Off-Nominal - 201 - Bad Ass, But Also Bad (with Casey Dreier and Eric Berger)

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Anthony is joined by Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, and Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica, to talk about the NASA 2026 budget proposal, the Jared Isaacman saga, and all the space policy storylines you could imagine.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 201 - Bad Ass, But Also Bad (with Casey Dreier and Eric Berger) (with Casey Dreier and Eric Berger) - YouTubeNASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in… | The Planetary SocietyThe Space Review: How NASA’s proposed budget cuts are felt across the AtlanticThe Space Review: NASA’s 2026 budget in brief: Unprecedented, unstrategic, and wastefulThe Planetary Society’s NASA Data DashboardsIsaacman’s bold plan for NASA: Nuclear ships, seven-crew Dragons, accelerated Artemis - Ars TechnicaThe administration’s anti-consensus Mars plan will fail - SpaceNewsSpaceX’s next Starship just blew up on its test stand in South Texas - Ars TechnicaShe was a Disney star with platinum records, but Bridgit Mendler gave it up to change the world - Ars TechnicaFollow CaseyCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyFollow EricEric Berger | Ars TechnicaEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / 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. Hello, boys. Thanks for just jumping in on a real weird show here. You know, there's no shortage of stuff. The only shortage we have is Jake, who is not here. He's on what will amount to a sabbatical by the time he is back. I'm back in this studio with nothing here because the mover is coming out of this house tomorrow. Good news is air conditioning here, not a new studio.

It's 100 degrees today. So at least I'm not sweating. but your eclis is working Eclipse is working unlike other spaceships that may or may not exist in this world and don't exist anymore as of this morning we've got someone who's had what I would consider like an Alexander

Hamilton level of output on the space policy sphere in the last several weeks Casey Dreyer welcome I'll sleep when I'm dead you've been op-eds anywhere that will give you the space Planetary Studies were pumping out the stuff. So tons of budget stuff to talk about.

It's been a few months since we talked, I think. I think we talked to you back in February. Lots of changed. Yeah, exactly. You can see the, I think the bags in my eyes are particularly prominent in this lighting conditions right now to blame that all on the current situation. Yeah. And Eric, welcome back.

You're not always the B plan. You're just a very reliable man who I text the night before and say, hey, do you think you could come and join us tomorrow? So thanks for being here, buddy. Hey, man, I'm a sludge for off nominal. I'm here, buddy. I was told before the show that I'm the only one. That was a real treat.

I'm the only one drinking, which is unfortunate. But you two are. No, well, I mean, I have my, is this, does this count as a, that counts. As a drug at a point. Yeah. But even to acknowledge Mars sample return is to, let me see it again. That's a, this is my Mars sample return mug.

I should pour one out or the concept or I mean humans will just pick up the rocks anyway so I guess we're all set We didn't go to Mars and all you got was that lousy mug Exactly This was a what was it a 2.4 billion dollar mug I guess is that what the current

Current expenditures have been Um Eric you got any fun space vessels that you're drinking out of over there Today is a day for for clear heads and sober minds, Anthony. I'm drinking like, I think I'm drinking a diet 7-Up or something like that. So pretty lame here in H-Town,

but I got a busy day. Well, we were going to start with NASA budget stuff, but I feel like we can't not start with a gigantic explosion that happened last night in your state there, Eric. You said it right before we went live. We're back to, what, 20-21 era?

Starbase. I mean, you know, it has been a terrible year for the Starship program, given the failures we've seen, kind of the soul-shining success, I think, was the reuse of a first stage of super heavy. But, you know, three flights of not getting data on the second, on the ship in flight, which I think is what they want most of all. And certainly when I had a chance to talk to Elon a few weeks ago, asked him what his top priority was, sort of, with the flights this year. And it was to get data on the reentry of the vehicle and continue improving the tiles and the heat shield,

which I think really is the long pole to reusing the upper stage. And they haven't gotten any of that. Now they've had a pad explosion, the type of thing we haven't seen since the Mark vehicles back in four years ago. And so on one hand, you would say, okay, well, the program's hardware rich.

They expect to be exploding. vehicles, it's inter-design. And I get that and I agree with that. But on the other hand, you know, we're coming up on the 10th flight test. And at a time when, you know, Starship really needs to be showing progress not only for SpaceX's business, they're certainly ready to move into direct-to-sell communications with Starlink. And, you know, the military is looking at them for point-to-point other applications. And NASA obviously desperately needs a functional human landing system.

So this is really the program seems to be going back, at least on the outside at the time it seems to going forward. I don't want to dog pile on them because there's thousands of people in South Texas working super hard on this. And the facilities there are incredible. Like it's a bona fide rocket factory now. And they clearly have the pieces in place to accelerate, but they've got to get through these technical issues

that have really had a series of pretty significant and setbacks this this year. And so it's bad. It's very bad, I think. Do you have any sense of like the implications to the ground infrastructure, like how that's going to impact their future, even just picking back up and even assuming they can figure out the design flaw? So, I mean, on one hand,

this is really the only place right now where they're conducting ground tests of the vehicle because of the sense of nature of the equipment on all. launch pads. So I don't know. I assume someone will do a flyover pretty soon. We'll get an idea. But at the day. It was damaged at least, right?

Like, you can see from the video that, uh, there's kind of like two phases of it. There's the initial explosion and then the much more energetic thing that was like ground level. It's just like snack through some of those. So it's on one hand it looks bad. I mean, looks badass. But it also looks bad.

Um, But I would also say that, like, rapidly building relatively simple ground infrastructure is a SpaceX core competency. So, like, they could have a new test stand built in a couple of months, right? Yeah. I don't see. And I think they're going to want. The second site that they've developed.

This is a massive test site. So if you're going to blow up one of your sites down there, this is the one you want to do that at. This is one of them. Yeah. Yeah. But even then, like, they don't even have a couple of months, though. Like, that's the pacing issues here for the schedule.

Like, this is, well, you know, months and stuff, don't you think? I think so much is riding on the third version of Starship with the Raptor 3s in terms of performance. And it's going to sort of solve, supposedly solve the issues we saw with the two test flights earlier this year that went boom. So it kind of always felt like we're in the waiting room for Starship version. three anyway. And so, yeah, they want to get some flights. They want to get some data on the reentry. And I talked to someone there who has been waiting, has been putting Starlink mockups on the vehicle

since Flight 5, I think. It's just a busy task of loading those in every time. I haven't got to deploy them. So I think that they maybe feel a little bit bad about that. But at the end of the day, I think they need to get to Starship version 3, and that's not coming before the end of the year. So look, it's not good, but it's not like the end of the program or anything. Yeah, I just, it's striking.

