D (3:26)

Yeah, the brain drain.

B (3:28)

Yeah.

C (3:29)

This is Kasey Dreyer, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. And if you aren't familiar, the Planetary Society is a non profit space advocacy organization founded by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman. P.S. isn't a government organization and is funded by people who care about space exploration and scientific advancement. And they fund all kinds of projects from public education about STEM policy advocacy in D.C. and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Cooler still, the org has been headed by Bill Nye. Yes, the Science Guy, since 2011. I wanted to talk to him for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that he and his org can speak freely without fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, but also because he can objectively contextualize what's going on here.

B (4:20)

NASA has the smallest number of employees since before basically the space age started, since right before the first human went into space, 1960. If these budget cuts go through, it would be NASA's smallest budget, adjusted for inflation, since 1961, before basically Apollo happened. That's, you know, again, these are historic levels of cuts.

D (4:41)

Jeez. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with Trump's attitude towards science broadly, but can.

C (4:46)

You talk a little bit about Trump's.

D (4:47)

Attitude towards space and space exploration in his first term and how it sort of shifted majorly in the second go round? I guess the question really is like, what do you suppose inspired his change of heart?

B (4:57)

Two big questions. So let's, let's look at Trump in first term was actually for space pretty good. There was an initial effort to kind of cut NASA funding by maybe 10% in the first year. But his vice president at the time, Mike Pence, was a huge space fan and through him initiated this thing called the National Space Council, which is an executive group of representatives across the government to try to create this coherent Space policy that was actually established by Congress in the 1950s. Some presidencies have never used it. Through that. You had the start of the Artemis program to return humans to the moon. You had generous and some very large requested increases to NASA's budget over those years with this explicit goal of trying to get NASA funding back up to its highest point in 30 years. And it basically benefited everybody. Science actually hit its most recent peak in terms of funding in the last year. The first Trump administration in 2020, roughly $8 billion in adjusted dollars at this point. And they said yes to a lot of things. They said yes to, you know, this great mission to Titan moon of Saturn called Dragonfly. They said yes to Mars sample return to get, you know, the collections of rocks collected by the Perseverance rover, bring them back to Earth. They said yes to Artemis. They said yes to all these things through that process. And actually, the way that they did it too, was very nonpartisan, bipartisan. You had the administrator of NASA at the time, Jim Bridenstine, running around building support on both sides of the aisle to start Artemis. You had this effort to initiate through the State Department, the Artemis Accords, to bring in other nations to work with the United States. It was a coalition activity and it was expressly designed. It was done by people I know and, you know, who I maybe don't politically agree with, but people I respect a lot who understood the history of efforts to return humans to the moon, who understood Apollo, who understood policy processes. They put together a very smart program and a coalition driven program that was intended to survive past any administration, right, to continue forward, and it did. The Biden administration basically accepted this Artemis return to the moon effort pretty much unchanged. And, you know, you can maybe count on one hand how many things survived like that from first Trump to Biden that spoke a lot to how much work was done to make it this, this nonpartisan entity. Put this into context. Historically speaking, that is the first time any effort to return humans to the moon had survived a presidential transition the first time. Right. There's been two other times that failed. So again, I think a lot of people coming into this second term were assuming it would be something similar, but instead you have almost 180 degree shift from that, and you have a situation where no one actually knows who's in charge of space policy. The Vice President and now doesn't really care about space policy. There's no National Space Council. It seems like there's specific people in the budgeting office who really have it out for NASA and NASA science. In particular, the budget director who actually wrote back in 2022 their intention to cut NASA science in half by 50%. That was on paper. You can look at this document. Does that jive with whatever priorities the president has right now? It doesn't. Trump talks a lot about sending humans to Mars, but not too much else. And so that is kind of the nominal thing NASA's supposed to be doing. But then how it's being implemented, how it's run, there's no attention to that.

C (8:19)

After a short break, we're going to chat about the Elon Musk of it all and the mighty coincidence that he owns a space exploration company and just so happened to head Doge, the fake department that decided NASA didn't need funding.

E (8:36)

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F (9:04)

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D (9:37)

I mean, just as a casual observer, there is sort of this elephant in the room and Elon Musk, who has his own private space company.

C (9:46)

Has a.

D (9:46)

Heavy hand in cutting government funding. I obviously am not going to ask you to like speculate, but is there any sort of belief among, I guess, people in D.C. or within the Planetary Society anywhere? Like, is the end game, I guess, to like fund his program with that money or is it just gone?

