Off-Nominal - 254 - An Advocate of Crazy (with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen)

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Former Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and leader of ETH Zurich Space, to talk about the state of science missions at NASA. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 254 - An Advocate of Crazy (with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen) - YouTube QuantumScape Co-Founder and CTO Sells His Trust's Entire Stake in the Company for $76,465 | The Motley Fool NASA Awards More Moon Base Science, Previews New Opportunities - NASA The Cost of a PROMISE | The Planetary Society Has NASA already found life on Mars? | Scientific American Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - NASA Science Follow Thomas Thomas Zurbuchen Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) / X Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative Earth turn. Well, Jake, it's our favorite day on this podcast. It is our favorite most boring lunar eclipse, Jake. It's the day we get to roll out that Neil deGrasse Tyson video clip of how boring lunar eclipses are. How are you feeling? I'm feeling great.

I got a new hat on my vacation, and it's awesome. That's the best letter on it. And if you're from the Netherlands, you might recognize. recognize this, but it's just going to be a little inside joke between us and me and the Dutch. That's what it's going to be for. I mean, for my six and almost two-year-old, I also have hats with just the letter of their name on it. So now you'll look just like my very young children. There you go. I appreciate it. You got to get a Z hat. Dr. Z's here. How's it going? Somebody should give me one. I have not found one ever. So nobody wants to be called Z. Failed, James. You should have brought one back.

Did they have every letter in this shop? or something. Where you bought the shop? No, no. No, that's why it's an inside joke between me and the Dutch because it's... Well, don't explain it then. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you'll get there.

Okay. I'll go one day. Dr. Z. Do you got anything fun today, Dr. Zee? Do you bring something interesting to show us? Yes. This is an IPA I found in the store right here in Utah, a West Coast IPA that I like. And of course, it's also very spacey.

Do you see? It's a beautiful, beautiful. I don't know what kind of beers you like. Often I like loggers, especially after running. I just ran up a mountain, came down,

took a shower, but this time it's an IPA. Jeez. So casual. Yeah, just casual. Remind us what country you're from? I'm surprised this was even notable.

Yeah, no stranger to incline, I guess. It'll be that. what do you got anthony uh i got i got the beer i break out when we have scientists on the show jake i've got a field study i pa i've realized that this is the thing i need to always do if we have anyone sciencey on the show is get a field study and in the dying days of summer here love it i did not run up and down a mountain i am in new jersey there are no mountains i mean there's

some mountains but they're not like mountains i've got uh the one of my coffee coffee boches is so this is a caramelized honey mead that I made. So, yeah. Man, that's dark for the summer. Wow. It's actually very fresh, though, because it's like, it's chilled and it's kind of like honey sweet. And yeah, it's good. Well, we've returned from our summer near sabbatical, Jake.

We've had pre-recorded shows. We did a bunch of stock tips last week. Can I bring up a talk? All right, Dr. Zee, last week we did a thing because Jake was traveling, so we had to pre-record a show, and we did a bit where we spent $100,000 of fake money picking space stocks. And Jake mistakenly bought the stock for QuantumScape because he thought it was Quantum Space, the thing run by Jim Bridenstein, and became a meme. And I just want to call this out before we start, Jake, that less than 24 hours ago,

the co-founder and CTO sold his entire stake in the company. I saw this. I just checked, how are they doing? And he sold co-founder CTO sold $76,000 of stock in the entire stake that he had in this company. So how you feel? All right. Hey, man. I'm going long.

I'm long. So you bought the rest of the company? The other you're on sale. It's on sale. It's on sale. Go in hard. Oh, geez. Anyway.

a large percentage. It's like if you maximize percentage of ownership, that would be a good way. We've done a hostile takeover. The All Phnominal podcast has taken over Quantum Scape. Funding is secure. Jeez. All right. What are we doing here, Jake? Why did you wrangle Dr. Z for this? Well, all right. So we have talked about this around the edges, Anthony. And I think it was due to like get its own conversation. But there's like, there's some just weird, interesting different stories happening in the science world. And, you know, especially with, with this administration, there's just been like approaches that are new. You know, we're looking, we're talking about

promise rover. It's like, let's harvest these like, you know, test articles and then slap stuff on it. And then we've got the, the gateway turned into a nuclear test bed turned into a helicopter deployment system on Mars. Like, that's a very out there idea. Just seeing a lots of different things. And I'm trying to make sense of it all. And some of it is cool and some of it is weird to me. And I don't know what's going on. And I don't know who to ask other than someone like you. So let's call it the top official available for it. So I was like, who's the smartest person we know about this stuff?

And we need to ask them a lot of questions on it. So that's why you're here. In an unofficial capacity, in an unofficial, just Dr. C who runs up and down mountains in Utah now. Yeah. Yes, I have to show my ID. Every time I go to NASA headquarters, the last time somebody looked at my passport is like, have you been here? More than you. More than you. More than you. That must hurt. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm not sure where to start, but maybe we just pick one of these and start dissecting it. So how we, why don't we do promise? Like that one is probably the one that's like most in my mind as as difficult to parse. Because I have like a lot of conflicting feelings about this. Like on one hand, I love the idea.

of putting some like, you know, top quality like science hardware on the surface to support Artemis. Like I want lots of science to go with Artemis, right? And so like this feels like it's filling that niche. I like the idea of saving money and reusing parts. Great. But I also have, I'm very confused because like I don't know, I can't get a good read on how valuable these like test articles, you know, not test articles. What do you call them? Development beds or whatever that you have, you know, these like the Maggie, the Rover and stuff. I can't get a read on just how valuable those are to the existing operational missions like curiosity, perseverance. I'm also suspect about whether we actually will save a lot of money or if this is going to be

just like a very expensive thing where we have to pay a lot of money for the clips provider because it's a bespoke thing and then you got to throw an RTG in it and then the instruments and then it ends up being a $1.5 million or a billion dollar mission anyway. I don't know. So I'm curious to know where we start with that. You've been on a journey with promise. Yeah. And I'm nowhere on it. Like literally I'm nowhere on it. What do you think, Dr. Zela? What's the deal with this? How are you feeling about it?

