Off-Nominal - 59 - Make it Rain in Alabama (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Casey Dreier, Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Adviser at The Planetary Society, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about the NASA budget, the recently-released decadal survey, and other space policy storylines.DrinksHop Horizon IPA - Tröegs Independent Brewing - UntappdLIGO West Coast IPA - Ecliptic Brewing - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 59 - Make it Rain in Alabama (with Casey Dreier) - YouTubeNASA's FY 2023 Budget Stays the Course | The Planetary SocietyPlanetary Science Decadal Survey: After the… | The Planetary SocietyBiden's 2022 NASA Budget Says Yes to Pretty… | The Planetary SocietyWhy NASA Picked SpaceX to Land Humans on the… | The Planetary SocietyReconstructing the Cost of the One Giant Leap | The Planetary SocietyFollow CaseyCasey Dreier (@CaseyDreier) / TwitterThe Planetary SocietyThe Space Advocate Newsletter | The Planetary SocietyFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. We got a really special guest with us today. We got Casey Dreyer from the Planetary Society. And Casey, it's been a long time since you and I have talked. I know that you've missed me in the 48 hours between now and our last conversation. But we're just filling the week up with Casey. So welcome to the show.

We're excited about it. Happy to be here. And, you know, we actually didn't touch on a lot of things in that hour and a half long conversation of the Decadal. So we could easily finish just that and even not talk about the planetary or NASA budget here. There's like going to be a Lord of the Rings length, Jake and Casey conversation for everyone to listen to over the next week or two.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Look forward to your feeds next week because we got, it's going to be a double part, a double feature two part or we Martians. You'll never see a breakdown of the Decaturl survey like this. It's going to be incredible. So once in a decade. And we got, yeah, once in a decade of that's right.

Yeah. We even got the, look at this. We got the planetary society literally in our comments right now. Look at this. This is amazing. Good to see you. Planetary Society. Thanks for joining.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. So we're going to talk about, we're not going to talk about the Decatur. Well, maybe we might touch on it. We'll see where the conversation goes. But primarily, I think what we want to kind of tackle today is some budget stuff. But before we start, we should probably do. drinks? Anthony, what do you think?

You want to start us off? What do you got going? Yeah, I'm going to be honest. Last week's was too delicious that I bought a whole box of those Trobes, Hot Horizons. But I do have in a sweet. It's almost summer here. So I've got it in a sweet Cape May brewing glass. It's got like a full beach scene.

There's a fishing boat on this side. Wow, that's a nice glass. So it's a pretty awesome glass. So, you know, just channeling my way to Cape May via central PA, I guess. Awesome. Casey, what do you got going today?

Well, I didn't want to be too on the nose, but I ended up going with ecliptic brewing. And they have a new LIGO. I just couldn't resist the LIGO. That's sweet. New West Coast, Hazy IPA. I am on the West Coast here in the Pacific Northwest, so it's local enough.

And LIGO, of course, is a Washington-based, at least one-a-half of it, Washington-based dark energy or gravitational wave detector. So I'm trying one of those today. That's awesome. You're making me really miss the West Coast right now because that was just not very good. Yeah, you know, it was hard because in the north part of Seattle area where I lived, I think there's 14 breweries within about a five mile radius of me.

And this was, I feel bad not even selecting one of them. But maybe next time I'll do a more local selection. This is in Portland, which is, you know, the south part of the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, south Seattle. Yeah. I know, I just got all, every Portland listener just unsubscribe from the show. Yeah, that's, that's fighting words. Last week, I got to do local central Florida humor with Brendan.

So now you get to do Pacific Northwest or Southwest as she refers it to. Like Seattle, but without sales tax. Did you go to the beer company, Jake? No, I didn't. I got a cocktail today. You've been, you haven't been there in a while. Oh, yeah, I do need to go back here. Right.

Yeah. I just, I wanted to do this one today. So just, you know, just let me pick my own drinks, okay? So this one, this one might be risky because after I made it, I realized that it really isn't anything but pure alcohol. But this is a, this is a Wahaka old fashion. So it is just basically tequila, mescal and agave sweetener with a little bit of bitters in it. So yeah, it's, it's pretty strong.

So I will see how that goes today. And it's already condensating in the growing, summer heat down here. So it's going to be fun. But yeah, cheers everybody. So as soon as you finish that, we can talk about SLS, your opinions on SLS. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end of the show, when this glass is empty, you'll get all the good stuff. And Elon buying Twitter. And Elon buying Twitter. Yeah, everyone's favorite topic of discussion. The topic de jure.

Expert decision, I would say. I saw someone describe it as the black hole of the discourse right now because everything is getting sucked into that. Very accurate. All right, let's stay as far away from the event horizon as possible. Jake, you've got to pick where to start on this because I have not yet listened to the Jake and Casey epic. So I don't know, maybe there's some areas you want to dig into that you haven't even broached yet. Well, I think we can we can delineate pretty well because like we were, we were very zeroed in on just the Decatal survey. That was it.

Yeah. Yeah. So I thought this would be really fun to, to, to, to, really just unpack this presidential budget request, which is, that's like the big reason we wanted to get Casey on because it's not like, I don't know, this is maybe a real start. I don't know if this is like a super big like news, like super headline like, oh my God, look at this presidential budget request. I've never seen anything like I don't think it's like that. But I think there's some pretty reasonably big stuff in it. And so like Casey, I don't know what's what's maybe the the big top line takeaway for you in this request, which, by the way, I've seen you describe it this way as like the first, quote, real Biden budget request because last year they were

sort of, you know, stumbling into office still. But anyway, what's your headline takeaway from it? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the headline takeaway is that very little has changed. We've just completed a full presidential transition, right? A full White House administration transition. And for the first time in a while, we haven't seen a major. reshuffling of NASA's human spaceflight and exploration programs, right? That was always this problem where one administration would start some nascent moon or Mars program. The next administration would come in, have some blue ribbon panels, sweep everything away, start over again. And NASA just ended up going in circles and circles, literally, right, around in low Earth orbit, and not getting

anywhere. But what we've seen now is a transition from a Republican White House to a Democratic White House and Artemis made that transition. That's actually just a really big deal. I'm trying to think the last time that really happened for a moon program or for any, let's say, deep space exploration program was Lyndon Johnson to Nixon in 1968, right? In 69. So this is a, that in itself is notable. The fact that we didn't see major changes and that we're continuing with the human landing system public private partnership model, right? And they're not even renamed. carried board. Yeah, right.