This is like, this is the sheer complexity of this system that we're witnessing where, like, the amount, I tried to express this a couple weeks on it. I don't feel like I've formed this in my head anymore, but it feels like there are so many things that they need to actually complete to get one of these tests done. And the fact that they haven't been able to take the next step on testing,

the new fin configuration on reentry and some of the heat shield tests that they've been working on deploying, like the door doesn't even work at this point. But every time that they have an issue that holds them back from testing those new things, they have to still catch up all the way from zero to

a full-blown Starship to even get to those next tests. So this part feels like such a speed limit in the way that the initial tests for Starship was not. And like, you know, we always say SpaceX has no problem with funding, and that's certainly true, but that can't be true forever.

Like, they don't have all of the money in the world. They have close to it. But how many of these have to happen before people start getting uncomfortable of like, damn, that was an expensive year of the Starship program? So after the eighth flight test, I reached out to some people and just sort of get a temperature check on, are we witnessing some kind of fundamental design flaw with the upper stage that is going to necessary some kind of major reset or just maybe it's not going to be practical to do this? And the sense I got from people who knew what was going on is that there was not that feeling within SpaceX about this.

There was confidence in the design of the vehicle. So on one hand, I would say that yes. But I would also add that I think you're exactly right, Anthony. Like there are so many more technical things to go through. And the two biggest ones I think are obviously can you do orbital refueling and store. storage and boil off and dealing with all of that. And they can't test any of that until they start to get to refueling tests, which is now looking like the middle of next year at least.

And then you've got the whole issue of, okay, can you actually land safely on the moon? Can you take off from the moon? And all these rendezvous and proximity operations that need to be done. And you can't do any of that until you solve the refueling issues. So you've got these gates. And oh, by the way, said again, and we're going to talk policy, I'm sure, set against the backdrop of this is, is how committed is SpaceX to human landing system?

And I would submit that at this point, given all this happened in the last six months, and given the fact that Musk was not a fan of HLS and Artemis ever, I would submit that they're not very committed at all. So it's just lots of, I mean, there's lots of questions. Huh? It's just an ominous. ominous way to lay that out there. You're welcome.

I mean, I just want to just, I don't, I mean, Eric, you follow this so much closer than I know, you know, so many people in there. But at the same time, it just, you know, you're talking about, it's one thing. It's okay to use a test program or exploding stuff, but just like random explosions on the pad when you're tanking seems like that's not, that's not the kind of explosion you want in a test, really. I mean, I guess you want to figure that up before there's people on it. But you'd rather figure it up before you get dame the six.

Yeah, you got to get to, I mean, and even all these things that they have to do, it would help with they got to orbit first. It's a giant setback, Casey. I mean, this has been a terrible year for the Starship program. We're halfway through the year, and they haven't got a vehicle to land, right, in the ocean. Like they did plenty of times last year. It's a bad year. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, we're talking about, I mean, we'll talk more about the budget, but it's it's been interesting when I've been going through the discussions, particularly in the last year and trying to, I know, I think a lot of you know, I take a more small sea conservative approach to this. And I'm generally a bit more skeptical. I think if anyone can do Starship, SpaceX can do it. But I think it tends to be talked about as an inevitability rather than an open question. And this is the data to me in the last six months have been leading to Starship as more of an open question, whether it's technically feasible or not. And you got to bifurcate. You've got to bifurcate it. I mean, the first stage is successful.

That's the thing, right? This is all problems with the starship itself, right? Not the super heavy primarily. So if you had to mass produce upper stages cheaply, you know, can you solve the propulsion issues? I don't know. I would think, yes, since they've flown several times. But yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, it is concerning. It's, I, is it, is it.

I do think it's coming regardless. It is inevitable in the sense that you're going to have a super heavy rocket with a fully reusable first stage that can land back at the launch site. And that's like 80% of the way. I mean, so you're going to have some kind of revolutionary capability. The fully reusable stack, who knows? But I do think that you ought to be vectoring towards some kind of super heavy abundant super heavy lift capability because it's clearly there already yeah yeah that's a good

point in splitting those two things and it's i guess when i've been talking about it with folks it's like they say you plan for this abundance of launch capability and it's sure i guess but i mean this is the interesting thing too is that this is as not a national program and we kind of saw a couple weeks ago and i'm sure we'll talk about this too that all of this is very much the whims of one individual whether things like this happened or not. And our national space program that's meant to serve, you know, the broad interests of the of the country is functionally fully dependent on the whims of one individual to keep something like this going, right? There's no one else developing a similar, I guess you can tell me it may be blue, however many years from now with their heavy lift, super heavy lift. But this is kind of it,

right? And so the whole promise of future abundance of heavy lift relies on one company controlled almost completely by one person who has demonstrated, let's say, questionable judgment in the last few weeks in particular. And that's where I, my policy side, you know, my stance starts to tingle and say, is this, is this where our national space policy is now, is that we just wait for them to figure out. It's different than like saying, we're going to go to the moon in 1961. And we didn't have that capability then either, but there was like a national commitment

to it rather than hoping, you know, Henry Ford builds a rocket that we can send Neil Armstrong on by the end of 1969. So that's very well said, Kate. And I agree with all of that. Let me just add a little happy Graham to sort of, because I seem to be doing that today is leading happy little messages across the video. But you talk about the national space program and it being sort of at this time being so dependent on SpaceX and Elon Musk. Consider the fact that we're looking at Artemis 2 next year pretty soon. It's coming up pretty soon.

I think sooner than people realize. When do you think the next human mission will be to deep space? And at this point, are we betting like there's a 75% chance that it's a Chinese astronauts? After Artemis 2, unless they just kind of ditch the landing attempt for Artemis 3 and make Artemis 3 a new. Or this is. Lunar orbit. This is why you have a gateway. Oh, man.

Here he comes. Big gateway rolling under the show here. I remain the lone sympathetic voice, I think, in the entire space community about Gateway. Which, me and Ted Cruz. I love the timeline in which the biggest SpaceX vehicle we get for deep space is Dragon XL. And StarCift does not happen in that order. It's like, oh, Dragon X-L is back on the menu. You know, Dragon on Falcon Heavy.

