C (3:15)

Well, the way that I think about this is, I mean, it's multifaceted and it kind of depends through what angle you're driving value. But at the end of the day, having a very ambitious, technically challenging goal that drives cooperation, peaceful cooperation by default, that requires almost peaceful engagement and cooperation with our allies, in addition to kind of within the nation itself, is a fundamentally positive social and geopolitical thing to do. The organizing features of sending humans to the Moon are just so complex and so challenging and so difficult that it's like going to the gym for the aerospace and innovation sectors of our economy every day and really pushing ourselves to the limit. In addition to that, you mentioned this. There is a real factor, this is hard to quantify and so it becomes, I think, easy to dismiss. But there is a real factor of inspiration, but also pride and optimism about the future. When you see a joint effort of your nation and allied nations to do something really amazing. There's something good for the soul in that, frankly. And we need positive opportunities and examples like that, things that are unifying activities rather than divisive ones. And again, that organizing effort of the Moon is so immense that it requires so much ongoing, focused cooperation. And also it requires buy in, almost necessarily in a bipartisan way in order to sustain this over the course of more than a two or four year political cycle. So just the act of doing it, the act of attempting it itself has just enormous benefits from, to our society and to our broader globe. And then of course there's, you know, the actual benefit of being on the Moon, the incredible scientific results that we'll get learning how to live and operate further from Earth and being more independent as a species. And then also just building this infrastructure that enables now this potential whole future host of economic benefits and economic growth through this infrastructure to the Moon and the space around the Moon.

B (5:25)

So I am very excited about going back to the Moon. And I think you're exactly right just in terms of the scientific payoffs. What we have learned from the rovers on Mars, the new space based telescopes, I think human knowledge about space in general has just accelerated even in the last 10 years. So it's exciting to continue that. But we also know that there have been national surveys of the American public that sometimes have found that Some sending astronauts back to the moon and perhaps someday onto Mars does not rank very high on the list of public priorities, just given all the other earth based challenges that we face. So how can you explain to the general public why space discovery and exploration should be important priorities?

C (6:10)

Yeah, I mean there's again, there's a couple of ways I think about that, one of which I think that's accurate too. I mean we have, I think the proper relationship and the proper levels of investment to. Yeah, it is more important that we house and feed and make sure we don't have mass starvation or that we take care of the elderly and the sick. Those are the priorities of a society and we do those. And I think that's correct. And if space is higher than that, something is actually probably pretty wrong about our society. I think where some of that inference and kind of what you're getting at comes in is that people see space that's so visible. A rocket launch is a, is a singular event that actually if you or anyone listening has never seen one in person. Absolutely add that to your bucket list. It is one of the more powerful experiences you will ever have. But it's really visible. It's strange, right? It's unusual, it looks expensive. And I think people then infer that it requires huge amounts of funding to pursue a program to the moon. When actually what we're spending is roughly right now 0.3% of annual expenditures in the United States go towards NASA.3. Right. If you rounding numbers, NASA rounds to zero in our annual expenditures. And every six days or so, Social Security spends the equivalent of NASA's budget every 12 days or so. Medicaid and Medicare spend the equivalent of NASA's budget. These are much larger programs. Housing urban development has 10 times NASA's budget. So we have that priority is actually represented small increases in that 0.3% back to up to 0.5 or 1% would actually have huge outcomes in terms of what we can do in space and still maintain that. Again, I think that proper kind of moralistic relationship of what we spend on this kind of long term deep investments in capability, workforce, scientific innovation in the nation mixed with our practical needs. Going even further than that, some of those survey results, and I think particularly maybe you're referencing the 2023 Pew Research Poll, I think there's a similar one in 2018 from Pew and then Morning Morning Consult in 2021 had something similar that asked the public to kind of rank what NASA does in terms of priority. And I think that's really Fascinating too, because you see at the top three things consistently across all those polls, it's fundamental scientific exploration, Earth climate monitoring and protection from asteroids that can kill us. Very practical and very reasonable things that I frankly all agree with. And interestingly, you know, going to the Moon or Mars is like way at the bottom in terms of what the nation thinks NASA's priority should be. And I think the problem there, and this is actually the opportunity and it's really mixing and making sure that what we do with sending humans back to the Moon addresses these fundamental capabilities, particularly scientific research. They can really work in scientific motivation, scientific exploration as the motivating factor and that's driving individual mission outcomes for these future Artemis missions. I think you actually then address what the public is asking for, which is what are the practical and helpful things going to space does for our nation? It keeps us alive, monitors our climate, the planet in which we live, and advances science. And I think that's the messaging challenge. And frankly that's always been a problem with, you know, NASA internally is divided between human spaceflight and science as a structure. And that's where some of this comes in.