Well, maybe the HLS, right? Yeah, but I mean, last time it was all the gateway, right? Horrible names of gateway, it went through like, what was it before the Trump administration? Because I think the Trump administration started with the lunar orbiting platform gateway. That was their decision, right? Wasn't it the deep space gateway before that? Deep space gateway. Yes, it was deep space gateway.

Lopjee gateway. Lopjee, yeah, it was, well, and that was kind of interesting too because that was a, notional issue coming from the Obama administration's Journey to Mars concept, right? Journey to Mars being everything, it was a lunar program, but with the word Mars on it, the whole time, right? And so now we just kind of are packaging everything together. But again, this is just a big deal, right? Because we now have this, it's demonstrated that this will survive partisan kind of

changeovers. And that'll just start build. I think we're starting to see inertia building behind this program. in a way that happens with, you know, you kind of get to this tipping point in human space exploration programs, right? They either, they're very weird, like, bimodal in the sense that a ton of them never happen. But when the ones that do happen, they persist for decades, right? Like the space shuttle started a program in 1972, lasted until 2011, almost 40 years. International Space Station began as an announcement in Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address, still going today, right? 40 years later.

And so we're seeing this tipping point, I think, of Artemis into potentially that type of program, this multi-decadal commitment that I really think is going to get us to the moon. I think a lot of people maybe haven't internalized that this may really happen in the next five to 10 years. It's really astonishing. Yeah. I guess like the question I have about that would be like, so it is a big story that Artemis persisted, but kind of underneath Artemis and underneath what was moon to Mars. and underneath before that constellation is like this, like the big budget line item,

which is this, you know, they're calling it ESD today exploration systems development. But it's the SLS program. It's Orion. It was Aries before that. Like that is kind of one, in a way you could think of that as like one long continuous program and then just like where you point that rocket has sort of changed between administrations. But does that make it sort of like, I don't know, does that sort of like weaken the argument that this is a big deal?

I get, you know, behind the scenes. I don't know. Because that's not really. Yeah. No, I see what you're saying. And the fundamental hardware has been around since 2011. You could probably, I would even say you could trace the workforce that it's employing back to the shuttle.

This is the shuttle workforce and contractors, right? That then was repurposed for Constellation. That then was by law mandated to go into SLS. It's, but we saw, we had a decade of SLS with no lunar program, right? And that meant something that we were working on a rocket. We weren't working on all the other things you need to use it. And what we're seeing here, the critical thing, I think, that is seeing surviving the transition is the human landing system program as conceived, right, as a public private partnership. First human landing, lunar landing program with serious funding behind it since the 1960s, right, in over 50 years.

and also Gateway, right? And Gateway is a key item of this, I think, from a political coalition building aspect. Because if you look carefully, it's Gateway that has all of the international partners signing onto it. All right. It's a lot harder to get to the surface of the moon. The first lunar landing, I think, is only two people. Hard to get a lot of international partners on those.

But Gateway, you can get too much more easily. You can send four people there on Orion or whatever. And you can hang out there for longer, some more shots on goal, in a sense, for that. And you're seeing it's the Japanese coming in, the European Space Agency coming in with with like serious commitments on the gateway, right? Adding real hardware modules and and cargo and supply and ongoing commitments to it. And that's going to be the centerpiece. It's basically taking the ISS model of international partners to the moon and then leveraging that to start building this access to the surface from gateway. So the gateway's real, I think, benefit is creating that

partnership model, that coalition building opportunity. And not only international partners, there's more the commercial partners that are on iOS, ISS today, right? Like Northrop Grumman's basically selling everyone a Cygnus or something that they can derive from one of their satellite buses and let's, what kind of shape do you need it in today? We'll send one out that direction. So like, you know, and so basically like Boeing. Right. And they've got that. Boeing is the prime on ISS. So like, if that starts talking about being sunsetted, well, they can shift their focus and say, well, maybe we can do it. some pressure vessels out by the moon.

And it's a less, I don't want to use the term heavy lift because of that connotation in this, but there's an easier extension for people that had currently invested interest in the ISS existing today. Some of the people that would continue to lobby for it beyond 2030 could be convinced that, well, just send one of those out towards the moon. There it is. Yeah. And I think, again, these survived by inertia, right?

In a sense, you want to build. up bureaucratic inertia. This is my pragmatic part of my brain talking, right? But when you build up inertia behind a program and you build an invested coalition that is interested in continuing it, that makes it really, you know, you can start integrating over long time scales, right? And if you're going to be spending this money anyway, you might as well, you know, this is why I like about, you direct it at the moon. And we'll start to see this self, I mean, whether it's self-justifying or expedient politically to kind of backfill rationale for things like SLS and Orion, whatever.

The whole point is everything now is pointing at the moon and NASA is spending on the order of, what, 10 billion a year on this, right? So this is a huge amount of investment going forward in ways we have not seen seriously. Like we never got to this point with Constellation. We never got to this point, certainly with the Space Exploration Initiative, for those of you remember, the early George H.W. Bush returned to the moon program. So this is as close as we've come since Apollo in terms of programmatic investment. I feel like we wasted all the good names in the early 2000s, though.

Yeah, we did. We didn't waste all the good names. Because now it's happening and it's just generically named hardware, you know? The space exploration initiative, too, was like the one where it's the opposite of this. It's where they said they had that report. It was like, hey, this is going to cost a lot of money. And they went, oh, really? Oh, cancel it.

Sorry about that. Yeah. Run away. We thought it was going to be cheap, and that's why we were in on it. And so it's interesting what you said about Gateway too, because, well, so A, I think it has a lot more topical relevance right now because of everything that's going on with Russia and Ukraine. Because my understanding is it's literally like the same agreement. It's this, this IGA, this intergovernmental agreement that sort of like got cookie cutter stamped from ISS over to Gateway. So Gateway might kind of be like the new Russia-free version of the ISS.

in a way. You can almost say it like that. It's a good, it's definitely a good, like, safety policy that, you know, like as far as NASA and the U.S. government is going like, wow, really glad we have this in case things really go south, right? But also, so I also find an interesting that. In case. Yeah. It gets worse. You know, hey, it can get worse. Everything's working on the I-Sage. That's a good attitude. I was going to say the other thing that's really, like they were going to build the airlock for Gateway and Zvezda is doing its best airlock right now. What was I going to say? Oh, my God. No, that's good. It's good. I was going to say it's really interesting to hear you say that, Casey, like to talk about Gateway as a like really critical part of the staying power of this because I think a lot of the discussion in the last few years have kind of talked about Gateway.

