This Week in Space 164: Goodbye NASA?

Summary

Podcast Summary: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) – This Week in Space 164: Goodbye NASA?

Release Date: June 6, 2025
Host: Rod Pyle
Guest: Casey Dreyer, Chief of Space Policy for the Planetary Society

---

1. Introduction

Rod Pyle opens the episode by outlining the major topics of discussion:

• The deterioration of the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
• ispace's unsuccessful moon landing attempt.
• The contentious NASA budget request and its implications.

2. The Fallout Between Elon Musk and Donald Trump

The conversation delves into the rapid decline of the camaraderie between tech mogul Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump.

• Martial Breakdown: Casey Dreyer describes the falling out as "a rapid unscheduled dis-friendship" following Trump's criticism of Musk's budgetary requests.

• Notable Quote:

  Casey Dreyer ([05:14])
  “Musk and Trump have experienced a rapid unscheduled dis. A friendship disenfriendship.”

• Public Perception: While some viewers found their public disagreements entertaining, Rod Pyle emphasizes the negative impact on the Republic's image.

  Rod Pyle ([08:07])
  “It's just like this is the face we've chosen to show to the world about how we work.”

3. Ispace’s Moon Landing Failure

iSpace, a Japanese private space company, attempted its second moon landing mission but failed due to technical issues.

• Mission Details: The Hakuto lander aimed for Mare Frigoris on the Moon but crashed during its final descent.

• Cause of Failure: Lag in the laser rangefinder data led to miscalculations in the lander's speed and altitude.

• Impact: The failure resulted in the loss of the ESA’s Tenacious rover, which was part of a collaborative effort to demonstrate lunar regolith scooping.

• CEO’s Statement:

  Casey Dreyer ([13:54])
  “The CEO of the company said very specifically when asked the question that it was not a time for crying.”

4. NASA Budget Cuts and Their Implications

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the alarming NASA budget proposal, which threatens to halve the agency’s science budget—the lowest since the 1960s.

• Budget Overview:

  Casey Dreyer ([40:54])
  “This will be NASA's smallest budget adjusted for inflation since fiscal year 1961.”

• Consequences:

  • Mission Cancellations: 19 active missions and 18 development projects are slated for cancellation.
  • Workforce Reduction: A third of NASA’s civil service staff would be eliminated.
  • Impact on Science Divisions: All five science divisions (Astrophysics, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, Earth Science, and Microgravity/Biological Sciences) face severe budget cuts ranging from 30% to 80%.

• Symbolic Loss: The cuts are not just financial but represent a "dark age" for NASA science, undermining decades of progress and international partnerships.

• Notable Quote:

  Casey Dreyer ([52:35])
  “We are risking something that we've taken for granted. And if we destroy, if Mars even becomes a partisan issue, we are so screwed.”

5. Impact on International Cooperation

The proposed budget cuts have significant repercussions for international collaborations, particularly with the European Space Agency (ESA).

• Broken Commitments:

  Tarek Malik ([55:32])
  “These types of situations are going to make it harder for these our partners to trust us in the future.”

• Shifting Alliances: With the U.S. withdrawing support, ESA and other partners may turn to more reliable collaborators like China, diminishing NASA’s soft power and global influence.

6. Efforts to Mitigate the Budget Crisis

Casey Dreyer outlines the Planetary Society’s initiatives to combat the proposed budget cuts.

• Advocacy Actions:

  Casey Dreyer ([67:03])
  “We have a petition that folks outside the US can sign, as well as people inside the US if you live in the United States, we have phone call scripts, we have pathways to. You can use our forms to write your member of Congress.”

• Collaborative Support: The Planetary Society is joined by other scientific and commercial organizations in denouncing the budget proposal, emphasizing its detrimental impact on both current and future space missions.

• Notable Quote:

  Casey Dreyer ([77:16])
  “This has been a long couple of months. But this is a taking something precious and just grinding it into the ground. And what a tragedy that would be.”

7. Tribute to Mark Garno, Canada’s First Astronaut

In a heartfelt segment, Rod Pyle honors the late Mark Garno, Canada’s pioneering astronaut.

• Career Highlights:
  Garno flew three missions aboard the Space Shuttle, contributing significantly to NASA’s endeavors and international space cooperation.

• Legacy: His autobiography, A Most Extraordinary Ride: Space Politics and the Pursuit of the Canadian Dream, chronicles his remarkable journey and lasting impact on space exploration.

• Notable Quote:

  Casey Dreyer ([27:53])
  “It wouldn't have had arms if not for them. And Edgar no was featured in probably the best film ever made about the shuttle, in my opinion.”

8. Conclusion and Call to Action

As the episode wraps up, Rod Pyle and Casey Dreyer stress the urgency of addressing the NASA budget crisis.

• Call to Action:

  Casey Dreyer ([67:03])
  “This is a budget proposal and the US Congress ultimately decides what is prioritized and spent... this is the time if you've ever to get off the couch and do something, if you've always been unsure this is the time to do it.”

• Resources for Listeners: The Planetary Society provides various tools and platforms for listeners to get involved, including petitions, phone scripts, and advocacy courses.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Casey Dreyer ([05:14]):
  “Musk and Trump have experienced a rapid unscheduled dis. A friendship disenfriendship.”

• Rod Pyle ([08:07]):
  “It's just like this is the face we've chosen to show to the world about how we work.”

• Casey Dreyer ([13:54]):
  “The CEO of the company said very specifically when asked the question that it was not a time for crying.”

• Casey Dreyer ([40:54]):
  “This will be NASA's smallest budget adjusted for inflation since fiscal year 1961.”

• Casey Dreyer ([52:35]):
  “We are risking something that we've taken for granted. And if we destroy, if Mars even becomes a partisan issue, we are so screwed.”

• Tarek Malik ([55:32]):
  “These types of situations are going to make it harder for these our partners to trust us in the future.”

• Casey Dreyer ([67:03]):
  “We have a petition that folks outside the US can sign, as well as people inside the US if you live in the United States, we have phone call scripts, we have pathways to. You can use our forms to write your member of Congress.”

• Casey Dreyer ([77:16]):
  “This has been a long couple of months. But this is a taking something precious and just grinding it into the ground. And what a tragedy that would be.”

---

Final Remarks: Rod Pyle and Casey Dreyer emphasize the critical nature of the proposed NASA budget cuts and urge listeners to engage in advocacy to preserve and advance space exploration and scientific discovery. The episode serves as both an informative analysis of current space policy challenges and a rallying call for public support against detrimental governmental decisions.

Transcript

[Rod Pyle]

Coming up on this Week in Space, is the space bromance dead between Elon Musk and Donald Trump? Also, ispace fails to stick its landing on the moon and the NASA budget request is out and it is awful. And Casey Dreyer from the Planetary Society is going to explain it all.

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[Tarek Malik]

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[Casey Dreyer]

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[Casey Dreyer]

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[Rod Pyle]

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[Tarek Malik]

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[Rod Pyle]

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[Tarek Malik]

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[Rod Pyle]

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[Casey Dreyer]

I'm good. Seriously?

[Rod Pyle]

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[Tarek Malik]

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[Tarek Malik]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Casey Dreyer]

This is TWIT. This is this Week in Space. Episode number 164, recorded on June 6, 2025. Goodbye, NASA. Hello and welcome to another edition of this Week in Space, the Goodbye NASA edition. There's a question mark after NASA. I'm Rod Pyle, editor chief, Mad Ast magazine, and I'm joined by my fellow distressed NASA observer, Tarek Malik, editor in [e-mail]. hello, my friend.

[Rod Pyle]

Hey, Rod. Slow week, huh? Slow week.

[Casey Dreyer]

Good God, that's it.

[Rod Pyle]

Show over. No space news this week.

[Casey Dreyer]

In a few minutes, we will be joined by Casey Dreyer, the chief of Space policy for the Planetary Society, who. Who has some thoughts on these. On these recent happenings and has had some thoughts for quite some time and they're good ones. So we're looking forward to that. Before we start, I know you haven't forgotten. Please don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like and subscribe to our podcast because we're counting on you. And if you're here, you probably already have. But if you haven't, shame on you. You're going to the Woodhouse.

[Rod Pyle]

Like, shame, shame, puppy shame.

[Casey Dreyer]

And now a space joke from Daniel Hart. And I had one that was neutral this week because I just couldn't bear to do another NASA basher. Hey, Tarek.

[Rod Pyle]

Yes, right.

[Casey Dreyer]

Do you know what's making waves across the Earth in space news?

[Rod Pyle]

I don't. Is it gravity waves? Gravity mo. Oh, I get it. I get it. It's a tide joke. It's a tide joke. I get it.

[Casey Dreyer]

It may be tied for our worst joke now. I don't know.