So, you know, it may be worth kind of looking at two strategies you could be using and then kind of seeing how these ideas fit strategy, that each one of those strategies in which one they don't. You know, the first strategy that the science community has been using for the last decades has advantages and disadvantage. I'm not trying to sell it as the right way, but it's basically as a different way. but it's basically as advantages and disadvantages. That is that every 10 years you bring,

what do you think are the leading people together, lock them in a room in D.C. And in other places for so-and-so-many meetings. And at the end comes at the Catoe strategy that says, in the next 10 years, here are the most important missions you should be doing. The first recommendation in all of these, almost always says, don't forget the RNA program because it's a C-Cordon of science. And the next highest recommendation almost always is, oh, remember, there's whatever the program is called, explore, discovery, like PI class mission, principal investigator class missions.

And then come the science missions. The science missions could be go find life on Europa or bring back samples from Mars or, you know, like if you're in, if you're in astrophysics, go, you know, look at. you know, gravitational wave science or whatever, you know, so it's kind of recommendation. So kind of if you sit at NASA headquarters, you say, well, what's useful about this? What's useful is there's actually some programs you really want to do that the community as a whole that gets delivered on the hill. Both parties are looking at this. Basically, where people can agree. So we don't actually have as much discussions about always from Adam and Eve, right, kind of like many of the other programs have.

Every time an administration comes in, you kind of throw everything away and start over. So that's the Decadal standard strategy. By the way, disadvantages of these things. Almost always the strategy is built in a context that is not wearing out. Kind of like whatever this year's situation is, is not the situation in five years, up or down. Sometimes you're done with the plan before the end of 10 years.

More often than not, you've only cracked, 20% of the plan by the end of 10 years. And so it's not actually useful in people. So it becomes a discussion. It's also not very good at developing technologies. I just want to say when I was on NASA, some of the biggest technology developments that were not in the decadal. So I did commercial lunar payload services because I thought it was important.

It was not in the decado. I did DART. Somebody, you know, the APL wanted to do that. It was a congressional priority. I put it in the budget without. the recommendation. By the way, the next time it came around, both of these programs were recommended, but it was not in there. So that's strategy one. Strategy two could be built a strategy post on science as a platform for technology development, like actually lean forward, develop

some things, kind of, I think about it as like arrows in the quiver for the whole exploration program. Like I just gave two examples. Going to hit an asteroid with a kind of technology that's normally used in, you know, artillery or whatever, in missiles or or developing commercial ways or data buy projects or not like a helicopter on Mars. The helicopter on Mars, you know, ingenuity, I pushed because it's just important. I thought it was important technology. I got into trouble with the science community, he's like, well, almost every meeting I could predict the one in the front, you know, with the tie. It's like, but it's not into the kid. It's like, well, we'll do it anyway because it's important, right? So you could look at that. So kind of, if you look at that, Jared, if you ever listen to him, you realize he's a guy who leans forward on technology. He has lived a life doing that. And so basically what you see is, by the way, that the first strategy, the Cato strategy, especially for strategic missions.

The fastest strategic missions ever seen is like seven years. You know, technologies you can do in like two years. Like, go. Like, okay, let's not make enormously important kind of requirements on it. So what you really see in many of these ideas is kind of a confidence or a contradiction of both of these strategies. and that's why we're struggling. So it's actually hard to kind of say like,

okay, what is actually, you know, how does good look? You know, and I would just kind of just honestly submit good is not doing the standard, always just doing the standard science strategy because it has actually not proven to be really forward-leaning and great. Like I'll give another example. There's a coronagraph on Roman that's going to launch, you know, end of August here, end of this weekend. Yeah, and so basically the coronagraph, big fight should the coronagraph be on.

The scientist is like, it's not absolutely needed, save money. And I'm like, holy crap, of course we're going to try to put a tech demo on it, not one that absolutely has to work, but one that we're trying to develop a tool set that if we go after Exoplan, it becomes the most important thing. So if you now take the mission, so I totally understand the idea in the second strategy. Like we actually have nothing in the queue kind of really fast that we could just turn around and perhaps it's nuclear, one of the priorities. I think we should push, you know, on a number of things.

And kind of like this actually could be nuclear. So kind of if, you know, Jared walks down the hallway and basically looks at this and it's like, why aren't we flying this to the moon? So it's kind of in the context of the second strategy. We need to actually do some things, kind of put some arrows in that quiver because we don't have a really capable rover on the development. You know, we almost try to turn off the Viper rover because of the situation that you remember. So it's really that the tension between those approaches, I think that it's going to be common. I mean, we can have more chats.

I want to stop talking kind of my monologue. But for me, for me, it's. killing it. It's really important. At the end of the show. No, for me, it's really important to see those two because I'm going to refer to them. And, you know, like, so we could kind of make a scorecard in each one of those dimensions. Is it the most important science?

Is it really the highest priority? You know, is it kind of driving to the most important science question? Or is it creating kind of new technologies? Does that make sense kind of as a starting point? Did he get you, Jake? Are you convinced? Well, no. I think I agree with everything you just said there. I think that's true.