Like it's a side piece and sort of like the, oh yeah, the like the black sheep of the whole Artemis program. I'm like, oh, yeah, we have to have this space station part. Like, why can't we just go straight to the moon? There's this other thing that's, like, latched on and it's stuck there. But it's interesting to hear you kind of reframe it like that. I don't know. If anyone else has thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, that's how I like to think about these types of things, right?

Is you don't have particularly, so, I mean, I always say this. Like, we have to see everything that NASA does, that it's in the context of discretionary activity, right? An optional activity in a representative democracy that is based on, on discrete geographical locations. And so if they don't have to spend this money, you don't have this kind of greenfield development opportunities when you're doing something like Artemis. You have to build a coalition from the pieces you have

in order to create the political will to give you the money to do it. People just don't do this out of the goodness of their heart, right? Particularly if you don't benefit politically as a political representative. It's just the structure of a democracy. It's not meant to be efficient, right? It's not meant to be fast. It's not meant to be cheap even necessarily. But it can be really powerful if you build enough people willing to invest in it, right?

That coalition building aspect. And this is why I think frustrates a lot of observers that it just you see. And on the commercial side where you have a functional autocracy of whoever runs a company, right? You can fire people whenever you want. You can shut down whatever you want. You can start or stop programs whenever you want because it's, you don't. have democratic accountability because you don't have coalitions investing in you. You are that kind of benign dictator of whatever organization that's being run. And so we apply in a sense, we're

misapplying expectations based on the type of framework that it's operating under. Right. So it's a category error in some sense to expect NASA to just say, now we're going to close three centers in Alabama and Texas and Mississippi. And we'll just take that money and we'll just invest in this like brand new perfect thing as if like the senators or politicians of Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama would say, oh, great, yeah, take that money, fire all the people in our state and do something great with it. Good luck, you know, because we just love NASA. And you know, they'll be immediately voted out of office. We'll be out there. We'll swing by and hang out of Disneyland a day. No problem. I always thought, yeah, the worst political pitch you could make is walk into a

Senator from Alabama's office and say, hey, what if we take $2 billion a year out of your state and put it into Southern California? Straight. And then do a bunch of stuff here because your stuff sucked. They're just directly into the 405. Yeah. And it's like they're not going to be too impressed with that. But that's just the reality of what we're working with, right?

And so I think we all have to understand that NASA doesn't get to operate, you know, free of these constraints. It's a political system, right? Anytime you have more than two people in a room, it's going to be political. You have to find ways to balance it out and build coalitions that will enable these long-term things. And sometimes, yeah, that can be really frustrating if there are, I mean, the incentive structure is then wonky, right? The incentive isn't always to do the best, you know, or the most efficient use of money. The incentive is to keep the coalition together.

And that can be obviously powerful, but also can be, you know, very disparate or difficult to align, you know, or whatever, right? It can be frustrating to see. I'm interested to talk about why this time was sticky, right? You've got your whole budget breakdown on planetary societies. And if you look at this beautiful table, there's only a couple spots of red here, right? And they're Orion and SLS are the red spots. No, I feel like not a lot of people talking about the only red spots. spots here where Ryan and SLS, let's fund the thing less and do the other things more.

It's happening. You know, and then it's, you know, and, you know, a little bit. There's an asterisk on those, right? Yeah, it's a little bit of close. The SLS is less than 1%. There's no way it'll get that little. It's going to get a bump up as it always has every other single year that's been. The idea.

Cancel the things we know you won't. We'll jam it back in the budget later. I'll know the Sophia thing didn't work out. But the HLS part going up by so much in the budget request, my thesis is that the previous decision to award SpaceX that sole source, or that's not the right term, not sole source, but single award for HLS, right? At the time, my opinion was that it was in a very aggressive move by NASA to say, because the typical was, we'll still pick two or three, we'll stretch the timeline by five years, we'll still do our same program, sorry we didn't get all the money, but Congress will give it to us later, we'll just make it longer. They chose the aggressive, no, we're going to the moon, we're going to pick the single award, and go ahead that way. And so now they've changed the debate around the HLS when they've come into this new administration, which is, okay, you want competition, send us the money.

You know, send the cash over, we'll hook you up with some competition. And that's not that they're stuck with SpaceX, but they already made that decision as an organization. and now the new bosses are going with that and say, and give us the cash for the other award. So do you think in the world where they didn't just single award this to SpaceX that we would have had the same outcome

with the very sticky Artemis plan changing administration or you think there would have been more shakeups because there was less committed to? That's interesting. I think, well, at the very start of at the Trump administration, when they were first starting to request the funding for human lighting system,

they didn't get anywhere near what they requested. too, right? So they were asking, in essence, they asked for too much too fast, and they didn't get it, right? They got, I think, a quarter of what they initially requested the first time around. And so in a way, you could say this is NASA calling Congress's bluff and saying, okay, you don't want to give us the money, we can do one. And if you don't like that, then, you know, we can't just like magically generate two human landing systems, right? What's that line from contact? HR hadn't is like, why build one when you can build two for twice the price? the first rule of government spending. It's the, and I think what you're seeing is this is actually the consequence of cost savings is that you lose coalition opportunities, right? Like, that's the irony of this, right? The more efficient you are, the fewer jobs you make, the fewer contracts you can give, and the smaller your coalition is going to be.

And so we're seeing this with Washington state senators, Maria Cantwell, really trying to push this NASA authorization. bill through the Senate that would demand a second selection, authorize the money, not appropriate it, that's very different, but still theoretically give the stamp of approval to spend on it.

But then running into a bunch of a bus saw other unrelated kind of economic issue of politics as a function of that. But I think this is the consequence. You're seeing suddenly, I think that's an interesting insight that

usually NASA would just say, fine, we'll give two contracts and we'll just delay everything out to the future. But this time they've really stood their ground and said, look, if we're trying to get there fast, we choose one, we're going to put all of our chips on it. If you don't like it, you can give us the money. And I think that was an interesting, savvy political move. And you're seeing a growth in this. And they clearly got pushback for it, right, from a must be a variety of sources. But the money that they requested, So, you know, just to clarify in this budget, they're requesting extra funding to support a second selection on the Lunar Lander. But the amount that they're requesting is relatively modest. Over the next five years, they project requesting an extra, I think, one and a half, 1.25 billion, right?

