into the spacecraft

and really dives in kind of and on the long end of it on this eccentric orbit. You try to dump down the data or, you know, like do two of the dumps. You know, sometimes, you know, Jupiter and the Earth are a wrong way from relative to, you know, so you store the data

and then dump down. So there's a number of very altruidant autonomous parts of it. And of course, you can do that the instrument complement is absolutely sophisticated. Anything from the magnetic field, you know, kind of plasma stuff to sophisticated cameras. And then, of course, the two-frequency radar to really probe below it. And also gravity measurements that, of course, spacecraft data are used. My favorite instrument is a mass spec, just because we went out of our way to keep the mass spec on it.

the mass spec really makes most sense there's a lot of we're going to learn from the mass back but the mass pack is going to make us all famous if in fact Europa is emitting water and organics with along molecules so the mass spec has a range of

exactly right the mass pack has a range of four and a half thousand dultans you know kind of very massive molecules and we haven't made those measurements yeah yeah shrimp exhaust from shrimp exactly that's awesome yeah i know i'm excited for it i hopefully they're they're learned a lot from juno because there's a lot of that that sounds like juno right you know the sort of like dive in they've got

a vault on there too so maybe you'll have to get a bunch of uh scott bolton's best people to to move over to clipper when uh when the time comes right yeah they already helped a lot i mean frankly when we did the design we actually had chats with the juno people and as you know both of the spacecraft were designed that at uh jpl so so kind of that we actually benefited from that tremendously. Yeah. Leiper has a really interesting political past, both from the way that it came about,

but also, like you mentioned, politicking around what launch vehicle is going to fly on. Are there any particular bits that, from like an administrative perspective, any lessons that you learned from that could or you would want to prevent from being applied to other missions within the science portfolio? So at the first and form,

most, you know, Clipper is a very high priority and was decided by the academies that it is, right? I had no worries whatsoever pushing with full energy. Clipper, the thing is I didn't need to push because, you know, the first meeting I had when I came into my job on the Hill, I was with John Culperson, who became a really close friend. And frankly, I've met many scientists who know less about things like, guy, Europa. He literally read papers, publications and

would like ask me questions about paragraph three on page five, you know, like this. But what did they mean here, right? So it's not what I love about him is it's absolutely sincere. Like it is absolutely sincere. So he used all

his power to basically push a clipper and then lander. There was a little bit more complicated on the lander. First of all, JPL couldn't do both of them. They just didn't have to people. But secondly, also, Lander was not recommended by the academies. And I felt it was really important that as far as I'm concerned when I was the head of science, right, that I stuck to the academy recommendations because, I mean, I'm not smarter than the community, certainly

in most areas. You know, there may be a very narrow area where I'm one of the best in the world. But generally speaking, if you're the associate administrator, you're, you know, we're, we're, working on such a broad field, you have to depend on the science community. So I really religiously worked with it. So kind of we never got to the case, to a place where we had to kind of have this discussion. Of course, the issue was the way Clipper was sold kind of politically. And again, I sat on during the launch, I was with four people, actually five people. I was with John Culberson, you know, and I just thanked them for what he did.

And scientists should thank him. I know he's on the opposite side of the political spectrum, then many scientists. But the point is, he, without him, I would have a really hard time seeing a story that that worked. Laurie Leshen was there also. And I'm just so grateful for the good people at JPL and everybody, especially these MOSFET issues.

And then the two Drake daughters were there. You remember, of course, their father's signature. I think Nadi was on your, on your thing also. She makes more sophisticated drinks than me. I've been at her house than her husband. But we were sitting there and just to stand, I'm just standing there,

just celebrating this. And I was so grateful for what Culperson did. The challenge was that he sold Clipper with a deal that he made with Shelby with SLS. And that would be a perfectly good deal if it worked, right? And kind of at the beginning, you don't know that. It's not like somebody did anything nefarious.

