Off-Nominal - 186 - It’s Like the Cinnamon Challenge (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, to talk about the current era of Executive action, Congressional pushback (or not) against it, and the upcoming Day of Action.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 186 - It’s Like the Cinnamon Challenge (with Casey Dreier) - YouTubeThe Day of Action | The Planetary SocietyThe Space Advocate Newsletter, February 2025 | The Planetary SocietyHouse hearing debates ways to improve Artemis - SpaceNewsFollow 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. Hello, boys. Hello. How's it going? Hi. What's up? We got this right. I don't know if you listened

a couple weeks ago, Casey, when we, like, at the end of an episode, announced to the world, Casey Dreyer is coming on next week. And then we end of the show. And Jake and I were like, that wasn't next week, was it? And we were like, no, we were off by at least half a month.

So you finally made it. I think we were going back and forth on timing. I was getting a tooth drilled. I think the last opportunity I had to be here. So I wisely did not commit. I couldn't move my mouth. for a couple hours after that, I would not have been a good guest for you. But not have been a great.

Excellent. Yeah. It's funny because we had talked about that date and then near the end of our conversation. Let's go for this one and said. And like I knew that. I read it. I understood it. I wrote on the calendar right.

And then just in my in the, we call it show fugue. When we're like, when we're live like this, we just sometimes the rest of the world just blocks out. We don't really know what's going on and we don't remember what we said. It's like we got in show fugue. so I'm sure millions of disappointed fans tuned in and didn't hear me the following week but I'm happy to be I mean and that the topic list is completely different but the topic is the same

since since only two weeks ago so what the hell's going on is that the yeah we get new data every time but pretty much yeah so I should have my glasses I always forget on these days when cases on I gotta wear glasses I don't know. We've got to differentiate ourselves somehow, guys. Jake and I are still emerging into the same person. We're not really, yeah, we're doing kind of an anti-D-EI episode here. That's basically, yeah.

NASA, give us your money. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. So good. That's how it goes. What do we got for drinks here today, boys? What's going on? I got a super weird one

I don't even know why I picked this beer off of the shelf I think it's called Little Treasures and it just has all of these like weird rubber duck and like seagulls and lobsters and these campers and then like little sailor guys over here and Moahead there's a lot going on

I don't know what I have no idea why I picked this one but it's like I don't know it looks kind of fun so vitamin C brewing from Weymouth Mass, W-E-Y-Mouth, Massachusetts. It's probably not pronounced like that at all. No, knowing Massachusetts, it's probably like mooth or something. So that's what I got, little treasures.

Cool. That's it. You got some, Casey? I do, actually, in an honor of all that's happening, I did. So even though it's a little early, I'm just having a little bit, but I'm having some Kentucky bourbon, Woodford Reserve, just a little bit, just a little bit. to smooth the conversation today. What is it about like a good,

you know, a good whiskey, good bourbon where you have like a glass like that and just the sliver makes it look like it's better quality. You're like, I can only afford this much. That's how good it is. It might be more of a context thing if I had.

I have a full glass of it. That wouldn't be usually not associated with a, with an enlightened attitude towards things. Or lunch. Or lunch. Yeah, you're recently off lunch. Yeah, this is why I'm just having a little bit. I say I'll have a workday ahead of me, so I can't have more than a set.

But it's a, I knew today I had to have something. That's more than just my usual water. Only when you go to DC, do you drink a full whiskey or bourbon glass for lunch? And then you go to the tune in right by Capitol Hill and you just drink an entire glass of whiskey. The hawk and dove. Yeah. The old hawk and dove, yes. We'll get there, yeah, which will be there in less than a month at our day of action on March 23.

and 24th in Washington, D.C. Wow. Is that too early for a plug? No, not at all. Planetary. Now, when you talk about it later, it's not weird. Yes, exactly. It's not manufactured.

Can I say something? I was at the Everyday Astronaut Space Gala Awards last month in Austin. And I ran into the owner of Star Base Brewing, who said that he had heard me on this show mentioned that I would happily accept his beers if he wanted to send them and said that he had internalized that and he came up to me and mentioned that which I was very appreciative. I have not received them though

since I've gotten back. I'll just point out. I desperately owe him a text back I think is the so I like he was very nice and he was there sponsoring. He might have cut everyone out that he heard on off nominal until we get back to him. I had a chance to try his beers which are great and he was sponsoring

part of the event and it was a very a pleasure to meet him. That's awesome. Awesome. And I'm still, I just again, I'll just casually mention I haven't got my beers yet. Awesome not out there. I love this. I love every time off-nominal becomes a platform for someone to settle up an internet argument like the time

that Mark Pellor called out Peter Beck for calling Centaur Fat and now you calling out Nate for not having the beers yet. I'm just saying facts, right? I'm just no judgment. I don't expect. I don't expect anything. It's purely an observation. Just passionate.

Just say it's a facts. The same facts. Wow. Wow. What you got, Jake? Do you get any beers down there? No, no. I went anti the advice of having a full glass of anything.

No, I'm doing margaritas. It's a pool's open this weekend, boys. Pool's opening this weekend. So this is a tamarind margarita. So it's got a little bit of tamarind. and constrate on it. And then the real Mexican way is you put a little tihine on the outside.

Excellent. You're getting good at those. Yeah, that's a very Mars-colored margarita. Looking at that up to your Mars one background. It looks like a little bit of Mars dust. Regularly on the edge there. Got to get some brushes to sweep that off, Jake. Some, yeah, something for those solar panels, right?

All you do is just let it sit outside. for a couple of months and you got that nice dusting on it. I always have reminded, I'm sure you both have read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Was it the religious sect that would eat the dust in red Mars to kind of consume the planet? I always think about that. That stuff would, it's like the cinnamon challenge, right? Because, you know, Martian dust, there's no water, so it's all jagged and sharp. It's not rounded like our dust here.

I think it would get caught in your throat. And I think, you know, and full of chlorides, which are pretty reactive. be like pop rocks in your mouth except poisonous. Cinnamon Chown, what a shout out to the when was that? I'm with it from 10 years ago. Yeah, I don't know.

Wasn't that long ago. I didn't think it was that long ago. It's from when Katie Perry was big around that time. Yeah. I know my internet memes when they are written about as concerned collapse of youth civilization in the New Yorker. So that's usually a few generations removed from what the current peak is.