So it's a 24% growth, but you're still talking about, you know, quote unquote, only $300 million this year, right? And we have a fixed price. When you said, when you run at the out years, like there's not enough budget there for, of those original proposals that they had. Like they couldn't fit that original Blue Origin proposal into that budget. They couldn't fit the Boeing proposal certainly and not even the Dynetics one. No, the Dynetics one was pretty expensive. Jeff Bezos would really have to kick in more, which I think probably he would do it.

He already increased his offer. Yeah, right. He already increased his offer that they'll get a billion just to have the imprimatur of NASA endorsing the company so they can build something like this. I think they would. So I'll be really curious to see. how this moves forward. And I think this level of increase is totally within the ability of Congress to swallow and accept it, right, and support it. Last year, right, the problem is, though,

you saw last year, the House budget and the Senate budget both proposed adding additional money, not that much, $100-ish million to human lending system. But by the time they, they're called the conference committee where they finally work out their differences and they put out the final budget that had all disappeared. And actually, NASA did worse for the first time as a function of the conference committee for the first time, I think, in like seven years, then it usually just kind of everyone gets a little bit of what they want. But they overall cut NASA's budget lower than either the House or Senate had originally proposed. And that's because of lots of things. The war in Ukraine, other priorities of the administration, taking up funding. And it's just,

so it's tricky. I would be surprised, pleasantly surprised, if I saw NASA. to even get this fault request this coming year because there's a lot of headwinds against overall increases for things like NASA and NSF and other science and technology things because of all the other pressures that the Democratic coalition wants to pass, not to mention we just saw today an additional $33 billion emergency funding request for aid for Ukraine. Right. So that's going to just start adding up and putting increased pressure on this. So it's, you know, this is again, we should just emphasize a proposal. This is an idea for, This sets the terms of the debate, and we'll start to see what Congress is going to be willing to fund starting in the next.

It sounds like a few weeks. The House seems like ready. They want to try to act on a faster schedule this year. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of weird factors in this, though. Yeah.

There's a lot of weird factors in this, though. So Ukraine being won, but also we have an election coming up this year, which is going to, I mean, no one can predict elections. But it seems like there's going to be something. change in, you know, seeing how tight some of the margins are, especially in the Senate. But so there's a lot of weird stuff happening. I guess we're coming out of the pandemic. So like, you know, it's like now is a time when people are looking for like, okay, we're back to normal.

Now what are all the normal things that are going to happen all of a sudden again, right? So it's, it's a, I guess this is, you know, there's probably a way to say this for every budget cycle, but this feels like the, the most important budget ever. Yeah, this is the most important election of our lifetime, Jake. The most important election of our lifetime. Every subsequent claim can also still be true, right? It doesn't necessarily negate the prior ones. Yeah, I mean, to your point, though, Jake, there's, it seems likely that one or both houses of Congress will flip to Republican control next year.

And the question will be whether this year, while they're still under Democratic control, even in the lame duck session that happens after the election, the midterm elections in November, whether they can strike a deal and pass a budget before the next Congress comes in, right? It's very unlikely this budget will pass before the elections. The closer you get two elections, the more politicians hate to take votes on things, right? They want to be out campaigning. They don't want to be tied to specific things.

Very likely this gets pushed back to at least late November, possible gets pushed back into the next Congress. But then it gets very complicated, right? Because it depends on who wins and who's going to be taking power. Do you want to, like, give up your negotiating, position at that point or not, it's very messy to think about really projecting this forward to accurately. So this is one of those things. And of course, NASA is not the driver of any of the larger factors here, right? I've always felt that NASA is like this little space agency on a raft

in this big turbulent ocean. And the waves of politics are going up and down. And it's not like the gods are against NASA. They're just getting... caught up in everything else, you know, that Neptune is messing up with the kind of the quality of the oceans here. And so it's pretty close to the Cato survey here. We're just buzzing the tower. Yeah, right. Well, you're in a sky, right?

I think. I double check. And so anyway, yeah. So it's like, so NASA just is along for the ride. And that's always the problem, right? At the end of the day, no one's really against it, though we're starting to see Bernie Sanders seems to have a real issue with the second lunar landing selection, which is really unfortunate.

I think a really fascinating consequence of this increasing access to space, which is functionally going to start with very wealthy people, which then suddenly makes people realize, what if I don't like everybody who goes into space? And then it starts, you know, kind of having these weird secondary and tertiary consequences as a function of that in politics, right, as it becomes more entering into these kind of cultural, economic, political issues. Just right up until they name the next lander system, the Burlington landing system from Blue Origin.

Like, here it is. Burlington.com. Burlington, Washington. Yeah. Blue Origin establishes its second headquarters in Vermont. That whole Amazon HQ2 thing didn't work out in Long Island City, right? Maybe you can find a new home right on the lake or something. Right.

Ben and Jerry's. There you go. That's it. Blue Origin and Ben and Jerry's team up for some ice cream experiments on the moon. Yeah. So if you're the governmental affairs director at Blue Origin, you can call us for advice. We'll take that off. Oh, totally available, especially this time of the year.

Hit us up, off nom.com. Number one political consultant. So I wanted to ask about the, so specifically about, you know, can you mention this is like a request, right? This is, this is NASA saying, this is what we want you to do. Please, please agree with us, Congress. I thought that this whole sustaining lunar development move was like really quite genius on NASA's part. So, so the quick overview, you know, before we had this, this sort of like preliminary contract with SpaceX, the one land. for the uncrewed and then the crude landing for Artemis 3.

That was like a, you know, it's like this weird dev, like pseudo-dev special side contract just to get things moving. And then there was supposed to be like all the flights after that on like the real contract. Right. I always did it quote the real contract where like it was like the rest of the flights and that was going to be competitive. And so now they snuck this like one in the middle now. And this is like specifically labeled as like, this is the one to make.

it competitive as per your request Congress. This is the line item. You ask for the line item. Here it is. We're just going to like put Congress's special lander program like right on there. And then like I thought that was kind of neat because it like really, it really makes you like in the most specific direct way possible say put your money where your mouth is. Right. Yeah. Really it is. It's like you can do a lot with contract modifications. Right. And it's just how much ultimately flows out of it. Yeah. It's like there's like There's so much space policy that happens through contract modifications or adjustments. It's pretty astonishing if, you know, the gears of bureaucracy working.