It was just, it's just what happened in, you know, and the vice presidents at that time, you know, Pence's speech, Moon 24, basically eliminated all SLSs for uses other than Artemis. And in addition to that, we found there was a really a strong disconnect between the dynamic environments that we had built the spacecraft for. Frankly, we could not have launched. on SLS the way it is. Do I think the SLS

could have been adopted? I assume so. They're really smart people. They know how to do this, but not in that time that we needed it to launch in 24. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, availability is tough for that, I think. I wanted to ask, so Clipper is a really great example for

kind of a big topic I want to dig in today, which is like cost growth in these missions, right? So Clipper itself definitely became more expensive than was originally anticipated. It's had some pretty significant growth. And interestingly, so one of the takes that I have espoused on this show a couple of times is that I think we should be braver and cancel more things when they get cost growth,

which I think you generally agree with. At least I've read that in your writing. And there was even an instrument on Clipper that I think you removed for that exact reason. So maybe I kind of want to open up with that. is just like, when should we cancel a mission? Because it isn't clear to me what the right time to do that is. Because I see some that get axed almost immediately when they go over and it's just like there was no hope. And then some that just seem to persist into, you know, overruns forever and ever until they launch.

Right. So I want to hear kind of your philosophy on that. Like how do we handle that kind of cost growth? So in my view, there is basically two types of. of missions to start their strategic missions and they're opportunistic missions. So, and I really believe, kind of, we handle them differently. By the way, we should have a debate whether we should handle them differently, but we are. The strategic missions are the ones that already mentioned.

They're the ones that the academy makes recommendations and say, these are the most important missions. And frankly, usually those are missions that we cannot do in another way than what we're working on. You know, there's no way of building of an infrared or, you know, far infrared telescope like JWSD, you know, the web telescope without the complicated thing that we had to do, which is just absolutely difficult. Like if there was a simpler way, trust me, let's cancel it and do the simpler way.

But there's no other. The other thing is true with, the same is through with Clipper in general, right? You know, they either want to go there or not. Now, I want to talk about kind of the perfectionism trap that we get into, which happens there. And frankly, I learned a lot from it, but I still think I have a lot to learn kind of how you manage it. But let's part those quickly. Those are the strategic ones. They're harder in many ways to handle just because you change the destiny of an entire science community when you take them out.

Whereas the opportunistic ones, the PI class missions, they're not strategic. By definition, they're not strategic. And I've been on record, right? So I've canceled a number of missions. The first mission I canceled was the radiation budget instrument. It was a factor two and a half over. We had already due to work stops. And frankly, I'm like, you know, you often put an empty chair in the room where we made decisions. It's like, can we explain to taxpayers, what we're doing. You know, and I'm like, you cannot explain to taxpayers how by your factor two and a half over, especially for something we can do cheaper otherwise. And, you know, so I'm like,

we're going to take it out. And frankly, that, me taking that out solved a lot of problems. Because everybody's like, holy crap, you know, but not every sin will be forgiven. And I'm a strong believer that canceling missions is a strategy that helps us take risks. See, I want to do complicated things. I want to do challenging things.

But if I'm not protecting the program, a single mission can stink up the environment, right? And I just really think the opportunity cost needs to be considered with these things. So I cancel multiple missions. You know,

here and there, sometimes small ones or kind of pieces or instruments. I cancel the number. Sometimes I just fire people, right? Because I felt that team could actually be successful, but the leader didn't, you know, didn't have any self-awareness of what's going on.

Sometimes the leader was just an ass, right? And I don't want, you know, like, I mean, I really believe. Right, you know, of course, we're not talking about names here. That would not be appropriate. But my point is, so we did a number of this. where I felt it was the hardest, and perhaps later we'll talk about MSR, because I think that's the quintessential example, but like Tay Clipper, right, could we have really done it with fewer instruments?

I think the answer is yes. But what we're doing, see in a mission like this, going to Europe, basically said, let's take the best shot humanity can take at assessing habitability. Now, there's a half a billion of the increase I'm not apologizing for. Let me tell you, there's a half a billion I own personally, because what I did is basically I looked at the mission. It was kind of in the upper threes. And I looked at the phase E, you know, the whole data site.

And I'm like, look, what's going to happen with Clipper, we're going to educate an entire generation of astrobiologists looking at the outer. solar system. And basically what we had is a staffing model that mostly was hiring people like me as they were walking towards retirement. And I said, let's not do that.

