StarTalk Radio - Bill Nye Takeover

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

How can we build a new Moon program while slashing science funding? Bill Nye takes the host’s chair alongside Chuck Nice to tackle one of the most urgent issues facing our future in space with Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, who’s been tracking and analyzing NASA’s funding for years. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/bill-nye-takeover/Thanks to our Patrons anthonee rolfson, David Moncsko, 7Linden7, Kyle Meserve, Nancy Kimmel, Marc Gardiner, Carl Cheshire, El Mero Chingón Daniel Shin, Daniel Fisher, Christopher Crider, pintos dabeans, Alfric, Ry Guy, Juan Roa, Ph1lycheez, John4Disney, Esther Klein, Mako, Matthew Schuller, Alison L Bentley, Spencer Dohm, Brandon, David Yamanoha, Yash Goyal, Emily Hendrix, Mick W, Darin Wagner, Grant Cameron, Cheryl Courtright from Spring TX, Yonatan Gher, Edward Martin, erin grant, Emilio Martinez-Cordero, Nathan Trent, Pat D, Daniel Nicgorski, Alvan Mbongo, Colin Zwicker, Grand One, Adam, ubanamie320., Eric Mill, Aikya, Sean Dalglish, brian rowley, Philip, Quentin Walker, david smith, John Dusenberry, Karina Szalaiova, Ycros, Karel Netusil, Joe M, Rossell E Cameron, Gary Weber, Major King, david powell, Six String Sam, milky, Alyssa Solis, Wrama, Deanna Szwarc, Anthony Wiseman, Veronica Tash, Carrie Wilson-Bridges, Sebastian Cruz, Rhyskel, Kendra Meinert Hodson, princess, Jessy Kaiser, Anand Raman, Lance Davis, Yvonne S McCool, cameron campbell, Gene Davis, Greg, Micheal Jarka, Jenn [Z3120], Mark Lineberger, Jimmy Walker, Noëllie Newcastle, Andrew Nolen, Andrwnick, David Harrold, Vicki, Kaelyn P, and Kevin Staley for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Coming up on StarTalk, it's about time we talk space policy. Well, Neil, Neil, I have some thoughts on that. Bill Nye here, I will be guest hosting this week. Turn it up loud. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And on today's show, we have... We have me. I'm Bill Nye. You're Chuck. Nice. Oh, damn. Well, it was pretty good, man. It was compelling. It was compelling. Yeah, it's compelling. I won't say you have a future in it, but it was pretty good.

With an impression like that, Chuck, you have a future in selling women's shoes. That could be. So with that in mind, We now segue seamlessly to talking about how we explore space practically. Oh. And by this, I mean today we're going to talk about funding space exploration. And right now we're at a remarkable time in the history of NASA, the National Analytics and Space Administration, where people want to cut the budget for science just

about in half. And whose problem is that? Everybody's problem. And so today, as you may know, Neil deGrasse Tyson was once on the board of the Planetary Society, as am I even now. Yes.

And Neil apparently was responsible for voting so that I would become the CEO, chief executive officer, 15 years ago. And since then, the Planetary Society has developed a strong, reliable, remarkable policy arm. And we have here today, a guy I consider among the world's foremost authorities,

if not the world's foremost authority, on NASA budgets and NASA budget policy. Ladies and gentlemen, Casey Dreyer! And the crowd goes, wow, it's pandemonium. My usual welcome, yes, thank you. Policy monks are rioting in the streets. So, Casey, you have analyzed the NASA budget extensively. I have. And what's going on right now?

It's real bad, I think. No, you're judging it. You're judging it. Why do you say it's bad? I think that's actually the most objective and kindest way I can put it. I mean, you're looking at NASA being proposed to be cut by 25%. That's the largest single amount of cut ever in NASA's history. What about when Apollo ended? It was smaller per year than that. Now it is?

Yeah. Now is the biggest. It's bigger than it was after Apollo. So we're cutting NASA, the proposal is, by more than we ramped down NASA after we ended the moon program. So we ended the moon program,

we had a contraction. Yes. And now what we have is a contraction that is greater than that. It's like falling off a cliff. Like falling off a cliff. But instead of ending a moon program... Proposed.

Well, proposed. But instead of ending a moon program, we're nominally starting one up. That's the opposite. Even worse. It seems like a bad idea, right? Yeah. And then of that big cut, half it's directed at science.

Half of the cut is directed at science. So we then have to, for the listener who's excited about space policy, who isn't, we have to distinguish between human spaceflight and what would be called scientific exploration. Yeah. Is that accurate? Yeah. NASA science is anything motivated by science that doesn't have humans involved in the process in space? They obviously do all the science here on Earth,

but this is things like space telescopes, like Hubble. These are things like Mars rovers. These are things like New Horizons, the probe that's out beyond Pluto right now. All the stuff we love. Yeah, and Earth observation satellites. Which is even more important. So speaking of Earth observation satellites,

how much of these proposed cuts has to do with what I would call Earth science? It would cut Earth science by more than half. And for me, what is Earth science? Yes. So, yeah, so this is when you put a science mission up in space and you just point it back down. And so you're observing things like water distributions, gravity anomalies on Earth, weather, large-scale climate, carbon monitoring, all the things that kind of give us the sense of how our dynamic planet evolves and our system works. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that sounds a little important.

It's very relevant to most people. Well, the other thing, just from a scientific standpoint, everybody, the big thing, the big question, we ask, where do we come from, but are we alone in the cosmos? That's a big question. So when we look at Earth, we're wondering what it takes to have living things. Right. We only have one example of a place with living things. Yes.

So the argument, as I will present it, is that by studying Earth, now we have something to compare everything else we find to with which. And so, of course, although we're talking about policy, we would never discuss. We would not discuss politics. No. No. Of course, we don't do that here? No, yes. That would be absurd.

How much of that has to do with climate change disinterest, uninterest, uninterest? Substantial, I think. And there's, I mean, ironically, what was originally called the mission to planet Earth was this expansion of NASA observation of Earth started under the last years of the Reagan administration and George H.W. Bush under two Republican presidents. Now, those woke bastards? You kidding me? Reagan, man, I know.