It's kind of scary sometimes. A lot of appendix is the next step. It's like, or a next step. It's like worse than hurricane season right now in the next step front. Yeah, we're going to have the next step appendix alpha, Appendix beta. Huh. Okay.

Yeah. I see questions about Shelby. Should we talk about Shelby? Yeah, that's more interesting. Let's go the Shelby route. Well, Shelby, let's expand it. Shelby and also anyone else that you're tracking, you know, that might be at risk of departures that would be impactful. Well, I've seen a number of questions coming about Richard Shelby, who's the senior senator from Alabama, the noted supporter of the space launch system since the beginning.

And Shelby's an interesting guy. And he started his political career as a Democrat, switched to Republican, I think. in the 80s. But he's kind of that old-fashioned type of politician, very parochial. He is like, I'm going to make it rain in Alabama, right? Just he's kind of bringing home the funds for Alabama. And he's just very, very good at that. So he's the chair of the appropriation, or he's the ranking member right now.

He has been the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, very powerful and influential. And he has been probably the most vocal proponent for the SLS, which is managed through Marshall Space Flight Center in Northern Alabama and has always he kind of really stepped up and funded that and has directed money towards it. I mentioned this earlier, but it's important to note every single year that the SLS program has been extant, Congress has provided more money than NASA has requested to it every single year, ranging from 100 million to, I think at the peak, 700 million extra, right? That's how much they would throw at it. So that gives you a sense of its political power. So Shelby's old. I think he's in his mid-80s and he announced he's retiring next year.

This is his last congressional session. He's done. He's not going to run for re-election. And I've seen a lot of people kind of ask, oh, you know, what does this mean for SLS? Like, is this mean, you know, does the coalition fall apart? Is this, you know, it doesn't have Shelby. And I think a lot of that is overdone. I think you forget that SLS has a broad coalition of support. And a way to look at this is, so Shelby is a senator, right? So if we had only seen over the last 10 years this overfunding coming from the Senate bills versus the House bills, that would be, that would tell you something, right? That might suggest it's really just Richard Shelby doing this. But last year, in particular, I mean, and years before that, the House funding bills,

that's just, you know, each House and Senate both make their own and then they conference it together, you've seen similar support coming out of the House, right? And that's not just Shelby. There's a lot of members of Congress, Richard Adderholt, who's on the Appropriations Committee in the House, he's from Alabama. There's a lot of support for SLS. And I would predict that nothing changes. Maybe you don't have as vocal a cheerleader, but there's a strong infrastructure of well-placed people in leadership or potential leadership who are going to be continuing to support SLS. And don't forget, it's not just those people.

SLS has contracts, I think, in literally every state. And at the end of the day, that's what drives political. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So I think if you think SLS is just Richard Shelby's baby, I think that's too simplistic of a way to understand the political support for this,

which is deep and broad. And I wouldn't imagine all that much changes at the end of the day. And at this point, again, they've invested so much in it. You know, I'll put some asteros. Maybe if it blows up on its first launch or something like that, right? Or it's seriously like obvious problems with the program. But if it doesn't, then again, I think all the fundamentals remain the same. It's also the weird thing that now that there's such a momentum building around the Artemis program,

like even if you're somebody who likes the other side of the Artemis program more you kind of need the whole thing to keep going if you want a couple billion to go to spacex blue origin pick your favorite to make a lander like the way to the deal you're making is a couple billion goes to SLS couple billion goes to the lander you like and what do you would you rather that world in which there aren't a couple billion going to the lander or would you rather the world where there is a couple billion exactly I tend to to think of this. So my my background's in physics, right? And if you think about like old physics 101 problems or if you've ever done physics homework, you have your ideal case where you do

like how much forces you take to drag a box across a frictionless surface. But in reality, there's always friction, right? And friction is like this coefficient of drag or whatever. There's something that like makes the process inefficient and dissipates the energy as a function of it. And in a way, you can kind of think about projects like the SLS as the coefficient of friction of doing a moon program, right? Like, you've got to build that coalition again. And if the SLS is the cost of going to the moon, to your point, if then we also get HLS and Gateway and commercial cargo resupply and the commercial payload resupply program or payload delivery program at the moon, not the worst deal. Kind of in. And at the end of the day, what you're doing,

Yeah, you're building this giant huge rocket and giving lots of people really good paying jobs and, like, high-tech stuff. Like, it's not the worst thing to spend money. There's way worse things to spend money on than that. Especially in today's world where we have, like, very good examples of state space programs that are not paying anyone money and where that leads the state space program to. And another one that, like, still exists, doing great. It's slower than you want. Sorry. You know, launch will be in November instead of July or whatever.

but there is a rocket and that exists and it didn't take 25 years in like the Angara or whatever, you know, like it's not the worst case scenario. I guess maybe the question, so to counter that a little bit, yes, there is like a, you know, a big coalition besides Richard Shelby supporting this. But does the loss of Shelby both, you know, in 2020 when he stopped being the chair of the appropriations community, as the House or the Senate flipped. And then now when he retires and you lose the decades of relationships and influence and, you know, the behind the scene sort of like soft power of the Senate, when you lose both those things, is there, is there going to be a measurable impact on the program? Or was he always just kind of a drop in the bucket?

You know, like, like if he, if there's no effect of him leaving, then he wasn't actually important before either, right? Yeah. I mean, the test stand. The test stand was nice. they finish that. Yeah, yeah. That'll finish that.

That'll be, yeah, I mean, I think he was the person, think of it this way. I think there are people who are quietly doing stuff and supporters who don't wrap their identity around it. But he would be willing to wrap his identity around it. He was the one who publicly go to bat for it. He'd associate himself with it too, right? And let's not forget, the current administrator of NASA is the other co-creator of the space launch system. Right? Like he is currently, you know, NASA's request, you're seeing the amount that Congress overfunds SLS decreasing because NASA has greatly increased and completely embraced the SLS in their

budget requests, right? They are aligned, right? They're requesting $2.6 billion, 20 million less than last year. They're going to get more. And, you know, the $2.6 billion they got last year was the overfund, right? So NASA is technically requesting more than it requested last year in the SLS. I'm sure Congress was. bit more. So let's not forget, again, the institutional influence and commitment to the SLS is broad and deep, including the current administrator of NASA who did write the thing into law. So, you know, don't dance in the grave of the SLS. Just yet, anyone who's done that has been dancing for a very long time. Yeah, they're getting tired.