Oh, man, we're getting old, aren't we? Ross and Lauren Sanchez, you know? Yeah. Weird makeup of a girl's weekend. Gail King, Katie Perry, just putting a real mixie together there. That's the whole situation. I don't even know where you want to start, Jake. I suggested topics. I suggested we talk about the trailer for Andor season two for the entirety of

the show. If you were going to, you, you've put capital E executive action as a topic, Jake. And I did. Well, only because, so I, Casey had been writing or doing analysis on these executive orders because they came in like pretty hot and heavy, you know, in those first, those first couple weeks, there were a number of executive orders that dropped and trying to parse out what they were, what they meant, whether they would or wouldn't have an impact, whether they would or wouldn't have an impact on space was like kind of your job a little bit for a while there. I felt like it's, I feel like some of the post you made was like, oh, shit, Matt Casey's deep in this right now and I want to talk to him about it.

So that's good. That was the impetus for the show. Maybe we can start with that. I don't know. What is the work you have been doing on that? And I don't know, I guess what did you learn? Maybe we can start. Yeah, that's certainly a big place to start.

I mean, big picture, right? So President Trump has been putting out a lot of an unusually high number of executive orders. You know, he's the head of the executive branch. He's basically, these are directing the executive branch how to, you know, policies and how to perform and decisions to make. Obviously, they're a bit more muscular than a lot of them had come previously and a lot of them are intended to drive a lot more change within the agencies. And in a sense, almost to kind of probe and discover what the limits of presidential power are. the impacts that NASA has been having from them are, I think maybe the first kind of context is that there's nothing directed

specifically at NASA, right? These are just directed at the broad executive branch of which obviously NASA is part of. And so the agency is trying to figure out how to implement these itself, but again, it's not like targeted at the space agency, right? So obviously you have a number of them regarding DEIA activities. You have a number of them regarding, kind of the more cultural stuff of gender and how to talk about that.

And then there's more, in a sense, impactful, at least quantitative ones regarding spending and workforce. And, you know, some of them have gone forward and some of them haven't. And you talk about things that trying to understand and in it, you know, I had a whole two days where we thought all government grants were going to be frozen, trying to understand exactly the scope and breadth. You know, by the time I'd finished the analysis on that and was about to start public. it, they rescinded it, right? So this is like a very rapid cycle that we're trying to keep up with. The one, actually, we just had one last night. Is that the one in particular you're referring to, or is there the ones? Probably not. I bet he doesn't know which one was that last night. The one from last night is more, again, I'm rather concerned about it in terms of a NASA workforce

and efficiency perspective. Again, it's not directed at NASA. It's just a broad government directive, but it's kind of asserting in a sense the, you know, the Doge team now has individual representatives, kind of in place at every agency. And that this directive in addition to kind of codifying that adds a series of tasks for them to work with with the agency head, in this case, the administrator. First of which is basically freezing all travel until you can implement some system that, in a sense requires constant written justification for every piece of travel you do with, for example, the scientific conferences, implementing a system to track all outgoing expenditures

and requiring written justification for every single, every single outward expenditure of the agency that then gets approved by the Doge person and the administrator, or at least reviewed by it. you have a limit on government employee held credit cards to $1 so they can't spend and buy anything. And you have a number of directives. They could buy $1. I guess you can buy a lot of, people still buy songs on iTunes for $99. You can buy a lot of things for $99.

They could sign up for our Discord or Patreon or something. Yeah, you know, maybe get a payment plan. It's true. 100 payments for $0.99. over the years. And also, I think maybe more troubling from a big picture perspective is the directive to start planning for what is unspecified but said substantial workforce reductions in terms of identifying which staff you don't need and property in terms of getting rid of property.

Now, obviously, a lot of this is very, you know, your perspective on this will change with different kind of political philosophy. And, you know, from the planetary society's perspective, again, we're as a nonpartisan organization, it's, I think we've been trying to be really careful saying, like, what we've been worried about isn't in a sense that NASA, we just need civil servants for the sake of having civil servants or NASA needs to have this big footprint for the sake of having it. It's to what strategy are they executing towards and to what, if they do need to reduce staff, what staff are they reducing?

and why and how will that enable the agency to, you know, execute its mission better, which is still, you know, despite all the talk, on paper to send humans back to the moon for the first time sends Apollo. And when they did that, they had 36,000 civil servants. They reduced it afterwards. And that was, you know, the analytical stuff you're talking about, Jake, just the original idea to, which they ended up not doing was firing all probationary, basically newly hired or newly promoted individuals, that itself would have been the largest involuntary layoff at NASA

since the end of Apollo, except now they're actually trying to go to the moon, right? They're not ending a moon program. They're spinning one up. And so again, it's like, is this a, how are they doing this and why? And obviously from this broad directive that came out last night, we don't in a sense have we don't know exactly what decision metric they're going to be using. we're hearing lots of scary numbers in a sense from the inside, but obviously nothing is for sure. And I'll emphasize that this, what's called a RIF, a reduction in force, this is all much more by the book, less questionable in terms of, you know, the legal authority to do so.

This is all relatively by the book and prescribe procedures for reducing workforce. So, you know, if they want to pull this through and Congress, which so far hasn't shown in total, much interest in, correcting this could have a pretty substantial reduction coming our way. Yeah. It's very chaotic. And there's like a lot of the impacts, you know, the thing I kind of think about a lot right now is that like you can't really have a, it's hard to make like a value judgment on whether it's a good move or not because like at a really fundamental level, the thought

process of trying to make the government more efficient is virtuous. like that both sides of the aisle would agree. Like, no, like if we can do the more or the same with government for less, like that everyone thinks that's better, right? Like, that's just like, you know, if you get more value per taxpayer dollar spent, it's good. But the way it's happening is very interesting. Like in the, I kind of call it like a forest fire style of doing it where you just like

burn it all down and then you hope that like the good stuff grows back and you get a healthy forest at the end of it. But like it's very disruptive in the short term. right? The one thing I was kind of paying attention to you is like all that analogy, just so good. First time I've heard you say that, excellent. Stuck the landing in that one.

Yeah. The thing I've been kind of paying attention to you was all these like analysis groups, right? So the planetary, you've got the, the Mars one is me peg, right? Meatbag and Meatbag and. Yeah, Mexag for Mercury. Jupes. Jube's bag.