Like the decadal, Anthony makes fun of me because I'm always like, but that decadal. I'm always like shout that out from the rooftops. Like, why don't we look at that? But like the decadal is specifically about science. Like it is like really driving into like, and science is one important of many things. One thing of many important things that NASA does. Right. So like I think it is important to say that like it's totally valid and correct and and should be done that NASA pursues things.

that don't have scientific value. You know, if they're going after technology development or there's, you know, geopolitical things or there's whatever, there's lots of stuff that NASA does. And this mission is one of those things. I think that's fine. One thing that I'm confused about, though, is like I don't feel like NASA has articulated well the number is for. Like they've talked about it's going to support Artemis and they talked about how

they're going to implement it, which like it's great. It's going to have an RTG. It's going to use this chassis. But like I haven't really felt like there have been a really good explanation of what value it delivers, whether it's science or whether it's tech development or whatever it is, right? So to me right now, it kind of looks like something that's consuming a lot of resources, not just in money, but in like valuable things, specifically the RTG, right? Those don't grow on tree. Have like something that's consuming all that and then no clear like value proposition.

They don't grow on trees. They grow underground, Jake. They do grow underground, yeah. They're like a root vegetable. Then they're more root vegetable. Yeah. So that's why I'm struggling with, Because I don't know, I don't know what it's going to give for all the, all the resources it's going to consume, you know? Yeah. So I, look, I have not seen a summary of, like, what would actually, what would actually be. No, I mean, I, I too haven't seen a summary of what the signs would be that you

would have. Like, okay, so, so like, take this as an idea. Like, I'm actually off the opinion that we should work on any ideas. Like some of them look a little bit crazy. Let's actually turn them over and say, like, is this a good idea? Should we do that? In the context of, let's say, Viper, in the context of the long lunar mission that was recommended at the last decade, right? Kind of the big sample return, kind of a big journey on the moon.

You know, like, how does that bring us forward? So it would be helpful if somebody did that analysis. Like if I just looked at it, kind of just because I know the rover, right, kind of what it does, of course, it has an exquisite camera system. It has a lot of infrared spectroscopy and spectrometry. What that allows you to do is really get compositional measurements kind of better over and above what has been done. You know, the Chinese have done some of them. There is, of course, on some of the clips land or some of them. These are really exquisite instruments.

like the fact that there's a drill allows you to actually look like for example with a good mass spec and you know without pretending that I understand exactly which instrument they want to put on but you know like you would really like for example there's ideas about helium three you should be able with with a drill to take the top and put it in a sample extraction and actually measure how many PPPs or PPMs of helium three there is you should be able if you're a you're in a cool place, which by the way, it's not clear that the rover would work there. I just want to be absolutely clear that many people don't actually sit down with a notepad and write the temperature down of how it needs to operate and just look at the mechanical systems

and, you know, how do they have to work, you know, just a lubricant. I mean, it's really hazardous to be in cold areas. But like, suppose you could take a sample out of one of these places. One of the biggest question really is, in what form is the volatile in the regolith? And so if you could answer that, that would be really important questions. The fact that you bring your own energy in the backpack basically allows you to survive during the lunar night, possibly. That would be my expectation, which really besides, you know, the Japanese lander and the Chinese with their lunar battery, sorry, with their nuclear heaters, you know, we have not, survive frankly, the bureaucracy of launching something with nuclear system. I mean, nothing prepares you for that. I mean, I remember after the fifth meeting that was basically

the same at perseverance, I'm like, I'm going to jump out of a building soon, you know, like the same risk analysis. And then, you know, like you were done with NASA, then the Department of Energy comes in, does their own. Then you realize NASA was never really responsible. It was always Department of Energy. Why did that waste, you know, five good things? of my life just listening to these enormously bureaucratic, you know, like at the end, you basically say, well, the only way somebody gets killed in this is literally it falls into somebody's mouth on the way down. I'm exaggerating.

It's actually really hard, like the likelihood that somebody gets killed, even with bad conditions in Florida, is a lot less likely than somebody having an accident in Cocoa Beach after the bar. you know so it's like i mean for which happens a lot like every day yeah so yeah so so i could imagine great rationales but but just like you i'm i'm i could not like i've been waiting for that right kind of by the way i don't think it would take a lot of time to just really sit down you know with 10 smart people you know three five of them of engineers the other sinus and just create a little kind of science traceability matrix that's the tool we usually look what are

the key measurements, how do you measure it? How do you close those measurements? I think the science community would be very excited if that came up good. And so with the tech community. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly. And I suspected that our conclusion at the end of this may end up being that the only problem with promise is a communications problem, you know, just kind of conveying what it's for. Because like the, there's, there's so many weird like possibilities that so It seems so obvious to me, you know, like, so, okay, let's say there is, like, we put a great science instrument suite on this, right? And it's like, okay, so then the, you know, the role of this is actually to do valuable science and we create a great traceability matrix. I mean, the Decaturl survey had a rover for the, for the moon to support Artemis, right?

We had the endurance mission concept. So then I always kind of come to a point where it's like, why don't we just steal all that? Like, it's already laid out. Like, you have a good jumping off point. Or it's not for science. And there's some sort of technology we need to develop. So, like, what is it? like why hasn't it been like the headline part of that?

We're sending this cool rover to do something. You know, we're going to practice power generation or like some sort of material science to build something. I don't know. Something interesting that would be possible there. So yeah, I get so like turned around on why it's not been. I don't know. I don't know what it's for.

I just get so stuck on that. I mean, one of the things that could be that answer, Jake, is the lander size needed for this is a huge weak spot in our infrastructure right now, right? New Glenn launch pad blows up and we're all saying, can we land a ton of stuff on the moon? Literally one ton of stuff on the moon in the next five years. That's a dodgy arrangement because the clips landers right now that almost almost all of the clips providers have said, this is our architecture for a bigger lander, but there's no contracts there.