Talk about a vehicle that Elon is not going to fill. Dragon X-L would be. He went to Dorm with the ISS, cancel HLS, but he's like, let's go. Dragon X-L gets me. He's not bothered. There's always Red Dragon to resurrect that, too, right? The thing that you're hitting on is that the last several years of the industry, as SpaceX continues to be the outlier in every way, I can't find one spot they're not the outlier on.

There has been an increase in companies saying, like, all right, well, we're going to take two space, right? They're like, we're going to build the payloads for the starship future. And you're right that when you point to who's second in line, is it, no one's even building something on the same scale. But then even when you look at just, all right, who's next up for like actual reusability? You know, you've got neutron that's going to have a nice, reasonable first stage, but not really any upper stage thoughts, as we know right now. Stoke space is the obvious one that I think everyone gets excited about because it's new and novel in a way. We don't really know

what the reusable upper stage plans are at Blue Origin, if any, at the moment. My sense is that it's all entirely notional. They've abandoned Project Jarvis. And I think they want to fly

New Glenn, get some data, see what it's like, see how the second stage performs. And they're going to really try to bring down the cost of the upper stages, which are super expensive, is my understanding. And if they can't do that, then they'll probably look into some kind of reusability. But I would, I think that's years and years into the future.

Way, way off. And so then there's been talk of like, you know, from a policy angle of like, how can we incentivize a second option, much in the way that the DOD for years have said we need, you know, dual redundant access and even commercial crew and cargo programs are designed in that way. But then, yeah, but then it's even then, right, if you have all the money in the world, like no one else has shown the ability. ability to perform at the level that SpaceX has. No one can figure out what that mixture is. And you can't wield that into existence. And that's hugely dangerous for the space industry at large. And the national space interest, just the national interest.

I've called this policy by outlier in the sense that SpaceX is used, I think, as the average outcome when setting policy for human and commercial and even science activities at NASA basically since the mid-20 teens, where it's like, oh, well, you'll just have companies will pop up and they'll be, look at what SpaceX did. Well, no, as you said, SpaceX is like this bizarre three-sigma outlier. There's no one even really, as you said, just competing with, even attempting to compete with them. My version of that is like, no, look at, look at what Antares did. Look at what Cygnus did. It's like nothing.

You could have easily had, that's the ultimate history. I'm sure, Eric, you've thought about a lot, right? With like, what if we had just gotten two Antares style servicing, rockets for the ISS, right? They basically never tried to break into any commercial markets or not seriously. They did their job and that's it. They're done. And so would have been cheaper, I suppose, right? But you wouldn't have had this transformative company. It wouldn't have been the side effects, which part of the thing is, though, with side effects is that you're setting these programs up to surprise you in good ways. And so, you know, we targeted cheaper access to the ISS. And what we got was the greatest launch vehicle history has ever seen in the best commercial launch service that has

ever been. Yeah. So like we didn't plan on that. We did hope that it would happen, but you can't plan on that. What we didn't plan on was no one else doing the same. Yeah, it's the only thing we got. And now they're, now that's the kind of the baseline assumption of commercial will perform like that. It will lead to that. And it's like, no, you get a starliner, you get an Tauris and you, if you're lucky, you get a falcon died out of it. And even dragon, they didn't sell. Now there's human missions, but like Dragon Lab was never a thing. Never, they never sold a cargo mission to anyone else. Yeah. It's, my point was. I've always said, like, it's, this whole thing is an experiment, and it's really worth doing

because the other counterpoint, right, is that what we've seen from the classic way of doing things has literally done nothing to, it's only reinforced everyone's worst critique about it, very like your SLS cost plus contracting, right? So it's not like there's a viable alternative here either, which is the frustrating point. It's like, yes, we can spend hideous amounts of money for outdated technology that, you know, will fly infrequently. Or you can kind of sense gamble on these new systems. And so it was always worth, I think, the experiment, but I think I've always tried to emphasize, like, it's still the experiment. And this is, you know, the new 26 budget that just came out for NASA. You know, they say, oh, we're taking all

these lessons we learned from doing commercial stuff at the moon into Mars. And I was like, what lessons we haven't learned that? We don't know yet. How the outcome is. We haven't validated anything really yet. And to apply it to like a problem orders of magnitude harder, as if again, these are kind of fade accompli, um, uh, efforts is just puts us in a really bad spot. So I always like to have I want Starship to work really bad. I just tend to be, I just, it doesn't, it hasn't yet. And that's where I worry about what's our policy, what's our backup, if it doesn't,

because so much is running out. Being of bad spots, Casey, it seems to me like where the budget may be headed is that NASA loses the science that it's lost. but Ted Cruz and the rest of Congress stick back in the porky-like programs for human space exploration, and we get, like, kind of worst of all. Do you think that that's probably the most likely outcome? Let's also be clear that your senator, Ted Cruz, just to be clear of, like, who on this show has the power to vote about? Is your senator, Ted?

Ted, Ted, yeah. Ted, who's now BFS with Tucker Carlson. Yeah. They're both so, you know, they surfaced this. I thought, fascinated. I think that's probably what's going to happen, right? It is. I think, and that's always been once that, when was we started hearing about it,

that was always my worry in the sense that that'd be the most likely outcome. Because I've, as I've said, you know, some of you who remember my previous experience is, like never underestimate the political coalition behind SLS, despite the overwhelming kind of public negativity about it. It has been one of the most stalwart. and supportive and just unwielding coalitions. There is a strong desire in OMB to kill it, though. Yeah.

And they have been driving the bus, in my sense, is that they will continue to drive the bus. Yeah. So I do wonder which force ultimately is stronger. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen probably soon, right? Yeah. But I don't see it as an inevitability. And that's kind of what I saw when they did go after it in this program.

Yeah. budget, that that would be what then Congress, you know, they can't react to everything. And that's my heart kind of dropped when I saw it because, okay, that's what's going to also just by the dynamics of our political coalitions right now, right? Just kind of through historical happenstance, your human spaceflight centers that do these types of projects are all now in Republican-led states, particularly in the Senate, ironically, because they were all Democrat states, Democratic states back in the 60s when they were created.