League from the moon. You've got OPEG for, yeah, there's all these different groups that, you know, look at different kind of planets and they, you know, they're like semi-independent, right? Like they're not really like part of NASA, but they've, they received some, some funding, I think, from NASA to, and sometimes they get help with facilities or they get presentations from NASA and all these kind of things. There's a lot of partnership that goes along with that. And they were basically told to stop. And so they bunch of them skip their meetings. They only have meetings every quarter or sometimes even every year, depending on the group.

And so like the, the productivity loss is there. Like, that's going to be the kind of thing that we'll have to look back on later to say like, you know, whether this was a good, a good change to the federal government or not, like what was the, what was the short-term productivity loss? And, you know, is that factored into the equation of determining its worth, right? That's kind of, I don't know, that's where I started with. Yeah, I mean, I think we could even go to last night's orders and say, does requiring everyone who approves already approved contractual obligations of spending, does requiring them to further justify it every time a check goes out the door and it's some written thing, is that an

improvement in efficiency or not? To me, it does not strike me as an efficient way of doing things, right? It's intended to try to slow spending. But again, contracts are already approved through a legal process, right? They've been approved. It's just literally just paying them out and or even just giving them through a process that's already been defined. And so it's in some sense, I worry, there's like a certain Orwellian nature to some of the language that I find troubling in that you're adding in a sense layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy and paperwork in order to dissuade some of these activities, right? That's the idea to kind of reduce.

The goal obviously is to reduce or to make it harder to spend money or to go travel. And again, for some people, that might be a reasonable tradeoff. The amounts of money we're talking about here are modest in the scheme of, again, just in the scope of government spending, right? You could eliminate all every non-military, non-social service in the United States, and you would still have a little bit of a deficit left over at the rate where deficit spending, right? So keeping a scientist from going to a science conference and saving a few thousand dollars is not going to be, you know, the make or break difference. But this is what is being implemented.

And, you know, with a tacit acceptance of at least the, the, the majority in Congress right now. And so I don't, again, this is all happening with that uncertainty. Again, is this going to make that workforce better at doing what we are asking them to do? And it's an interesting analogy, the forest fire. Forest fires are uncontrolled, destructive, right? Obviously, a lot of my colleagues that were very affected by that and just in Los Angeles. And yes, you can rebuild from them, but you have to actively rebuild.

build and what grows back may not be what it had before. I think that's the predicate of the philosophy of what's happening now. Well, whatever structures there is so ossified and broken and immovable, it just let's wipe it all out. We haven't seen that second part yet. What are you intending to rebuild it with and how, right? There's a lot of discussion, oh, we'll be more efficient with fewer people and we'll use like AI or, you know, I usually says, like, we'll use AI-ish, you know, and there's always some kind of like undefined sense of applying that or software.

It's like, okay, well, how? And we know, what's the process for putting that in on what timeline? We just haven't seen that part two yet. There's clear, I think, desire, I think from a philosophical perspective to shift a lot of this onto external contractors and commercial entities, which we can get into as well. But then there are just certain things that just don't. aren't good matches for that. And I think that's going to be the big question.

We just had a house hearing yesterday about Artemis, where there was a lot of support. I think we've talked about this before. If you're already dancing on the grave of the SLS, you know, that may still be premature given the statements we saw from the Republican leaders of that committee and elsewhere regarding that program. And so if we do have then big cuts and they do end up preserving the SLS, they'll fall disproportionately in other places.

And my concern is areas like science. which has no commercial, there's no commercial science company, right? That's putting out science missions the way that there is with rockets. The congressional, like, movements right now, they're starting to have hearings. They're starting to be budget talks and the things that Congress do are starting to be relevant after the first, like, you know, month, month and half of primarily executive.

Yeah, Paul Trump all the time. Crazy, too, that, like, yeah, they're, you know, we spent the first, spent from, from, November to January talking about the Republicans have both houses of Congress, they've got the presidency, they've got a Supreme Court that's friendly, look at what's going to happen on this three branch of government sweep, and then it was like all executive action, right? Actually, that's the thing that I'm kind of mystified by is that it doesn't feel like it's, most of these things are not landing particularly friendly with the Congress right now, and I think

there's going to be some like intergovernmental dispute when, you know, maybe as a person who's generally been concerned about the scope of the presidency in my lifetime, like, hey, maybe this is the moment in Congress. It's like, no, no, no, we get to do some stuff, right? Like, we actually do still control things. Like, maybe this is the moment when they start creeping back. Crazy that it will be like a same party thing that that happens with. And that might be on specific topics, like we're talking about SLS, but that could be a larger thing.

Or the space station. Or the space station. But, you know, the fact, it's such an interesting mix politically right now when you a president who is on his last term and, you know, we'll find out if it's more or less likely that his vice president might run and win next time. But like, it's a one-term presidency right now. So that particular person does not have a lot of future power. People in Congress don't feel like they need to stay friends with that particular individual. They do want the support of his movement generally. But there's so many interesting dynamics. But I don't know.

Were you as surprised as I was that the first month really was, completely excluding Congress. And now as we get into March, we're going to have Trump speaking in like the state of the union kind of address in a president's first year. We're going to have budgets being floated. We're going to get into the standard rotation of things that we usually see. What shifts or what notable signals are you tracking for like the March timeframe? Well, I've certainly been, I'd say, surprised at the relative lack of Congress's own kind of protection of its own responsibilities, right, and its legislative responsibilities. Now, again, Republicans in Congress would dispute that, and they say that they believe what the

president's doing is within his powers, and they will do what's within their powers. The big question is really on, I think, the idea of spending and impoundment, what's called, the idea that Congress can appropriate money and the president is claiming, he can decide whether or not to spend it. is what's called impound the appropriated funds and just declined to spend it. There's some historical examples of this going way back. Nothing really in the modern era except until Nixon and the law that we have, the 1974 Impoundment Act was passed by Congress,

a big, big, big majorities of Congress to protect their power of the purse, right? It's kind of Article 1 of the Constitution. The argument is being the president is supposed to execute the laws, and if the law says, here's the money to spend. your job is to spend the money. That's a big, that will be, I imagine, some sort of Supreme Court decided thing. So I won't kind of hazard to say which way it's going to go.