B (9:37)

No, I think those are all excellent points. And certainly the scientific advantages are a big part of the benefits of the space program. A lot of people also don't realize there have been concrete economic benefits that have come out of the space program. Like GPS kind of started there. Some of the advances in wireless communications come from there.

C (9:58)

So solar panel efficiency. Right. Maybe natural. NASA was green before any other agent. Right. Because you can't use diesel fuel in space. Yes, huge innovation and, and also social benefits. NASA in the 1970s pioneered some of the first communications satellites. You know, we didn't have communication satellites before 70, 60 or so years ago. That was all pioneered through NASA investments and then also working with developing countries at the time like India, to bring telecommunications and access and to spur their space program development. That's created navigation, as you said, but also things like again, Earth monitoring satellites and understanding how our weather works and understanding the climate that's going on in our planet. Not just at Earth, but understanding how climate changed at Mars, which became extremely cold and dry and arid, and then also how the climate changed at Venus, which had a runaway greenhouse effect. And in fact the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect was inspired by observations of Venus at the beginning to explain why this Earth like planet became so incredibly hot that it's hotter than enough to melt lead. These are extreme conditions of climate that we see on both Mars and, and Venus. And it's kind of our Goldilocks situation where we have too hot, too cold and just right where Earth is. And it's good to know what those edge cases are.

B (11:18)

Yep. We definitely want to know how the Earth compares to some of these other planets. So hopefully we may avoid some of the scenarios that have develop there.

C (11:27)

Indeed.

B (11:28)

So there have been many efforts for a second series of lunar landings that have fallen through over the years. So Artemis is noteworthy in the sense that it's I think really the first program since Apollo to have the support of back to back presidential administration, which I think was important to maintaining the momentum to actually carry through the program. What are the factors that you think have made the Artemis program possible today?

C (11:54)

Absolutely, and it's worth dwelling on that there were two other real attempts to return NASA astronauts to the moon. One was under George H.W. bush on the 20th anniversary of Apollo back in the late 80s, and then under, interestingly, George W. Bush after the Challenger disaster in the early 2000s, when NASA was kind of reevaluating itself and its priorities. Both of those initiatives failed and were canceled by the subsequent presidential administration. The fact that we have Artemis now existing through Trump to Biden, I mean, even the Trump to Biden shift was the, you know, what else did those two administrations agree on? And the Biden administration basically accepted Artemis unchanged. That was remarkable. And I think the difference there is that there was a intentionality to the design of Artemis to make it politically stable. The other, it's not like they didn't try, I think back in the 80s and early 2000s, but there was such an awareness of those failures. There was a desire and I think a lot of lessons learned from those failures and you found a way to basically build a big enough coalition. So if you see, you know, if any of your listeners kind of see critiques of Artemis, you know, various program aspects of it being really expensive or a bit of a Frankenstein kind of assemblage of various different spacecraft and programs and things. And it's not efficient. Well, that's kind of the cost of political stability. Right. In a, in a democracy where you have geographically discrete representation through the annual appropriations process, you have to build sustainable things by giving a lot of immediate benefit to a diverse set of coalition, you know, representatives around the country, you know, members of Congress and commercial industries, scientific interests and so forth. And that's, you know, I kind of see this as the moneyball equivalent of a space program design where you just, it doesn't matter whether your ideals are. If you can't get to first base. Right. You're not going to get a run ultimately in baseball if you can't sustain a moon program for more than four years, no matter how beautiful and perfect and optimized the engineering plan is, it doesn't matter. Right. Because it just. You won't be able to build anything that fast. And so that was a big part of it. The other factors that really I think are important to this is you had the end of the space shuttle and so you opened up a wedge, they call this a budget wedge of funding within NASA that needed to be, that could then be more easily applied to something else. And you have the near end of the International Space Station, which has been, I think, up there for over 25 years now. It's a program that really began in 1984. So it is like a 40 plus year effort and that's going to wind down in 2030 or 2032. And so you need this next step to move on to and that available money, plus kind of the end of what we would call low Earth orbit or just Earth orbit human programs. The Moon is kind of the place to go. There's really no other immediate place. Mars would be wonderful, but it's exponentially more difficult to get to. So it's a factor of these programs and I might even add commercial space capabilities giving the, at least on paper, the ability to lower the immediate upfront cost to the taxpayer, to offload some of those investments onto matching funds from the private sector to lower the cost requirements. And that's another key aspect of this. So I think I answered five different things or so are changed. But it's a lot of these things finally coming together basically, and that enables this. And there's been enough kind of political momentum that things have shifted very, very firmly in favor of lunar exploration.