B (10:04)

That's part of it. But I wouldn't necessarily say it was an intentional thing to give it to him specifically. There is just a broad ideological alignment of commercial industry. Space being the new thing. It has obviously done really impressive things. I mean, that's part of it too. We can't deny and shouldn't. SpaceX has an incredible, I mean, just as a company, it is a, you know, outlier company. No other space company has ever been like that. There's no other space company like it now. It is very capable, moves astonishingly fast and it has lowered the cost of launch. There aren't any other companies, so they kind of functionally have a monopoly right now, particularly in launch, to access to space. So any kind of shift towards commercial anything will just by default basically benefit SpaceX and Elon Musk. Beyond that, though, I mean, you had Elon Musk even tweeting or xing, whatever, posting YouTube these days.

D (10:58)

Yeah, whatever, Right. I'm going to call it Twitter.

B (11:00)

Right? Yeah. After the budget came out that cut science in half, he, he was even like this seems like a little much. And so with Elon Musk is saying, like, that's cutting too much, like that's bad. Right. So it, I'd say the initiative isn't coming from him. NASA was not spared from Doge cuts. I actually tracked these in a, in a dashboard I was doing the last year and you know, NASA had cut something like 120 to 200 million dollars of contracts, but out of 25 billion, nowhere near the level you saw at National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation. So you have a situation, I think, where the Mars goal such that it is kind of aligns. It obviously benefits thing. But then obviously, now that the politics between Elon Musk and Trump are kind of uncertain and dubious, you've seen maybe a shift of rhetoric back to focusing more on the moon instead of Mars. But yeah, it's so opaque, it's hard to say either way.

C (11:51)

So it could just be a coincidence. But the truth is Elon hasn't done nearly enough distancing from the decisions of the Trump administration that to deserve the benefit of the doubt. But more important than Musk, who despite his best efforts, likely won't live forever, is the forever implications of what destroying the US Space program will have on the future.

B (12:12)

NASA isn't just pure exploration. NASA runs most of our climate monitoring satellites and does not even, even directly, just Earth monitoring satellites, right? So we're measuring ocean topography, we're measuring the movement of water around the Earth, we're measuring gravity, you know, of the planet at a high precision, understand the exact nature of what's underneath the surface. All of this data then is funneled through a ton of research that is supported by NASA. NASA is the, depending on how you measure it, third or fourth largest funder of fundamental scientific research in the country. And so you have people and students and professors and researchers at universities and institutions around the country that depend on these fundamental research grants to study data coming from the satellites for earth science, for fundamental technology development. Right? This next generation of capability technologies, all of these things are basically being cut almost entirely or down to the bone. And so you're hitting at a very fundamental level kind of the future payoff, right, that we're investing in now. I always see NASA as the equivalent of our high risk, high reward investment as a country where for those things you take a small amount and NASA is a small amount. We spent $6 trillion last year. We spent less than 1/3 of 1% of that on NASA. You could actually erase NASA from history. Take all of the money you would have saved from every going all the way back to Apollo. All of that money would barely pay off our annual deficit this year for one year. And that's if you took it from all of history for the last 65 years. What you do with that though, is because space is so weird, right? Again, official insightful term hashtag, space is weird. Yeah, space is super weird, right? And it's because of that, because it's so extreme and unforgiving and that the environment there is so harsh. It forces engineers and scientists and people to engage with it. Like at, you have to have incredibly precise planning and engineering. You have to have incredibly capable manufacturing capabilities. You have to have really open and flexible minds to understand the data that you do get to integrate this all together. And it's this innovation factors, this generative activity that you do from this. Because it's so weird, because you're purposely inserting ourselves into a place where we kind of he, as humans shouldn't be. We learn a lot about how to really make things well, think through things and have precision that then we just kind of filters out through the rest of the country, whether it's intellectually or through our manufacturing capabilities, workforce, you name it. You turn that spigot off basically this way. And you also do something, I think that's more subtle but also really important, which is through these plans, which again turn a lot over to the commercial sector. And there's value in some ways of doing this right. As partners, they've done incredible things. There are ways to lower costs again of launching things into space, of commercial observation of the Earth. Things where you have other markets, but there's no market at the Moon. There's no market for observing Jupiter, there's no economy of Pluto. That's what we do, uniquely. But also if we want to send humans back to the moon, we want to ultimately send humans to Mars, which I think are grand, unifying, inspiring events that should reflect our higher values and ideals. Those are national endeavors. Right. And so we're setting national goals, but this policy makes them responsible by basically an individual to solve it. So if it's a national goal, then we say, okay, well, we hope Elon Musk does it for us.

C (15:47)

Hoping Elon Musk does the right thing feels like a fool's errand. Right? Has he done right by his 50, 11 kids? Has he done right by Trump? So what makes this instance when the greater good is the only point, any different? And it's not just Elon Musk. There's Jeff Bezos and his company, Blue Origin. Are these just vanity projects for men with outsized wealth? Does this really bode well for advancing humanity?

B (16:12)

You're turning over national responsibility to the whims of an individual. That's a huge risk, as we've seen. Individuals can change.

D (16:20)

Yeah, Right.