So all we're looking at is the human landing system landers that can sometimes carry cargo. That's the slot that needs to be filled right now is like take the New Glenn explosion and the promised rover as good impetus to specifically target that class of payload to the moon because we obviously need it and we are hugely vulnerable to one launch pad blowing up and having a big problem to be able to land that amount on the moon, you know, in a simplified architecture. Even then, though, like, if the objective is to like develop a one-ton lander, which like, I agree, it sounds like it's a really valuable thing we need to work on, it's like, why would you gate that technology development behind a, you know, a nine-figure,

rover with an RTG? No, I'm not saying, I'm not saying gay to eat behind that. A load or something, right? But I'm saying, like, one of the arguments against developing a lander of that class is we don't have stuff to launch in that class. And it's like, just make a whole list of everything we would launch in that class and put Viper in it and put promise in it and keep thinking of other things to put in it.

Throw an argonaut if the Europeans want to get around to building that thing. Like, figure out a bunch of landers and a bunch of payloads that would fit in that class as a reason to fly that. I mean, this is what the Department of Defense does, right? they say, we need to hit these nine orbits with this amount of payload. I'm not going to tell you why. I'm not going to tell you what I'm putting there, but I need this thing to exist. And I have a vested interest in that existing.

If NASA is really serious about a presence on the moon, they need that class of payload service to exist outside of the constraints that are pressed upon it when you have the two organizations capable of it being tied up in the human landing system and all the complexities there. Yeah. I mean, I believe the landing system is one of these kind of infrastructure plays. The other one is just cargo delivery. Frankly, if you have humans there, right? I mean, kind of in many of the architecture,

it makes a lot of sense to actually preposition the cargo, especially if they do interesting things. It's also how humans will interact with rovers at the surface of these planetaries, you know, like at the moon and eventually at Mars. I just really believe the opportunity space is to be a lot more rich in the environment. You know, like, I mean, what humans should do

with supervised rovers, not just drive. You know what I mean? It's like, like, I mean, to a certain extent, you know, like if the human needs to sleep, the rovers don't. And, you know, there should be a lot of stuff happening while the human sleep. And that only works if kind of the science

and the tech communities mature together with the core kind of delivery mechanisms. And perhaps what we're really saying is, is kind of alone, there's promise grower, kind of is kind of by itself, kind of does not check that box, right? There should be a strategic kind of way of handling that that would make it a lot,

a lot easier. We never, we never really had, my whole time I was there, you know, the six, six and a half years, we never really had enough money in the other pieces, I would just say, like the space deck. What happened in space tech is kind of the NASA centers came and a lot of was earmarked right away.

So kind of if you actually looked what, you know, like so, we had this, you know, the huge kind of servicing mission at Goddard, which like went ever more expensive and took a lot of money out of the space deck mission directorate. Right. In science, we did, you know, the clips because I really felt like what we needed to do is. yes, develop the capabilities to go there. I couldn't do it with the traditional ways. Like I did a quick look at this. I asked JPL, you know, how much would it be to do a lander? They did an analysis.

The answer came back, you know, kind of what I would say, the closest number that I stakes to my mind is close to $2 billion, right? I can have to do what others do at $200 million or less, right? And so basically I just like, I couldn't. Yes, I know we could do. more and we can make it much more sophisticated, but I just, like, I can't get that extra money in the presence of having to do human, you know, delivery services. So, so basically what we then tried to do is just create kind of a more eye child program, which, by the way, worked.

You know, like the lunar community is in much better shape today than it was, let's say, in 2016, right? Kind of, like I always said, like, it's easy to define the lunar, you know, the lunar session in a conference, it's the place where old men talk about the past. Like it's literally like a very little, very little new happened, right? And so basically by developing like the time I left, we had something like 40 new technology developments that were going. But we never, the work we had to do kind of as we then went forward is to integrate them and put the infrastructure around it,

like, you know, car code delivery, vehicles and others. I think that's a really important part of the strategy. And you're saying that the decadal-driven thinking of this, right? That's focusing on the scientific results, the output, and you're saying there's like a scientific methodology or enabling technology aspect that, do you feel that's a thing that in the role you had at NASA like that is your purview to Shepard as well?

and that that's not something they're going to be considering in the Decadal is we have this accumulation of needs here that would be serviced well by this other set of technologies. How could we capture that and shepherd that along as well? So the key issue, I think it's very possible to do that, to shepherd that kind of discussion. The key issue we have is like the Decadal is a 10-year process by the name but also by process. What happens in that administration tries to do these things in four years or eight years, right? So you have a really hard time making pivots. So the way I, what I did when I did these things that were not in the decadal, what I did is I went and communicated very openly.

It basically said, look, this is the national priority. By the way, I think it's really important as a scientist to recognize that there are other priorities than science. I mean, like, not the science is not the only metrics of success when you build missions and when you build programs. So it's kind of we have as a, like if we feel like we need to develop nuclear technology for future exploration, which by the way, I think we do. Like if we want to survive at night and do long-term expiration of the moon, where can you need nuclear stuff? The same is true. If you want to go into the outer solar system and do something really meaningful, searching for life, example, or go be a past voyager.

You know, like there, we need nuclear technology and not just nuclear batteries, which are relatively inefficient. You know, we need, we need other things. So if you said these technologies are really important, I think that we can use our science program to actually do exciting science with these technologies. And I actually felt the science committee was very supportive overall, but it requires, like you said earlier, communication transatlantic. transparency, like also communication, not when the cameras are on, right?

I had a lot of unhappy people at times in my office. Like, it's like, well, you're supposed to do X. I know it's your favorite mission. I don't have money for it. I wish I could. But, you know, like, I mean, that priorities must be here. So I actually, the only thing I just like is to say, I would like some kind of, sorry, I'm going to use the word crazy.