But I say, you know, from when we talked last and from if those have listened to MySpace Policy edition prior to this administration beginning, I would say that I assumed a stronger congressional opinion than what we've seen so far. And that may just be the key word so far, right? I mean, we're still very early into this administration. We're five weeks, not even five weeks really into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at some point, you know, it's in a sense the actions being taken so far, you know,

they're broadly popular within the Republican Party. And as the nation has become more, in a sense, polarized, there are fewer and fewer competitive districts, right? And so, you know, members of the Republican Party, even if they see some pushback or are a little uncertain by it. A lot of them are in just very, very safe districts. And it's actually a bigger risk for them politically to break with the president because then they could lose in a primary. And I've started to talk about this a little bit. But I think this is a really fascinating thing that we're seeing right now is that since the end of Apollo, the space politics have been

defined by parochialism, right? Like the what will this do from my district? I'm a senator from Texas. I want money flowing into Johnson. I'm a senator from Alabama. I want money flowing in to Huntsville. I don't really care about the broader national interest of the space program. I may pay some lip service. I may care a little bit. But at the end of the day, money comes here, right? Because that's where my constituents are. We're seeing, I think, the first real potential shift of that, right, where it may be more

politically beneficial, particularly for members of some of the, you know, in the Republican party right now with who has a very strong and very popular president among their base to say, it's okay to take that economic hit in my state because that's better for me as a you know, to be aligned with this leader of my party. And if that occurs at that fundamental dynamic shifts, then it's a really kind of a very different game for space and how it goes forward. And so again, and we haven't, we haven't finished running that yet. And clearly we're seeing a little bit, there's still that lingering, right?

Ted Cruz didn't seem super happy about, you know, deorbiting ISS really early. we're seeing a lot of quiet but real pushback against canceling the SLS right away. We saw some of that yesterday in the hearing with Brian Babin, who's the chair of the science committee from Texas. And we, you know, so it's not dead yet, right? I think it's just a very different, it's much more of an open question than has ever been because space has been generally one of those last bastions of, you know, this kind of local politics trumping the nationalization of all of it.

political ideas. Yeah. I kind of thought, I've been thinking about this, this idea, too, it's like, you know, where's, where's Congress is in these last five weeks? But I think, I think I'm, I think I'm not as surprised by it as I, as others are because, A, like you said, five weeks is, I know it feels like a lot longer, because there's just been so much news, but like, it's just five weeks. And I think that, you know, when you think about the, the, the, presidential election, I don't think it was super surprising that Trump won, but I think it was super surprising that his mandate was so strong, right? I think that was sort of the, you know, everyone was sort of prepared for the eventuality that, you know, it could go either way. It could

have gone Democrat, could have got Republican. Like, I think that was totally on the table as a possibility. But like, the idea that he would have come in and just totally secured every swing state and done, you know, and coming with such, such a vigor of a mandate, I think. that probably puts Congress back on their heels a little bit, right? Because it's just like, oh, well, it's not tenuous. It's not like last time where it's like, well, he just squeaked by with a couple of swing states and didn't have popular vote. Like, none of those excuses are good anymore. Like, like straight up, the guy won. Straight up one. Like, period. You know. And so if you're, if you're Congress, you probably want to be strategic at this point because it's just like, you know,

Trump's really popular. I'm not going to say a bad thing yet. We got lots of time. I'm just going to see which way the wind blows, go under the radar, not ruffle any feathers, let them spend a bunch of energy on executive orders. Half the ones I don't like will get struck down by courts anyway, so I don't have to put my political capital on the line for that. And then once the dust is settled, we can pick the battles we want to pick and then go to war, right? That seems like how I would have approached it politically. But I don't know, does that seem sane or am I missing something? No, I think so. I mean, that's certainly, I think that's certainly broadly the case and then I would add into that if I cross you cross the president right now

Elon Musk will spend $200 million in your district to promote your primary opponent. I mean, I'm not joking. I mean, that's one of the real unexpected kind of aspects of this is that you have someone who is willing and essentially free to give a free reign to jump into these situations like that and basically be that enforcer. And so that the question is then will they, you know, how and what battles? will they pick and what will they feel that is, you know, anything like that, you'd almost have to say that they would be willing to lose a primary four to openly go against the president

in a high profile issue. I think what you'll see is maybe what we're starting to see now, a lot of behind the scenes pushback. And, you know, we have seen things successfully reversed, right? The initial freeze on government grants was rescinded before it was implemented. We've seen a lot of agencies pulling, I think the other day, they tried to fire, a bunch of individuals from Veterans Affairs. And those were trying to, I think, canceled or trying to be restored at the last minute. You've seen people who were laid off from Department of Energy's Nuclear Safety Commission trying to be hired back.

So there are, clearly there's some sort of pushback happening. It's just not visible. And I think that's the key is that there's a visible alignment versus a, you know, pushback behind the scenes. And my guess is that that's what you're going to broadly see. Now, obviously, that's different. If you're a Democrat, right, you want to be. very visible. And it's the way that these incentives work in terms of how the political

alignments have developed is that Democrats will be highly incentivized now to break completely and be highly critical, which will actually make Republican defectors less likely to want to join them because then they'll be seen as joining, you know, a highly critical opposition party. And so it just, it just that kind of that further cleavage of the partisanship, unfortunately, we'll just kind of push this into strange areas. But it's, I mean, it's one of those things, again, where we do have to keep, I think, the big picture. And this is where for the planetary society's perspective, right, there's a lot happening.

Some of the stuff is well within, I think clearly well within executive authorities. Some, as you point out, others will be challenged and are being challenged by the courts. The one that I'm, again, that I'm really concerned of is both workforce and budget for NASA. these two kind of normal-sounding things that could have real long-term consequences, right? So we talked a little bit about workforce. I'm very, very worried about upcoming budget cuts to NASA and where they will be applied. And those aren't just coming from the White House. So we have a White House budget request that's due sometime in the next month or two.