And Republicans run the Senate and House right now. And so just in terms of ability to set the agenda, those are going to be the things that care about from a parochial perspective. And the sciences are represented now in states represented by Democrats. And so they're already just have a kind of cut out of that power dynamic. Then you add all this out of crazy stuff that's going on top of it. It's a really big uphill move. But I thought it was fascinating to see also just in that reconciliation bill where this 10 billion was put forward by Cruz. the Republican coalition represented in that because no Democrats going to vote for this bill,

just flat out because of everything else in it, right? So there's zero reason. There's no effort to negotiate with democratic interests. So it's purely Republican parochial interest incorporated into the space stuff. And you can see exactly which ones by where they dull out infrastructure money, right? To various NASA centers, Dennis, Marshall, Kennedy, Texas. It's just like they just, here's your coalition right here. You each get a piece of it.

and that there's their programs that hit that hit their workforce. And so it's, it's that to me basically explains the entire thing. And that was always going to be the case when they went after SLS. Now, you saw Congress kind of teeing up to say, don't mess with it by the hearings they were having in advance of this budget coming out earlier this year. So yes, that will take up a lot of energy, unfortunately. And if they do put money back into it, it will take away that, you know, the size of that pie available for science, which is smaller and more.

distributed and unfortunately now located in democratic states and cut out of the power structure. Quick side task here is, uh, let's talk about this commercial Mars or the the Mars relay communications relay that was also part of this build. Um, either of you have anything on that because it certainly is weird to be shaped a lot like the Rocket Lab, uh, relay form of that was part of their Mars SEP return program. I mean, it's, it's necessary, right? From a science, from a standpoint of our assets at Mars, we kind of need something like this. Well, this is why you don't cancel Maven,

which is a currently functioning high volume data, really. That's a lot cheaper. But yeah, they're aging. We've always needed some. And the budget calls for like a commercial telecom system TBD. But yeah, you do need it. I'm pretty sure the description almost mirrors the relay that was part of Rocket Labs proposal.

Yeah. And it's also kind of like the NASA, those Mars Clips things where they were looking for this kind of relay spacecraft. That did strike me as pretty odd. And I don't fully understand where it came from. The world of which Peter Beck and Ted Cruz team up to the whole reconciliation bill is kind of fan of state. Yeah. I don't know if you saw everyone I'm sure was checking Breitbart this morning.

But if you didn't, they had, they went after Ted Cruz on their on their page stage. They went after Ted Cruz's reconciliation amendment as going against the president's wishes in space. And it's, you know, I don't think any coincidence that it was, what, a day after the Tucker interview and kind of with this larger intra-coitutional breakup happening right now around the hawkish foreign policy or not in America First style policy. So it's already now being leveraged against him, even though this came out, what, almost two weeks ago at this point. So it's, I mean, it is very contra to the president's space. I couldn't think of a faster congressional rejection of a presidential budget. It was like four days, right? And absolutely.

So, and I think it's fair to say that space is pretty low on the totem pole for White House interests. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see where this goes, but my money at this point would be on Congress getting the brookial programs at once. But, but then again, maybe there's just not going to be a budget passed. and we're going to get some kind of mess with a workforce to do anything at the rate we're going, right? They're going to live on sweet Biden budget one more year. No, they're going to live in the OMB's going to force down the changes, I think. They're already going to try to pull some of the 26 proposals into 25. It's going to really messy.

It is. Casey's done a lot of charts. We should pull up some charts. So you've been, Jake's described this when you emailed us. Jake was like Casey's in our email inbox. He's on a war path. And I was like, I can't argue with that description of your activity in the last several weeks. You've been putting out a lot.

You guys did a, was it like a live stream kind of situation a couple days ago? And then you wrote this post afterwards or maybe I have the order in verse. We did a briefing. And then I think this was out beforehand. This gets a little hazy for me now. You can see it's some of our, we've done our own infrastructure investments over the last few months preparing for this moment. So we have more, you know, kind of fancier ways to distribute this information. But yeah, it's trying to just visualize and emphasize just how

his, you know, unprecedented this proposal is, right? This isn't your normal. Yeah, it's, it's easy to dip into hyperbole when you're an advocacy organization. And, you know, we haven't been immune from that over the years. But it's so when you do say this is the worst ever, you know, we needed to back it up with data. And that's what I hope this does. But it really sets this context. It's It is a radical proposal. And we've, I mean, this is, as we said, way back at the beginning, Eric, when you first reported this, which again, oh, kudos to you turned out to be completely correct. You were, you nailed the story right at the beginning. And that allowed us to do a lot of preparation for this.

But this cutting science by half is a radical proposal and destructive and wasteful in the process, right, to cut that much that fast. and they put it forward. They don't, there's no, interestingly enough, though, too, there's been zero effort really to sell this proposal to anybody, as we saw with Ted Cruz, even to their own party. They almost forgot to brief Congress before this came out. I think there was like a briefing 45 minutes before the release of this budget to the congressional appropriations committee. So, you know, there's no one there at to sell it. Obviously, they pulled Jared's nomination, so there's no empowered leadership. they're clearly treating this as it is an indefensible proposal, right, and hoping they can just kind of impose a lot of it before Congress can act to reject it.

But yeah, so I mean, this is existential and this is kind of, you know, this cuts to the heart of what the planetary society is about, but also, as I've written before, kind of what we want from a public space agency. I think the funny irony here is that this is actually doubling down and throwing money at what the commercial sector is already pertaining to, at least the private sector is pertaining to do with, sending humans to Mars and abandoning the unique thing that NASA does, which is scientific space exploration, which is definitely not perceived by individuals or commercial partners. Nuclear propulsion, as he went on about in the interview with you, Eric. Nuclear propulsion plutonium 238 production, which just has been spun up over the last 20 years. You stop that. You lose access to the entire outer solar system.

You lose the underinvesting in communications infrastructure. They're canceling telecom orbiters at Mars while calling for new telecom. capability at Mars. It's a self-contradictory budget. It doesn't even make sense because it was all hastily thrown together. And from everything we've talked to and the briefings that NASA has been giving to members of Congress, NASA leadership has no idea what these numbers that they're requesting are for. And you can see this in the budget themselves. They literally say, $350 million from Mars technology. What does it do? We will, this is literally in the budget. It says we will figure out what the program is and brief Congress at the appropriate time.