[Rod Pyle]

With your sense of humor. It ebbs and it flows, my friend. That's another tide joke.

[Casey Dreyer]

Now, I've heard that some people want to defund us when it's joke time on this show, but you can help send us your best work or most worst or mostly different space joke at TwistWit TV. Until then, we're gonna. We're gonna just carry on so. You know, I almost don't want to touch it with a finger, but let's do some headlines.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah. Headline, headline news. Oh, I was early.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, according to some of our loyal listeners, if you come in early, it might actually be on time. So you're probably right in sync. Gosh, the bromance is over.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah.

[Casey Dreyer]

Musk and Trump have experienced a rapid unscheduled dis. A friendship disenfriendship. So where does one begin? You know, who could have predicted it? Oh, yeah.

[Rod Pyle]

Except for almost everyone who saw this coming.

[Casey Dreyer]

Right Amongst everyone, trauma of the last few weeks. Trump and Musk have a break in their bromance, which results in Trump saying, correct me if I get the order wrong. Hey, if we really want to save money, we just cancel all this expensive contracts with Elon Musk and his dumb companies. I don't know why Biden didn't do it, because everything is Biden's fault. With Musk saying, fine, I will decommission Dragon. And parenthetically, although he didn't say it, you could walk to your damn space station and then. Then throw a little more dirt onto it. Musk said, hey, wonder why you're not seeing the Jeffrey Epstein files. It's because Trump sent him. Yeah, what are you doing?

[Rod Pyle]

Is a turn.

[Casey Dreyer]

And after that, actually, Trump kind of took the high road, which surprised me.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, so it actually started early. So this, by the way, we're recording this on a Friday, and all of this happened, like, within the space of, like, four hours. Like yesterday, like on Thursday. It was. It was. I was sitting there watching Japan land on the moon, which we're going to talk about in a bit. And meanwhile.

[Casey Dreyer]

And.

[Rod Pyle]

Meanwhile, like, this whole, like, the richest man in the world, and I guess you could say the most powerful man in the world, the President, are going at it on their different social media things. And it started actually in a press conference with German Chancellor Rod, where there were questions. And Trump said that he was very disappointed in Elon Musk because Elon Musk had seen his big, beautiful budget bill, which, of course, Musk has been criticizing all week long, since he left government on Saturday. Saturday, less than a week, man. And, And. And Elon said it was false. Like, call them out right away and. And told, you know, said that Trump was ungrateful because it was him that got. It was Musk that got Trump elected. And then that's where it all just kind of devolved in spectacular form in front of, like, the entire, like, Twitterverse and, And like, Internet world. So.

[Casey Dreyer]

And honest to God, I mean, it's not intended to be a politically charged statement, but it was a bit like watching a couple of toddlers throw oatmeal at each other. You know, it's like, nah, nah, you're a sticky pants. No, you're a sticky pants two times over.

[Rod Pyle]

A lot of people thought it was great. Like a lot of people were like, look at how fantastic this is. Look, they're finally fighting. Like we all were hoping.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah, but I mean, it's still not good for the Republic.

[Rod Pyle]

Oh my gosh. It's just like this is the face we've chosen to show to the world about how we work. But it raises a lot of questions because I was just talking about it with the Space.com team today and where we ended up last night.

[Casey Dreyer]

Boy, that must have been an interesting pre press conference you guys had.

[Rod Pyle]

Oh my gosh. Well, so consider the purpose of the commercial crew program that led SpaceX to develop Dragon for NASA's crew crew transfer. It was NASA, in the wake of the Columbia accident, realizing that they had only one assured way to get to space. That was the Russian Soyuz. And even then that wasn't very assured. And so they would like to have their own US access, independent access to space. Not just one, but two vehicles. So that's where Boeing came in. And that's why, you know, we would, we would never be dependent on anyone again for anything because we would have our own way to go. And cut forward five years, which is we actually just hit the five year anniversary of SpaceX's first crewed flight with Dragon, the Demo 2 flight. And SpaceX is right now NASA's only US independent access to space because Boeing is off back trying to recover from the Starliner flight and get ready for I guess the next one, which is sometime next year. And, and we're in the same place where he could take his toys and go home. And then what do we have? Right? So we don't have an Orion that we can launch whenever. So it was a very big illustrative issue that we're kind of back in the same issue where we were way before.

[Tarek Malik]

So.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, and my two favorites from today, Trump. I'm not even thinking about Elon Musk and then putting up for sale the red Tesla he bought.

[Rod Pyle]

That's right, in March. He just bought that car. So. Yeah, you think it has a, you think it has a bumper sticker on it that says I bought, I bought.

[Casey Dreyer]

This test, bought this before Elon went crazy.

[Rod Pyle]

What does Elon do with the key to the White House that, that Trump gave him last week? I don't, I Don't know.

[Casey Dreyer]

Drop it from orbit, perhaps. Actually, I think you should weld it to the side. If it's metal, you should weld the side of starship and use it for a reentry test. All right.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, I don't think the story's over. Everyone keep an eye on it because everyone's mad about that bill that. The budget bill, which we're going to talk about in a bit too, I think.

[Casey Dreyer]

So I Space strikes out again.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, disappointing.

[Casey Dreyer]

So, you know, we're watching this. I thought they put together a pretty good media show for the landing. This is the Japanese company who's trying to land a private lander on the moon.

[Rod Pyle]

Not to be confused with China's I Space. I both spelled them the same.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, except the China's has a capital S, but yeah.

[Rod Pyle]

Oh, there you go.

[Casey Dreyer]

And this was a company that started as a group that entered the Google Lunar X prize competition in 2017.

[Rod Pyle]

That's right.

[Casey Dreyer]

Which 2018 wasn't able to give an award because nobody could make it. Oops, a little harder than we thought. And there went 30 million bucks. But a handful of companies, including Japanese Ispace, continued on and this was their second attempt. And doggone it, same thing twice, right?

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, same, same, but different, I guess. I'm not trying to make a joke there. It is very disappointing. And they were very upset, but resilient, which is kind of the name of their spacecraft. I Space in Japan had built their. Their second Hakuto, our moon lander, and they tried to land one of them in April of 2023, and they failed during the descent because of issues with the laser. Laser range finder, the thing that. That says how far the spacecraft. And. And so they thought that they had learned from them and incorporated fixes in this vehicle. And also yesterday, when all this stuff with Elon Musk and Trump was going down, they were trying to land in Mayor Mare. Pardon me, Mare Frejoris, in the far north of the Moon Sea. Yeah, the sea of coal. That's right. And. And they. They got down to about 192 meters during their final breaking burn when something happened. They believe that either there was a lag in the data from the laser rangefinder. Again, the thing that's telling them how high they are. And because of that lag, the spacecraft was going faster than they thought it was going, and then it just augered in and hard, hard landed. Right. Which means crashed in the surface of the moon. Or the spacecraft was going faster than they thought and that caused the rangefinder to, to lag. They don't know which came first in that. And they're trying to figure it all out. And they hope to figure it all out fairly soon because they want to follow this up in 2027 with not one, but two missions using a new type of lander called Apex 1, which is actually twice the size of these ones and much more capable. Meanwhile, lost on this flight was a small rover for the European Space Agency called Tenacious. It had a shovel on it to scoop up lunar regolith in a demonstration for NASA. So they probably won't get that, that eclip from. Because they lost the spacecraft. And there's an investigation underway to really try to pinpoint from the final telemetry, like, what went wrong, how to avoid it on these future missions and how to proceed. But to your point about them being, you know, sad, the CEO of the company said very specifically when asked the question that it was not a time for crying. You know, they actually have to, you know, buckle down and, and figure out what happened because they want to succeed and they are committed, if not for just themselves, for the 80,000 invest and supporters that have helped make the mission possible.

[Casey Dreyer]

80,000, wow.

[Rod Pyle]

That's what they said. Yeah.

[Casey Dreyer]

That's almost a quarter of the people that were boosting for Apollo back in the day. Okay, let's go to a quick break and we'll be right back.

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[Casey Dreyer]

So Jammer B has weighed in with an interesting thought. He said, can't Trump just nationalize SpaceX? And I suppose he probably could, but I can't imagine Musk not sabotaging it if that happened.

[Rod Pyle]

Steve Bannon wrote last night while all of this was going on. Steve Bannon, right. That's the guy, right? The old advisor. That they should see SpaceX immediately to secure the space thing. So it's like it just got well, and then. And then, of course they'd get to.

[Casey Dreyer]

Hawthorne and find an empty hangar. Right?

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't. We didn't touch on this. But at the end of the day, Elon said, yeah, yeah, Everyone calling For cooler heads. They're right. We won't decommission SpaceX. You know, it's like, I don't know, you know.