Reagan. God, what a libtart he was. Thank you, Chuck. That reference. But in other words, Casey, you're saying this goes way back. Well, it's interesting. It wasn't originally part of NASA's primary focus, right? Even though NASA's original, everyone, of course, knows the 1958 NASA Act, right, passed by Congress.

Oh, everybody knows that. No, but especially, if you are a Star Talk listener, you are aware that NASA, National Analytics of Space Administration was created for, a reason and that reason had to do with Sputnik. Well, that was, yeah, that was the motivating reason to form a federal agency. But when they were creating it, one of its, you know, Congress listed out the statutory responsibilities of the space program. Okay.

One of which is to observe phenomena in the atmosphere and space. So that's the course, that's like actually, yes. Yeah, they didn't know about other atmospheres and other planets yet in 1950s. That's remarkable. And so this is, I mean, they really expanded this in the late 80s, and Earth's science has become this major field, again, and you have these data sets now that they've been tracking various aspects of Earth for over 40 years. And that continuity is really important, because then you see these long-term cyclical changes. You understand that there's substantial deviations

from that. You're monitoring temperature, and again, carbon and all these other, you know, key indicators of the health of the planet. You do this by kind of this constant focus on it. And that's why they created a specific part of NASA science. Well, the second letter is aeronautics. National aeronautics and space administration so if you're going to study aeronautics you presume you would have some interest in the atmosphere in the air right yeah the air and so yeah it's pretty important we put the air in aeronautics yeah well for real so i took us down a climate change digression but the thing is and before we get off of that let me just well set it aside oh okay good we're not going to get off of it but i would say and i'm just conjecturing here that when you're looking at 40-year long-term

trends and you know things that happen in the atmosphere one of the things that you're going to discover is that our burning of fossil fuels is a deleterious activity with the health to the health of the planet right so could it be that if i wanted to support the multi multi billion dollar industry that pays me a lot of money could it be that if i wanted to support them i would get rid of that information. It's certainly, yeah, how do you, if you can't monitor the status of the planet, then it's harder to track kind of the impacts and changes to it. Now, it's this type of stuff, again, it's, I wouldn't necessarily even make it that strong

of a one-to-one connection. Okay. There's a deeper political, well, I think, but it's fair. There's a deeper aspect of this. That's certainly part of that motivation. Okay. And, but ironically, you know, we're talking about these other parts of NASA science, Earth's science isn't even the thing that's cut the most.

I mean, so that's where I'm saying, there's something kind of going beyond this. What is cut the most? Astrophysics. Astrophysics. Yeah, like the actual, like, just looking out. So, and then Neil's not here. Coincidence?

Yeah. Perhaps not. So everybody just understand, if you're just tuning in. Chuck is here, per always, but our guest is Casey Dreyer, who works nominally.

You work for me. Nominally, yes. Some disclosure. but I just do what he tells me. He has studied the NASA budget in a way that is extraordinary. You have written software, you've used artificial intelligence.

Tell us about your wonky nerdiness. Well, I'll start with my... I'm the chief of space policy for the planetary society. And I'm also... I'll just plug host of Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, my podcast and monthly basis.

For those of you, I'm sure it's your primary podcast, and this is your secondary, of course. space policy edition I promise it's way more exciting than it sounds well it's very important so look everybody who who listens and watches start talk will be ultimately interested

in the NASA budget because NASA is the largest space organization at least in this hemisphere and how does it get funded so that we can make these discoveries in astrophysics or whatever else it might be back to you

well funding's part of it And I think there's also just motivations. I'm interested in why things happen. I always say, you know, all these missions that we just talked about offhandedly, you know, to study the Earth, to look deeper into space, to go to Mars, someone has to make those decisions. Someone has to rally and provide resources to build them.

They have to design them, think really hard about them. Those don't just happen, right? And I just want to emphasize to write, the word mission is not code, but a shorthand for the spacecraft itself and all the things that happen on the ground and all the people employed on the ground to enable the data to come down here.

Back to you. Yeah, well, they don't happen in isolation. Ironically, they don't just happen in a vacuum, right? In space. See what he did there? The vacuum. Space, you got it? You're with us, Chuck?

You know, it's a little difficult to keep up, but I caught on there. No, it isn't. Go ahead, please, Casey. So, again, I'm mentioned the why. And so I love the output. of course, too. And I want to get more of those. And I think by studying the whys of how

they come together, the incentive structures, the reasons why things actually manifest themselves, right? You're talking about in the U.S. government? Yeah, and particularly in the U.S. here, because it's the largest and it's where we live and spend most of our money on it. How does this idea that the forms is like some sparking neurons in one scientist's brain

end up cascading to build something multi-billion-dollar spacecraft out of metal and silicon and what have you and then launch to a different planet and return this data and discover something completely new. It's that process from neuron to building the spacecraft that I think is so valuable but also fascinating. It's like physics. Why do things happen? You try to model why that happens to understand it better.

So there are people right now, not in this audience, and I know it's not this audience, but there are people who will hear what you just said and then say, but so what? What's that got to do with me? How does that help me? And doesn't cutting the budget leave more money for the rest of our important things? I mean, why are we, and this is the term, wasting money on going to another planet or getting to Mars or looking at exoplanets, all this stuff that you guys do, you're wasting money. We could be using that money for something else. That's the argument that you hear

most commonly against spending money for something like NASA. Or that we don't have the money. Or we don't. So we can't spend it. So I always like to put this in context, right? And I know Neil has said this very eloquently before, but NASA is just this tiny, tiny fraction. So if you want priorities, most of the money the U.S. government spends is on health care, national defense and support for, yeah, and social support, right? So Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military, all that stuff. It's vast, three quarters of all spending is that. And then NASA's this year little sliver, less than a half of a percent. And then of NASA, right, a third of NASA roughly goes to science. So you're talking about a third of less than half a percent, like 0.1 percent

of every tax dollar, right? You're talking about fractional pennies at this point. So it's not a lot, right? the scope of when you're spending six trillion dollars, right? This is akin to, you know, we spend more money on pet food in this country than we do on sending things into space for scientific reasons, right? We can afford this. I mean, dogs got to eat, man. Come back. So we can afford this. I saw some very fancy pet food places. We can afford this, and yet there is a movement to not even spend this money. Correct. There's an overall desire to kind of cut, cut, cut without really consideration of what does that mean more broadly? And I'd say to your To your question, Chuck, there's practical reasons why we do space, and I think we talked about

some with climate. We want to understand why we can live on this one planet and not others. And by understanding other planets, we've learned how unique and rare our planet is. You look at Venus and Mars right next to us. Those are your two kind of worst-case scenarios. You either get way too hot with global warming, and global warming was actually an idea spurred by observations of Venus. Yeah, Venus is, you can make an argument that in the modern era,

but climate change on Earth was discovered on Venus. And is that because Venus has runaway greenhouse effect? Boom, boom, boom. And it was, our imaginations as humans are so limited that we actually need to go out and look because then we're surprised about what can actually happen. Especially my old boss, am I right? Limited imagination.