Okay. Do you want to talk? The other question that was popping up in the chat here was about China and how much geopolitical influence is happening here. I guess this is kind of related to Russia stuff too, but China being the big one who has a, I guess it's the credible threat and who could actually also go to the moon instead of the United States. So do you think that's, I mean, you were talking to these, you know, to people who are working on the hill all the time.

Are you seeing that enter the logic, you know, the equation that spits out a budget or a bill at the end of the day? Like, is that starting to get in there? Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. And I think that that's certainly how Jim Bridenstein and others in the Trump administration were kind of talking about Artemis initially, right, of kind of demonstrating as function of U.S. soft power. I tend to see the China.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. He really highlighted the Marslander. Was that in his like hearing for administrator? Something like that. Yeah. Watch the Chinese.

Yeah. Great quote. I mean, I think they're using that. I haven't seen it be that effective, though, for NASA, right? Like, if you look at just functional increases, NASA's been growing at pretty much a steady three and a half percent a year on average, which is great. It's actually one of the longest runs of continuous growth for NASA budget in its history. I think where you're seeing this really impact is Space Force.

I think Space Force is being proposed to 25 percent. budget increase this year, right? From the off the top of my head, I don't follow this as closely. But Space Force, I think, is the real recipient of that kind of China competitiveness, geopolitical approach. And at the end of the day, though, I think there's also this, you know, people tend to very rapidly want to compare it to like the Cold War and the Soviet Union. It's just such a different situation, right?

And again, this is why, you know, I recently published a paper in the Space Policy Journal kind of reanalyzing some of the Apollo budget numbers. And I did a comparison to things, but I make this argument that at the end of the day, if you want to know what actual policy is, what the actual policy priorities are, you look at where the money goes. Rhetoric is cheap, right? Words are free clearly. Me, I use words freely as if they cost nothing. I can go on and on. But where you put your money, you can only spend a dollar once, right? And so at the end of the day, where you spend your money really shows what your priorities are. And when Apollo happened, you know, NASA's budget doubled in the year after Kennedy made his

first speech about it and then it doubled the year after that. And then after that, it went up 60%. Right. They, Apollo ultimately took up, you know, like a 4% of US GDP. It's just this huge program, very rapid increase. It got the money. It needed when it needed it. For all talk about China that we've seen, NASA's budget has,

continue to march along at 3% per year. Right. And so clearly if they were truly concerned about it and needed NASA to show to counter this broad geopolitical soft power challenge from China, the money would, we wouldn't have to argue about whether we get a second human landing system, right?

The money would be there for it. And so the fact that that hasn't shown up suggests to me that a lot of this is just rhetoric. But the fact that Space Force has grown so much shows that that's really the kind of the recipient that's enjoying the benefits of that type of contrast. Okay. How about ISS?

We're going to talk about that, because that was the other part I was watching in the budget was like, you know, if you're picking a year to be aggressive about where you're requesting money in a budget line item, this was the year to be like, we need a billion dollars for commercial Leo. And they didn't do that, which I'm kind of bummed about.

they did get we didn't really talk about the fact that they got that you know full funding on a couple of programs like a week before they put out the new budget request and yeah they finally finished 22 right under the budget deadline to get the new thing out they were like well they were funding the budget passed when they should have requested the next one but

you know that's what it is um do you think that that was I don't know how do you how do you feel about the budget line items in there for commercial Leo and transitioning off ISS. Is it, because it's like, you know, $100 million here, 200 million next year. Compared to the amounts we're talking about, it's not that much money. Yeah, relatively modest. And again, also we should emphasize predating the invasion, the Ukraine, Russia issue.

And so I think you started to see the increased tension happening and that, whoa, Russia really may be serious and not really either going along with the 2030 extension or this will be the last extension we get. But yeah, to your point, it's a small amount of money. This is a very similar situation to early on in the COTS program. Part of the problem is it's an experiment. We don't know if this will work. And Congress doesn't like to just throw a billion dollars a year at something that's

completely improved in. And so we should be a bit humble about the fact that no one has ever created a commercial space station before, much less a functional and cheaper one. and that we've had the reports that we've had analyzing this. And there have been a few, notably the one that NASA released somewhat cheapously, I think, in 2017, said, like, there's no functional way to make these worth, like actual work as a private station. Like, they will never make money. There's no market for them, right?

There's no, we're starting to see hints of human commercial spaceflight market, right? How enduring it is? I don't know. I mean, we've seen what, that first axiom one, that's it? you know and you know and yeah right there's a few others but like how much of a deal they got to stay up there for another like half a week they got a two for one I don't know I wish that's like I was so jealous of those guys because they got up there for what they're supposed to be there a week and they're there for functionally two weeks two weeks yeah

and they didn't have to pay any extra yeah they said they know they had the deal it's like oh yeah weather's bad again I guess I have to stay in space another day that's what I was at a weather machine and you were a billionaire and you bought a flight to space fire that baby up, you know? I don't like to look at the weather at the landing side. I don't need to orbit Earth for a couple more hours. Yeah. Yeah, so the commercial space station thing, it's a bit...

I don't want to say, I want to say half big, but that's probably too strong of a word. It's too many? It's just like a quick-baked or what? It's an experiment, right? It's not a... There's an interesting situation we're in, And I keep threatening to write some longer paper about this.

But we have, we're creating policy around one outlier of commercial space partnerships, right? Like, if you look at the sum total, in the 21st century of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX is just so far beyond the performance of any other commercial company. It's astonishing, right? In terms of just their reliability, the cost efficiencies, the technological. leaps that they've made. But it's not like there's a thousand spaceflight. SpaceX is blooming as a consequence of it. There are people who say they want to be that.

But you just look at explosion after explosion after failed launch, after failed launch, or just delay, delay, delay, like Blue Origin. Still hasn't, how far are we from New Glenn? And yet, at the same time, NASA and there's this huge community that is pushing really hard to say every company is a SpaceX level of, reliability and will just show up and create things that will work. And in reality, we have no idea how common is SpaceX. And so I see like this normal distribution, SpaceX is way out at 3 Sigma, right?

But we're treating them from a policy perspective like they're the average, that they're the likely outcome. And we don't have any data to support that. I always think of the, remember we all talk about COTS. There were two selections in the commercial cargo resupply program, right? What's the Antarius done lately beyond resupply the space station? There was a company that didn't even make it to that part. Well, that was the good part. Well, that was the good part of the put.