Let's add a whole kind of junior league. Right? Kind of bringing people in. And we, not the guy who did it. You know, Paulardo's, you know, it's just an amazing guy. He's the project scientist,

Kurt Nieber, program scientist at headquarters. They work with a team came up with that, you know, and for me, that is what I call a strategic investment that is good for the community. And, you know, my full trust and belief is people will use it that way. So it's, it's seed corn for the future. So, so my point is, we should perhaps, you know, kind of in retrospect. So we, there were like three or four reasons Clipper got more expensive. The first one is, we actually made mistakes. I just wanted to know. we made mistakes. We did the first design and there were some things. We made mistakes and frankly,

we had replaced for, you know, reasons not because we fired anybody, but somebody went on in their career. Replace the manager and new manager came in and found mistakes. So we fixed those. So that's, I mean, that's tens of millions or perhaps, you know, low 100. But then I actually, we actually cost money in the tens, perhaps close. to 100 million because of that launch vehicle thing. Because for a while there, we were treading. We were standing still. And then the third reason we lost money is, frankly, during COVID, we really struggled.

Planetary missions were the worst during COVID because you have fewer valves than any other mission. Because the planets are not waiting for you just because you're sick. Do you see, like for Earth science missions, we were just moving by a week. You can't do that. So what you have to do is you have to over staff. So it costs you a lot more to kind of stay on track. So literally money is the only valve you have because you don't have schedule.

You don't have scope. And so basically, so that's the third piece. And then, you know, some of the other pieces, you know, at the end, there were some problems they solved. And as I said, I have the billing was that kind of investment into the future. So you add up the pieces. I actually pulled a list, and I don't know whether there's a way to distribute that list to you later.

I can give it to you for every mission performance that we have in the last 15 years. What did we say? It's going to cost. What will it cost? If you look across the board, if kind of the entire time, you know, New Star is the first mission, JWSD is the last. if you don't take JWSD and it, he basically said you added all the cost that we said it's going to cost. You add them all together of all missions.

And you look at the total performance, we're minus 2.4% under. So we actually are on track because there's a number of missions that make less news that are under. If you add JWSD, of course, we're 3.7% over. But, you know, you get the point. The one mission really just skews. the data. Yeah, and I actually showed all these data. Every time I went to Capitol Hill, I showed those data.

So I just wanted to know, if you look at planetary missions, and we're going to talk more, I would say this is where COVID got us the most. I just really, and in addition to that, we had weaknesses, staffing weaknesses and otherwise. You know, the Psyche report, I'm sure you read it or you looked at it, that Tom Young that I commissioned talked a lot about these things. But that's how I would talk about Clipper. Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting. I'm glad that you articulated it that way because you have, it's sort of a hunch that I've been kind of going on is that a difference between strategic and competed missions because they are very different in terms of where they are in the priority

list, right? So just like you say, a strategic mission is by definition, like what we want. It's, it's like our number one goal. It's what drives kind of how we're thinking about things. The competed ones, I think, is probably where I get the most, like, irritable with, because I feel like a lot of them, especially because things like New Frontiers and Discovery have actual cost caps, like defined cost caps that are part of the plan, right? And I just seem to see them, like, we just seem to blow past those over and over again, you know, and thinking about like, even, you know, Dragonfly right now. Sorry, Anthony, I'm going to poke your favorite, but Dragonfly is like a good financial decision. It's going to be significantly over the cost cap, right? And I guess that's

where I kind of struggle is. It's like, so, you know, some of that I know for, like, I'll give Dragonfly a little bit of credit is that they have that same COVID problem that all the other ones had, right? So like there's going to be some overages there for sure. And we can make changes for that. But it feels like a lot of money. And I'm trying to figure out how we make those decisions. Like when does, you know, when does Insight get to, you know, go twice as, twice as two times over the cap? Like, they're out with a billion dollar mission on a, on a 500 million dollar cap. And then when does it, when do we not allow that to happen, right? Like, that's like a really tough thing I figured to try and manage, you know?

Yeah. So I remember when I came into NASA, Insight had already gotten its second life. And I sat him down and said, you should know that if I was the, administrative, he would not have gotten a second life. And what I realized, by the way, and I, of course, supported what people had done ahead of me. I'm going to tell you, because I was not able to cancel Psyche. I want to tell you why. But I came in, and frankly, insight was yellow on schedule. Now, if you're in a planetary mission and you're yellow and scheduled two years before launch,

you know you're walking near death. Because schedule is the only thing you can't change. Right? You can change money. You can change schedule like every day's a day. Right. And I remember I dropped everything and went to France. And basically what I,

because we're waiting for the French instrument, right? And I sat down with the French and I basically, I literally told them, it's like if you're, I told them, here's the delivery time for the instrument. And it's the 14th of July, 14th of July, 14th of July. Because I know the French go for vacation until like the cows come home, you know. Just have to pick a random date in July. Yeah, right.