We're expecting what's called a skinny budget in the sense that they don't have the full amount of time to put together a full comprehensive budget request. They may put out something in the next few weeks that is just a high level. Here's what, you know, top line numbers for agencies or key programs. We're expecting some pretty draconian sounding cuts in that. That would be consistent with what we've been seeing coming out of the White House and with workforce reductions. But then at the same time, you have what's called a reconciliation process successfully

has now moved through both Senate and House so they have to reconcile. They have to reconcile the reconciliation. budget, it's a, it's a variety of these kind of internal legislative quirks. But the end of the day, what they're trying to do is set themselves up to pass some substantial changes in tax code and other kind of funding issues free of needing a 60 vote majority in the Senate, right? So they only need a simple majority. And to do that, you need to, you know, kind of balance a number of things around. We won't go into the arcane aspects of this. But what we've seen coming up from both Senate and House are calling for substantial, you know,

on the order of $2 trillion over 10 years reductions to the account, you know, the part of the federal budget that funds NASA and other domestic agencies. NASA classically has not bucked the trend of that account, right? So when that pie gets smaller, NASA's slices generally gotten smaller. When that pie has gotten bigger, NASA slice has gotten bigger. And so, you know, we have a two-track pathway then, right? We have the White House looking probably for budget cuts and Congress presenting a situation,

where by committing to larger tax cuts and increases in border security and defense spending, you just shrink the pot that NASA has to use. And at the end of the day, both of those align in a way that I'm not excited about, right, that you would have just less money for NASA priorities. And, you know, again, this would be, I think you can debate whether and how NASA should spend money, right? I know that a lot of your listeners in your Discord and what do you have opinions about wasteful programs in NASA.

My, my show content may or may not be mostly about that. Yeah. I think the worst case scenario, though, is that what we end up is, is keeping big expensive projects like SLS with a reduced budget. I think that's actually where the politics are probably most likely to lead to. Yeah, that's like a worst case scenario because it just sucks up all the good money. And I think that's the most likely scenario we're actually facing because SLS has the most support.

It has the support of the, you know, SLS is overrepresented in states, uh, represented by Republicans right now who are in the majority. And NASA science is unfortunately overrepresented in states represented by Democratic minority, right? California, Maryland and Virginia. So that's a bad, just that out of the gate is a bad dynamic to be in if you're a fan of NASA science, but also just like the broader geopolitical competition with China and the kind of primacy of human spaceflight as a symbolic representation.

of what NASA does, and even just the clear interest of what Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been talking about of sending humans to the moon, none of those require missions to, you know, Europa or Venus or, you know, the scientific stuff that we're really excited about, the planetary society. And that, again, has no or very limited number of commercial ways to reduce those costs, right? There's just, I can get into it. But I think there's like a fundamental difference of type of mission of science missions versus human spaceflight and other types of missions that make them really difficult to achieve that kind of savings in. Yeah. Yeah, the, sometimes I, you know, refer to what's happening here is, like this style of government changes. It's not, you know,

it's not the first time this has happened. It's, I call it like, you know, business man solves government, you know, where it's like very much, oh, I will go in. It's, how would a CEO fix the government is sort of, you know, what's happening here. And it, it always feels a little out of touch. to me because it's just like, well, all the, all the tools you have as a CEO, which is like, my word goes and you do what I say and I have like ultimate authority. Like that doesn't, doesn't really work in a democracy. That's not how democracy is function. Right. They're, they're slow and messy by nature because they have to involve a lot of consensus and public support. And I feel like science missions, it's like one more level of that, right? Where it's like,

not only is this a publicly funded program. And so like CEO levers don't work and fixing it. It is also a like a really difficult, the program is really difficult to show the value of that program directly the way you can with some other ones. Like, you know, you talk about the post office or something. It's like, well, we spend this with money and Americans get mail. Like, there's like, that's what they get. Like straight up, you can draw a straight line between the value. But it's like, what do Americans get when we find out that there are organics in a rock on

Mars. And it's like, it's a lot trickier to explain, you know, to draw that, that line to say, like, this actually is good for you as a society to have this knowledge and what we can do with this, right? It's a harder one to say. And businessman fixes government doesn't want that nuance, right? It's a trickier one to soar out. So yeah, I can kind of see how that might be a bit of a trap I get into, right? I'm going to push back a little bit on that. But I think the fundamental communication strategy problem is there. because when they pull Americans in public polling, is the stuff at the very bottom, right,

in terms of what they think NASA should be doing. The very stuff at the top, it's Earth observation, planetary defense, and science. Those are the top three things. And it's not by, they're not edging out human spaceflight. You know, they're like three to four times, right? It's a huge difference. And it's a completely inverted structure

in terms of what the political support is for those, right? And it's a, so I think there is, it's almost, I think, that you have an easier time with science, in the broad sense that I think science is an unalloyed public, or at least knowledge, let's say, even just kind of pulling back from some of the modern culture war stuff that's going on now. Just knowledge is, I think, widely accepted as a public good, right? It's good to know things about the world in which we inhabit, so we better understand it. And it can help us live better or be better or not get eaten by or fall into volcanoes or whatever, you know, kind of situation you're looking at. Prove that one the best.

That's also the part of it, right? Yeah, it's, there's also like the action of science in the ideal sense is kind of an ennobling activity, right? That you're working together to better understand things in a systematic way. Space science in particular is often discovery science, right, where you don't have a lot of opportunities just left on Earth to say, what if we go there and you'll learn something brand new, right? Because you've just never been there before Earth is so well discovered, explore that you don't have that as many options. And space science also allows you to basically validate, it's stress testing every theory we've developed just on Earth, right? Like,

have we taken for granted some aspect of the domain here on Earth, whether gravity or physical or whatever, geologic, that doesn't necessarily. that we don't even know is a variable. So we test our things out there to say, do we really understand something? Let's stress test this theory. We've got to go somewhere else. Does geology work the same way as it does on Earth? Does physics?

It does biology. That's obviously the big question. So in a way, I think people understand that kind of maybe somewhat intuitively. But the problem in a sense is that science is smaller in scope than human spaceflight. And so the political coalition that wants to defend it is. just smaller, right? Just by nature of it being in a sense more efficient, you don't have as many bought-in districts for it. And then there's just kind of just an accidental alignment of the political, the representational district, like where NASA is. I had this really great

interview with Brian Odom, who's the chief historian at NASA, and he published a book about NASA in the South on my podcast, Space Policy Edition. You know, and you realize every NASA center that NASA made as NASA has been in the American South, right? Every other center that is not in the American South predated the existence of NASA and was just incorporated into it, right? And so that's, and that was a number of reasons among them was the government policy at the time to try to economically revitalize the South and modernize it and create infrastructure and build it up. The presence of Southern Democrats in the Senate at the time who, how inverted our politics were that that was the case.