No, go ahead. He is the problem. It's a solid joke. But by going out and looking at these things, we're like, oh, this can happen. Things like dark energy. These things about what we don't know surprises us by definition. And it's that surprise that pushes us to modify and improve our understanding

of the systems in which we inhabit as humans, which is the cosmos. And so we are behooved to try to understand them better so we can live better in it. And then there's, I'd say, a deeper philosophical thing of do we want to be people who are looking forward to new things? Or do we kind of hunch over and just swipe on TikTok for the rest of our existence as a society? I know what my vote is. All right. So hang on. Let's talk about something specific. Let's talk about something specific that's near and dear to me. Obviously, Chuck, Mars. Yes. Planet Mars. I knew you're about to blur it out. I was about to go there. Yeah. So right now, as we're recording, just last week, a paper that had been published over a year or about a year ago. No, the paper just came out. The discovery had been. The discovery. Yeah. The initial discovery. Explain that. Yeah. Please.

There is a rock on Mars that the Perseverance rover studied. This is the, what's called the, they call it a potential, potential biosignature. But it's the most promising potential biosignature. What makes it promising? What are we looking at? Leopard spots. They're called, yes, the technical term, the casual term, leopard spots. But what they found on this piece of rock is they found biological, you know, kind of organic traces overlay.

Carbon, carbon, yeah, carbon compounds, which are the building. blocks of life, overlaid with various kind of these shapes and patterns in the rock that on earth are always made by biological systems. Right. And so it's not, yeah, a little bacteria. And so if we had found this rock on earth, we'd obviously, the bacteria made this. Oh, that's what we'd say. So there would be no obvious other explanation. So they can't fully say that it is because there are some unlikely but possible, what they call abiotic natural ways to make this, that they can't

completely rule out. But we have a sample of this thing that if we wanted to, we now have this paper put forward a series of hypotheses that we can test. We have to do them here on Earth because we need the big expensive equipment to do it. But we have the ability right now there's a piece of rock on Mars that we could bring back and say, where's this life. And it's in a tube. It's in a tube ready to go.

Helpfully ready to go. There is no plan to return these. Yes. So we have this, and the White House budget canceled the effort to bring back those samples. What motivated canceling that? Chuck's thing about what are you wasting money on? That, yes, money is a big part of it. This belief that, oh, humans will just pick it up anyway, so I guess why bother having robots do it? So, every, if I may digress, Chuck.

Yes, please. Surveyor 3? Surveyor 3. Exactly. I'm glad you brought that. So, have you ever heard of Surveyor 3? I have not. Before we landed humans on the moon with Apollo,

sent a few spacecraft that weighed the footpad, the cool-looking pancake-y footpads, had about the same weight on them on the moon as was planned for the lunar excursion module, the thing taking the people. So it landed Surveyor 1, 2, and 3, and then Apollo 12 astronauts in the cool go-cart. No, they didn't have the go-car yet.

they landed next to it. They didn't have the go-cart until Apollo 15. Thank you. Of course, right? Everyone knows. Yeah, well, he does know that. He's the Wonkman. So they walked over to it.

Moon walked over to it. Oh. And brought back a piece of the camera or camera-related... It's cut off some pieces of the spacecraft. And brought it back to Earth, and I was a kid during this. Oh, my goodness. Microbes have survived for two years on the moon. They found micro.

Yeah, they found some potential microbes on it. But then it turned out, It was our microbes? That we just contaminated it here on Earth, just screwed it up. Now, I don't think there's any fear of that on Mars, though. Well, there's, that's, I think the fear is the right word, or a concern maybe is the thing. My fear or anxiety or taxpayer arms akimboticness is if you send people, you're going to contaminate it. You're going to make a mess.

And then will you be able to determine, distinguish between what may have grown the leopard spot patterns or what humans brought by accident. And this is not rocket surgery. This is obvious to me. Dirty little secret. Every astronaut space suit leaks. It's constantly leaking little bits

and we're just these walking bags of bacteria and viruses, right? And so it's just we're walking around on Mars you just like shooting off little viruses and bacteria just in this air around you. It's functionally impossible to do what's called planetary protection, this idea that you have to not infuse another.

the planet with your own biome. And as humans, so when we send robots, we bake them at 500 degrees, you know, for three weeks to kind of kill everything or cover them with acid. Kind of kill everything. Yeah. And, but with, you can't bake an astronaut at 500 degrees to make them. Although there's a few. If you do, they are delicious.

They're a lot less effective as an astronaut. Whoa, that's getting a little weird. But just a little. So anyway, this argument is clear. to StarTalk audience I can make this argument that you can't send people will contaminate, you won't be able to distinguish what you were

looking for from what you brought by accident. There's a number of reasons you can't have people necessarily do it. Because it's also where you land on Mars. Can humans get to where they sent the robots? Maybe not. They landed in this big rocky crater. Humans will have to land in a big flat, the safest possible space.

Big runway. Can you get close enough? If you're landing in a big rocket, will you just kick up so much dust and debris that you damage everything? There's a lot of problems with this. Plus, more to the point, at no point in history ever has adding humans to a space mission made it cheaper or happened faster. Right. That adds complexity.