Many people think when I say crazy, it's negative. I mean, crazy is kind of brilliant, forward leaning. Like, we're not right there yet. Like, when we started with Dart, it was that, right? Or the Mars helicopter. We need a little bit of crazy in science, too, right? I just really, I'd like us to actually pull new tools and new arrows in the quiver, new tools in the toolbox of science exploration.

and for that, every once in a while we need to reach past the comfortable. And I really, I think if we're not doing that, I mean, I just, I'm an advocate for crazy, not just like running on the train track of the decadal, which, what the decadal is really good is prioritizing science over science. What is most important right now, you know, the atmospheres of exoplanets or gravitational wave science? Like, where should, I mean, I think the best people that can assess that are scientists. I just really don't think politicians are particularly good at it.

Yeah, you're kind of dovetailing into my next question here because I was going to ask you how you think about the Decadal because like the Decadal has got like it's got, you know, the way they structure it. There's like root questions like you talk about, right? Where it's like these are like things we wish we knew. And if we knew these, it would be really good. It's like, it's like implementation agnostic, it's mission agnostic. It's just like, it would be really great to know how old the surface of Titan is or something. You know, there's like really some random thing like that. And then they sort of, they spend a lot of time talking about what that means and why it's important.

Then they provide some derivative sort of like guidance, right? It's like, by the way, if you wanted to answer that question, here are some ideas we've come up with for missions that might satisfy that. And then from there, here are some ideas for technologies you could work. on to make those missions happen to answer those questions, right? So you have kind of like layers of of things that happen there. I've always thought that the first part of that Cato is really the only thing that's like, not one thing that's important, but it's the part that can last that 10 years, right? Like you said, because after a while, the missions or the technology may be out of date, but the questions remain and just the way you want to implement them can be different, right?

When you're in NASA, do you spend much time thinking about the second and third layer there, or are you kind of laser focused on the questions? Well, you kind of have to think of all of them, because like in every meeting you go, people ask me, ask you questions on page 220, right? So you have to know what's on, you know,

in the second and third layer. But I just want to just quickly echo what you said, because I think it's actually profound. What happened over time that the Cato's turned from a strategy document, which is what you just said, like tell me what the most important questions are and prioritize them for me. That, and you said implementation agnostic.

That's really important. Like, don't actually tell me which technology I should use. Like, give me, give me that. It started there that the first decadals were, you know, dozens, a couple dozen of pages to something that's many hundreds now. And the reason it's many hundreds is because people are trying to guide the, the politicians and the leaders hand in detail. And for me, I just really don't think that works.

Like, I think the cadels that have the strategic framing of the type that you just said are really, really useful. I think there's probably a second later that I think can also be useful, which basically says, like, if we wanted to do that, like what would be the framing? Is it more like a hundred million type of problem? or is it more a billion type of problem? Or is it a 15 billion type of problem? You know, there's some people who walk around and talk what I think are 15 to 20 billion

type of programs and make them sound like they're 2 billion. That's going to crash. As much as it crashed when the first time somebody asked how much is Shane's web, put the hand up and said a half a billion. I was just on a panel a few weeks ago with Lori Garver, which, by the way, I think she did amazing work, you know, and it deserves a lot of credit. But God, it agonized me.

You know, she said, oh, the first time somebody gave me a cost, it was a half a billion. And she is correct. But that was bullshit. Like from the beginning, everybody knew that there never will be a half a billion dollar weapon. Like, I mean, it's just absolutely not in any way reasonable. And so for me, kind of that realism, you know, kind of that, okay, so what are the kind of, not don't tell me which instruments should be up there, but.

But kind of generally speaking, a rower of the type of curiosity, how much is it roughly? The answer is two, two, three, right? Or four, depending. So it's not one. But then you have something that's a lot smaller, right? So you could do something that's a half, you know, then it's more like a viper. Do you see what I mean? So it's a different class.

So I think that intermediate piece is also useful, but it should not be this recipe, you know, like a good kind of cookbook. It's like, you know, a little bit of sugar and, you know, two spoons of that. Like, you know, so for me, it just becomes not very useful because what it does, at first, it makes you less flexible than you should be. You're actually not opportunistic as a leader because you're standing there with the rulebook. It's like, well, I can't do that because the decadal didn't say it. Like, that is not, that's not what the decadal should do.

But the second thing it shouldn't do is it shouldn't lock you into a specific technology environment, especially now or certain technology. You know, like, there's a lot of spacecraft being built in Earth science between 1 and 5 million. It used to be the last decade. When we did that decadal, we thought in Earth science, a kind of a spacecraft is between 20 and 30 million. No, no, it's like, I mean, literally, I can, like, we can take a plane and I can open this up. like here's a spacecraft costs you know with instruments 10 like that's a lot like it's it's a factor of then lower so kind of why shouldn't we use these do you see like to actually do amazing earth science and then equivalent elsewhere yeah yeah it's always like kind of a uh like that's

sort of what your job was and what NASA's job is is to me is to like interpret those questions and then say something like okay Mars sample return is flagged as number one priority you know because that answers us all these questions. That's our number one thing. And like to me, it would be okay for NASA to say, great, here's how we're working on Mars sample return. We're not ready to fly it yet. We're developing some technologies to do this or that or we're building some industries. And then as far as missions, we're going to actually fly. We're going to look at the number two thing and fly that instead because that's achievable based on the, you know, the TRL levels of all these different, you know, that is a reasonable strategy. And it's like, that's someone building an

implementation strategy plan against a priority list, right? Because that's a reasonable. like that's the name of the game priority. That's, that's it. That's the only thing there is really at the end of the day is you have, I want to do a thousand things. This is the order that I think they're important and we just start working down the list and do it we can. Right. And that's, that's just, you never get to the end of the list. The list keeps growing as you knock things off of it and you just keep working on it. Right. Exactly. I think there's one more benefit and that's the ability to say no. Like I, you know, a strategy is not what the priorities are like we're not doing this now. Like we're not ready. Right. I got off like. the ability to say no. I mean, for me, at times, you know, I think some of the mistakes that happened, you know, we already talked about Marstampo returned the last time I was here. It's like, hey, stop. We're trending so badly. Let's reset.