[Casey Dreyer]

So this piece I thought was kind of interesting. It's not a big news item, but the launch act.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, I'd like you to talk about this because you seem more familiar with it. I just learned about this about like.

[Casey Dreyer]

Half an hour before you did. So Senators John Cornyn, Ben Ray, Lujon, I don't know if I'm saying that right. Rick Scott and Mark Kelly of Arizona introduced a bill that would streamline licensing processes for commercial space companies, opening the way to a boom in rocket launches. Get it? Boom and rocket launches.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, let's hope it's the good kind and not like the bad kind.

[Casey Dreyer]

So, you know, people in the industry, especially launch providers, have been complaining a lot about the regulation red tape that they have to go through loudest amongst them, Space X. Although, you know, given what they did at Boca Chica, which is going, they're saying, yeah, we're just going to launch little Falcon Nines here. Oh wait, we're not going to say it, but we're going to launch Starship. And oh wait, by the way, it blows up with the power of a moderate yield nuclear warhead. And oh wait, by the way, by the way, by the way. So I can understand why people, they're a little disgruntled. On the other hand, we support what Elon's doing there from a distance because it's easy for us to say so because we're not living there with the smells and the bangs and the crowds and all that. But it's important work. You know, I just, you kind of wonder why they couldn't find like a really crappy little island off the coast of Florida somewhere and say, okay, we're going to, we'll just buy the whole thing. But they didn't. So they're in South Texas. I think it's really.

[Rod Pyle]

Oh God. Go, go, go ahead.

[Casey Dreyer]

So what? I don't know whether this would have any, I don't think this would have anything to do with the other problems they have like with fish and wildlife, which are some of the hang ups. But it would streamline presumably FAA clearance which has, has been an ongoing problem for them.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, it's interesting because actually the senator John Cornyn also put out a blast actually right before we started taping that was kind of picking out the big beautiful bill and like saying how great it was for space exploration, which was also kind of weird. So this Seems to be like a dueling narrative that's going on for this, because at the same time, are we going to talk about the, the, the, the Senate reconciliation bill that Ted Cruz put out?

[Casey Dreyer]

Oh, yeah, I didn't put it in here, but we absolutely should because, you know, finally, some pushback, and I suspect it'll be gentle, semi apologetic pushback, but pushback it is, because there's districts that lose a lot, for instance, if SLS gets canceled when they're suggesting, which is after the first moon landing, whenever that may be, whatever decade that may be.

[Rod Pyle]

In for people who didn't see it. Late yesterday, Ted Cruz revealed the Senate reconciliation bill that they have put together at least to start discussing as an answer back to the House. Big, beautiful bill that includes the NASA budget request that would gut the science, which is kind of what we're going to be talking to, to Casey about today. And that reconciliation bill includes. Restores funding for Space Launch System, increases NASA's budget by $10 billion, includes funding for Artemis 4 and Artemis 5, the missions that were canceled in the, in the Trump NASA budget request.

[Casey Dreyer]

The missions were canceled, but the use of the program.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, that's right. The use of sls, pardon me, was canceled. Includes the Lunar Gateway, the space station, which was canceled. And, and other things.

[Casey Dreyer]

And, you know, excuse me, but I'm not sure I know of anybody at the moment other than Ted Cruz that might be crying over the loss of Lunar Gateway. I mean, obviously the contractors, but it's always been a bit of a force fit.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah.

[Casey Dreyer]

Lunar program, you know, they've built a rationale for it, which to some extent was built around the fact that the initial upper stage for the SLS is too weak to get into a proper lunar orbit. And, oh, well, we'll build the station and we got parts left over and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's. It's a bit of. A little bit of a square space station into a round hole.

[Rod Pyle]

And it does give all of the flight controllers that work on the space station a place to go after the space station is retired.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, something to do.

[Rod Pyle]

I'm sure that's part of it. Right, so maybe not all of it. So.

[Casey Dreyer]

All right, let's move on to. Hey, it's the 60th anniversary of the first US spacewalk, which was spacewalk in history. Astronaut Ed White, who sadly died in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. In 1965, during the flight of Gemini 4. Was it 4? Yeah, I think that's what we have here. Gemini 4 commanded by Jim McDivitt. Opened his hatch in that very small space capsule, stood up and drifted out. He had a little nitrogen powered maneuvering hand gun jet, and it didn't. It didn't work very well. But he was out there for, I think, 15, 20 minutes, something like that, and just having the time of his life. And Ed was a big, athletic guy, you know, so getting out of that capsule was a treat because he had actually to pass astronaut qualification, had spent hours the night before jumping up and down to compress his spine because he was too tall for Gemini. But anyway, he got out, had a great time, and towards the end of it, Chris Kraft, who is the head of flight control, was getting a little. A little agitated and said, okay, tell him to get back in. And it took them another, I think, eight minutes, 10 minutes to get him back in. They kept calling up the orders. For the first couple of times, I don't think McDivitt was receiving him. Then he was, and he said, hey, Ed, it's time to get back in. And he's like, huh? I can't hear you. What? I can't hear you.

[Rod Pyle]

I'm in a tunnel. I'm in a tunnel.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah. And then finally he said, this is the saddest day of my life. So he was clearly digging it. He was floating out the end of a long tether which both kept him attached and carried electricity and air to his Gemini suit. Now, the big question about this, of course, amongst space aficionados, one of the big questions has been if the suit ballooned up too much, as happened with the Soviets and their.

[Rod Pyle]

Their earlier attempt with Alexei Leonov.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah. And he had trouble getting back in the capsule. Had that happened with Ed White? You know, what Leonov did was release some air from his suit, which is a very dangerous thing to do. But it worked. But had it happened to White and the Gemini being as small as it was, what do you do? And so the story has been circulated for decades about. Well, they had a pair of snippers stowed away, and McDivitt's instructions were to snip the line and leave Ed to run his own and close the capsule and come home. I've read a lot of accounts of this. I've still seen nothing definitive. You know, this is a bit like the Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theories. I see nothing definitive one way or the other. Absolutely. But I tend to fall on the side of probably not. But it's an interesting story because.

[Rod Pyle]

Or the historian.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah. Quote unquote. But it would suck if you were the guy in the driver's seat and you can't get the passenger back in. It's like, well, I guess we'll distort it until we re enter.

[Rod Pyle]

I got a question for you about Jim McDivitt. Based on the fact that the Gemini hatch was open and therefore the entire capsule was exposed to space.

[Casey Dreyer]

Right.

[Rod Pyle]

Was. Was Jim classified as the second American spacewalker even though he never left the capsule because it's all vacuum inside? And that's what the space. The space Hilarious dawn people were talking about.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, don't get me started on who's an astronaut. I mean, they were definitely astronauts.

[Rod Pyle]

We're talking about who's a spacewalker. Does it count as a spacewalk if you never leave here?

[Casey Dreyer]

Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Okay, I'm a spacewalker now. Yeah, it's kind of like the who's an astronaut because you held your breath.

[Rod Pyle]

Is that what you're saying?

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah, yeah. Sorry. That was a very bad thing for people on audio only. Let's move on.

[Rod Pyle]

I don't get it either.

[Casey Dreyer]

Let's move on. Because I don't want to get hung up on who or what is an astronaut. You have an item here about Marcano we should buy.

[Rod Pyle]

We should. Who? Tell us in the comments or emails if you want to hear an episode that is just about what is an astronaut right now. Because Rod and I have been talking about this in the background. We even talked about it. I talked about a Jerry Griffin recently. Last in July, in April. But if you guys want to hear about it, you won't want to hear about it. Let's. We'll get people on to talk.

[Casey Dreyer]

You're talking to Jerry Griffin.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, he was at. He was at nef.

[Casey Dreyer]

Oh, okay. I spent the weekend with him. Yeah, yeah. And he. He among many others at NASA have been very kind about this conversation. An astronaut, Somebody who flies to space. What space? Well, anything higher than 60 miles. Wait, no. 50 miles? No. Are you taking the international definition or the US Air Force definition or NASA's definition, yada, yada, yada. It goes on at dinner, the debate saying just be saying astronauts when I was growing up were heroic. People who trained hard, tended to come from the military, knew how to be pilots, had survival training, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, that's steely eyed missile people. Well, if you remember. No, you wouldn't. But when I was a kid, nobody else in the room will remember this. When I was a kid on comic books, they used to have a picture of this big Muscular guy flexing his arm, Charles Atlas saying, I'll make you astronaut tough in just six weeks. So we all set away for his little booklet. And it told you to attach a string to a chair and yank on it and stuff to become astronaut tough. Didn't work in my case, but that was kind of the. The image we had then. It was all male, all white. Not the right way to do it.

[Rod Pyle]

But yeah, let's slot that in for an episode because we had a good debate at that dinner about contributions to society and the body of science that is all as merits. And I think that we could. We could easily pack an hour or more into that.