I'm counting them because that was part of the thing. It was like, hey, we picked two companies that haven't done a thing. One went out of business before they even got close. And then they brought in, you know, another one that made Antares. Right. Which I historically am known to completely hate. And Rockling, Kistler is a good example of you had to shut down a non-performing entity. And they barely got away with that, right?

In the history of that, they got pushed back for trying to shut off the contract. But at the end of the day, you had two successful. And Tarius is successfully supplying the station, right? It's doing exactly what they asked it to do. But it's not going out there like SpaceX and transforming the launch marketplace. I don't know if they've ever launched. I don't think they've launched a single other customer, right? Nope.

And so maybe that's the likely outcome, that you get a NASA, dependent monopsony, right? A single buyer market driving things. And then SpaceX just happens to be the brainchild of this uniquely weird you know, messianic, billionaire genius

organizer. As a consequence of it. Well, I mean, so that's what's like how much of it, how much of what we're seeing with SpaceX is kind of a unique combination of it's not, because it's not just DMS, it's going and shot well, right?

Absolutely. And Hans, yeah, it's like all these really amazing individuals. And the fact that I haven't seen similar type of performance from commercial companies yet, you know, again, that's why I say it's an experiment. I'm trying to, we don't know how this is going to turn out, but I think we should all acknowledge. We don't know how it's going to turn out, right? And it's going to be really interesting to see the first payload delivery launches to the moon coming up later this year with astrobatic and others to see what that's going to work like.

How much failure can we take at once? And so there's this interesting thing with commercial, to bring this back to the commercial Leo is we're treating commercial Leo as a given. It will work, right? When in reality, we have no idea, right? There's no, just because SpaceX has done one thing doesn't mean. mean, it's a logical fallacy to assume that this unrelated orthogonal issue will also then be successful just because it's a commercial. It may be, but we have to be aware that it could fail

and then what's the plan? Yeah, there's just no data behind it. The way that I'd put it is that all of all of the success of these SpaceX elements of the industry have been when SpaceX is going in a direction that happens to work for something that NASA or Space Force or whoever it is, they want something similar to that. So SpaceX sees it as a viable mechanism to help them get from where they are to where they're going. Whatever NASA wants to do, if they want to go to the moon, cool, but that's not where SpaceX is heading, but they can fly there too. So that works. If the space development agency wants to make a constellation of satellites, it's not the kind that we want to make, but it does help us make a couple of extra satellites off the production line. So toss the contract on board.

So the only hope that I have there, when I use that frame to look at commercial Leo, is that Blue Origin has such internally driven desire to create some infrastructure in low Earth orbit that the thing that NASA wants is close enough to that path that helps them be successful in that way because it's the thing that they want internally. And so, like, is it the internal function of SpaceX that makes them successful? Absolutely. But it's also the fact that they're on a mission that is well-defined, and they have a really good insight as to what things can we capture that are close enough that help us, you know,

put a little extra fuel in the tank for that. Yeah, and to sort of build on that, too. So we just saw this morning there was, I think there's the Ascend conference is happening right now or something. And so they were talking to intuitive machines. And they said they had an interest in returning samples from the moon with their landers. So not just going there, but also coming back with something. But then it was, you know, I think it was Tim Crane, right?

They said, but we were waiting to find out what NASA would pay for that and how much they want. And they're like, I'm like, okay, so you don't actually want to bring samples back. But if NASA was going to buy samples from me, then you do it. And that sort of demonstrates the line between here's our mission and our goal. And NASA, if you want to do some side contracts to help us get there, great. Versus where NASA spends the money, that's where we go, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And I should be really clear that I'm really supportive of the experiment, right? Like even if I sound like I'm being a bit critical. Like, we know how the other process works, that we were just talking about it, right? It's just, it is a slow and expensive way to do it. And if you want to try to do it, and if you want to try to doing lots of things, this is a really fascinating way to do it. And maybe you will get another outlier. Maybe you will shift that average, you know, to more SpaceX's, right? And fewer rocket plane Kistlers.

And so I'm truly supportive of it. But I think people need to understand that it's not a given. that we get to that thing, right? It's a risk. When the narrative is that commercial wins every time when you say you're excited about the experiment, you sound like a downary. Yeah, right. There's an interesting, there's a selection effect in space stuff where it's like it's,

you want to, it's fundamentally an optimistic field to be in, right? Like, you have to be optimistic. Even like the really basics, if I have to assume my understanding of physics is correct, that I'm going to point my Mars rocket there, even though Mars is over there right now, right? And they're going to line up and I understand things. And I'll be around in eight months when it gets there. And so, yeah, I think, but it's optimism. You just have to just be tempered by realism, right?

This kind of pragmatic thing. And this is why I think talking about failure as being an okay outcome. And that, right, that we have to accept failure if we want this type of stuff to happen. And it's been interesting in the past that failure hasn't been, it's always punished, right? If you talk about these incentives, these structural incentives, failure gets you a congressional investigation. Failure gets you on the front page of the New York Times saying that the country is failing as a technological system. And I think what is different with public-private partnerships is that you're in a sense, you know, NASA has a burden of symbolism, right, that it carries as the space program of the United States, as the inheritors of the legacy of Apollo, that NASA represents competence and success

and forward-thinking all this stuff. But as a consequence, when they fail, like with disastrous consequences you saw with the shuttle, or even in smaller levels like Mars polar lander and Mars Climate Orbiter, that's front-page news. That's like,

it's not just that NASA failed. There has to be some larger self-identity crisis of the nation that if NASA is failing, what must be wrong with us? So what's, what's changed, I think, with partnerships. And this is, I think, very big benefit to them is that you're offloading the burden of national symbolism.

You're offloading the failure to them and not to NASA, right? So SpaceX can blow up its rockets over and over again. And then you can get excited about it. But they're like, great, hey, we blew it up. We'll figure out something. And it's not like some, like, big thought piece written in the New Yorker, like, is this country going down the twos because it's rocket blow? And that allows the system of pushing the boundaries to failure and taking risks to happen

without kind of impugning NASA's good name. And I think that's a really important development that we're seeing here. And again, this is why it's so important, I think, to run these experiments to see how far can you push that? Like again, if every commercial payload lunar lander fails in the first two years, like that may be dumb. People may be like, what are we spending $300 million a year on? But I think we haven't found where that boundary is yet, and that's the important part of doing the experiment. Yeah. We might want to cancel the rest of the off nominal because that was like the best monologue we might have ever had on this show. Well, yeah, that's great.