Some random date that doesn't mean anything to the French at all. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said you deliver your instrument by that time or we won't even take the spacecraft that we had finished out of storage. Because we're not going to go. we're just going to cancel if you're not delivering the instrument. And of course, what they had to do is they had to negotiate with their unions to actually work seven days per week to make it. By the way, they delivered on the 16th of July.

So I'm not that Swiss, you know, like I'm good with two days. But, you know, but they did it. By the way, I went after that, I delivered. And Inside has been such a huge success in many. many ways, but I went over to France, and that's the, one of the two speeches I gave in French into the factory where they had worked like nonstop shifts, and I gave, I thanked them in French for their work. And I basically said, look, I mean, you're making history with us. And of course, little did I know. There's the amazing things. You talk to Simon about all this incredible stuff.

We figured out with insight. So I had the same issue with Psyche. psyche, frankly, it's still, I mean, look at the psyche report for a number of reasons. COVID was a contributor. Remote work was another contributor. Unders staffing was a third kind of lack of experience on it. There's a number of leadership issues. And I would have canceled Psyche just for the reason that you said. Because I just think if we're not, by the way, it's not because I don't like the mission.

and I'm really excited that it launched. And I think Lindy is an amazing person. By the way, I think very little of that responsibility is Lindy. It's kind of, you know, the management piece is really. PIs have different management styles, but Lindy is kind of a science PI more so than kind of an in-the-weat management PI. So I would have canceled it, but then I was told kind of from the people upstairs that kind of, you know,

this was in the state of Arizona, and you remember who the senators are there, one of them is a friend of a friend, right, former astronaut. One of those of people at NASA, yeah. But I actually, I mean, I'm on record already. This is not news. I had written it down in a paper.

The reason I think it's so important to cancel missions is because of the opportunity cost. Because we are now slowing down the discovery program so much for no reason, right? Some of these Venus missions, we really are want to fly. They're now, you know, standing in line, kind of with triple, you know,

like I think finally they're getting more money. But the reason for that is because we don't have the courage to terminate. Of course, what would have happened to Psyche without a doubt? They would have proposed it for a future one, would have won because it's a really small cost to that moment to bring it to launch and would have launched it. But I just really believe that we should have the courage to cancel.

Dragonfly is a different story, if you don't mind, quickly talking about it. I would love to hear it because that's the one that sticks out to me. We'll actually have data and we yell at each other about it the next time. Yeah. So dragonfly is a different story because what you'd like to do is give full authority and accountability to the PI and their manager. So you basically say in insight, it was entirely the PI and the manager that screwed up. You cannot go for you.

You can say, well, the French didn't deliver. Well, it's your job to manage your own team, whether it's on this side of the Atlantic or the other, right? Well, in the case of Dragonfly, that just wasn't the case. What we did is we selected Dragonfly. By the way, still one of my favorite moments at NASA, that selection meeting. I just wanted to know just kind of how people got comfortable with the risk of this mission in the meeting. Of course, none of us knew that kind of COVID is going to smack us and all the things that happened. But what we did, see, in the whole planetary program, we prioritized the launch pad of every mission.

We prioritized mass, you know, Mars 2020. By the time Mars 2020 launched, it was 19% over. I'm on the list that I just, what I'm going to give you is 90. And part of that was, you know, we, I like asked Mars when I came in,

the schedule was also yellow. And I'm like, every time you can buy schedule with money, do it. Because schedule is worth more than money. Because if you miss a window, it's one and a half billion. So I'm like,

okay, so you're going to be 150, whatever million or 200 million o'er. it's still a good thing. So we prioritized the launch pad. So drag and fly, every year we push drag and fly out. We spend a little bit of money on it so that could work.

But we push drag and fly out. And if you do that, the cost gets more expensive because we're spending money, but we're actually not allowing them to develop the mission. So there's sunk cost and inflation. Those two factors together drive the cost up. So if you looked at the cost that it was selected at, And remember, the cost gets selected without the launch vehicle.