[Tarek Malik]

So.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well. And we're giving an award at the ISDC to two researchers, one of whom flew on a verge of galactic flight and took an experiment up. Now, it's always a little weird to read about these experiments because, like, what kind of zero G experiment can you do in six minutes? But it was a biology, a plant biology experiment where he took a number of vials loaded in his suit, almost like one of those alchemists in Tolkien land who, you know, throws little bottles of stuff. And during the flight he activated them. And apparently that's actually enough time for them to do whatever kind of germination or what they were researching to do. So it was a valid experiment. So I'd call him an astronaut. But anyway, let's talk about this astronaut who died in 76.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, Canada's first astronaut, Mark Carnot, has died. And, you know, the, the first astronaut for any country is always someone to celebrate. And Mark Garno, you know, is, is, is, Is no exception by far. I mean, he was a, a, a career astronaut for, for csa. He went on to be a foreign minister. But he, he died this week at age 76 after an illness, which is quite sad. But he flew in 1984 on his first flight on the space shuttle Challenger, as I believe a mission specialist, if memory serves, measuring atmospheric pollution and water vapor according to the New York Times here. And then he flew two more times on Endeavor, and I think they were both in 96 and 2000, both on Endeavour. And then he ended up leaving the Canadian Space agency in 2001 before shifting into politics for the country, which is actually something that other Canadian astronauts have done too. And I just, you know, we thought, actually it was one of our listeners here that reminded us that, that he had passed. And we just thought we would take a minute just to recognize Garno's contributions not just to Canadian spaceflight, but spaceflight as a whole and international cooperation as well, because without the Canadian Space Agency, much of what NASA and other partners have done in space would have been much more difficult because they helped build the literal tools that then went on to build the space station and. And use on many space shuttle flights, too, with the original Canada arm.

[Casey Dreyer]

That's right. It wouldn't have had arms if not for them. And Edgar no was featured in probably the best film ever made about the shuttle, in my opinion. The Dream is Alive.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah.

[Casey Dreyer]

Which was an early IMAX show that was released just before the Challenger explosion. So it was very. It was Walter Cronkite narrating, very optimistic. Oh, routine access to space. How hard could it be? So it's a little unrealistic that way. But visually, if you get to see that in IMAX anywhere. And it doesn't play very often anymore.

[Rod Pyle]

His autobiography, yeah, just came out last.

[Casey Dreyer]

Year, so that first launch is real. Tearjerker.

[Rod Pyle]

No. Oh, I apologize. I did not mean to step on you there.

[Casey Dreyer]

It's okay. I'm used to being stepped on. You can't scare me.

[Rod Pyle]

But, yeah. His autobiography, A Most Extraordinary Ride. Space Politics and the Pursuit of the Canadian Dream. So you can learn more about him there.

[Casey Dreyer]

Okay, let's go to a break and we'll be right back.

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[Casey Dreyer]

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[Rod Pyle]

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[Casey Dreyer]

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[Tarek Malik]

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[Tarek Malik]

I'm good.

[Casey Dreyer]

Seriously.

[Rod Pyle]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints. Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom. Wait, wait one sec. I've Got cupcakes in the car.

[Tarek Malik]

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[Casey Dreyer]

CT mobile.com and we are back with Casey Dreier, who is the chief of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. So Casey, before we go anywhere and great to meet you, I've been following you for years, but I don't think we've met face to face. What is a chief of space policy and what do you do?

[Tarek Malik]

I'm the guy who has to figure out how to get all of our space policy goals done or at least advanced at the Society. So that means the search for life, supporting planetary defense, things like promoting space science and exploration. I do a lot of the strategy, I do a lot of. I'm the data guy too. So I do all the budgets, analyses and tries to figure out why things work the way they do. And then I work with colleagues who are based in Washington D.C. too to execute on that plan. So try to push that forward. So really trying to carry forward the goals of the Planetary Society and its members in a strategic and functional way in the guise of a non profit. Right. So all we have really working for us are our words, our members, our ability to persuade. And so yeah, it definitely keeps me busy.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, and I'll say from the position of a person who's moderately highly placed in the National Space Society, we admire your work and envy your budget.

[Tarek Malik]

Thank you.

[Casey Dreyer]

Sorry, go ahead really quickly.

[Rod Pyle]

We should probably ask Casey just to give our listeners a very quick idea of what the Planetary Society is. And then Casey, I usually ask people how they got involved in space. So if you've got a little bit of a window into where your interest got into that and for Planetary Society to give us a primer, that'd be great.

[Tarek Malik]

Certainly. So Planetary Society, for those unfamiliar, it's a nonprofit organizations founded by Carl Sagan back in 1980. Since 2011, I believe Bill Nye, Science Guy, erstwhile Science Guy, has been the CEO. I've worked there since 2012. And we are a public membership organization. That means pretty much anyone in the world can be a member of the Planetary Society. And that keeps us independent. So we don't take government money, we don't represent professional interests, we don't take big aerospace money. We are, in a sense that try to be the public representation of space in this arena. And advocacy and policy is one of the ways in which we do that. We do a lot of outreach, education, we do projects. A few years ago, we launched, we designed, built, funded and launched the only, I believe, only successfully crowdsourced satellite LightSail 2, which demonstrated solar sailing in a CubeSat. So we all do a variety of types of things. I think it's a pretty fun and unique organization to be a part of. And we really believe in the kind of the scientific side of exploration. So scientifically driven exploration that expands, not just finds and does exciting things, but really pursues that kind of Saginesque vision of a enlightened and kind of emotive feeling. Right. Almost a spiritual aspect of going and discovering something bigger than yourself. And that's been, I think, a really important perspective to present at this point in time in space history. You want my story? It kind of feeds into that.

[Rod Pyle]

I'm just curious how you got involved in space.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah.

[Tarek Malik]

I mean, I was certainly the kind of kid who would like, scribble and when I was 3 years old and call things a rocket. And my parents say they never knew how I even learned that word. But I never. I thought I wanted to be a scientist until I tried to do science in college. I have an undergraduate degree in science, but I realized, oh, this is really hard.

[Casey Dreyer]

Tarek is one of us.

[Rod Pyle]

One of us, one of us.

[Tarek Malik]

So I did the next best thing and I married a professional scientist and got involved on some of the Mars missions. I went and saw, I. My first launch, the Curiosity Rover in 2011. And you know, you know what that's like. I mean, Tariq, I've seen you, we've met there. But for anyone who hasn't been to a launch, right, you're at Kennedy Space center, you're surrounded by rockets, this hallowed ground of all these, you know, past history of space flight, exploration highlights. And it almost, again, it feels like hallowed ground. And all of these old feelings as a kid started coming back. It's like, oh, my gosh, this is like the most amazing stuff.

[Rod Pyle]

And.

[Tarek Malik]

And then I saw the rocket launch and nothing prepared me for it. Right. For all of you who've seen it in person, compared to what it's like on TV where you have the state, NASA now saying, all right, now we have liftoff on successful mission going to go. They always are so monotone. But you're there in the crowd, and I was sitting with all the scientists and engineers on this mission, and you could feel as we're counting down, it wasn't just the countdown. The tension was rising inversely proportional to how close we were to zero in terms of this countdown. So thicken the air. And then suddenly it launched and it just like shoots up right off the ground. This is an atlas 5, 5, 4, 1. So it had a lot of these solids that really pushed it off the ground fast. And the whole crowd just lost their mind. Completely lost all that stress and tension just exploded out of the crowd. And it just. It was the very close again. It's like to a spiritual experience. You have this. This transformative moment where you just feel something so, so powerful and profound and all of that. What to like, go to this little red dot in the sky. What's going on there? And that was that night. After a couple of tequilas, I was like, I need to work for the planetary. I want to do something for the Planetary Society. And that kind of started my journey to that.

[Casey Dreyer]

Wow.

[Rod Pyle]

Very different story.

[Casey Dreyer]

Kudos on having a much smarter in than Tariq and I did. Marrying a Mars scientist or a space scientist is smart. I wish I had thought of that.

[Tarek Malik]

My wife is a. Yeah, she gets to do all the hard work, right?

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah, you get to tag along for the good times. I've seen. So I was. I'd seen a couple of shuttle launches which were also big and noisy. And then I took my kid when he was about 8 to see a shuttle launch. We waited and waited, and we literally sat in Cassimi for a week waiting for this thing or Titusville to take off, and it just wasn't happening. So instead I took him to the beach in Titusville that kind of curves down closer to Kennedy for an Atlas launch. And, you know, it's a smaller rocket, right. With much smaller solids. I thought, well, you know, it'll be kind of a pale comparison to the shuttle, but that's okay. At least you'll see a launch. I think it might have been because it was a cloudy day, because that changes the acoustics. But it was so loud. He was terrified. It was.