Let me drop a little tidbit that's germane to that. First of all, I would just say that the planetary society should be screaming from the hilltops about this. And I commend your organization. This is why you exist. I would also just say about regarding the briefings and so forth, after the budget was passed back to NASA for the first time. So this is, I think, before the budget actually came out. Janet Petro basically put together kind of a response, you know, multiple pages. is basically, I think likely Janet Petra is the acting administrator of NASA,

iterating some of the points that you're making there. And the response to that from the White House, and particularly OMB, was shut up or you're going to be fired, basically. So to your point, there is no leadership within the agency that can stand up to this and just sort of say, this is where all the things you're doing don't make sense. They don't want to hear it. They don't want an administrator or acting administrator that would in any way sort of be an impediment to that. So it's basically policy by budget.

And we'll see what Congress does, but Congress is no hero on a lot of these programs as well. They're much more interested in parochial interests. So it's a very dark time for the budget process. And when Jared was lost as the potential administrator, I think, are sort of our hope for having someone in there to really speak up for the good things that NASA could be doing was probably lost. I know some people probably celebrated because I think he had close ties to Elon or he was somehow a show for SpaceX, but none of those things were really true. He's really his own person, in my opinion, and would have been a pretty great administrator. And so,

you know, we're going to get someone else that nominated here in probably in a couple weeks, and they may get confirmed before the end of the year. But this is probably going to be someone whose position is quite a bit weakened and will be holding for them the political side of things. So it's, it's a very disturbing time to be thinking about space policy. It's super bleak. How do you think Jared would have done, now knowing that this is how things were laying out, like, do you think the parts that we were excited about collectively for Jared being in that role, that he would have really been able to advocate effectively for the, the sensible roadmap that he had a vision for?

Like it still feels like he was going to be pushed around by the setup of this entire administration and this the take that they just had that you would outlay there with with Janet Petra. But like would he not have been in that same situation? He would have been, but there's a big difference between an acting administrator and someone who's been confirmed because this White House was embarrassed repeatedly during the first administration because all of its appointees were resigned or fired. And so they've been trying to give their appointees a little bit more. had a little more sticking power this time. So he would have had a little bit more of Hill to stand on. And especially, you know, they were going to stand up a national space council. They probably still will.

But, you know, J.D. Vance was going to be the head of this space council. And so if he and Jared were kind of in agreement on these things, and I believe they were, then there would have been a counterweight within the White House to the pressure from the OMB for some of these programs. And so if he could have worked with J.D. Vance. to set some of these priorities, then, yes, I think he could have effectively advocated for. And it really would have been then a White House versus Congress thing, as opposed to a NASA administrator versus OMB, in which case a NASA administrator loses. It's very much an OMB.

To me, I see it as very much a, you know, this, this administration is composed of factions, various types of factions that have kind of formed this Trump coalition. And OMB is run by the, you know, Russ Fote, who is unfortunately very good at what he does. and he is single-mindedly committed to kind of imposing his, I would argue, his personal set of policies under the guise of presidential policies in terms of spending and what the U.S. spends its money on. And OMB is a very different place even than it was.

No one really was a huge fan of the OMB ever because they have to be in control of the money. But the lack of information, openness, and lack of transparency has been shocking in the last, They took down all of their, they usually publish the budget historical spending tables, projections, GDP, stuff that you can use and analyze their whole project. None of that. It's all taken, even the historical stuff has all been removed from their website.

The spending cuts are very, very similar to what he himself proposed within Russvote, the OMB director three years ago. So that's clearly no coincidence. And obviously, independent of any developments and policy or whatever's happened on the ground since then, right? This is a sustained effort by him and I'd say that broader coalition of to undermine lots of activities in U.S. science and NASA is unfortunately really taking in here and given the overall conditions in Congress and it's the difference between the speed at which this administration is moving and Congress's speed in reacting to it, which is almost,

you know, standstill. And so in the difference where there is no congressional guidance, which there's not allow right now. And if they continue, do another continuing resolution, don't pass appropriations by October 1st. This budget functionally goes into effect. It's called apportionment. They apportion outspending at the rate that matches the lowest of all primary,

you know, budget proposal. And because it's so severe and they seem intent on doing this RIF, reduction in force before that starts, they can functionally close down programs all but on paper. Mm-hmm. your op-ed in space news from a couple days ago I thought it was beautifully written in ways where

as I'm reading this I'm thinking like reading this from whichever end of the political structure you're reading it from there are messages in there for either side that are really resounding to me and it speaks to something that I have talked about a lot in the Doge era that like of all the people on the show I'm probably one of the most susceptible to being worried about federal spending generally and being like

at some point we're hitting an iceberg and we've got to figure this out. We can either start steering now or just wait for the iceberg to hit. But the thing that has always concern me is that it's done in a way in this era of cut without building a vision for where you're going or how to be

how to reset the clock and be responsible the next time we get to this point and like what do you put in place to make sure that we avoid mistakes we've made in the past. None of that seems to be there in any of these proposals and then on the NASA side it's not cut these programs because we're going to go and do the good ones

or find the PIs that are running things really effectively and actually enforce cost caps and actually go back to that kind of mechanism. None of the forward-looking, here's the vision for how to run things now, is there at all? Even like you're saying with the human spaceflight stuff, like money for Mars, have fun, figure it out, do some Mars stuff.

Is it enough for what they want to do? They don't know because they don't exactly know what they want to do. That's the part, though. Is that the Jared Gap? Like, would, having a person that actually provides the vision, or has that never been part of this consideration at all? And they don't care that they're not building a coalition to carry this forward beyond this administration. It's a good question. And I think one thing that Jared learned from his six-month adventure going behind the curtain at NASA is that there is a lot of inefficiency at the space agency.

You wouldn't call it fraud. you wouldn't call it waste and you probably won't call it abuse, but you would call it inefficiency. You know, like they're holding meetings all the time, right? And a lot of it to some extent feels like busy work. And there's not, there's many more checkers than there are doers.

There's, there's, what are kind of cliches because I use? But basically just saying like, like you could go into NASA and try to make some changes that stretch those dollars further. And you could identify the programs that aren't making sense and trying to, you know, trying to find the ones that you should really focus your resources on. You know, I think that Jared's mindset was something along lines of they're doing lots of little programs

and we should be doing a few really meaningful big ones that really inspire. hire people and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I do think like having a really, an administrator who I think would have had some agency within the agency when it comes to, you know, as long as he wasn't breaking budgets to really, really make smart changes. And I think what was attractive about him is that he understood the problems and he had a strong desire to fix them to make NASA more efficient, which there is room. for that to be done.