That's the ecliptic difference, I think. It just crushed it. Thank you for being fans of the show. We will adjourn now. For all future contact. Yeah, yeah, all members will be converted to planetary society members. Yeah, enjoy, enjoy planetary radio. It's your out next week.

Yeah, on that note, what are you working on? You've gotten through the little budget, you know, budget March and April that you do every year now. What else is on your radar? Done the budget analysis. Well, we'll be kicking up our actual advocacy work. So for planetary society members, or you could, to do a quick plug, you can sign up for my space advocate newsletter, which comes out once a month. That's free.

Jake just mentioned space policy edition, planetary radio, which is also free. You can just subscribe once a month. And so at the end of the day, I think it's important that we all love space, and I'm really trying to help people make sure that they can be effective citizens for space, too, right? And so particularly in the U.S., we have ways to train you to get you engaged and then to let you know how to take action and when to take action that has the maximal effect. So we're getting ready for that, ramping up as Congress starts to develop its response to this proposed budget. We didn't even touch on this, but the big issue this year is going to be the Neo-surveyor mission, right, the planetary defense mission. I think, you know, again, the planetary society takes this bold stance that we don't want to have a civilization destroying asteroid hit us at any point.

And so we need a space telescope out there looking for these things. And now it's actually the Decatal Survey prioritize that as a top priority. We want to make it. But NASA wants to cut it by $100 million next year. It's kind of this insane thing. And so getting people engaged, that'll be our next step is really going to be consuming mine. I'll be going to the astrobiology conference in Atlanta coming up, Abpsychon. And that's another big thing you do, search for life.

And I'm trying to work with the astrobiology community to really create what's a great policy for astrobiology and the search for life at NASA and more broadly because it really is this crazy multidisciplinary area. And then I'll be at the Space, the Secure World Foundation Space Situational Awareness Workshop, Space Security Workshop in London in June. So those will be taking at my time coming up the next few months. You won't miss Artemis 1, so it's good. I'm not missing that.

I want to, I will, I do want to be there. I think it will be a spectacular thing to see, right? I never saw a shuttle launch. Yeah. And I will, one of those beautiful kind of experiences of, we should just mention this, right? Just for anyone who hasn't seen a rocket launch, right? It's maybe one of the most sublime experiences that a human can have,

particularly if you're already watching this show. Yeah, totally. You're kind of sold on it. But it's like, what was interesting to me, I'll do the quick version of this, which is there's a true difference, right, between intellectual abstract knowledge and experiential knowledge in the body, right? And seeing a launch, I've watched, I had watched thousands of them, I don't know, hundreds of them online or on video or whatever, but being there in person and feeling the shake

in your chest of the rocket launching and seeing or having your eyes hurt, looking at the flame coming out of the back of the rocket, feeling the energy of the crowd and the emotion of the crowd, feeling the humidity of the area and just connecting that to that history, that was something just profound. So seeing a launch is one of those things. I think that would, it's almost like this great conversion experience of creating not just space fans, but space advocates. That was my conversion experience.

But also helping to bring people in that this is not just something that's an abstract thing, right? Like space is one of the most abstract out there, literally out there, concepts that we have. But seeing a launch is one of those pure experiential moments of sublime, almost grace, right? And it's a really fantastic experience. So going to see something like SLS, no matter how over budget, how much Boeing has been overpaid, right?

No, how much behind they are. Like, all of that will fall away in a second when I see that go up. No one's going to care when that thunder from the solids hit us. No one's going to give a shit about that. I could literally be burning as much money as spent on it, and we would not care. It might be good for the economy at the moment. There you go. Yeah.

It's an investment. There was actually an interesting. We might want to consider putting like 20 bill in the flame trench anyway. Just like an inflation joke created at the end. Nailed it. The next time we talk, there's an interesting argument made that Apollo was a functionally a second reconstruction level investment in the American South. in terms of infrastructure, hardware, work programs.

So I'll leave that dangling for the future. Whatever date you decide you want to come back on and do that, because that sounds very interesting to me. We sent to the link to the calendar, just look in there, let us know what date that's going to be, because that's great, excellent content right there. That's excellent. Okay.

Yeah, we're way over time. Anthony, what are you working on? That was great. I had some good ones this week. I had some good shows You could have put a lot of podcasts. Yeah, everything landed at the same time. What did I do first?

We had, oh, we had Brad Cheatham from Advanced Space on to talk about Capstone, which is like low-key, a really freaking cool mission that's going to near rectilinear halo orbit. And that's, so it was really cool to talk about what they've been working on, how they're flying that one.

And it's honestly a mission that's like only possible right now. A small satellite launching on a small launch vehicle because NASA's working on a moon program was not a thing that would have happened even like five years ago, so very cool mission. And then I had Brent Sherwood on, who is the Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Programs at Blue Origin, which is a crazy title.

But we talked about Orbital Reef, so similar to what we were getting into earlier on the show about, like, how commercial Leo works. I thought we got into some good stuff. I wish I had more time, generally, but scheduling was tough, so that's what we had.

And I don't know, it was interesting to talk about like specifically how they're going to build modules for other businesses, which is kind of weird, but I think necessary. So that's what's going on over here. Next week, Jake, you had a great show for next week on this show. Yeah, yeah. So if you love this conversation with Casey today, check the We Martians feed next week because there will be lots of Casey coming down the pipe.

So it's going to be really good. So yeah, we covered Decatal Survey. So this is the big, big once every 10 years report on, planetary science from the community on what they think NASA should be doing. And there's a lot of gems in there. So like Casey mentioned, we talked for an hour and 45 minutes, I think. That was the unedited length. We'll see where it ends up.

But an hour and 45, and we did not cover it all. So it's going to be kind of our best picks is what's important. I'm really excited to go through that this weekend and get it all ready to go. What about this off-n-m-idea-d-d-dye-that's what I was teeing up? This op-num idea, yes. Yes, next week. So next week, Anthony and I will be doing a show just the two of us. We're doing something fun.

So every once in a while we like to do a kind of a fun like nothing episode that is not related to what's going on in the world. And we're doing cursed, cursed rocket, cursed missions. I don't know how we want to box this in, but we're going to pick a couple of weird flights from the past and sort of, you know, reminisce on what happened and what weird stuff happens. And so tweet us your weirdest favoriteest rocket anomalies and we'll see if it makes the cut. Yeah, there's your preview. It's going to be great one. Casey, thanks for hanging out with us and putting up with our horse crap while you were doing epic monologues. Thanks for writing me in.

That's always a delight to talk with you guys. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.