The final cost is with the launch vehicle. So if you just add the things, kind of compare apples to apples, I would say there's a half a billion I cannot explain. All the rest is just, it's the launch vehicle, it's the FACC, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, the, the, the, the CIPI did nothing wrong. Cipy Turtle is the PI, another amazing leader, I think. You know, she is the PI. She had no fault in everything. The half billion, again, I was not in the room, so I cannot tell you what I'd have

billion comes from, but there's a half billion that somebody needs to explain, right? But most of the increase ahead of the confirmation, most of the increase is really, was caused by NASA. I did it. Lori Blaze did it. But we did it because we actually never got relief from the Congress. Right. So basically what we did is by being successful, we got every mission off, right? We got Mars 2020. You know, Europeans, many of the missions got delayed. We got every year mission off. We, we, you know, Psychi was the first one we didn't get off. It still bothers the shit out of me because I'm like, I wanted 100% record after COVID. And, you know, like, it's the one blemish. But anyway, I'm in it, it's doing well and I'm really excited for them. But, but, but the point is, um, track and fly was really taking the prompt of the impact of these delays and kind of the and so so yes

i hate that the cost is as big as it is but i would just say the majority of a responsibility is i not not sippy right because i made the decision to take it to delay track and fly by the way there was an alternative which was to cancel it and and frankly i thought about it back and forth and and there's two things I never wanted to do. I never wanted to cancel a mission without the fault of the team, just because of politics. I think I'm all for accountability and responsibility, but I don't want to just cancel because some political problem arose, right?

I just really hate that. The second thing also is we set a signal with Dragonfly that we want to do ambitious, exciting missions, and canceling it is the opposite signal. Oh, we're just chickening out now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anthony gets a point on that one. I'll only be able to come after you now for half a billion,

not the whole Holocaust thing. Yeah, I mean, the rest is taking up right here. Next door on the screen here. That's right. Taking the rest of it, apparently. That's good. No, it's good contact. It's really good context.

I think it's interesting to hear you talk about these as at a strategic level that it's hard for us from the outside to intuit where whether it's the small decisions of taking a particular person off a mission or which mission to cancel for what reason there's there's strategy around the way it affects the other missions that is hard to see when you're not when you don't know exactly how the lines map but but when you hear about it it makes a ton of sense and obviously is like that's the job of your office right to figure out how any particular mission impacts the others and when you tweak one thing, how does that shift everything else in the whole program. So it's a tough job, but it's really interesting, you know, because that was

from everywhere, from cancellations, but also from the other side of like, how do we want to promote the next generation so that we actually have a farm team to work on the things that we're going to fly in 20 years or whatever. It's huge stuff. But we got to get to MSR also. If you don't mind, I want to talk about two things that we're not often. talk about. So we were in the news horribly about James Webb. You know, when I did an independent review. By the way, highly controversial. Many of my team members did not like me doing it. They said, everything is fine. You're just dragging us through the gutter. There's no way there's a James Webb today. If I didn't do that review, I want you to know because we needed to fix things. We did that.

You know, schedule efficiency is a famous parameter that really matters in later phases of missions. Schedule efficiency says if I schedule a day of work, how many days does it take me to do it? Schedule efficiency of 100% means for one day, I need one day. If I take two days, the schedule efficiency, of course, is 50%. We were at a schedule efficiency for close to one and a half years at 45% with Web. And the reason for that was because we made a mistake every six months. And that's a cultural problem, right? So a lot of the leaders were replaced.

We did retraining these recommendations. We implemented the Young report. We went to a schedule efficiency of 95% within four months with the same team and stuck with it. And then during the deployment, we're over 100%. So I just, I mean, that also happens. You know, for me, so amazingly proud of them. because everybody pulled them through the gutter, like these teams,

the screws come off and, you know, it's like the stories, it's like, you know, it's a good story. I wish I had more hair. But it's like, holy, like you're going to rip your hair.

When you read that story. Yeah, of course. And it is really embarrassing. But the point is the team came back and did it. Take another example. When I came in, Roman, you first had kind of grown during six months a half a billion bucks and I'm like absolutely not

not after web we're not going to do that and I actually prepared a termination I did an independent review with Orlando Ficaro at a chair that's the first one I did even ahead of yeah we might talk about him again real quick here yeah and basically what happened I actually set targets I made the chronograph a tech demo and reset targets for the cost. And I want to tell you, this, this Roman, this telescope is on track. They're in phase D. There's an asterisk to it. We needed to add some money, which we independently assessed because of COVID. So we added it for the increment, the inefficiency that happened during COVID. You know, Jamie, who's the manager that he is on track.