It's clear, as Casey has written, and as others have said, that from the budget proposal laid out by OMB, there wasn't a lot of that thought, right? It was just cut, cut, cut, cut science and kill programs and save money and throw some money in there for a Mars program because the president said we needed to do that. And that was basically it. There wasn't, there was some thoughtfulness to it, but there wasn't a whole lot of it. And so I think having the right minister, yes, could have put effectively made some of those changes while staying within the budget proposal. I mean, I think there's, I always want, I like to add some additional. I mean, that's the thing. I don't think anyone disagrees. This was the, the Augustine report that kind of came and went last year about NASA's management challenges and becoming too centralized. And, but at the same time, and I think any large institution is always going to have, that's your constant battle, right, of how you manage even places I think.

like IBM and Google clearly. They're just, and they can course correct easier, but you hit any side, you have some sort of inefficiencies. But I think at the end of the day, the concept of efficiency is clearly not what they're after for the things you just mentioned right at the end,

which is just, we're just going to take the money away. It doesn't matter if it actually succeeds in what we wanted to do in our program or enables, like again, if you cut a third of your staff in one year, what business does that that? That's not actively going out of business or in bankruptcy, right?

Like, that's hugely disruptive. cutting programs like New Horizons and the Kuiper Belt that are functionally irreplaceable and it costs $9 million a year to run that, what efficiency are you gaining from that? And what do you tell other missions that are, you know, the expensive ones are actually, you know, James Webb was the one that they keep running, right? It's like, what lesson are you teaching at the end of the day there? And that's because it's not about efficiency, right?

At the end of the day, that's kind of like the overall claim. The key, I think that Jared would have brought, and I think what's been missing, from this even this budget first proposal is that a lot of the things that you kind of identify to Eric are internal NASA structures like the entire NASA regular internal regulations and policy directives about how NASA works and what it does. If you want the agency to be more efficient, you have to change those. And again, so far from everything we've understood, and maybe you've talked to people that's starting to think about this now, there's been zero effort to reevaluate those. So, you know, cutting NASA's budget by 25 percent and not taking any

effort to refine its internal structures and staffing and hierarchy doesn't do anything besides just slowly everyone down. And that's the hard work. But at the end of the day, without that kind of empowered leadership, they don't seem particularly interested in it, particularly even on the sciences. Because things like science, too, are just fundamentally different than some of the human spaceflight needs in terms of program. And the idea that at so many points in this budget, they say, we reduce this program line by

30% assuming efficiencies will be found. It's like, are you even empowering them to find efficiencies? And usually a good example, something like perseverance that cut its operating. It's not canceled, but the cut, it's operating budget by 30% next year. All that will result in is just fewer days to operate on Mars. So you just have a rover kind of sitting there, right? Is that efficient? No, because it takes engineering time.

You're paying salaries and staff for people to run it. Are you giving them an ability to reconsider or invest in technology to make it more efficient? No. And so at the end of the day, it's just a completely self-destructive, as I said, it's destructive, but also self-destructive because, again, by doing this so divisively and by making functionally zero effort to make any sort of groundwork, which is the big distinction. This is what's so strange, right, the big distinction of Trump's first term, where they did do

the work and created something that did outlast them or with Artemis. that they've unlearned that lesson and now created something almost certain to not survive this presidential administration because it'll be so tainted with this divisive situation. That's the point I can't get out. They're resetting the funding clock but not rethinking or trying to impose a vision for like, here's how we can do better with these things. It's none of that second half. I think Casey raises a great point that no one in the agency right now is empowered to make any kind of meaningful changes, right?

that no one wants to stick their head above the parapet because they're just going to get shot down. No one wants to make a decision and have ownership of that decision because it's just such an uncertain fraught time. You don't want to make a mistake and upset someone on the political side of things. And now, you know, the next administrator may be awesome and I hope he or she is, but you've just lost another six months. And so effectively, you're going to have a lost year at NASA where there's an enormous, budget uncertainty. There's no leadership and everything is just kind of coasting along on fumes. And it's just such a lost opportunity. And that combined with the budget cuts is just this is an awful time for the space agency. And at a time when China is doing incredible things

in space, it's like we just took a gun and shot ourselves in the foot. Their planetary ambitions are kind of like the inverse of what this budget proposes, right? Everywhere that we're pulling back from, China has proposed missions to. Neptune, Mars, sample return, Earth observation, sample returns beyond Earth, and then like a Callisto and I-O orbiter. You know, it's just all these outer planet. We're shutting down Juno at Jupiter. We're shutting down Mars sample return effort. We're shutting, you know, abandoning Uranus and Neptune.

where all these, you know, and we're obviously slashing kind of climate earth observation. Not to mention all science on the ISS kind of a bonus cut to science. I've always like, like, what are you going to do on the ISS if you don't have any science to do? You're just going to float around and fix the F and toilet, right? Like you, you, mostly, mostly the area. Yeah, I mean, it becomes this, the entire motivation of the ISS turned into doing science on it, which is why I was called the National Lab. And if you take, they literally cut functionally all funding for that, like 90% of it,

which means there's literally nothing for them to do up there as beyond maintaining their own existence as if we're sending just like as we're as we're, as we're amoebas with no higher purpose, right? To merely but to live as long as possible and ultimately reproduce. And that's that's existence, right? This very empty spiritually void aspect of just pure, you know, DNA vehicles. carrying ourselves forward and there's nothing beyond that in life. And that's like this, that kind of goes to the essence of it.

It's like, what is the purpose? And there's a larger argument here that I worry about that I raise a little bit, which is by doing these things, by abandoning these types of activities that are perpetually self-justifying or are broadly supported by public expectations, that you're actually moving NASA away from even the public itself and making it seem like a larger or like either or playground of billionaires or just further removed from their people's daily lives. And that ultimately then weakens it too. Like NASA has,

it's tied with functionally the very most popular federal agency, right? I always say that you don't see people wearing the Department of Interior logo on their t-shirts. They don't buy those at the gap. And but NASA is a federal, like, what are the federal agency do you have wear a logo on your shirt, right? NPS is all I can think. National Park Service.