[Rod Pyle]

Because the sound bounces off the bottom.

[Casey Dreyer]

I'm looking at my kids feeling. Feeling bad for him, thinking I should comfort him. But I was enjoying the launch too much. So I just said, suck it up, kid.

[Tarek Malik]

Well, I mean, it's an overwhelming. It's a physical experience. I think this is like why you get so many people who watch who you kind of make these pilgrimages to Starbase or SpaceX. And, you know, you have these almost like shanty town encampments now that are watching these daily launches. And it's just a really physical aspect. It's the most physical aspect of it. And it's overwhelming. Right. That sound hits you and it resonates in your chest and you think it can't get any louder, and then it does, and you realize how bright. You realize how much work the cameras are doing with a dynamic range adjustment on the flame coming out of the back of the rocket in person, you just, you almost can't look at it. And I think that visceral experience is such an important aspect of balancing out with what has generally is such an abstract experience. Because, I mean, you know, for the most part, one does not go with the rocket into space. And so that is your physical connection to the entire endeavor is watching something launch something that goes. And it's maybe. And maybe it's something also like really deep about being an. Some evolved animal on Earth with some intuitive sense of, you know, Newtonian physics. Right. Things, you know, we can all anticipate arcs and catch, you know, things in the air, but to see something that goes up and then doesn't come back. Right.

[Casey Dreyer]

That's a really interesting point.

[Rod Pyle]

And that doesn't.

[Tarek Malik]

That's not supposed to happen.

[Rod Pyle]

And to a similar extent, I was going to say, to a similar extent, if you see like the space station overhead, if you're like one of the spotters, you know, people see it and they're like, oh, pretty dot. And then. No, you think there's seven people living in that dot right now. Yeah. And then, you know, some people I might have met. Well, you know, that kind of thing.

[Casey Dreyer]

And I'm the only person in the room who can say what it was like to look at the moon and realize there were two guys walking around up there. Yeah, that was truly transformative.

[Rod Pyle]

Okay, but all of that, that was done.

[Tarek Malik]

Do we have to talk about the unknown stuff now?

[Rod Pyle]

I was gonna say, I mean, that's great stuff. You want to go to a break.

[Casey Dreyer]

Or I want to go to a break so he can talk about the budget.

[Rod Pyle]

Because that's what I was gonna say. I was gonna do like a lead in and a big thrower, but okay, go to it.

[Casey Dreyer]

Do a throw to the break because you never have to do those.

[Rod Pyle]

Oh, I was gonna, I was gonna say, I mean, like, so all of that great stuff that we've talked about that inspirational part.

[Casey Dreyer]

No, that's wrong. Sorry, go ahead.

[Rod Pyle]

Wow.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah.

[Rod Pyle]

Casey, thank you very much. You know, I think you've put the wonder right up front. But it all came from this effort of international exploration, a national focus with NASA. And of course, that takes funding for both the science, for the spaceflight, for all of it. And that's what we really wanted to start, you know, getting into, because there's some stuff I think our listeners and your supporters need to know. And we're going to do that right after this break.

[Sponsor]

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[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, so, so like, like you, like you said, Casey, now we brought you to talk about probably like one of the less fun at the moment, for sure. At the moment things. And that, that is just kind of what's going on at NASA. In fact, I saw that, that you and the team at the Planetary Society call this the dark age of NASA science. If this, this budget request that has come from the, the, the White House gets realized. And of course, a lot of this was released in detail. We had a skinny budget before late last week, so it's still extremely fresh. And, and it's really bad news. Cuts NASA's budget to, I think, the lowest since the 60s. Is that right, Casey? Do you want to kind of paint the picture? Yeah. Paint the picture for, for why we're in a bit of a danger zone for NASA science right now.

[Tarek Malik]

Absolutely. So the budget that was proposed, we knew the top lines about a month ago, and what we got was the full, what's called congressional justification. So the detailed, here's what we're going to do with this money. And as a, you know, you go through this and this is the full kind of mission by mission detail. So this is all the grisly details now of losing a quarter of your budget in one year, which is what happens to NASA overall. And then with, of course, it's not applied evenly, it's half of that or the primarily paid for by cutting science in half. And so, yeah, you cut science in half, a lot of bad things are going to happen. So, yes, the big picture thing, so this we can look at a couple of big and smalls. Right. So this will be at this. Assume this goes through, or at least in terms of proposal, this will be NASA's smallest budget adjusted for inflation since fiscal year 1961. Fiscal year 1961 began in July of 1960. So this would predate human spaceflight.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah. Oh my gosh.

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah. So this is a NASA that before Shepard's first flight, before even Gagarin's first flight, this would be the. In terms of big. This is the biggest single year cut as a proportion of spending ever proposed by a White House. And that includes the years after Apollo in which they were ramping NASA's budget down. Another the smallest. This also fires a third of NASA's civil service staff, which would leave NASA with the smallest workforce since fiscal year 1960, which began in 1959. So it's. This is a NASA budget of really, again shrinking and kind of narrowing of capability through both. Just, you can just look at the top line numbers and putting it into historical context again. So we have to talk about science. Science is cut in half. NASA has five science divisions. Astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics. Right. Sun science, Earth Science, and then microgravity and biological sciences. Basically pays for all the stuff they do on the space station, all the experiments. The cuts are not applied evenly, but functionally, they're all cut anywhere between 80% in terms of microgravity science to a mere 30%, which is planetary science. But astrophysics in particular loses about 62/3 of its budget in a single year, which is kind of astonishing when you think about how successful it's been. That's your Hubble, that's your James Webb Space Telescope. That's every. Yeah, right. It's astonishing. I mean, again, it's. And again, this would be NASA's smallest science budget since 1984, which was a very, very different time for NASA Science as a much smaller program. Earth science didn't even exist as an independent branch of science back then. So this would cancel 19 missions that are currently active and in space and, and producing good science. It would cancel about 18 NASA led development projects for future space missions across all of those divisions. And it would cancel multiple, all told, about 41 active projects in development or in flight, which is roughly about a third of NASA's entire science project portfolio in a single year. Right. And then even you extend it out, you look at some of the future projections, there's a lot of other ones that get turned off next year or the year after that. So this is a Calamity. Right. It's hard to.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, I was, I was going to say, I mean this. I mean I've been playing catch up, Casey, since this budget came out. You know, I went on a family trip, I came back, this was here. I've been trying to understand it, but from what you described, it sounds like a catastrophic budget proposal for NASA 41.

[Casey Dreyer]

Okay, so excuse me for a second, but look at this. If you're watching the video stream, look at this chart. We have. Anything red is bad. Okay. So. And I just want to point out, and you kind of alluded to it, but you know, there are people that will look at this and say, well, it's a good thing we're saving money. There's a lot of sunk costs in these programs. Whether they've flown or not. There's a lot of money spent on them. And then you talk about something like Juno out of Jupiter that's paid off. You know, all we're doing now is minding the store and keeping the thing going and bringing the results down. So it's really a false economy on so many levels. And then you get into the conversation about killing SLS after Artemis 3, assuming that actually lands in this decade. Yeah, it's 4 billion a launch roughly estimated. That's a bad thing. Maybe Boeing can work on that a bit and the other contractors. But we've spent how much on SLS and Orion to date?

[Tarek Malik]

A lot.

[Casey Dreyer]

Edging up to $18 billion.

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah, more than that, I think 24 million. On which. And it depends when you start counting tens of billions, let's say.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, we start counting when Constellations started. Honestly. That's fair.

[Tarek Malik]

Sure. So 2000, that gets you up. Yeah, exactly. For some of those. And I have those numbers somewhere just off the top of my head. I can't recall them, but certainly tens of billions. Yes. I mean I think. And we can talk about the Artemis aspect and SLS and Orion say those are arguably the most defensible. At least you can defend it from a policy perspective. Right. Just putting aside kind of the other stuff about it.

[Casey Dreyer]

You mean by saying the word China to the administration?