Makes sense. Because you're bringing bubbles of Earth with you to keep you alive for that amount of time. And also, we require a lot of maintenance. We are quintessential high maintenance. I have a toddler right now, so I resonate with that very strongly. So with this in mind, the last budget, posed for bringing back these rock samples. This is

an acronym everybody loves is MSR Mars sample return. I think it's the worst just the worst name. What would be a better name? You know, that's a great question that I don't answer for. Can I just be the critic on it without having to offer a solution to get back? Bring back better. Bring them back. Well, I have

my Mars sample return, bring them home t-shirt on right now. But I always think sample makes people think of like the doctor. The bring them home is pretty cool. Yeah. Because that elicits a different type of bring them home. And the word home is invocates. Right, yeah.

I mean, there's, call it just something cool, like the Athena mission. I don't know, right? There's just, it's sample return just sounds very, you know, clinical. Yeah. And kind of static where this is a really ambitious. Is it a true fact or a false fact that the last bid was $11 billion, right? That was one of the reasons that things were, there's deeper technical reasons to do this because you're not, lots of novel technology.

You have to land, go back to where there's a rover now, land next to it, somehow get the samples onto a rocket that you land on the surface of Mars that can sit there for two years on its own. Why two years? Because it takes two years to get to Mars and come, right, and land and come back. You have to launch on these cycles. And then it has to launch itself, go into orbit,

rendezvous with itself, with another spacecraft all autonomously, and then come back to Earth without, you know, getting anything dirty. So it's not seven minutes of terror. It's two and a half years. I mean, it's incredibly difficult. It's all stuff you have to. do if you want humans to go to Mars, ultimately anyway? Yeah, it's a great dry run for when we go.

But more importantly, and I don't know if you can answer this, are there benefits that we would glean from doing this that have nothing to do with the Mars mission, but that would end up spilling over into our everyday life? Yeah. This type of stuff, when you set extreme limits for yourself, why do people run triathlons? Why do people run marathons?

why does Mercedes build cars for F1 racing? These are extreme, they seek out extreme conditions so you can practice and train yourself to be extremely good at something and have high precision, have high capabilities, and figure out how to do really hard things. So it makes your manufacturing better, it makes your engineers better,

and it motivates and challenges people to pursue these incredibly difficult things that then go out and just make the world better through their own spin-off businesses, and technologies, you need a goal like this, right? It just sets this bar. And these types of, again, autonomy, right? Robots know how to do things is kind of a big deal right now, right?

We're figuring out how to do that, and there's huge reasons to do that. So you threw in the word reason. Why does anybody want to bring these rocks back, bring these rocks home in the first place? Well, the life question, right, is a big one. That's it for me. I claim, if we were, I claim, if we were discovered life on another world, it would change life on this world. That's my claim. Could that be a fear for many people, though.

I mean, let's be honest. If you find definitive proof, okay, evidence that there is life on, or was life on Mars, and then you look at the whole, you know, how do we fit in? How do we fit in? there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be very upset because their origin story changes. It's like saying Spider-Man didn't become Spider-Man, you know, when Uncle Ben got shot. When did he become Spider-Man?

Well, that's when he became Spider-Man. That's documented. That's documented. All right, so hang on. Now, with this said, I went down this road, or I believe took you down this orbital path, presuming that this was worth doing, right? But there are people, scientists, engineers in the Mars,

or rather planetary exploration community, if that's a thing, who think this isn't really a worthwhile use of our intellect and treasure. Anytime you get a bunch of scientists in the room, and I'm sure you've heard it on this show, they will never fully agree with each other, right? I mean, they are contrarians by nature. And so there's ongoing and vigorous debates

about how to prioritize. things. But I think, you know, it's been through this very long-term and ongoing processes to try to, you know, there's a whole thing, a bunch of scientists every 10 years, get together. It's kind of making it sound like some papal conclave, right? Well, it almost is, right? It's

more open than that. They don't go into a secret room. Did they wear the hats? They don't wear the hats. You know, they don't let me in, so I can't see. Yeah, you can't say. There you go. But they, it's through the National Academy of Sciences, right? And it's through, they argue for about 18 months about what our priorities are. And they argue by email or something? They get together. They get together.

They go to conferences, they have formal ways to get together, and then they argue in person, and they say these should be the biggest. Actually, what they do is these are the biggest questions. And I think this is what's interesting about separating science from human space, about how we decide what to do. Science, because it's measuring real things in the physical world, you have some external set of conditions and realities that constrain what you do, right? Give me an example, are you talking about measuring temperature?

Well, you have a bunch of scientists, you know, a bunch of contrarian scientists in a room together. No, you don't. And that would just be, how do you resolve? I think looking for life on Europa is more important than looking for the history of geologic evolution of the cosmos in dark matter or dark energy. Well, they can get together in a room

and they can say, what are the biggest questions? Because as a field, they generally know what that is. These are the biggest unknowns that we've learned in the last 10 years. And because those unknowns exist beyond the opinions of somebody, right? because, again, science is measuring some objective reality, you will eventually find some version of consensus to say, these are actually the biggest and most important questions, right? So what happened with Mars sample return?

Well, I think it's said as the priority, and I think it has been a long-term priority because, again, it has all these benefits. I think the problem with Mars sample return is that there's so many various justifications for it that there isn't a single one that you can just save it. So do I have to get in charge, Chuck? Is that what it is?

That's pretty much what the answer is. out if life started on Mars. Mars was hit with an impactor. This fell to Earth, and you and I are descendants from Martians. That's what we're going to go find out. Right. Do you guarantee this as the outcome? I guarantee that we will evaluate that. We can evaluate that hypothesis before we send people and contaminate it. Yeah. So with that said, there's this proposed cuts, cut, cut, cut, cut. Meanwhile, people at the China National Space Administration are going, Chuck, I've disturbed. I'm sorry. Take it, Chuck. Take it. That was a fabulous reaction. For those of you listening only, Chuck grabbed his face. Yeah. And that would, you know,

this very troubling image. Back to you. I'll put it in the words of a very wise leader who said, we invent all of this and then we don't have it. It's not here. China. China's killing us. They're killing us. So, I mean, you know. Who were you talking about? So the China National Space Administration is doing all these missions that are almost one for one. They actually have a Mars sample return mission going in 2028. Well, I mean, so.

But I did an offhanded remark. Expanded on that, please, if you would. Well, I think so maybe just to step back and say, even if you don't buy the China competition, or don't want to have that kind of geopolitical thing, it is the framing of the administration right now. That there is a, and even beyond that, a new space race with China. There's just a hearing and Congress framing it, literally that way.