But there's kind of the stabilizers are the Cato. The second stabilizer are in international collaborations. And now kind of by stopping, you create such a just a, a full bucket of like just problems for yourself that you're trying to you're trying to fix the airplane by flying and then you know

mostly we don't do that you know you go land and figure it out again right kind of like I mean so for me so for me that's the other kind of like kind of the that's the other thing like we actually have to do the right thing first yes the

the decade or should tell you why they're the right things. But within the framework or was there, let's do the right things first. And then we figure out what actually fits, as opposed to getting in these straight lines for 10 years. I mean, that is not what we should be doing, right? Yes, by the way, I worked on a number of the cadets personally.

I was the vice chair of one of them and was a committee on the other, on the executive committee of three others. So I understand, by the way, the quality is really high of these things. Like if people say it's just really useful and there's nothing good, like they haven't actually read it.

And it's not selfish. Generally speaking, there's not many mistakes in there, generally speaking, over time, the decadals are really, really good. It just, it can't be a cookbook. If it's a cookbook, it's a 10-year,

cookbook and that is stupid in an environment that's changing on a time scale of 18 months. Yeah. Do you think Mars Samprotern is, it ended up sounding like what you would describe the James Webb problem, that it was always bullshit at the beginning. But do you feel like when it started, it fit in that same mechanism of James Webb at half a billion? Like, was it that bad? Or did it snowball and become that over time?

So I can just tell you, the first number I ever heard was $3 billion. That it could have been some room. And the way I did it, I basically said, what do I, what is the leanest more sample return we can do? Like what the team wanted to do is something like a $25 billion kind of initiative. The first thing was a massive flyer in communication time, like, you know, for $5 billion or three to $5 billion. the next thing was this and so forth.

If you added it all up, it's 20 to 25 a billion. So I basically said like by knowing what we know from perseverance, by using the same landing system, you know, it was three billion. Kind of in retrospect, if you looked at the kind of reviews that were made, they didn't name my name. They were nice, but they were correct in a sense that basically said, well, that three billion became a stronger thing. kind of people actually had a hard time kind of moving off it.

But so no, we didn't start in kind of in a land, which, by the way, I'm 100, okay, I'm just going to say something and I'm probably wrong. If you give $3 billion to the right people who want to be successful at Marst sample return, you can do this. I would personally invest. I don't know how much you invested in this company. That's just the founder just sold. $76,000 of QuantumScape stock committed to the $3 billion budget here. I would personally put some money into that. But the problem was what then happened is the bureaucracy got a hold of it.

And I wanted to do is like, you know, somebody in some room where I wasn't in. It's like, let's pinpoint land. You know, pinpoint landing. You can't do that with the perseverance landing. And I wasn't smart enough. I mean, it kind of like I didn't. Why didn't my team see it? But like, you know, the pinpoint landing was one of them.

just took it out of the box. The second one is I said from the beginning, I told the science community, if we only can bring one sample back, we'll bring one sample back. We don't want to bring all the samples back. Well, the requirement, the last time I, like I wasn't sitting on them enough.

Like, oh, we bring all of them back. So pinpoint lining all of them back. And then we had international collaborations. We built systems that had to fit in the international. And frankly, the fun. final part, I think we talked about that earlier. We didn't have the A team working on it. They just made mistakes.

I mean, frankly, embarrassing mistakes. And that together just took it out of the box. I think where they ended up at the end, I forgot what the number was, $5 billion or something like that. 7 to 11, I think was the most recent, where that was a GAO saying 7 to 11? I forget what we said.

Yes, but the APL one that, you know, like they had at the end was, I believe, five and a half. There was already money. Just kept going out. So it's, yeah, but, you know, it went going up that there's no way this could be successful with infinite money, my opinion. Like when it's increasing. Yeah, yeah, on a track like this, because you don't actually know what you're doing, right?

You can't go from six to 12 in six months, which is what happened in that hearing or 11, six to 11. But that's, I mean, frankly, you just say, stop it. We don't know what we're talking about. But I think at the end, JPL came with something like five, I think they could have done it. Like with industry participation, what they did, you know, they wanted to do the lander themselves.

That was the only stationary lander ever did by myself. So I said, why didn't you know that when you sat in your chairs? Like, that's a good question. Why didn't I? Why did that never come up? And, you know, it came up at the end when I found the problem. But, you know, I wasn't there long enough to pivot it. By the way, I pivoted, like, you know,

I had to pivot Roman, which is launching. within cost and schedule, which had also ahead of schedule. We're early. Yeah. Launching early. Yeah, six months early.

It also grew, but there, you know, like got it under control. I just think what happened is we, I mean, frankly, we waited too long, but we didn't have a solution.

I just really don't believe that it was a money issue. It was a scope issue and an understanding of what actually it takes. Kind of the most complex mission is not the most successful. You know, web was complex, not because somebody wanted to make it complex.