Yeah, maybe the closest. one. I got a great NHTSA shirt. NPS. No one would know what that was, right? No. I wear like my NPSB shirt all the time. I've got them all. Yeah. It's or NIST, maybe I would wear a NIST T-shirt. One thing, here's one thing I don't want us to lose track of it. I'm on my, I'm on my soapbox. Yeah, get off that for a second. Let me go in mine for a minute because I don't want this to be lost. We are at risk of focusing too much on this particular. administration's take on NASA, which is the reaction is cut stuff because this ain't it, but I'm not

going to tell you what it should be. And that's exactly what the Bill Nelson announcement of Mars sample return was right before, was it, within days of the election. I forget what date it was. It was like October 30th or something. Which one? Because he also made their decision two weeks before the administration turned over to in like early January. I think it was the first one where they were like, we're canceling what is current Mars and return. We're going to rethink it, but the next administration will be the one to decide what it is, and we're going to do a year and a half waiting period. It was the same physical response to Mars and return is,

we're canceling this thing. We don't think it's working. We can't spend this much money, but we're going to institute no new vision for what this thing should be. And so I just want to make sure we remember that. There is something underlying, and maybe it's what, Eric, you were saying about, like, the leadership struggles, right? and is at NASA or the federal government right now generally that no one's willing to make bold decisions and decide on the direction and institute what needs to be done to get these programs

actually going in an efficient direction. But that was the same response that happened in the last administration. And if we forget that, I think that's more alarming because whatever is replaced in this era of NASA leadership probably still has that same flaw in it, if that's something that is not just this administration's take on the matter? You know, there are these big, big questions, right, about NASA that really needed to be decided this year. Like, what really is our future in low Earth orbit with commercial space stations? Because you're really going to have to get off the pot on that and make a decision.

Mars sample return, the previous program was hugely over budget and was not going to happen anytime soon and needed to rethink. needed to rethink possible cancellation, but you had to make a decision on that. Beyond Artemis 3, you really need to figure out what you're going to do with that. The whole gateway, exploration upper stage, all of that funding for very questionable purposes. You needed to decide that. And you just had lots of big issues that you needed to make a decision on. And it just feels like we're either have made bad decisions or are punting on these things, again, without a lack of leadership.

And as you mentioned, Anthony, like, it's not clear where we're going with this budget. Because, yeah, they're going to say, well, yeah, we're going to Mars. Look, there's money. There's a new budget line. But the realist in me says, no, we're not because Elon Musk has left D.C. Jared Isigman believed a lot in going to Mars and was going to take steps to make that happen with nuclear propulsion. and he's gone and probably going to be replaced by someone who's more interested in the moon. And so who's left really to execute the Mars vision at NASA in Washington, D.C.

And I don't see anyone. So it's not clear to me at all where we're going, which I guess is okay since we don't have the money to go there. But yeah. Adrift part two coming up? Yeah, I'll be doing another drift series. Well, it's also, I mean, I think it's more. than that too, which is Mars, the way that it's being now aligned politically will almost become, could become toxic. And that's like I said, it's like one of the great, could be one of the great

tragedies out of this where it shouldn't be. And you have, I mean, this is what, you know, Bob Zubrin is not like the most leftist person. We were that we were at the same conference together. He was talking about. He was dead on like months ago saying that this is, he was not happy with this plan. Bob Zubrin of Mars society of like basically the, you know, the err motivator of our modern era of getting to Mars with an efficient system sees this too as a huge threat because it is becoming, there's this thing in politics, it's induced political opposition, basically. When you have like a non-grounded ideological issue, if one party embraces it really strongly or it becomes coded with one party, you'll just have a natural opposition through the overall

kind of political opposition of the opposite party. And I'm worried that's what's happening to Mars. The general social survey is a survey that has asked a about NASA funding being too much, too little or not, you know, or about right for since 1972. They ask it every two years. And they just released their 20, 24 numbers. And something that's been, there's a really fascinating story in here because for the last 10, 15 years, um, people have been saying that NASA has not getting, it's been too little. And the number of people saying it's been getting too much, has been dropping precipitously, too little is, right?

Is going up. So there was this idea that NASA was not getting what it needed. And that's the, you know, some of the highest numbers ever and asked this, you know, since they asked this question after the end of Apollo. In 2022, 2021 era, those directions shifted both of them very dramatically. And that was after the,

I don't know, and it's like causality is a very kind of questionable thing, but it's notably right after the, the Bezos and Richard Branson launches. But it's also when Elon started to become very much more political in what he was doing with Twitter. And there's been some interesting, I don't have, and that's just purely causality, but I do worry that there's been a downward

trend for the last couple of years then. So those trends have reversed. And the people, so people are seeing or thinking differently about what NASA, or just as space exploration, doesn't say NASA. And so there is a broader changing public relationship to what NASA does. I mentioned about what science, you know, multiple polls over many different years show that when asked and just presented with options, the highest, the, the, People expect NASA to do climate science, space science, research, and planetary defense.

The very, you know, at, you know, two-thirds basically, roughly went all of those things. The very lowest priority for everybody, every single time is send humans to the moon or send humans to Mars, like 10%. Right. And so that's my kind of broader picture by aligning so strongly with this and cutting the thing that people say they actually do want, you actually then start to remove NASA even further from being relevant to people. and those numbers may continue to then shift down of like,

what are we even doing this for for a lot of people? And that's, again, I'm really, really worried because it shouldn't be this way. This should be an opportunity for unity. And Trump won. And the people who worked in the Space Council and Jim Bridenstein and his team, they did an amazing job. And I credit them all the time for that. And that's what's such the bizarre tragedy of this is that they had the template

for making this work. And they're just literally doing the opposite right now. Yep. Yeah, that's, that's, it's something I've worried about for a number of years was sort of space becoming associated as a boys and their toys, a billionaire playground. And you're right, the events of the last six to 12 months certainly have accelerated the trend. We observed in the summer of 2021 when, when Bezos and Branson both went to space. Yeah, there's a really fascinating. And the one billionaire who did it right just got their nomination pulled to be the head of NASA.

Yeah, yeah. there's a really fascinating thing I just noticed last night going through this data. You can break it down by income level class, you know, kind of self-described class. And the one class that breaks the trend on all these ones that just described is people are self-described upper class, suddenly like a dramatic drop in saying NASA gets too much money. Right. So something in like the last, and just in the last two years. And it's way bigger than the margin of error just for that class, though.