B (16:21)

If Elon Musk wanted to, tomorrow he could burn SpaceX to the ground. Jeff Bezos could say, I no longer care about rockets. I will no longer do this. And within two days, the United States would have no access to space for any. That's national security for space or science or whatever. Right. And you even saw Elon Musk literally threaten to just dismantle the Dragon spacecraft that could take astronauts to the space station because that is their only ride. And so we have, we have. We've turned over national capability and national priorities to, again, literally individuals. And this is different than just like Boeing or Lockheed, which are much more governed by boards and publicly traded companies. These are very centralized organizations. I don't think that's a smart move as a nation. Yeah, I want a national goal to be reflective of the nation. And there's a fundamental mismatch and a risk that we run.

C (17:14)

And then there's the whole, if a couple of guys basically get to claim the entire universe, what's to keep their operations here in the US.

A (17:24)

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F (17:55)

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D (18:25)

Something that I've been really trying to like, wrap my head around is America no longer being a leader when it comes to space exploration. How does the planetary society and how do you think about, you know, where you're supposed to be looking, I guess, in the future if the US isn't it?

B (18:41)

There's a couple ways that I like to think about it. So there's one is that I have a relatively ecumenical approach to exploration. Like I take a pro humanity. I'm excited when, when Europe is making advances. I'm excited to see a lot of countries been building up their civil space programs. Japan has been really nailing it in the last couple of years. And then also, of course, China, which is really rapidly becoming near parity and soon to be leader in certain areas of space. They have a plan to launch in 2028 and land on Mars, grab samples and bring it back. And I'm excited to see what they bring back. I've been excited to see they're landing on the far side of the moon and sample return there first. These really exciting things. But on the other hand, too, I have like, maybe a rapidly challenged and diminishing idea of like, there's a. There's a set of ideals and values that I think this nation represents in its best case of, of openness and freedom of information and freedom of thought and freedom of operations and, and the desire to work with partners across the globe to establish rule of law and all the, you know, these kind of broad fundamental values that I think are really important to be reflected in who and where goes out into space. There's no, like, law enforcement body, right? There's no space cops that'll come down and kick your door open and arrest you, right? It's basically you establish normative behaviors by who goes first and kind of sets fundamental operations and expectations. And again, first Trump administration. The Artemis Accords are a perfect example of this, which is like a set of basically fundamental beliefs about how we're going to operate at the moon. We're going to operate together, we're going to share scientific data, we're going to respect historical sites of Apollo. There's all these kind of fundamental, just kind of beliefs and 55 countries now have signed up with it. Like that's the kind of thing that can really be a unifying thing. So that's one of the reasons why. And also just like, just like through our open system, there's so many ways to input in our society still what NASA does and where and how. And that's, I mean that's essentially my job, right. Is trying to bring people and there's, if you stop to even think about it, it's actually astonishing that so many citizens can go to their elected official who has basically a 1 or 2 degree step away from literal just directing where our space program goes. Right. And to tell them what they think and frequently have that influence and weigh on those decisions. That you have a scientific community that has a huge amount of open and at times frustrating and lengthy but just open debates about where we go and what's important. And that is actually used to then direct our investments. You don't have that in China. Right. You just don't have that in the same ways. And so the ways that people can engage personally and through that process to say you're spending taxpayer money, I get to have a say on this. That's really important and I think a really critical aspect of our system. So I'd like to see that as the primary way of going into space personally.

C (21:31)

Which brings us back to diversity.

D (21:33)

It's kind of ironic for like an administration that is so anti, like diversity that like diversity is going to end up happening. Having to be the strength of going to space if we don't have a space program.

B (21:44)

Yeah. You want, I think you want to maximize the ability of everyone to contribute as best as possible to it.

D (21:49)

Yeah, I think that's the best case. I think we need human, I think we need the whole Earth actually doing their best.

B (21:55)