So it doesn't make sense that in order to win a space race, they cut our science budget at NASA in half. Well, why is the argument that getting to the moon is what matters? Well, the moon, yeah. The universe is a lot bigger than the moon in Mars, right? There's a lot more to the universe. If you say you want to become or retain

leadership over China or any other country, you can't just decide other parts in space don't count. Right? It's like no to start, you know, it's like no, no, no, no, no, going to Mars sample return, that doesn't count. Jupiter doesn't count. Anything further out, that doesn't count. Only the moon counts. That sounds like again, a two-year-old determining

making things up on the flies so that you can and you have a two-year-old now. I have resonated very strongly with irrational claims very strongly held. How often have you said to your two-year-old, you have three kids? How often did you say your claims are irrational young man? I can't

count them. I can't count how many times I can't say it. It's an excellent way to argue with it. China Space Administration is planning to do this and we'll talk about stuff besides Mars everybody, but just this one thing they're going to do this similar mission. Yep. Okay,

so how about this? The person, the same people that we spoke of hypothetically in the beginning of the conversation, and they say, so what, they beat us? Big deal. So what, we lose our hegemony in space? Big deal. What's it mean? Yeah. That's actually, frankly, a really good question. Because I don't, I mean, I tend not to really go in on the pure competition aspect of it.

I think there's a symbolic aspect of what do we choose to do as a nation that is peaceful and cooperative and ambitious. And space science is all of those things. By definition requires us to work together in groups of people, because it's so complicated. It requires us to work with our allies, you know, to very closely. And it says it's wildly ambitious and optimistic. It's like we're going to go, what's on that red dot in the

sky over there? Well, let's, you know, roll up our sleeves. So along this line, you say it's cooperative. Right now, so during the Apollo era, as I like to point out, when I was young, during the Apollo era, it was a government effort, everybody who worked, NASA was considered

the best job in the world for a few years. But now, we have these commercial companies competing with each other, not working together. Address that, man of long. Well, commercial can do a lot of great things. They can make cheaper to launch things into space. They can make satellites that bounce our internet signals back to us.

They can make things that look at Earth. They do things that go up and point back down. That's what commercial does. Because that's where the market is. Because there's money there. There's money there. Well, why is there money there? People like to hear themselves talk.

Are we not the most, like, insular creatures, right? Like, we are self-absorbed, so everything is just, again, I go back to this TikTok, and sorry for people like TikTok, but I'm a little man now, and it's just swiping, and social media is like the lunchroom in the high school cafeteria, right? And it's all this, who's saying this, and who said that? Oh, this person has a beef of this person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It is the most kind of internal and closed, kind of self-obsessed driver of human interest. Space is literally the opposite. It literally pulls us out and away from ourselves a little bit and have a bigger perspective. No, no, it's cool, man. So commercialists, so people will pay for, again, practical things. I need to have a communication satellite that can beam, you know,

this amount of data to like the Indian subcontinent for this expansion of broadcast market that I have. I want to learn about, you know, trends in agricultural development in various places, right? But go beyond that, there's no market to say, how does Jupiter work, right? What is the nature of dark matter? Is their life on Mars?

And I can say, you know, we've had a lot of private space companies and individuals. They've been happy to send themselves into space and they've been, you know, or small, you know, tourism in various ways. And they built rockets and they build a lot of things. But there's no one of them, not a single one of them, has ever built a science mission with that money. Not a single one of those companies has ever decided to just go and figure something out. because it's not even, it's not their fault that's just the wrong incentives, right? Well, they have investors and they need a return.

It's exactly right. So along this line, Casey, you have talked about guys who built telescopes in the early, early days. Built telescopes. Space exploration before we had rockets. Right? Just a little digression there, if you would.

So in the United States, we didn't have public funding of science basically until after World War II. Because science or technology turned out to be so valuable and winning a war. Yeah, I mean, it turns out, oh, there's actually like a fundamental, yeah, the nuclear bomb or any number of things. And rockets themselves, right?

Yeah, rocket themselves. But before that, it just wasn't seen as a responsibility of public investment to do, it was private sector responsibility to do scientific research. And that works up to a point, but when you start doing really complex things like going into space, it's hard for any one person to do that. So before we had rockets, you can say space exploration was basically looking through big telescopes. And there was a...

Which was amazing. Yeah, I mean, that was revolutionary. I mean, the technology enabled bigger and bigger lenses and mirrors. And, you know, there's kind of this prestige race among the equivalence of billionaires at the time. You know, these, like, Yerkes and Keck and some of these other people whose names now grace these telescope, ground-based telescope, Lowell. And they use their money to build these big telescopes on the ground to put their name on them.

And what they would do, generally, they'd, like, they'd, they'd, they'd, cut the ribbon, they'd say, you know, I'm such a great, you know, person and I've built this thing for the benefit of humanity. And they take off and they never fund anyone to actually look through it. And that's the difference, right? So you can get sometimes an individual to build a thing. Because I think our brains like to focus on a physical thing. But the ongoing activity of something is really hard for a person to take a lot of attention to. Which is why we built this into the public sphere, right? We have funding. It's not just enough to build a mission to Mars. You have to pay scientists to figure out and look at the data, right? Without any data, none of those missions mean anything. The telescope without making sketches of what you see. Or taking pictures of what you see. Right. It's like the equivalent of a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it. Now, along this line, you've referenced Jupiter. You might have said, I think you said Europa for a minute.

So there's different opinions in the science community about which place to explore with how much money, right? Yeah, I mean, until basically all this money was cut by the White House, right? So that's like, I think that's really pushed a lot. Those are internal, you know, it's like we have a certain amount of steady funding. Let's kind of figure out where to put our efforts. And over time... And you say that was a good process or good enough. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the best, you know, it's an ongoing.

process, but it's an open and deliberative process. There's always going to be disagreements. But the point is that you have these external factors of just the big questions. What big questions are we trying to answer? Where did we come from? Functionally, that's the... Are we alone in the universe? How did these things form? Why does the solar system the way it is? How did

life arise? What is the, again, the nature of dark matter, dark energy? These are all frontier science things, and that's what you bring up in terms of China's space ambitions. Their scientific program is ramping up to answer the same questions. They're like people in many way.