So talking about billion, right? It's just like, is that because they see they can buy a right in the space or it's becoming like tech kind of tech Silicon Valley related area? I don't know. I don't know the answer to it, but it was a really notable difference. It coincides with people starting to really invest in SPACs and space companies. So if these people have money to spend, they want to see the government supporting their commercial ambition. Yeah, that could be that too. Yep, absolutely.

And then it makes you, there's a lot more people who are not upper class, though. then there are in terms of numbers. And so you wonder, again, the implications for that, how it's changing. So this broader relationship is shifting. And this is where, again, Jim, the difference is, and you even had this with Jared. I mean, for why I was always optimistic about Jared, too, even though I think he was untested, is that he loved space, right? And you've written about this and you've talked to him, like, he loved and respected NASA

at the end of the day. And Jim Bridenstein loved and respected NASA. They understood what they were inheriting with it, right? This nonpartisan kind of best of ourselves aspect, you know, what other part of the government basically said, go and make us proud, you know? And you put someone in the head of that, in that seat who doesn't think that. And it just becomes this vassal for whims of highly partisan decisions. You break something that has been resisting this overall divisive trend of our politics

for the last 30 years. And it turns it into just like everything else. and then you start going back to these violent swings of policy every four years because it'll be politically impossible to accept the policy of the prior administration. Just to be clear, I don't want to prejudice the next person who is nominated to be Nassad administrator. Like I said, it could be someone with good ideas and good intentions. We don't know. We're not saying. I'm not saying that.

I'm actively lobbying for it to be mean, by the way. The thing is, though, he or she will have that impression, whoever they nominate, whether they deserve it or not because it's been stated we need someone who will not disagree with the president at all. They will have that, you know, the assumption that they're going to be a yes person, right? And that's the tragedy. I mean, that's, again, whether they deserve it or not, that's a terrible position to be in. I'm lobbying to be this person. I told Lori Garver this on my other show that this is the best time to be the head of NASA

because the expectations have been very clearly set. The bar is so low that you can trip over it. If you make it a month, you've made it a month longer than the last guy. and any positive progress that you make, you're like, shit, they pulled something great out of that really bad scenario. I'm going for it. I'm actually lobbying. I'm just going to text some people and be like, listen. I would support you're not doing.

You guys could be, no, okay. Can you at least, if I get it, can you be like somewhere in my administration, chief of staff or something? Can I just be the guy who goes and looks at cool NASA hardware? That's what I would. Yeah, you could be the office decorator, pick where the moonrock goes. It's not in the Oval Office anymore, so it's available for the NASA administrator. There you go. Can you guys plug some of the things you're working on?

Casey, obviously, we talked a lot about the things they're writing, but any other stuff coming up in the near future that people should be watching out for? I'll highlight the dashboards that I've been putting out, and those will be coming more. So dashboards.complanetary.org, you can look at a breakdown of NASA science spending across the entire country by state or by congressional district. And you can trace to and find district-specific economic impact reports for science in your area that are presented for you with details about who is spending money, who's doing what with it and what is happening.

This was a big data gathering step. It's all coming from contract data. So it's all updated every three months. And we'll be rolling out more of these just to help make that. what's the story of NASA where you live, particularly NASA science, because obviously that's our really focus right now. And just planetary.org, save NASA science,

our action hub for this. We have talking points. We have actions you can take. We have all the charts and data that you saw. All those new charts, you can download the raw data yourself, mix it up, display it in creative different ways.

We have versions specialized for mobile displays, widescreen display. We have all sorts of contacts and things for you to use to make your case. And if you've ever been on the couch, you know, on the edge, you know, deciding, is this the time to do something? Now is the time to do something. Whether it's write an op-ed, tell your friends, right, your member of Congress, go to your member of Congress anything because NASA needs your help right now, particularly NASA science. Or run for NASA administrator. Sure.

We'll leave that out. Or run for president and, you know, do it for white sides or do a run for Congress, right? If you care about it and want to run for something and support it, this is the time to do something. Eric, you're talking about leaks a lot these days, right? You're on Leaks Wash. I've been on vacation, actually, for the last week. So I don't have anything imminent coming out.

I did write a fun story published about a week ago on Bridget Mendler. She's a CEO of Northwood Space, former Disney star. She has a hell of a story. And it's super cool. Like she and her husband started a space company to try to really increase the capacity to get data down from satellites. And so I put a lot of effort into that story if people are looking for something to read. And I just did want to end been kind of Debbie Downer this last hour. I don't know if you noticed.

But there was a bit of good news this week in space. I was excited to see the Varda space, this company which flies, build spacecraft to fly, experiments autonomously and potentially could lead to some breakthroughs in space manufacturing. Got a license from the FAA to fly as many missions as they wanted to the end of the decade. And it's an interesting and novel approach to this, and it's important to develop new commercial markets if we're going to have a vibrant commercial space industry. So I was excited to see, I know it's from a regulatory standpoint, getting that permission has been a pretty uphill battle. So I thought that was a nice win for Varda.

The best case scenario of the situation is that people ultimately are inspired to really step back and take some creative decisions and make some interesting ideas, right, that comes out of this. And that's internally at NASA and that's what a lot of these companies too, right? That I think realizing these potential weaknesses and really, again, looking at what our values are, what we want to do in space. and I hope to see that in the scientific community as much as anywhere. So, I mean, that's, and we know, we've been invigorated at the society about this.

And I think you're seeing just, Eric, what you're probably, there are tons of so many exciting things that we're still doing and capable of doing that that's in a sense the big picture, right? That at the end of the day, even if this nihilistic, self-destructive, self-sabotaging, you know, mess of a thing called the budget is implemented anyway, its ultimate outcome will be nihilistic nothing, right? and you can build back from nothing. So its legacy will be nothing beyond a pointless disruption and delay of things that we should be doing because we can always build ourselves back. That's my happy ending. We're parking it up here at the end. I appreciate you guys.

Thanks for hanging out. It's going to be just me for a while. So I think I'm trying to get Lauren Grush on the show next week. So we'll see who hangs out with us then. I'm sure there's going to be some more stories to come up. But until then, thanks for hanging out. We'll see y'all later. Thank you.

Peace. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, end of death.