But the result is that those centers tend to be human space-frit related because that's when they're building it around Apollo. And these other centers that aren't just do other things. And so there's this fundamental, just political alignment based, complete accidents of history about how the politics evolved in those locations. At the end of the day, that question, though, about why, you know, we're doing, you know, various things versus others. It's obviously been on my mind a lot.

I do have, I've been monologuing a lot, so I'll stop. But I do have, and it might be an opportunity to test this out. I do have a broader kind of perspective on, in a sense, defending in a sense, the value of a public space program and what that gives us that I've been working on from a conceptual thing. And I think that's, I think that's a message that we need to talk about more. And not in a way that saying we don't need or don't value commercial or private space flight. It's that I think we're almost trending too hard.

And I think we talked about this the last time I was on the show, but this kind of focus on the efficiencies of the private sector, they're real. But as you point out, Jake, right, they depend on a fundamentally different mode of operation, a less democratic mode of operation. You can't go and as citizens, you can't go and advocate to SpaceX, right? They do not care. They won't listen. You could try to convince Elon Musk himself, right? But then you're convincing an individual. And I think at the end of the day, the question to me is,

private space hits on an actual, it's an individualistic mindset, right? In the sense that you have a very strong founder ethos related to most of these new space companies. They're representing, ironically, and it's a more emotionally impactful, internal individualistic opportunity, right? Settling Mars, you know, changing, you know, saving humanity,

doing these big kind of dreamy things that would never make it through the public policy process, right? But then in practice, they're relentlessly utilitarian. military and, you know, as I keep saying, you know, it's great to have this incredible launch capability that SpaceX has given us. But you got to, someone's got to build the thing to go on the rockets, right? And they can't all just be things pointing down to send us, you know, more internet signals back at each other, right? Like, if you want to do anything else, you got to build the thing that goes on top of the rocket. And so ironically, the public sector,

which has the more bloodless, you know, kind of acceptable policy-oriented quantitative arguments for why we're doing things, is the sector that does the really truly inspiring non-commercial, you know, let's go to Europa and look for life. Let's go to Mars.

Let's go to Pluto. Those things don't happen in the commercial sector because you cannot justify them as any sort of profit-making utility. So there's an interesting tension between the, it says a private space flight, spaceflight has this romanticized rhetoric around it, but in practice, it's relentlessly utilitarian, while public spaceflight has a certain kind of bloodless bureaucratic speak around it, but the application of what it does is truly romantic and inspiring.

And I think that tension has yet to be resolved. And this is where I think we need to talk about, at least from planetary society perspective, this value of what does the public sector space program, what does that give us in a unique sense? And the unique things that it does, that's the thing to do more of, right? By definition, and go from there. Are there, like, structural things, though,

that you can look at to figure out where the NASA spend is? Like, when we see the line item for SLS spending is, two billion a year? What do we got? Two, three billion? Two and a half. 2.5, 2.6. Like, how much per year gets wired over to Boeing's account

versus how much is captured within NASA's? And what is that part doing? Is, like, are there things that you can look at if you were to take this on, right? And is that, which part is the part that actually would be the better cut? Is it wire less money to Boeing or capture less money within NASA?

It depends what, it depends who's saying what is the better outcome. I think you're framing, though, of, like, of getting to the romantic application process. Because I don't think there's many people in the space industry that would argue, like, probably could do less in both of these departments. But how do you actually figure out which part is the thing that is in the way of getting the romantic part? Sorry, I'm getting excited, so I don't mean to cut you off.

No, like that's a great of a drama of bourbon now. It's more of a function of, again, I think, leaning into the, unique quality, right? And so obviously, SLS is not something that is a unique capability. I mean, in some ways, technically it is, but obviously NASA or Boeing, you know, through its classic contracting methods, they don't build rockets as well as the private sector. It's been definitively, I think, answered, you know, multiple times now. And is that, you know, if we're facing a situation of less money and wanting to be efficient, doesn't make sense to replicate that internally. And so that's where I would say probably not.

And that that money, you know, whether it goes to Boeing or not, isn't so much the question is how are you spending it? Are you spending it doing the things that NASA then can do uniquely? So at Marshall, if they want to keep that money in Alabama, and this was actually ironically the original proposal that Lori Garber did under the Obama administration when SLS was mandated, was saying, you know, instead of building rockets, why don't you figure out like nuclear propulsion? let's do that because the private sector is probably can't do that one. Can we do advanced new types of propulsion? Can we do real serious attempts at long-term life support? The types of things that you really need that the private sector just can't really do or you want to do first and then hand it over to them,

the kind of cutting edge uncertain research and technology development, that's in a sense how the money should be spent rather than doing stuff we already know how to do. And you can actually probably utilize a lot of the same workforce. So it's, you know, NASA generally, I think in, that's the number, it's something like 80% of the NASA budget for NASA just goes out the door to contractors every year as it is, right? That's that even predates the current era of commercial space. And it's how that, again, it's just where it's directed and how it's spent. And so leaning into, I think, to the unique quality, what can we do the industry cannot?

where do we recognize that just the fundamental incentive structures of how we tell contractors to build a big rocket versus a commercial company and a fixed contract to build a rocket clearly don't lead to the same outcomes. And we can learn from that, right? And this is where, again, I go to science. And this isn't even to say that there aren't efficiencies to be found. But I think we've kind of established so far that the concept of efficiency is a bit of a misnomer in terms of what's being applied at the moment. it's about cramming down all sorts of spending on a relatively modest scale, but with real kind of overburdened consequences to the people, you know, asked to do this stuff.

Can we make that work better? And, you know, we were called for that in our recommendations to the incoming Trump administration is holding contractors to account, expecting more in terms of performance and having a higher level of, you know, decision-making process and trying to reduce these types of burdens. But at the end of the day, again, no one else will send a mission to Europa except the public sector, right? Because there's just no, and it's not even the sense. You can't even necessarily pay a private company to do that because you're starting in a sense.