Yeah, right. And that's for the longest time been one of the motivating factors. And I think this kind of goes, if you'll allow me a slight digression, but this is related the way that nearly all of us have grown up with our relationship to space being defined by, at least in this country, by NASA. NASA, sometimes a little boring, NASA sometimes can be a little slow or bureaucratic, but a lot of it is because it has the burden of representing the nation back to itself. Right. That we are literally going into the heavens. Right. The things that have hung above us for millions of years as, as human and hominid species, the thing that is carrying our presence there is a joint and collective endeavor. Right. Through our public representation, through government through our public institutions. And so that's why NASA has always gone to great pains to say our astronauts are going to be basically the top examples of human capability. Like how many marathons will they run in space today? But they're also, they're dedicated when they're back. They talk to school kids. They try to get people and they serve the nation back. So many discussions about NASA's we even had today. What does it give back to the nation? What does it give to us, right? To do this both in. Enriches us by what it does, but also reflects again these ideals, this joint efforts. NASA works with other nations all the time. The International Space Station, 15 other nations. Right through that process, we are in a sense reflecting these ideals back to ourselves. We're embodying those ideals. The shift towards commercial, in some senses it's more efficient, it's often cheaper. But you're, in a sense, you're trading that democratic oversight which makes things slower and more expensive for a more, you know, I say autocratic, but just like centralized system that doesn't owe anything to anybody. And then instead of representing, in a sense, the body politic, it represents the whims of an individual. I think we've been starting to see more of that tension arise in the last five years as we associate Mars now with functionally one person, not with a nation or an endeavor. Or we see one person's attitudes or a handful of people's attitudes start to coalesce and reflect what this is. With no desire or no, no awareness or prioritization of seeing space as almost a gift to give back to people rather than what we can take from it. And I'm not saying we shouldn't have any commerce in space or we shouldn't have any of that in space. It's just that the core of it, through our public institutions, should be embodying these values and also trying to pursue knowledge and exploration and joint kind of efforts to do that. But that tension again is increasing because we've turned over so much to so few.

D (24:33)

I mean, I will say as someone who was, you know, I guess at varying points in life more or less interested in space. Like, it's a lot less inspiring to think, like, oh, well, maybe you could make a few dollars there versus like look at the amazing things that humanity is capable of.

B (24:50)

That's exactly the essence of it, right? That there is space is so interesting to me because you can see it as almost. There's a term for this, a civil religion. It embodies and allows Us and provides a framework to talk about spiritually adjacent types of emotions and feelings. These, you know, crassly. Right brained kind of things. You feel something when you see a grand vista of Mars, or you feel something when you see the deep field taken by the Hubble and every point is a galaxy, not a star. You feel something when you see a rocket launch. Like literally. But also emotionally, it's a. It's a powerful event that particularly I think in our pretty secular society, it gives people some sort of access to the sublime, to these deeper experiential aspects that we normally don't have a pathway for because it's not like a structured religion or creed or belief system. It's open to anybody. Right. It allows and supports this broad sense. Anyone can be a part of that feeling and access that through the endeavor itself. When space was really starting to become a realistic opportunity in the mid 20th century, that was how it was presented. I mean, if you, if you've seen 2001 A Space Odyssey. Right. Like, what is that movie about? But literally. Oh, going into space will turn us into angels.

C (26:06)

Yeah.

B (26:07)

Not to spoil.

A (26:08)

Yeah.

C (26:09)

I mean.

B (26:09)

Yeah. And I think there's something to that. And I think that's what needs to be preserved, as you said, against just this idea that it is a place that we can. Oh, it's a new place for extraction and consumption. It can have parts of that. But I think the core motivator of this broad collective effort should really be.

C (26:25)

The sublime parts, which is kind of the point. You know, NASA has been a symbol of America's willingness to look outward and actually do a good thing. And when we lose one of the most appreciated and beloved agencies ever created by this country, it speaks to our lowering standard in the world.

B (26:44)

That is so important for a society that I think through our technology is pulling us inwards and pulling us to be obsessive about ourselves and obsessive about turning the world into a giant high school cafeteria that is just gossiping endlessly about itself. We need something to pull us out of that. And symbolically and literally, space is up and out. Right. By doing that, by forcing us to contemplate these bigger things, to realize we're small within this grand scheme of things, but also to say that we have this power to understand it. And that would be lost if we just let commercial things do their commercial things. Because that's not their job to do that. There's no market in that. It's a core aspect of, I think, our modern society that we would lose if we stopped investing in this.

C (27:26)

So here we are at the edge of a future that used to feel limitless, suddenly being downsized into something small, short sighted and dangerously dependent on a handful of rich guys and a president who distrusts science. NASA may not be perfect, but it's public. And it's not better to gut this important national program in order to advance Trump's billionaire first policies. So look up people. If we want a future defined by wonder, one that favors giant steps for mankind rather than small steps for men, then we need to fight for NASA's future.

B (28:03)

Foreign.

C (28:12)

Thanks for listening to or watching. How Is this Better? Make sure you're following or subscribing on your platform of choice, including our very own YouTube page@YouTube.com how is this Better? And if you can leave a rating and review or comment on the episodes because because all of it is super helpful in spreading the reach of the show and we appreciate you How Is this Better? Is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It's produced by Devin Maroney, video editing is by Shane Verkus. Kevin Dreyfus is Courier's National Managing Director and Executive producer. RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social and Charlotte Robertson is the Deputy Director of Brand and Social Media. Samantha Hollows is the YouTube and podcast growth marketer and Marianne Kuga is the Director of Marketing. Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution and if you're interested in advertising or sponsoring, you can reach her@advertiseuriernewsroom.com show artwork is by Danielle Deplato and original theme music is by UC Vault.

B (29:23)

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C (29:52)

Cmn.

B (29:53)

Com.