The coronagraph with very small deviation was developed within the cost we gave him. If you made me bet up front, this was a 50-50 shot. Tom, who Lubechuk, who was the manager of this, I didn't know how he did it. He should teach classes.

Like, I mean, that also happens. Those are strategic missions, right? I mean, I think this is going to be the most, you know, that coronagraph is going to be one of the most amazing, you know, investigations. in the history of NASA once this thing launches in 26, 27. So that also happens. I want to talk about that first before we dive into the inevitable, which is Mars sample return. I need another drink for

that one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great T. It's a great T. Sometimes strategic missions go really well. And sometimes we get Mars sample return, which is, you know, it's gone in a different direction. So I don't know where to start with MSR, to be honest. But I guess maybe just your perspective on how did we get to that point, right? Because there's, I think in hindsight, there's a lot of interesting decisions about kind of how it was structured, especially from like the leadership kind of management perspective across the centers and HQ and stuff. But like, how did we, how did we get there? Like, where do we start with MSR? Yeah.

So what I did is, you know, after I left NASA, I really had a hard time sleeping. because some of the problems that I saw, like kind of the way I work, like I screw up from time to time, but I go fix my own problems. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm like, okay, screwed up, let's go fix it. Like, you know, like, okay, I was wrong.

I tell the whole team, this is what I did. And of course, you know, it's just kind of see what happened, you know, and I found I was at JPL late November, 22, and I saw how bad the problem. problem was. And I considered should I stay or should I leave? Because it really needs one of those resets right away. By the way, Nikki was not in her job.

This is not Nikki's responsibility. It's my responsibility. I brought it there. And, you know, so what I did is kind of to handle that kind of things, By the way, a lot of people screwed up in a different way, but I'd like to talk about how I screwed up because, you know, I understand my screw-ups better than the others. There's a number of things that cannot understand that happened at JPL.

There's a number of things that cannot understand that happened at headquarters. Why the hell it took over a year to reset it if you needed to do it right away? Part of it is also it's like cancer. When you find cancer, go after it right away. You do not wait one and a half years. So the problem blossomed into a debacle, right? And that is because of the time. Again, it's not Nikki's responsibility.

I did that and kind of people who had the controls right afterward. So there's a number of things. You know, one of the biggest challenges we have at the beginning of missions is something that's usually really good in life, which is optimism. We start these missions with almost optimism groupthink. And I want to tell you I was really worried about this mission and I got sucked in. So what I wanted a really different management structure. And what I did is the team, you know, and mostly an asset team came back with a management structure that they were really excited about.

And I looked around and against my gut feeling, I excited. accepted it. That's my mistake. It was a really stupid management structure. It was way too many layers. And it basically, it has a management structure that actually did not serve as well in other missions in which the program office sat next to the project office and did not have actual oversight. In this case, it was worse because the program office at JPL was kind of actually sometimes interrupting work at other places, right? Kind of at government. Now, so the cultural differences I should have seen. We should have done something simpler. I wish I could blame somebody else. I accepted it, right? And I did it because everybody was so excited. And of course, in the idea, well, this works just fine.

It's a class book. Like, you know, I'm teaching a system class here. That's how you're supposed to do it, right? It's just, it's so complex. You know, kind of one way of talk about complexity is looking at the number of interfaces. And if that number of interfaces between systems is n, the complexity is n squared.

So this one is a hugely complicated, it's way more complicated than James Webb. So we have the wrong structure. The second, so it's kind of a political, kind of in retrospect, if I really look how it came there, it's a politically motivated structure. You know, kind of everybody was happy, so to say.

right right right right right there's a good rule if everybody's happy you have not led you know kind of usually you want you I mean I mean it's kind of actually when you hire also you can get consensus candidate you know and almost always it's probably not you know if you really want the best candidates there's like one person that really is irritated like a little bit right they come on board later but kind of consensus candidates often are just average you know and so kind of that was a consensus idea and and I took at, I think the second thing I didn't capture. This is the first time I signed on to a proposal that said that a stationally lander should be developed at JPL for the first time, even though I did not realize this is the first time that happened. Every stationery lander was developed by industry. And I signed on with, yeah, exactly lucky. Even though I knew that there were staffing