Well, I mean, they're driven by the same, you know, and there's all these aspects of national pride, and are you going to be the nation that discovers the future or not? Yeah. But they also, you have to remember, well, we all have to remember, that their government invest in these technologies that don't, we did. But that's what I'm saying. So Bill and I, people, years ago on this show, predicted the future that we are living in now, where he said that it was going to be imperative that we develop battery technology.

And I never forgot that. Wow, I love you, man. Yeah, I never forgot that. And now the Chinese, they dominate battery technology because where we did not invest, they did. Yeah, Casey, what about that? Well, batteries are very useful in spacecraft. No, but seriously, China has like mission for mission. There's a very strong one-to-one correlation between what China is developing

and what we have proposed to cancel in the United States. Proposed to cancel. Yeah. So it's like a needless seeding of this kind of competition to other nations, not just China. I mean, the U.S. would become second to not just China, but Europe and Japan and other places. But the thing is not just human, we're not talking about human spaceflight. This is all the space science stuff. Everything.

And let me ask you both then. So if we're seeding these areas to other nations, Does that mean that the scientists and the brilliant minds that go along with those projects go to those nations? Yeah, absolutely. And the partnerships between nations. So all of the things that the White House has proposed to cancel, more than a dozen are with our closest allies nominally, right? And so we're European Space Agency, these missions, these joint missions that we've made commitments to, we're just abrogating those commitments. And we're saying, sorry, folks, we are no longer going to fulfill our commitments.

There is no one within the administration pushing back against the way you described, but it sounds extraordinarily short-sighted. It is extraordinarily short-sighted. So, yeah, strangely enough, Congress itself has actually been doing the right thing on this. Tell us about Congress. Which is not a phrase I say often, but they've actually been doing. What have they've been doing? They, both House and Senate, which are both Republican-run, same party as the president,

have put forward their own kind of funding bills for NASA next year as part of this whole ongoing annual process. So can you wonk it for us? Sure. There's something called the president's budget. President's budget request, the PBR, if you will. So then what happens? So the president requests, here's what I want to spend next year for NASA, that sets the baseline of argument, and then the House will put out what's called an appropriations bill

and say, well, here's how we would appropriate money in response to your request. Then the Senate would do the same. They vote on theirs. They reconcile, they kind of iron out the differences between the two. They have a meeting in some smoke-filled room. Yeah, the proverbial kind of meaning to get an agreement. and then you ideally pass it by the Congress and then the president would have to sign it into law, right?

So that's like the ideal process. This is your spherical cow of legislation. So do you get the spherical cow? I don't know the spherical cow. It's hilarious. Casey, physics major, tell us about the cow. Let's see if I can do this joke. What is it?

A farmer comes up and goes to a university and says, my cow isn't producing enough milk. How can I get my cow to produce more milk? So it goes to the biology professor and the biology professor goes through this long process of understanding that he explains to him

he gives these types of foods and things when you understand these kind of process works and he does that and that'll help your cow get more milk so the farmer goes

okay okay that's a lot and then he goes to what's the other one an astrophysicist I'll just do it in two instead of me and he goes to a physicist and says my cow's not producing

enough milk what do I do so physicist thinks for a while let's go a year he goes away from a year and he draws up a bunch of stuff comes back okay and the physicist goes all right, I figured it out. Here's how we get your cow to produce more milk.

He said, step one, assume a spherical cow. First, we assume a cow is a sphere. It's so funny. Which is hilarious. For any physics major, yes. So the reason planets are round, you guys, is because of gravity. And the reason asteroids are not quite round, they don't quite have enough gravity. So with all this in mind, Casey, so the president's budget request, this year was extraordinarily low.

Destructive, yeah. So destructive. Deaconian. Unstrategic, wasteful, needlessly disrupt. Wow, tell us how you really feel. These are the polite terms. So along this line, as an observer, is it a bargaining technique just to go into the meeting saying we're going to give you half what you asked for so that they had reached

three quarters of what you asked for when they split the difference? No, because this predates this whole process. The person who runs the budget office in the White House called a shot three years ago when he published a report saying he wanted himself to cut NASA science by 50%. This is deeper... You're talking about the Votster, Russ. Russ Vod, yeah, the director of the Office of Management Budget, who we don't have to go into this level of detail,

but that's what the space policy edition is for. But the point is that... But the StarTalk listeners are interested in how we got here, there's a deeper level of animosity clearly being expressed towards federal investment in science that I think is profoundly short-sighted and ignores the wild benefits that have come from, again, this very brief...

In one person's lifetime, the United States went from not funding science barely at all to winning most Nobel prizes in science. That all started again and started in the late 1940s. It was 1950 when the National Science Foundation was created. It all came from a report by this guy, Vannevar Bush, the president of MIT, to Franklin Roosevelt, saying we won World War II because of science. He called science the endless frontier. Science.

And through science, public health, national interest, national defense, industry, everything. but we need to do this fundamental stuff that markets and private individuals cannot do. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, Congress is to promote the progress of science and useful arts since 1787. Wow.

Casey, you made it on other arts, isn't it? Well, useful arts to me is making stuff. Bridges. What did they do? Church steeples, plows. Engineering and architect something else. So now, Casey, you threw out a word, which I dig.

Can you describe why these cuts are you view as unstrategic? Well, again, so you're destroying the fundamental research base of the entire country, right? And this goes all the way down to whether students can be trained to become scientists and good thinkers or engineers. It breaks again all these alliances with our allies. It pushes them to work with other countries who are more reliable. So we're actually pushing allies away. We're becoming more insular. We're destroying our own ability to do this.

this research. And, you know, through this broader attack, I'd say, on universities and academia, we are undermining, like, the very, this kind of, like, powerful engine of insight, discovery and economic growth that we've created in this research. So specifically, I wanted to ask you about sending humans back to the moon. So in that sense, too, by, well, and also, and so there's a pivot to sending humans to march. If your strategy, is to send people to the moon, this is unstrategic. It also, again, tried to disrupt a ton of the other, political investment and in the political consensus behind going to the moon. So that's the

other thing. You know, nothing happens space at NASA. It's inherently, it's a product of politics, right? We are in a democratic, nominally still democratic society, and we have the ability and the right of every representative to have some kind of valid reason

to support. You need a coalition of people to support you. Why are we going to go back to the moon? It can't just be one person. It cannot, it should not be one person, right? And it cannot just be one person. And So you need to have something that builds a coalition of people who agree with you. And you have all sorts of reasons. People have all their reasons for wanting something.