It was the simplest mission to do the job. And so we needed to do the simplest mission to do the job, not the most complex mission. And that the pinpoint landing was not needed, as were many other things. And we needed the A team without the A team. We had no chance. So you can screw up a perfectly good recommendation with all these things, right? So that is not the fault of the Decadal. I actually don't think the Decadal got any.

anything wrong. We did. The way we implemented it. We really screwed it. If you think about what the Decado was saying is all they're saying is that getting the samples back is important, right? Super important. That's all that's the that's the key thing to take away from the decadal. Getting a sample back, not specifically 11 tubes or whatever. Well, I mean, you can even go for the back. They don't care about getting the samples back. That's how you do it. They have questions, right? They want to know how old is Mars and the samples are the best way to do it. Right. So they're like you, You can go back to the most atomic level of we need to, there's something we don't know,

and that's all that they're really saying there, right? The samples kind of coalesces to a place where it's like, if we had a sample, we could answer 15 of our most important questions. And that's like a big broad brush and that's like lovely for us, right? That's why it's so important on the priority list. But yeah, I mean, you're right. It's like that saying no to it and shutting down MSR is not saying that the

recommendation is wrong. It's saying that we weren't able to do it, right? And those are distinctly two different things, right? Yeah, and we should be, kind of my point again is we should be able to stop and then try again without just like running it into the wall so badly that at the end, kind of, everybody is bleeding from the head so badly like for a generation again. Like, you know, I mean, I don't know what you saw. Like Nadia Drake a few months ago wrote an article on Mars, I think in Scientific American.

Frankly, I thought it was fantastic because, you know, it's the fifth. 50th anniversary of Viking. So she interviewed, she interviewed, you know, Tom Young and interviewed scientists today. But kind of the way I would summarize it is, first of all, the case from our sample return has never been stronger than just now. Like what actually happened in the last two years made the case much, much better. And they know kind of that kind of Tom Young, like, you know, he said, like in his better words than me, but he basically said, like, you know, whether or not you do more sample return

relates to whether you're a great leader or not. Right. I got off like, this is important. Like, and history should be made. We should not back off from making history just because we struggled the first time we tried it. So for me, that article I thought it was really good. And of course, it's agonizing for me because we actually had an honest-to-god shot to do it with congressional support, White House support and everything.

Yeah. Bummer. Do you, we promise to do. Is that this article? Is that this one from July? So I just really think there's a lot of good in there. Like for me, the most important thing is to really go after what the different experiments were, you know, from curiosity, from perseverance. and also some of the others.

I just think that work on finding life or kind of extinct life on Mars. It's just a really hot topic. And frankly, we need to make progress. I mean, kind of at, you know, everyone's in Ireland. I think we should do an international call and say, who wants to bring those samples back? We haven't been successful. Yeah, that would work. We promised to be positive on this.

We got a little less than 10 minutes left there. I was wondering maybe a good thing for us to do would be if you could tell us a bit about Roman because I'm going to be honest, I'm more of a rock sky and you're more of a look-through a telescope guy. So this is an exciting mission, I know. And maybe you could help us kind of understand some of the why, right? What does the decadal survey say about Roman? Why are we doing this, right?

So in many ways, I would say Roman brings big data to astrophysics in space, to space astrophysics. You know, like what some of these ground telescopes are, which you know, you know, that are distributed, that Roman is that big data to space astrophysics. So what it does is it's basically a Hubble quality type of telescope, but a lot faster. Faster in this case is an astronomical term, which basically says, how quickly can I get a large image taken? And then basically with a single instant,

basically the field of view at the resolution of Hubble. It's not the full frequency range of Hubble. It's mostly visible to infrared because we're looking at the environment. We can basically get 100 times the speed of Hubble. So kind of 100 times the area in the sky that Hubble did with one instant. Now, the second thing that helps is that basically we're not in orbit and lower Earth orbit, and so have to recharge and go from day to night. So we're at L2.

So basically what that does, it creates a telescope that within a few months gets the same amount of data to ground and Hubble in 33 years. So just five to six months or so, the same amount of data, just bits and bytes for scientists to analyze, basically to the ground than Hubble and 33 years. And what that allows us to do, in the meantime, we were really hoping this would happen. It has happened. In the meantime, kind of the AI technology

and the machine learning technologies allow us to now look at kind of integrated data sets of the whole sky. And there's a number of these data sets that are going to be established. Some of them have to do with gravitational lensing, you know, micro-gravatational lensing. If you just keep staring at the sky, you see things changing. Some of them have to do with exoplanets.

You can just see thousands, if not tens of thousands of new exoplanets just staring at the sky. Some of them have to do with the structure of the universe in three dimensions. Where is the dark energy distribution over time? Where is dark matter? And that just happens from really mapping a large amount of sky at very high resolution together with Doppler shift. So you can do kind of map out the entire universe, so to say, at least the local universe, not all the way back to web times. But really map out the sky. Overall, if successful, what this mission will do is really either solve the problem or put major constraints.

of the question, what is dark energy and how does it behave over time? And what is dark matter? How it behaves over time? But also what are kind of exoplanet distribution and kind of gravitational, kind of, you know, gravitational lensing type of events, which of course have other information. So just for me, just think of big data in space using a telescope that, you know, the mirrors we know from time spent. And, you know, some of the mirrors look down and earth, some of them up.

From times back. You know. Yeah. 15 years ago, the NRO said, we don't really need these anymore. One of the craziest storylines in space. Yeah. Yeah. And that Sean Groundsfeld, of course, made that deal.

We, of course, had to work on the telescope to get it actually to the quality so we can actually make it that fast. We had to, you know, work at it. Alphi Harris did a good job with that. a lot of the instrument was done at Ball, now British aerospace systems, right? But overall, you know, I mean, for me, what this telescope will be known for,

for me it already is, is kind of the proof that we can do things differently. So we were on track. Within six months, when I came in, I noticed that the last six months, the telescope, which was not called Roman, then W-first,

had grown by half a billion. And I just basically said, I still have to deal with, I can't deal with two behemoths that want to grow. Either we're successful or we're not going to do this. And frankly, I did a review, caught a half a billion dollars out, pissed off some Nobel Prize winners doing that,

their favorite instruments left, you know, but basically what happened. I actually was not sure we could do it. I actually, I mean, I just want to, I can tell you now, she's no longer on the hill. I went to Jean Tolheisen, who was the clerk for the Democrats, and went to her equivalent for the Republicans. It basically said, put it in the law that the cost cannot increase.