This is like the other fundamental difference of science, I think, versus other domains of space. Science as we've configured it, mainly space science, you start with the questions you want to answer. And then you work backwards from there to define how you build the spacecraft. is like, are you going to answer these questions? And that leads you. That's why you have a spacecraft designed to answer those set of questions. You don't have multiple, you don't just pull Europa clipper off the shelf, right? And the domain is so different.

Europa environment is so different than Martian environment is so different than lunar environment that you don't have, you don't really have an opportunity for scale in terms of production, maybe in terms of some sub components, that if you want to answer the big questions, you have to start with those. work backwards. Human space flight, you can build a lot of the same thing, right? You can build multiple dragons because every dragon is basically the same thing. Build multiple shuttles.

You build multiple rockets. They're all basically the same thing. You're printing to order, right? They're in a production line. You can get economies of scale that way. Sometimes one shows up a little late, okay? Listen, get a month or two month delay and then you just start tweeting some crazy shit.

All right? Yeah. Back off of that. Or that. Right? And so, you know, science as an endeavor, I mean, has been fundamentally argued as a responsibility of the public sector after World War II when we realized, oh, it turns out having science saved the Western world. And so that's probably a good thing that we invest in as a society. And I feel to a certain degree, we might need to make that case again that this isn't to say that there's not efficiencies or adjustments or problems in science. It's that there is. a fundamental benefit by the act of doing these things in a well-intentioned and structured way that has profound benefits, not just to, again, the concept of knowledge. And here's my,

here's my big pitch, that I believe it's like a fundamentally revitalizing societal force to be constantly inundated with novel and new information from areas we have never been before, right, that it demands a society contemplate and ingest and accommodate the new. And it's a counterpoint, it's a counterforce to nostalgia in a sense or ossification or cultural decline or whatever you want to call it. And so by constantly pushing ourselves, challenging ourselves by believing that we can do such things and then having to handle and integrate new novel things. I believe is, again, this kind of ongoing rejuvenation to our society that really no other area focuses. And I keep

thinking a lot about, you know, space science in particular is the opposite of how most of our modern life has, you know, instead of, you know, we're all kind of like down and in on our cell phones, right? And on social media obsessing over. what other people are doing. And space science is literally pulling us up and out, you know, away from the individual and to this broader sense of relation to the cosmos. And I think if you step away from that and if you take a purely utilitarian, somewhat extractive view of what space can do for us, you actually lose something really important. And I think you lose something really important as a energizing aspect of the society and culture in which we live.

right moment to plug the last time Casey was on the show when we were dunking on space as religion just going to say it was an exquisite moment to smash cut to the last time you appeared here there's a difference between there's a difference between I think a blind faith which I think that was kind of making in a sense of a belief about how you approach specifically human spaceflight

that was like the human spaceflight yeah yeah I mean that's the salvation deal I mean that's in a sense that's the salvation right of... You're more on the Saganism that kind of started the project society. Yeah. You know, another way to put it, the listeners in my show, maybe hear me talk about this in the last year, this concept of the sublime, which we were actually relatively denied that in our modern life. And our culture, I feel they start moving into this dangerous area of cultural criticism. You know, it's like, you're straddling this political divide. Like, just an exquisite work of art.

I don't know if you're doing it on Fox News or what. what? Like, this is, you're just killing it. So keep going. I was going to say as eloquently as this has been put, I don't know how well it would play at a Trump rally. So I don't know how well he's I don't know that it wouldn't. I actually feel like he's just hitting this right down. Well, everybody can listen to this and take their thing into it. It's kind of perfect. If I, I, I would love to have the opportunity to be invited to a Trump rally and share the space. Because again, I don't think that I don't think this is a political perspective. I think this does touch on some, a lot of people's concerns about modern society. And then it is a

it to, you can go to degrees of whether it's neelistic or just too relentlessly practical. I know that there's a variety of critics of modern cinema, which say it's, there's nothing, there's not enough weird stuff in, you know, the visual medium of film anymore. I'd be an example of that. But the idea that, you know, is the weird, weird tangent, but it's the same in web design. Anthony, I talk about web design a lot. He says it's super boring. It's just all derivative.

It's all kind of consolidated to one various style. right? Like it's the three big things at the top and I don't know, they kind of talked to it. I feel like it's a very, it's converged right to this very bland practical thing. Yeah. It's the new north of Grumman logo. That's the epitome of the design. That's the one. It's and so what I was saying is like this idea, the sublime and, you know, again, forgive me, if this starts getting like too heady and weird, but the sublime is a, you can kind of trace it back. It goes back obviously further, but this, I've been obsessed with this idea of, obviously,

you've heard me talk about the real and acceptable reasons for spaceflight dichotomy that Michael Griffin wrote about. And I realized the other day, there's really an argument of romanticism versus kind of enlightenment utilitarianism. And this idea that there is some essence of being that is not easily written down and quantified as this kind of romantic ideal. And real reasons for spaceflight. are in a sense romantic ideals, right?

They make you feel something. They make you, you know, and feeling something is in a sense, all that we have as, as beings who are alive in the world. And it's a very different type of knowledge, right, to have experiential knowledge rather than purely intellectual knowledge, right? There's some deeper feeling you have with an experiential knowledge. And feeling something about space, and I think this is why so many of us love space is that we feel something about it, right?

And tapping into that and embracing that as actually, again, this really important counterpoint to a culture that is just, I think, relentlessly practical, quantified measured, literally in the sense like they're measuring, it's so easy to measure, right, with data and digital, you know, the digital world makes everything measurable. That you need, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to experience something that doesn't make quantitative sense, right? And so watching a rocket launch, I think this is why so many people park outside. of Starbase and watch the launch, right? As you guys know, like, watching a rocket launch is a transcendental experience, particularly if you've never seen one before. You lose yourself in the moment to something profoundly more powerful than you. And I think this whole area of things that I'm talking about, this is where I think the role

of a public space agency is to provide that in a sense. Like, obviously, that can't just be this whole reason. But I think in terms of why that makes it distinct from a private one, is that. that the actual application of its ambition is in the areas of this like discovery-based, pushing boundaries or exploration-based. The thing that you put on that big rocket, right, is ultimately why you're doing all that work. And if there's nothing kind of big or profound or ambitious about it, if it's all just to launch another trance of Starlink, so you can, you know, access your crypto accounts from Bermuda more quickly, there's something lost to me, right,

in the application of why we're going into space. Yeah, yeah. Well, uh, damn. So is that what you're going to tell everyone? I know, we could probably do this for eight hours. Are you,

are you working on your day of action, like opening argument here? Is this, is this when you were going to Congress person's office? I mean, this is, we've kind of gone back to the drawing board a bit this year at the, you know,

in our policy and strategy program, I'm really thinking about, and I think this is a critique I would make of myself, that we've become so focused on, we want this mission or that mission, and we need to do this, that it's because we, we ourselves, I think, have lost that sight of like that kind of bigger feeling aspect of why we're doing this. And I started to think a lot about, you know, people who come to advocate in D.C. We're asking them.