[Tarek Malik]

Well, no, in the sense that they are very expensive and clearly NASA has options with. With launch that. And you can maybe. Can you reformulate certain aspects of Artemis that way? Probably. Right. And it's certainly very expensive it. But you do risk going into you breaking this code, what I would call the consensus that that is enabling Artemis to survive. And you know, but let's put that aside just a second. So do you want to talk Anyway, just let's focus on the science aspects because again, that's all happening in the context of exploration actually going up in this budget with this ambitious new Mars program being added onto it, which again, without this context would be generally exciting, but has functionally no real clear implementation. But again, so science. Let me just finish on the science thing. Your point about operating missions. When a spacecraft launches, and generally any spacecraft, but particularly a science spacecraft, on average that spacecraft and its entire life of what it will cost the taxpayer, 90% of that expenditure has been made by the time that it launches. Right. Building it is the difficult and expensive part. Operating it, that's when you get all your, all your benefit from it, and that's the cheap part. So you're right. Things like Juno, New Horizons, which is out in the Kuiper Belt, missions like Maven at Mars, you're talking about at most 10 to 15 million dollars per year, often quite a lot less. And so you're saving very, very little money. You are going to end an irreplaceable or a unique asset that if you want to replace it, would cost you a lot more money to build. And at the same time, you're, you know, there's to me, this deeper symbolic part of your something about us turning off these missions of exploration and letting those tumble into the blackness merely because we've asserted some tautological statement of, well, we can't afford these because we no longer are giving money to afford them. It's something very sad about what we're, It's a, it hits me kind of a deeper level. Right. That's not smart policy. It's not. And it's not smart budgeting. And in the context you are also, I should say in this, you're breaking a lot of joint projects with particular European partners, I don't know, the international partners in this budget. Right. So you're actually abandoning a number of efforts that we have made commitments to as a nation. The one that really gets me is the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover from the European Space Agency, which we had already broken a promise to the European sun 15 years ago. We pulled out of that one already in 2012. And that's what drove them to work with the Russians. They were getting ready to launch it. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. Europe pulled out of that agreement and was searching for how do we launch this thing? US Came back and said, we will provide you a rocket, Falcon 9, some landing, some systems support, maybe help you build the lander. And this budget cancels that commitment again. Right. So it's like, it's something about this like the second time pulling the rug out from under the Europeans on that project at a Mars mission. Phenomenally Mars as being a goal is just again, it's just a, it's, it's bad policy, it's a short sighted decision and it undermines a lot of these goals. So you're talking about this is a.

[Casey Dreyer]

A human Mars mission, right?

[Tarek Malik]

That plan for, for their new human Mars initiatives. Yes, they, they say they want to do that while at the same time they're saying like we need, well as a consequence we need to build telecom relays and all these other infrastructure at Mars while they cancel maven, which is a telecom relay spacecraft at Mars right now that you're getting pennies on the dollar to operate. So again there's a lot of self contradictory stuff in there which I think belies the fact that this budget was not, not thought through at all. And for the most part we know that this was. The dollar amounts were set arbitrarily first. NASA was not part of the decision or their input was not requested when this came together. And NASA is now frantically trying to figure out what to do with these new initiatives that they're being told to do. But the money they do even request for this human initiative to Mars, no studies have been done for that. They, no trade studies, economic studies, no industry input. You know, two months ago they were going to the moon and so they're, they don't know if even the money they're asking for is enough to do anything if there's a market to support these types of things. Again, it's a profoundly bad strategy and policy. Even if you want to do these things they say they want to do, you would not do them like this if you want them to succeed.

[Casey Dreyer]

And, and to your point about human spaceflight to Mars, among other problems and we've talked about on the show before, we have things like life support systems that are expected to last at least seven months before shutting off and killing you and radiation mediation. I've seen no work out of SpaceX even approaching that. And, and that's going to add a lot of weight to that spacecraft and refueling flights and so forth.

[Tarek Malik]

I also cancel Mars sample return because it was too complex and over budget it. And what was driving one of those cost increases in that project was that it was trying to, it had to land a lot of mass, the largest mass ever put on Mars. And so your entry descent landing EDL stuff was novel and new and couldn't be reused. This budget cancels MSR and then calls for hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on a human rated EDL demonstration project in the next few years and says that humans will pick up rocks anyway. Adding humans to spaceflight does not make things easier or cheaper, I'm sorry to say that is the reality of it. So again, it's kind of internal contradictory system, but also maybe they could have been more clever, right? Can Mars sample return and this human, Mars initially it seems like those can actually fit together if you think about it a little bit. So it's again, a lot of this doesn't make sense and it's because it was rushed and it was not led by a standard process. It's just the budgeting office saying you get this because. And they had this budget. These budget numbers, particularly for science, were called out years ago. The current budget director of the White House, Russ Vote, released his own alternative budget in 2022 where he said we should cut NASA's science budget by 50%.

[Casey Dreyer]

Right.

[Tarek Malik]

He's the budget director now, lo and behold, What a coincidence. NASA's budget is cut by 50%.

[Casey Dreyer]

And this does feel like budget by women. Tantrum. We're going to go to a quick break and then we'll come back with Tarek's next question. Stand by, everybody.

[Sponsor]

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[Rod Pyle]

Casey, you know, one of the things in reading, kind of all the analysis and like the coverage about this budget rollout and the cancellations and some of the things that we've seen in the past because in Trump's first term there was a big cut, I think on like five or six different Earth science missions, for example, and whatnot. Some of those ended up getting reversed. And I do recall during the prime, the prime missions for Spirit, not Prime, the prime lifetimes of Spirit and opportunity. There was a call to cancel those missions even though they were working just fine. They hadn't gotten stuck in the dirt yet on Mars. They were just long in the truth. And it was like, well, we could save that money and put it somewhere else. And there was an uproar from both the public and the science community about just those two rovers from one mission, you know, the Mars Exploration Mission rovers at all. And then of course they went on, they made more discoveries, maybe even some of the biggest ones. Well after that point and the rest is history. And so I'm looking at this list and it's only a partial, as you mentioned, 41 projects. We talked about Juno already and Mars Sample Return. But New Horizons, you know, that extended mission which just barely got reapproved like last year. We had Alan Stern on the show to help call for that. And then it just seems like immediate backpedaling from that. The Osiris Apex extension, you know, for planetary defense. That was, is that, that wasn't an Apophis flyby, right? I mean that was.

[Tarek Malik]

It is, it is, yeah.

[Rod Pyle]

Like the scariest asteroid out there, right?

[Tarek Malik]

Yes, it is NASA's only Apophis mission again that we're leveraging a pre built spacecraft to do. Right. This is where that's the essence of efficiency. Right. We're using. It's, it's there, it can do it. We don't have to build a new one.

[Rod Pyle]

You mentioned Maven, of course. And then Mars Odyssey, one of like the longest lasting planetary missions we've had going forever and well into Venus missions too.

[Tarek Malik]

Well, yeah, all of Venus. All of Venus is wiped out, including US Contribution to. Europeans envision Venus mission as well.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, and excuse me for breaking Tarek, but. But your points about the European Space Agency are well taken because what part of their budget we're wasting with our waffling is a much bigger percentage of the money they get to spend than the US budget. I mean, their space programs are tiny compared to ours. So when we back out of something and say, oh sorry, yeah, we were just kidding about that launch thing. That's a huge hit for them. It's huge.

[Tarek Malik]

Oh yeah. And Europeans, they miss, they lose out more than just on the science missions, right? Like the end of Orion is the end of their contribution for the European made service module on Orion, the end of Gateway, which is canceled in this. Europeans had a major commitment on Gateway, including planning for their astronauts to be parts of those crews. They lose contribution opportunities on some of their missions like Euclid, some future space telescopes, future Earth science missions. It's really again treating our partners very poorly in this process and not enabling, you know, just not really getting, filling our part of the bargain. These types of situations are going to make it harder for these, our partners to trust us in the future and to enable these types of Joint activities, which is one of your big soft power international benefits. If you want a very practical, real politic benefit of spaceflight is to make your alliances stronger with your allies and to demonstrate to your adversaries how strong and integrated your economies and alignments are with your supporters around the world and to build new allies. Right. By doing these types of joint projects. So it's again, it's just very pursuant.

[Casey Dreyer]

To what you're saying. This also especially with the Europeans, tends to pivot them back to China as a partner because China tends to follow through on what they say they're going to do in 10 year increments. And there's a lot of people concerned about the geopolitics of that, not the least of which is the current administration who's basically saying to those partners, yeah, go work with them because they'll follow through.

[Tarek Malik]

China is absolutely leveraging this opportunity to reach out to Europe and other developing space nations around the world to say we are the reliable partner, you can trust us.

[Rod Pyle]

Is there a, just like a, a brain drain risk that you see here at the, the Planetary Society? Just about the, the where you have a generation, I guess, of scientists that would come for these missions that have been canceled. Right. Or engineers and, and, and whatnot. And then the ones that are working now who, like you were just saying, not just these other countries will see China or others as a more reliable partner, but the scientists that NASA would need to get kind of the basics done would find maybe better prospects and more reliable, more exciting science to pursue there. We just had a story at space about how the most recent China moon samples, for example, are being shared outside of NASA. Right, but, but scientists and in different universities are figuring out ways to be able to study them, but they have to go around NASA because of, you know, some of the political things there. But this seems like it would take that and just ramp it up to like a bajillion because there would be.