issues. But I didn't pattern match it. And so for me, what needed to happen is I think what they're doing. And frankly, I had started to work on the commercial things. You know, like I called up a number of people and basically is actually the model that I pitched to people is how about you pick up the samples and you bring it to NASA headquarters and I pay you 50 million per sample. Would you take that deal? There were people who took that deal. I want to do that.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so kind of, so for me, I, you know, in retrospect, so I got socked into kind of a consensus belief that looked good on paper and I did not kind of go under the surface. We did not rickoryize it. And I really, by the way, there were a lot of meetings and this never came to the surface. So, so what I, you know, if I stayed on, you know, I. think I said that. And again, this is ahead of Nicky. So I'm not critiquing somebody was there. I'm just

saying, if I tried to fix my own mistakes, what I would have done is, you know, immediately run them through a review, which is what happened now and then look at commercial things. So everybody knows, like, no, this is not a given. You have to earn your way. Cut it down into something that's much more feasible and then, you know, for example, a perseverance landing system as opposed to one made from scratch with pinpoint landing, which is what was the baseline and then kind of see how far we get. And if the answer is we cannot do it, let's talk about it. Because it may be too early. So it's a, it's kind of a sad story. But, you know, I don't think it's a story of people who are bad. It's a story of people who are driven by optimism doing one of the most complex missions and are not pattern

matching and that includes me and by the way a lot of other people we could talk about but it's more fair to kind of blame me than others um that basically are not pattern matching how complex is going of not the not the not the politics side of NASA yeah pretty pretty evident in this 52 minutes yeah no i mean i just i just really think You know, I called up JPL and said, let's do a meeting. Everybody bring their own sheet of crap they screwed up. And let's go say what we learned from it. Because that's actually more healthy than some independent report

that does a white-gloff version of it. Let's call it what it is. Like, okay, here's where I was blind. And the point is, you should have caught me. Like, NASA is so successful because if I make a mistake, you catch me. in this case you did not catch me what did you miss why did you not catch me

and by the way why did I not catch you when you made the mistake I from the beginning said let's start with perseverance why did that give that up I mean that's I'm sure you know the landing system as opposed to some virtual landing system nobody had ever done you know for me

you know I think it's perfectionism like let's do the best mission and kind of design it with kind of a set of requirements at the beginning. And cost is kind of what comes out at the end. It's not kind of a design parameter. And in many ways, we did it like Jamie on enrollment did better, right, kind of because he put cost in as the design parameter.

But in more sample return, you know, we did not learn that lesson. And that just teaches you just because you do well on one mission doesn't mean that you do well on all the subsequent ones. every team is new, every lesson needs to learn, be kind of internalized again. Yeah. Yeah, it seems to me like, I don't know, that sounds pretty much bang on to what I kind of imagine because like a scope this size where you've got like, you know, this is a flagship mission that is actually three flagship missions, you know, if you kind of think about it. And it's like, so you have the compounded complexity of, you know, three N and then like,

like you said, all the interfaces makes it squared. And so you have, you know, then and cubed kind of, I guess, if you think of it that way. So, so I can see how easy that is to like to fumble, right? Because it's just like you're, everyone's wandering into a scope space that that no one really has any experience with it. Like we've, I don't think NASA's ever done anything. Like, I'm thinking to be Apollo was like the last time we had, you know, multiple component scope of that size coming together, right? Shuttle maybe, shuttle ISF stuff, I guess. you can kind of think of that.

But those are a huge project. This is not that size, right? They donated decades and still do. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting to kind of hear the behind scenes there. Yeah, I think this. Just really, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, like, so is this, you know, current plan to go to industry?

Like, you said you wanted to approach commercial stuff yourself. You feel good about that? Like, I'm a little concerned. I'll just lay it out. I'm totally honest with you. I'm a little concerned that there's going to be like this weird tension between trying to fit the old pieces in with like new commercial bits and make something like that works there that isn't again overly complex because you're trying to like you know squeeze a circle through a square. But how do you feel about that? Like you think that we're on track to get it back?

My personal feeling is that there's a lot of good ideas that are in that stack of ideas. And there are dangers and you're pointing to one of them, which is to kind of use a political limit. or some kind of cost thing as a design characteristics and drive complexity into the system that's not needed. Clearly, if you and I were in that room, right, that, you know, Einstein is leading and others, right, to make recommendations. You saw the committee that's out there. You know, Steve Patel is probably the best engineer that I know. I mean, hard stop.