And you have to accept that. That's just a product of our system. And so our current effort to the moon, it's not the most efficient. It's not the cheapest. It's not the fastest. But it is politically stable. And that's like your zero-ist law. Describe it.

What do you mean? It's been going on for decades. It's survived. It's the first effort to return humans to the moon that has survived a presidential transition. since like basically since the start it started under the first Trump administration he actually had really the first administration had really good space policy

and he was about it with space force and the whole deal and well there's yes space force got a lot of it which is arguably actually not the worst policy but then creating Artemis Project Artemis right and the Biden administration carried that on unchanged what else did Biden and Trump agree on

and so like the fact that because well because you know nothing I mean as we as your listeners know right motions of the planets do not follow convenient political cycles, right? They don't go on two and four years cycles of politics. You need to have someone to pass this baton off on. Because you can't do it in four years.

You cannot do it in four years. You can't do it in two or four years. And so you need to build some consensus of someone to carry on that progress. And if you want to send people back to the moon and then go to Mars, which is also in this proposal, despite cutting NASA's budget so much,

while destroying such a popular part of the agency and this broader, even making an effort to build a coalition around it, it will fail. And so it is an anti-strati, who will carry this forward, right? Because why would they bother to do it? There's no groundwork established that anyone else agrees with this, right? And so by destroying the coalition we do have and then not making one for this new idea, you end up wasting money in the immediate term, destroying this huge thing that we have built

support for, and then undermining their own goal in the long term, which is why it's an anti-strategy. Specifically, certain listeners, viewers may remember the Ares program and the Constellation program. So I went to Cape Canaveral. They built a giant gantry tower, steel, welded things, rivets, spray paint, giant thing to hold up a giant rocket. And the rocket was going to be all solid motor, a solid rocket motor is no liquid fuel, right? Wow. And then people realized the thing was going to be a wobbly mess. Is that accurate? Yes, it was the last gasp of what George W. Bush's return to the moon program was this, right?

So hang on a second. Is the current Artemis program not derived from return to the moon? One piece of it is, the Orion capsule, which is going to launch with astronauts in it next year. But the space launch system, big rocket, no, that's not derived from that. That's all different stuff. All right, so let's talk about the space launch system. Sure. So the other organizations, everybody, this has to do with cosmology and exploring space, SpaceX, Blue Origin, European Arianne rocket, Japanese...

Rocket Lab, Firefly, all these new rockets, are working, largely, by and large. Space launch system... It's fun? Go ahead. It's fun. I mean, it's just, it's the big government moon rocket. So this is why Congress mandated. This is the first rocket to be mandated written into law.

It's illegal for the U.S. not to make this rocket. 2010 or something? Yeah, 2010, it was written into law that NASA had to make this rocket using existing shuttle components. It's a way to basically, you know, when they retired the shuttle, they wanted to keep their workers in their states working on space stuff, so they build this rocket out of the same shuttle. And this is part of what you say, the inefficiency of NASA,

but is inefficiency necessarily bad? It's a pending what you're optimizing for. Do you optimize for political stability? Then yes, you like inefficiency because then you spread your money around the country. There are 10 NASA centers for a reason. There's 10 NASA centers, big contractors and contract, like Utah is really invested in the space launch system

because they build the solid rocket boosters there. Because it's Morton Salt. That's just like where they happen to, yeah, create that company, you know, that's where that company happened to be established. And people don't like that. I mean, I understand the frustration. And then they say, oh, well, we should have SpaceX,

which does things a lot cheaper, which they do. and a lot faster, which they do. But because there's an irony when in, because they're so much more efficient, they have a much smaller footprint around the country. So their invested political coalition is a lot smaller. So they're actually at cross purposes, efficiency and political stability in terms of,

you know, kind of does my district benefit from this moon program? And so these are the types of inputs that I think are really fascinating. Why do we have this rocket that costs roughly $4 billion per launch, right? We'll launch $4 billion to launch the world. stack with the Orion. Expensive. It launches once a year, which is crazy low, at most, right? You know, SpaceX has over 100 launches this year. Yeah. And it's only September. Well, you have, then yeah, then you have Starship, right, which is the whole space, like, which is like everything will be made obsolete by Starship, which it might be. But the reason why it persists. And they, so the Trump administration tried to cancel this rocket this year. But you know what happened is that Ted Cruz, no critic, no real critic of Trump, completely wrote, into a separate bill.

Nope, you're actually going to fund this. You're going to spend a billion dollars in this every year from next year. Well, see, that sounds like it's more like a jobs program than advancement. It is, but I like to say, space is the only industry that is a shame that it makes jobs. Like, great, I love jobs. Like, doesn't that's true, because defense is nothing but a jobs program too. There's a lot of jobs. There's a lot of jobs.

Come on. No, no, defense, they make stuff to defend. Well, this is true, but I'm saying there's a lot of defense when you look at almost, when you look at $800 billion, dollars, there's a lot of waste there. Almost a trillion now, yeah. There's a lot of waste there. So, I mean, this is my contrarian self, right? And this is, I'm frustrated by it too.

And this is like, I don't necessarily defend this way of doing things. But it's the incentive structure selects for these types of programs, right? Based on this distributed representative democratic system we have. And if that's the tax, in a sense, of getting a moon program to survive for the first time, the fact that we will be launching astronauts around the moon next year, fine. So let me just make a public service announcement if I might, because what you're saying right now seems to be that if you can incentivize your representative to fund NASA, NASA will be funded. And believe it or not, when you reach out to the people that you vote for and tell them, hey, man, you better do this, they actually do take note because quite as it's kept, we're the boss. Okay, I know nobody wants to actually believe that.

They work for us. They work for us. So if you reach out to them, and I'm talking about our Star Trek audience, and say, I do not want to see NASA decimate it. I want to see as much money as possible that can go to NASA. And to be science. Right. And to studying the earth, I want money there. Yeah.