[Tarek Malik]

As, yeah, huge opening for them. And in addition to that, you have a number of kind of corresponding initiatives within this administration, obviously hitting science at a much larger context as well. Right. So this is a broad omni crisis for American science and you have fewer opportunities for new students. And even within NASA, we haven't touched on this yet. NASA's entire Department of Education and STEM outreach is eliminated in this. That provides. That's the very popular space grant grant program. Each state has a space grant office that gives, you know, thousands of dollars level of donation support for students to do summer internships or rocket Clubs for, you know, people to really start doing these types of scientific work. Again, I've seen this firsthand. My wife, again as a planetary scientist, works at a state university. Being able to offer opportunities to work on active spaceflight missions is like a magnet for talented, ambitious students who have never seen a role for themselves maybe before in space or in space engineering or in computing. And whether they stay in that industry or not, you're pulling these people again it's like this lighthouse effect. It draws people to you. So again, this is where as we've characterized this, this idea that this is even despite this claim that it's this big ambitious effort to go to Mars. It is a narrowing ultimately of ambition and scope of what we expect our space program to do. And in the consequence this a very short sighted and ultimately self destructive long term process to abandon this and to close off so many opportunities for people to do it. And most of us have grown up in a world where we've had this kind of broader, not just science, but again this kind of public minded NASA that is interesting trying to represent the best part of ourselves in space. And to, you know, I always. I've been writing a lot about this idea that you know, a public space agency, you know, the, the role for it that I see obviously is doing these unique activities. But it's also a potent symbol for our culture to project itself and its idealized values into the literal heavens. Right. Like the, the symbolic value of that is, is really powerful. And this is why I think NASA has always been so serious about what it wants its astronauts to be and what it's a spacecraft and opportunities for everyone in the nation to be offered to that. It's more than just a business doing this. It is again the self identity of our culture. So what we do in space matters. And what we don't do in space also says something about this.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, and to follow up on that. So I spent, I was telling people before we started, I was at a gathering of Apollo veterans over the weekend and I was sitting with flight director Jerry Griffin and his daughter who runs a space PR agency and there are a few other people from, from that time and place there when this news about Jared Isaacman came in, followed by the news, at least when I got it, that the recommendation was that they close the NASA field center public affairs offices and slim down the one at headquarters to a sliver and privatize it. Now is privatizing that effort something that. It would certainly be different. I can't say that I'm Convinced it would be better, it would probably be less expensive, but you're messing around here with one of the premier brands in history. NASA has always rated in global surveys in the top tier. A brand recognition of people having, you know, it's a feel good brand, people respect it. The conference that the National Space Society does every year, we generally get between 4 and 500 foreign students from both Asia and Europe. And they are NASA crazy. And it's because primarily of the public outreach efforts that NASA does through education and through their PAOs. So shutting that down and then having this gap while the private sector steps in and it could become something good or it could become what happened in National Geographic when Fox bought it and suddenly we're having reality shows about Orange county astronaut housewives or something. And it is not. I can't say I've got a great feeling about it. And I feel like we're squandering. You talk about soft power. We're squandering, squandering one of the largest soft power outreaches we've got.

[Tarek Malik]

Absolutely. I mean that's true about the international and it's true nationally too. Here in the United States, NASA is often the top or tied for the top, most approved federal agency, usually with the post office. Right. So it's even internally within the country, NASA is seen as widely respected and supported for what it does. And again, it's hard to mention it.

[Casey Dreyer]

The same breath as the post office, but. Okay.

[Tarek Malik]

Well, I think it's just, I mean people know the, I mean for all the. Yeah, you know, it sucks to wait in line sometimes, but you know, you can send a letter for 50 cents or whatever it is these days. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a place, it's the point of contact most people have with the government. And then something as, as frankly as esoteric seeming as what NASA does is kind of up there at the same time it's the opposite. Right. Most people do not have a direct point of contact with NASA. Right. They take, take pride in it because of what it does and because of what it's doing on behalf of everyone. Right. Not just a party or not just a subset of people. And that's very easy point. It's a dangerous thing to play with. And I always think it's kind of, it's a luxury item to think that you can do that and mess with it so badly and it'll just continue again. We've all grown up with NASA as being in this unique position and mediating this relationship of the nation to space. Obviously that's been changing with, with the growth of commercial space sector and private space, which I think is an interesting trend that we've been seeing over the last 10 to 15 years. That's probably an entirely different conversation. But this idea that NASA does represent something very positively seen by the nation and the world, that is precious thing. Not many things pull that highly, right. I don't even know if kittens pull that highly in general. And I mean, like, you don't see the Department of the Interior T shirts flying off the shelves at the Gap, right?

[Casey Dreyer]

Oh, that's a really good wear.

[Tarek Malik]

NASA logos. Right, Right. What other government agency has its logo on T shirts that people pay money to wear?

[Casey Dreyer]

Bureau of the Budget.

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah.

[Casey Dreyer]

Yeah, let's do. We're going to do one more break and then we're kind of going to come back.

[Sponsor]

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[Rod Pyle]

Well, Casey, this has all been very disheartening, but informative, I think, for our listeners. And I guess that gets us to what might be one of the most kind of important parts of our discussion is like, what can people do right now? I know that you and the Planetary Society are putting up a massive effort to try to get people involved and spread, I guess, awareness of how serious a step back from science and engagement and exploration this budget really is. But maybe for our listeners at home or for people who maybe aren't in the United States but want to be involved somehow, what can you recommend that people should do to make themselves heard about this?

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah. So this is, this is a budget proposal and the US Congress ultimately decides what is prioritized and spent and also ultimately what US Policy can be through legislative vehicles called authorization acts. And so this is the time if you've ever to get off the couch and do something, if you've always been unsure this is the time to do it. And this is why I try to put those big numbers at the beginning. This is not your annual, oh, it's going down 5 or 10%. I don't like that these handful of emissions are cut. You know, it's hard to be. It sounds hyperbolic, but hyperbole is appropriate right now. Right. This is why I've tried to use. We have the data showing this is the most, the most extreme radical shifts and cuts to what NASA has ever faced. There you go. And [e-mail] we have a petition that folks outside the US can sign, as well as people inside the US if you live in the United States, we have phone call scripts, we have pathways to. You can use our forms to write your member of Congress. You can, we have directions and tips on how to write op EDS for your local community. You can take my online Space Advocacy 101 course and get even better in learning about how the nuts and bolts of these processes work. And, you know, so again, this petition you have up there, we're going to hand deliver that to the appropriators and submit it through official processes in order to have it entered into the record for the appropriations process, which starts in July. And so we are, we have an opportunity to push back. And we have seen a lot of pushback from this. And so I'll emphasize too, that this is not just the Planetary Society raising the alarm on this. We have obviously professional scientific societies, the American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union and others raising that alarm. I think really importantly, we have industry and not just prime aerospace contractors. Right. Those are upset too. Commercial Space Federation, they have come out very strongly against this budget. Right. This is because this is bad policy. There's a lot of bad policy in here. Even if there are a lot of initiatives to try to add more activities for the commercial sector, they see that through these scientific cuts, there's going to be. It'll drive up costs components, it'll drive up costs for just fewer opportunities for these commercial companies to engage in. And I think, and this is something that's really important, this broader thing that I haven't had a chance to touch on this idea of consensus, you know, orbital mechanics do not obey or do, you know, aren't convenient for electoral politics timelines, right. So in the US New Congress every two years and we have a new president, presidential election every four years. This is President Trump's last term and so someone else and, you know, there's no way in which any humans will get to Mars by 2028. I think we can all be honest about that. Even, you know, I think even if SpaceX hasn't been having their exploding, you know, starship been exploding, it's been getting space. 2020 is wildly, wildly ambitious. So someone will have to carry this forward and there right now is being zero effort being done by this administration to sell these radical changes, not even just for science, but for what they're shifting. They are functionally shifting Artemis to be boots on the moon, something something and then all everything going into Mars. Right. That is a huge change in policy. They are proposing lots of money down the line after canceling SLS and Ryan, which is non popular with Congress for all this Mars stuff. And they're not doing any effort to engage not even their own members of the party, much less Democrats who are in the minority in Congress right now. Well, Democrats don't always be in the.

[Casey Dreyer]

Hand the signatories, the Artemis Accords. This puts them in a weird position certainly.