Because I want that everybody understands we're not going to go from bad to worse again. And then what we need is a leader who could do that. And that's what Jamie done is. like Jamie took that, took that mission. You know, besides all the amazing signs, you're going to see incredible imagery, like, you know, just kind of come at the completeness you've never seen. But besides all of that, Jamie just did it within cost. And, you know, like he did crazy things.

When a company didn't work, he would just move there, just move in, figure out. How many hours are they actually working per day? I mean, I love this guy. Like, I mean, like I said, taxpayer, this is what you want in your, it's saying. So for me, in addition to that, there's a coronagraph on there. It's one of the hardest technologies done ever in space optics. I mean, kind of in terms of just the optical system in any way, kind of at the same level as some of the web things, you know, with these kind of conformal mirrors and just absolutely complex.

Tom Lubcheck was the manager of that at JPL and he also came in with NCOST. And he did it in a Class D way, basically without bureaucracy, which may be just the reason he was successful because we let him work. And at JPL can do amazing things. And I just look at this coronagraph. It's just absolutely incredible. So I can't wait for the launch because, again, it's a, I love the night sky. I really love it. Like I look at it every day.

I was out there yesterday looking at the moon and the night sky. But looking at it with this telescope, but also knowing it was built by great people who did the best with the money they had. They didn't just ignore that. I'm glad you're like looking at the night sky, as does the NRO, who's glad you said that because they never want you to point it at the ground.

So that's good. I'm realizing now that the next time we have you back, we need to do a deep dive on people management because this is the theme that I'm just pulling from this is like, you know, these people that really nailed it on Roman and then the not a team on MSR. And I think we could probably have a whole hour long conversation about how you pick those people and what's, you know,

how do you identify them and how do you manage them? Because that sounds like a, I'm going to see how many management shows we can get into this. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Hear me out. Hear me out. Let's develop a major impetus for the NRO to spend $10 billion trying to get samples back from Mars and then donate it to NASA and be like, we don't need this.

When they make 30 of them, they can give 20 back to... Yeah, can you do anything with that? I just really believe that in the next 10 years we need to bring the samples back and we should put an effort in it. We should use all tools we have, including industrial tools from industry. I think the capabilities that we have, the Artemis program is really developing this capabilities. And I just really believe that Mars is the place we ultimately want to be.

Yes, the moon is a good place to develop these technologies. It's too big a leap. But this becomes in the realm of the possible. So there's many things that the first time we didn't work out in history and became big triumph. So we need to make this a triumph. Why would you back off now? You got to keep it down, though, because Peter Beck's going to burst into the room with an idea for you pretty fast.

He says 4 billion, not 3. Yeah. And by the way, I never believe that 3 was the right number necessarily. I just, I told you the number 3 because they gave it to me. Like literally that that's the first number ever got. So it, and I do believe four, I mean, perhaps it's 5, perhaps it's 6, but it's not 11. Yeah. That, I mean, you don't spend 5 or 6 by aiming at 11.

You spend 5 or 6 by aiming at 3. So. Exactly. Exactly right. And so, and I do believe, I just want to say also, you get the right people at JPL to the right people in industry. You can do that. Like we just get off. But we, again, we can't go in straight lines. The one thing at Roman, we had to do major pivots. And frankly, one of the things that we did is we let the manager actually make hard decisions. Like I just, like frankly, I'm so proud of this guy. He's now the Goddard Center Director. So I actually, I asked him. them for a beer and I put the microphone in front of him and interviewed him. It's like, how did you do it?

Right? Kind of like, there's a number of managers like this who just did it, you know? And then frankly, frankly, yes, you should, you know, perhaps you have him on the show. Yeah, I was going to tell you what I learned from him as from others, right? There are amazing people. It's not that long a drive. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. No, they're cool.

And then Roman, what an amazing thing. So I can't wait to see the, the, the rocket leave and I hope everything goes exactly like we all aspire and hope for. Be an exciting Sunday morning. Early, early for me and early for you, Dr. Zeev. Worth it for a Falcon Heavy and a cool space mission. Yeah, both of the boosters are coming back to land. So it's going to be, so it's more than one highlight. Never will, Jake.

It's been abandoned. They're barely blind this thing anymore, Jake. I know. What a treat to see one fly. Oh, man. Well, thanks so much, Dr. Z for hanging out with us. Always an awesome conversation. Lots of good insights.

Tons of titles, man. We're going to have a tough time picking. Who are we kidding? I think I got it. Called an advocate of crazy. It's almost certainly your new bio. Mark it down for your tombstone one day. Thanks for the work you do.

And, you know, I just really, I'm in. I'm in fond of space exploration, you know, what's possible to serve the planet with it. But I will always be a champion for going to space to learn about our planet, but the planets around us and the universe around us, which are just so incredible. And so much of it remains to be discovered. So let's do it. Let's go. Heck yeah. Rock and roll.

Yeah, Jake. Do we know what we're doing next week? We do. Matt Jertsen's coming back on the show. So his book is out. He's an old SpaceXer. Another management show. Another management show, especially because I think he's got some thoughts on Star Base Louisiana,

which obviously we talked about it with Mike Laox and John Goff. Not that long ago, Jake, but it feels like now it's officially announced we should look at maps or something. I don't know. You're going to have a great view of the launches from where your house is. Dude, I'm going to have starships flying in every direction. Constantly. Yeah, there would be landing right over my house to come back. to Louisiana as per your theory.

So it's going to be fantastic. All right, y'all. One per hour, yeah. See y'all soon. Bye. See you all soon. Bye. Bye. Bye, bye, bye, bye.

Bye, bye-bye. Bye-bye. 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. End of death.