Like, he's on there, right? They're the right people. It's kind of an all-star team when you read the list, honestly. It's a pretty good team. I totally agree. So they will understand that complexity is poison here. Right? And if they will understand, just like you and I would,

that complexity is really what you want to drive out of the system. And what you should do is perhaps you don't bring back all the samples, you know, like the whole battery of samples, but you bring back, you know, the samples that are the most promising ones, but you actually make, you know, notch that, you know, Knox that kind of success. I just really believe there is a hope with these ideas. As I said, I don't know enough. A number of people told me about their ideas that they have submitted. So I'm quite optimistic that there's good ideas there that really give us an opportunity.

But look, I mean, there could be an option. I just want to say that we're not ready for it. We're not ready for it. And if we're not ready for it, we should have the courage to see. say so. And I basically, what I would just really like to urge people is like if you're not ready for it, decide, but this, explain to us what you need to be ready. So you can bring it back from the dead at that point. Right. I don't know whether the answer is we need to first launch our Mars with another vehicle. I mean, that is the, by the way, I don't know what the readiness will be. We're like land 10 tons or something like that. Yeah. We talked about that a couple weeks ago, Casey Hanmer's on the show that like maybe the good first step is pick a how many tons do we need to land on the surface of Mars and spend money to get to that point because at that point a lot more options open up for you and you've at least got a different place to work from than where we are now exactly so if we're not doing it we should explain what it takes what the parameters are to do it so we can come back from where we are because I am convinced that this uh just like the excitement I have for Clipper

because of the astrobiology, the excitement I have for more sample return. I want those samples in the best labs. This week alone, I've been in three different institutions in two countries that are getting ready for these samples. Like, everyone's in a while you hear people's like, oh, there's a really small community who's interested in samples. Yeah, like if you do your poll in, you know, Martian camera people, right?

It's like, oh, like everybody of you, Who's interested in molecules of big samples? Like, I don't care. I just care about, you know, landslides or whatever, right? I mean, so for me, for me, for me, there, the astrobiology of it, you know, just, just like the excitement that we're seeing from these moon samples, both the ones that NASA is opening, you know, the sample from Apollo that that was opened. but also some of the Chinese samples that came back. Look at the papers that are coming out. They're awesome.

I really love those papers. Are you really telling me that kind of samples to the best labs on Earth? I mean, I was just in Japan. Looked at Hayabusa 2 data. I mean, that's insane the signs that's coming out of five grams or whatever. Right? I mean, it's at 50, I forgot. Like, it's, I mean, it's a tiny amount.

Yeah. tiny amount. And, you know, ORAX is going to just revolutionize things. So of course we want those samples. And the Academy said it's important for good reasons. All right. Okay. Well, we're going to have to definitely have you come back and evaluate the proposals.

Jesus. We didn't even talk about clips. I was going to say, monthly recurring slot of Dr. Z. We just call them up, hit him with a question about another one, because, yeah, we've got, Clips is a thing. I feel like in the way that we might be too early for Mars, Sanford Train, we might be like six months too early to talk about clips in a way that we really need to. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, I think we'll get there. It's very early days there. But this has been awesome. Like I said, I joked that you could tell you're on the side of NASA, but it's always refreshing to hear people that we're at your position in the agency, talk the way you do with the openness and explaining the strategy and the thinking, because I think that's what a lot of us on the outside miss. And it's easy for us to, I mean, again, it's a really funny story that the screws

fell off JWST, but it's easy for us to like clamp onto that and lock onto that for years. But when you hear things that were going on inside is the perspective that you need to like round the whole circle. So I very much appreciate you hanging out and speaking about things that you were a part of in the way that you do. well look i really appreciate the work that you're doing and and frankly i've listened to you more than once so i'm glad you finally invited me yeah so uh you're just a second appearance so congrats if there's another topic i have to come up with a better drink but i really love this kind of rock and fashioned so uh so we'll come up with something else but uh thanks for

for this i really appreciate it and see you next time okay all right thanks so much thanks everybody i don't think we have anything else to plug right now, Jake, do we? Not right now. I don't think so. Not yet. We're in a scheduling quandary, so... We are, yeah. We'll let you know what we come up with, but we'll see on Halloween in summer. It might be Dr. Z back again, yeah.

In a Halloween costume this time. Yeah, exactly. All right, thanks, we'll see you all. Bye, everybody. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.