And generally, because in the role of that D.C. policy sphere, you have to be relentlessly practical, right? That's acceptable reasons of spaceflight. But they're all there because of that real, that fundamental experiential. They feel something about it. And that's a funny tension sometimes. But in a way, you're going to proselytize about something you believe in. And we want to give you the access and opportunity and confidence to be able to express that this is some important ideal.

And again, what we like to believe we offer at the society is that we're not there to say, there's plenty of people who are focused in making sure we have a very vibrant commercial space marketplace, which I agree with. I think we should. There's plenty of people who are there representing the interests of professional engineers and aerospace experts and scientists. There are people who represent the interest of large aerospace corporations, but there's no one there just representing the idea of exploration and science, right? And so going there and being able to talk about this is a very important

counterpoint again and a very important perspective for those individuals, elected officials to hear because if we don't do it, they're just going to get, we're just going to get drowned out by everyone else. And going back to this bigger picture again of why do we have a NASCAR? Like, why do I feel like there would be something lost if NASA became just a pass-through agency for commercial space? And I think, you know, that's what I've been trying to state, right? That there's some bigger cultural and individual relationship that we have towards a public space program. Because its responsibility, it's back to the public that enables it. It's more than an agency.

It's a mirror of the society back to itself, right? It tries to be an expression of our highest ideals, and it doesn't just want to do that. It has a responsibility to do that in a way that private actors don't. And so trying to find ways to share this bigger picture, I think right now is very important. And so we're kind of stepping back a little bit from the specific mission focus that we've had and trying to say, what are these reasons ultimately that why we do this? Because I think it's time to, we really need to start talking about this. So is it too late to join up if people have missed the call?

We have two more weeks, give or take. The 14th of March is when registration closes. We can just say you are responsible for getting yourself to D.C. We understand if you can't do that. And we will provide online options for taking action on that same day with our members. We have an afternoon, full afternoon, four hours of training, in-person training on March 23rd. where we will go through all of this kind of strategy talk. We'll have online training in advance.

We'll have opportunities for kind of deeper engagement and prep beforehand. And we will book all of your meetings with your members of Congress. We will give you opportunities to drop in with other congressional offices. And we're putting together a special planetary radio live show that evening of the 24th. So we have a lot of opportunities to do stuff and give you as much confidence. and assurance and support as you need to go into these offices and to share your passion for space. Love it. And as I always say every year, we try and have you on to talk about this, but we have a few listeners

in our Discord who participate in this. And without fail, every time they come back with like this feeling of accomplishment and like connection with not just with space, but also with democracy. Like it's this kind of like lovely blending of like I went out and made. my country better. I made my society better today by talking my representative and talking about this really cool thing space. And that's always something that I, I'm just a dirty foreigner. I can't participate in this kind of, I might if I, if I was an American. But so it's nice, I still have the, I still have a love for democracy living in Mexico right now is, is double

trouble. Yeah, I'm just, you know a lobby for lower tariffs. That's all you're going to do. Yeah, that's exactly what I would love it. Just step off is what I would say. That and crypto, you're like, these are both my interests. But yeah, I'm right. I mean, people really generally have a really positive experience and it does make you feel, it does change your relationship a bit to your elected officials and, you know, you're walking through the whole of Congress. It's so easy to be cynical about politics.

And so it's really nice to have like a thing we can point to where it's like, this is, you know, this is the virtue and the, joy of a democratic political process that you could be a part of, right? And what's amazing, too, is that we have to constantly remind the people that we go see in these offices that the people who you see before you, the people who came to Washington, D.C. on their own dime, they have no financial interest in what we're advocating for. We will not get paid. We will not have careers from this for the most part. We will not get a big fat contract. They have a hard time processing that, frankly, a lot of the time. They just do not realize. It's hard for them.

to understand that people could care about space this much and just go because you care. And that's actually a really powerful message in and of itself. Like your very presence shows something, right? And that really just does not happen for many other topics. And so that's what gives it such. And the fact that when we do this, this is the largest advocacy event of its kind. And it's for people who don't have any, you know, fiduciary benefit that comes from these policies we're advocating for.

So it's really unique in that sense. And people tend to have a very positive experience. Even if it doesn't go our way at the end, right? I mean, that's the end of the day. We're not guaranteeing. That's democracy. By not trying, right, you want to be there to at least try. And I think it's, if we've already, you know, that classic phrase,

if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And that's basically true. Yeah, yeah. Well, Casey, this has been lovely. another great sermon from the great Casey Dryer. Join me every month at my Space Policy Edition increasingly sermon. I try not to monologue so much,

but I'm pretty, my head's been in this quite a bit. So thanks for our, that's why we have here. That's what we asked for. We needed it. We got our junk out last time. So this is,

we needed some, we needed the Casey take direct to our ears. So this delivered. Relevant show next week, too, Jake. Yeah, highly relevant. Talking about getting the joy and inspiration of science. We have Dante Loretta coming on next week to talk about Assyrus Rex. And there's been some great new results from these samples from an asteroid,

a place we've never gone before. And we brought a piece back for us to look at in great detail. So we're going to have it straight from the horse's mouth. It's going to be good. And I'm looking at the calendar right now. So that is actually what we're doing. Yeah. And the funding challenges that they're having, trying to make sure that they have scientists for that when it flies by Apophis. As we were reminded.

That's not the hot killer a asteroid anymore, though. I know. Well, I think we're back to the office having a slightly higher chance now, right? We had a brief shining starlet kind of try to take the theme. Good reminder. Didn't even get a good name. Yeah. You know. All right, y'all. Casey, you're the best. Thanks for hanging out with us. Anytime. Thanks for having me.