Believe me. So along that line. It means something. Yeah. Well, so I'll just plug planetary.org. So, I mean, one of the things we do is try to, this is a nonpartisan grassroots effort. that we try to do. For the most part, you know what,

Congress has agreed with us. All the things I've just said, Congress has largely agreed with, and it really speaks to the, this is not something to completely despair over, right? And because it's generally still, with exceptions of things like Earth science,

unfortunately, but generally still non-partisan. Political but not partisan. Yeah. And so if you just participate in that process, and we've done this for years, and we've had a very good response. How would a visitor to planetary.org participate in the process, Casey.

Funny you mentioned that, Bill. And what was that website again? Planetary.org. Well, we have a link, Save NASA Science is our big campaign to do this. And it's been a huge, we've had hundreds of thousands of people respond. And we've had dozens of other organizations,

thousands of scientists. To your point, Chuck, we are members, and people who visit the website, send emails, they write paper letters, and they... They go to Washington, D.C. with us. Over 200 people will be joining us in Washington. So 200 people who take the time, they take a day or two off from a job, often fly on a plane

to Washington, sometimes drive, take a train, and that we organize it so that they can visit their congressional representative, their senator, and make just the case that you're describing. Excellent. So check us out, you guys. It is also very rewarding. I think everybody who participates gets a lot out of it. You really walk the halls of Congress. You really meet with your representative.

You meet their staffers, some of whom are old enough to drive. And you, oh, in New York, that's a reference. People operate motor vehicles. Many of you don't. And so it is really a cool thing that with Casey's leadership, with our other guy in D.C., Jack Carolli, we have been able to build this very well-organized effort. and furthermore, when members go to congressional offices,

Casey, you have created what you call tools to help people take it. Well, we want to empower people. Empower. Yeah, I mean, well, you want to walk in and to say, you can say it, you can go in and say, I want this. And that's totally legitimate. You're not a, you know, I want this expert. But if you can make the case saying, you walk in and say,

oh, here's actually NASA's real economic impact in your district. Here's NASA's science impact specifically. So you have written software. We have pre-generated, we've done all the analysis for people, all this stuff to show that there's an impact here, right? So if I'm from a congressional district, I go to planetary.org, and I find... You can go to dashboards.planetary.org, and you can find, or save our NASA science at planetary.org, and you can find your state and district, and you can find out how it impacts your locale, because that immediately establishes relevance. Something happens here because of this, and if we don't do it, it goes away. How many congressional districts are there? Well, 435 congressional districts.

and 50 states. And 50 states. So that's 100 senators. So you can go in either with the ideas or the numbers in your head or you can print out the numbers and you can present them to your representative and senator and say this is the effect in our district. We want to fund NASA science.

We want to explore planets. And China National Space Administration will kick our empanage if we don't do something. So we give you, yeah, I mean, it's whatever. works best for you and with best for your representative and what resonates. And the point is that there's a lot of ways to argue for this. And that it's also in so doing, it's anti-cinicism. It's like a good antidote to cynicism, frankly. Like most people come out of this and this is because you don't run into these partisan walls, you are there really just trying to express your passion. And that's

at the end of the day what we all have and what's so unique about this is that this isn't just and, you know, as Bill, you said, we're independent. I don't get any bonuses if we go to Europa or Jupiter, unfortunately, right? We don't have anything to gain but seeing the incredible pictures or sharing in the knowledge that we find. And that enrichment, that is an access, I think, to the sublime, that we do not get

from pretty much anything else in a secular world today. And that's why I say it's the antidote to like scrolling on TikTok or whatever endlessly, is that there's something bigger and grander and just waiting, literally sitting on the surface of Mars waiting to be known. Surface of Mars is one example. Europa. Just whatever, right?

And we have the ability to do it. We're all for all that. So you're not just there talking about a specific thing. You're saying, in so doing this action, we ourselves become better. So what a great thing that are you for. Let me just add this, you guys. Planetary Society was founded by the famous Carl Sagan, the guy who gave Neil a copy of his book, gave him a ride to the bus station, but Neil chose not to take his course.

I can't, you'll have to take that up with him. Carl Sagan, Lou Friedman, who was an orbital mechanics guy at Jet Propulsion Lab at the time, and Bruce Murray. And Bruce Murray was the head of the jet propulsion lab during these famous, famous missions. Viking landing on the surface of Mars and Voyager, the famous Voyager spacecraft that did the grand tour of the solar system,

the golden record, which is still flying out beyond the heliopause into the cosmos. He was the head guy during all that. And he famously was asked, why are you building these spacecraft? What are you going to find? We don't know what we're going to find. That's what we're building them.

And to that point, all four of my grandparents were born in the 19th century. They were born in the 1800s. I'm of a certain age. All four of them. They did not know there were neutrons. They did not know there was relativity. They did not know that one day we would have mobile phones that depend on both special relativity, the speed of the spacecraft,

and general relativity, the Earth's gravity, the Earth's gravity affecting the speed of clocks. They did not know any of that, and all of that is derived from space exploration, and in the case of relativity, and largely from just the telescopes, just the beginning before rockets. They didn't know about Pluto.

They didn't know there was a Pluto. And there still isn't a Pluto. There's a Pluto. So anyway, you guys, Pluto's made up. I'm starting my own movement. So to take it back to Casey's point, with all this talk, all this concern,

about NASA budget funding, international competition. What could a person do about it, Casey? Well, again, planetary.org, there's links right on the homepage for our Save NASA Science campaign. It'll catch you up on the news. It'll give you ways to write your member of Congress. You can call them if you want. It catches you up on talking points.

And then whenever you want, you can join us. We go to Congress every year. Sometimes twice a year. Sometimes twice a year. And so you can sign up. I have a space advocate newsletter and then also subscribe to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

to keep going into all the depths and nuance and reasons for why we do these things. And then the more you know, you know, the better you're going to be. I just saw a star go across the room. How appropriate for where we're talking about it. So really, you guys, a lot of times on StarTalk, we talk about cosmology and astrophysics and so on, and the discoveries that have been made about anthropomorphic star ripping the guts out of the star cluster or the planetary nebula or something. But this is the practical information about what it takes to support NASA science so that we can make these discoveries and work to answering the two deep questions of where did we come from and are we alone?

The search for life. Keep looking up. Thanks for listening. Thank you.