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah, I mean like this is the whole point of Artemis. Why it was structured the way it does is, is that this is a sustained effort to go to the Moon. That we are not going to back away from this commitment. That was always seen as the key, not just for our international partners, but for commercial partners too. If you are a business trying to raise money to invest in this new CIS lunar economy, you need to be able to say to an investor, the US is going to go here for the next three decades. It will cost you some money now to build up this hardware and capability, but we will have contract opportunities to deliver payloads in perpetuity. That's where you make your money back. That's how it worked with the space station. That's why SpaceX could raise money, that's why Orbital Sciences at the time could raise money. Because they knew on the back end, which ultimately was correct, they could make billions of dollars servicing these contracts for years. Now we're moving away, we're breaking that promise to them too with Artemis. And so we're actually making it harder for commercial companies to operate and do what we want them to say, we say we want them to do, which is to offset these costs of the taxpayer because we are waffling, flipping around and building no effort at consensus. No one believes the smarter stuff will survive this next term because particularly if they're destroying all these projects that are broadly supported in Congress, but also making no effort to build consensus among Democrats or even again Republicans, their own party, if you have a Democratic president, they are not going to carry this march program forward. So how can you raise money knowing that this will not continue after three years? This is the essence of waste and inefficiency, ironically. Right? So even in the context of what they want to do, how they're doing it here is Self defeating and wasteful. This is why I can't emphasize how bad this is enough. Even if you support everything they want to do, how they're proposing to do this is disastrous in terms of breaking this consensus. Artemis was the first return to the moon program, right. That that has ever survived a presidential transition. Right. So you had Apollo barely survived arguably into the Nixon administration. Any subsequent effort to send humans back. The moon died the next time a new president was elected. That trend ended with Artemis because. Because ironically, under Trump's first term, the people who implemented that policy knew this and specifically designed this to be a consensus driven process. Right. You had Jim Frankenstein out there building support among Democrats. You had Mike Pence and others in the National Space Council creating smart policy, good policy that was widely seen as valuable, which was not rescinded under the Biden administration. What else did Biden and Trump agree on? But Biden continued pardon this and handed it back to the Trump administration. So which is they are not doing like that with Mars.

[Casey Dreyer]

If I recall correctly, that was the first time space efforts bridged administrations success.

[Tarek Malik]

That's what I'm saying. Yeah, the first time. And sent the first time return to the Moon program survived a presidential transition, much less went to the opposite party. And that was not a foregone conclusion.

[Rod Pyle]

And you just named out Jim Bridenstine, Trump's NASA administrator at the time, as like the shepherd for that, naming the Artemis program, naming the Roman Space Telescope, which also got a pass surprisingly after being canceled. You know. Yeah, in, in a way. In a way, right. It's obviously it's not dead, but it.

[Tarek Malik]

Doesn'T have the money it needs to succeed. It may just hit a budget overrun and then that will be the justification. But yes, it's better than being outright.

[Rod Pyle]

Canceled in this budget right now. For all intents and purposes, this budget is somewhat a smash and grab put out when NASA has no firm leadership or a figurehead that could do that kind of bridge work between the public, between industry, between lawmakers to keep something alive. And so it seems like it's very much a target of opportunity rather than any kind of policy at all that people should know about and complain to their lawmakers about.

[Tarek Malik]

Well, this is important because this is because we're risking something that we've taken for granted. And if we destroy, if Mars even becomes a partisan issue, we are so screwed. For those of us like me who want to see people get to Mars. Right. There's no reason why any of this has to be a partisan issue. This could actually be A consensus building opportunity as it was in the first Trump administration. And there's a reason why we choose our metaphors in our language. Right. You said the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages, generally, you can say, is like when the Vandals came and destroyed Rome and smashed everything. And we lost that knowledge for generations. And we lived in this dim subsequent existence of vague memories of what was with no sense of what could be. And this is, this is exactly what you said. This is a vandalistic activity that is happening here, destroying these incredible things that have been painstakingly built up over 70 years in the United States and elsewhere in order to make a point. We can't even necessarily speculate. But even again, what they say they want will not succeed because they are not putting the work in to make it succeed. And so at the end, you will have no moon program, no Mars program, no science program, and maybe even at this point, no commercial. What's your commercial customer base going to look like when there's no NASA to pay for it? And you, you will have, maybe space will just be things that are sent up and then point back down and just talk to, you know, our Internet. Great. We can like talk to each other on the Internet more efficiently. Joy. This is why we wanted, this is like the big thing. And that's, this is why we're so worried about this. And so this has to be rejected. And, and we are seeing that, and we're hearing from Republican offices, too, that this is dead on arrival. But obviously, as some of you, as you know and some of your listeners obviously know that Congress is itself a somewhat dysfunctional body right now. And it, through inaction, a lot of this can still happen. And that's why we're trying to push as hard as we can.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, thank you so much, Casey. The Planetary Society folks, if you're looking for easy place to go, planetary.org but as Casey mentioned, many other agencies, American Astronomical Society, Commercial Space Federation, just some of the, the places where you can look to try to get involved.

[Tarek Malik]

Yeah, tons of resources on our website here so you can learn more about this, go into detail. Don't have to take my word for it. Right. To borrow a term, we have all of our charts, all of our data, all of our contacts and background FAQs, and you can take actions.

[Casey Dreyer]

And I do want to point out, Tarek, I'm only monitoring discord, but this has been the, by far the most active, active discussion of.

[Rod Pyle]

They're mad. Yeah, they are mad.

[Casey Dreyer]

It's an abomination.

[Tarek Malik]

It's been a long couple of months. Right. But this is a, this is a taking something precious and just grinding it into the ground. And what a tragedy that would be.

[Casey Dreyer]

And the excitement's not over.

[Rod Pyle]

Well, when this budget gets overthrown and a new and like sensible one comes in, we hope Casey will come back to explain that one.

[Tarek Malik]

And you know, I'm happy to talk about fun space stuff too. Yeah, I always tell oh that people hear my voice in the media a lot, like things must be bad. I've been doing a lot of unhappy talks lately. But I also have on fun things to think about space. So maybe some other time as well.

[Casey Dreyer]

Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode 164. Goodbye NASA?. Casey, we should all be tracking you and your work at the planetary [e-mail] is there any place else or anything else you want us to look at?

[Tarek Malik]

My podcast, monthly podcast on space policy called the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. That's part of the regular Planetary Radio feeder. You can just search for that online and it's special monthly feed for that as well.

[Casey Dreyer]

And Tarek, where can we find you rigging your hanky as I am over all this.

[Rod Pyle]

Yeah, it's, it's like 90 degrees in my office, everyone, if you're watching on the stream. So that's why I've been trying to dab a bit. You can find [e-mail] as always on the Twitter on the X, I guess, and Blue sky at tar. Eric J. Malik, in a bit of lighter news, you can find me on YouTube @spacetronplays because the big Star Wars Live event is this weekend as we're recording it. But that is a very, very far remote from the stuff that matters like we're talking about in this podcast here. So hopefully chronicling this whole development and improvement if your voices are all heard.

[Casey Dreyer]

Everybody out there fiddling as Rome burns. And of course you can find me at astro.com and check out what I'm up [e-mail] and you can, of course, if you wish, you can come find Tarek and myself doing a couple of episodes from now this show live from the International Space Development Conference in Orlando in late June. And we welcome the hecklers because I already know there's going to be a few in the room.

[Rod Pyle]

We should do it from the launch pad.

[Casey Dreyer]

We don't have time to get up there that Friday. It's from June 19th to the 22nd and we'll be on that Friday the 20th. You can find more info on that conference at isdc.nss.org I encourage you to come. It's actually a lot of fun and we're gonna drag Casey out there at some point because I don't think. Have you been to one?

[Tarek Malik]

I've been to the one in Los Angeles a few years ago, but I do have a toddler now, so my ability to travel is limited. But maybe she can come with me sometime because she's my future space advocate.

[Casey Dreyer]

So you bet.

[Tarek Malik]

And we'll be back learning early.

[Casey Dreyer]

We're back in LA in 2027 and I'm chairing that year while co chairing with Pascal Lee. So we'll make room for you. And remember, you can always drop us a line at Twist Twit tv. That's Twis Twit tv. We welcome your comments and at least I will answer your email, if not both of us. New episodes. This podcast published every Friday and your favorite podcaster, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews and all those other things because we want to keep doing this. And who knows, NASA budget cuts might strike us someday. No, that's not going to happen. Don't forget though, we're counting on you to Join Club Twitter 2025 to help support the network and this show so we can keep bringing you great guests and horror jokes. These electrons aren't free. We gotta pay some overhead for them. So sign up. Annual memberships are back and I don't know what the price is right now because I think we had a small increase, but it's still worth it no matter what. You can also follow the Twitt Tech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and Twitt TV and Instagram. Casey, thank you. Thank you to everybody.

[Tarek Malik]

Everybody else, my pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[Casey Dreyer]

Great. And we'll have you back and we'll see you all next time.

[Rod Pyle]

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[Tarek Malik]

I've talked to people who survived mass.

[Rod Pyle]

Shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose slap, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends.

[Tarek Malik]

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[Rod Pyle]

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[Casey Dreyer]

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[Rod Pyle]

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