B (15:30)

Actually, we call that a complete answer in the sense that you covered a number of different factors as to why this is a special moment. There are lots of things that happen to have come together. One of the things you did mention I would like to explore a little bit further is the role of commercial companies in the US Space program. I actually have a book coming out early next year on US space policy. And one of the things I'm looking at is the commercialization of space and the growing role of these companies. So I'm just curious how you see the role that the partnerships with the private sector are playing, playing in space exploration now. How does NASA work with these private firms?

C (16:11)

Yeah. So, boy, how much time do we have? There's there's, there's no denying the fact that in the last 10 years we've seen, I think it's fair to say, a revolution in the capabilities and ambitions of the private space sector, primarily led by SpaceX. This has allowed NASA to offload a lot of the financial risks of investing in new programs. So the old school way that NASA would work pretty much up until 2010, 2011, was that NASA would contract with a big aerospace firm like Boeing or Lockheed Martin. They would jointly design a big project and NASA would have really deep oversight into what was happening, set all of the requirements, they would build it at whatever it would take. You know, they would try to stick to a contract goal. But if they went over, NASA pays the difference. And then when they're done, NASA takes ownership of the hardware and does what it does with it. The big shift now is that NASA is going into a fixed price contract, sometimes with more milestone based payments. So you don't get paid until you actually demonstrate that you're making progress along a development path. And NASA at the end doesn't actually take ownership of the spacecraft. They kind of use it or lease it, or it's a service provided to the space agency. And then the IP and the hardware retains and is owned by the company. This is why SpaceX can fly Taurus into space to do what it wants, or launch a car into Mars orbit or solar orbit, I should say past Mars. And it's what they do, they own the rocket capability. So this protects, if there's any cost overruns, the company is on the hook to pay those, not the taxpayer. And that's great in a way that it really protects the investment of taxpayer money. It prevents these projects from spiraling out of control and eating up NASA's budget. And it pushes kind of innovation, it aligns the incentives of these companies to say, well, as long as we deliver the product up to spec, it's up to us how to make it work. We don't have NASA peering at every single decision we make. We can be faster, more agile, we can try new things. Perfect example of this is SpaceX pioneering reusable rockets, landing rockets themselves and then fueling them back up and launching them again. Huge savings in money was seen as very difficult to do prior to that. It is difficult to do. The downside though, and this is where I think this is where I have a somewhat ambivalent view of how this has gone. There's really important and valuable benefits that NASA's gotten. And then of course there's a huge Existing market for a very specific thing or a handful of things which is launching rockets to Earth orbit. Right. So there's commercial companies, you know, you have like DirecTV, XM radio, a variety of other kind of satellite communications companies most people have never heard of that build their own multi hundred million dollar spacecraft and then launch them into Earth orbit for their business models. There's a pure commercial market that exists independent of what NASA does in Earth orbit. There's Earth observation companies. We're seeing this, I think we're recording this now during the initial days of this incursion into Iran. And you can pull up the New York Times and you can see the before and after of missile impacts on various facilities around Iran because those are all purchased by commercial providers.

B (19:27)

Right?

C (19:27)

We have, there's a lot of local and kind of economic interest in buying pictures of Earth. The way that I kind of like to frame it as anything that kind of, you know, if there's a market in space, it's for anything that goes up and then turns and points back down. Right? The market is on the Earth. Space provides a domain to give a certain kind of literal and figurative perspective on what it's doing. What NASA has done with Artemis, however, it's taken these kind of initial successes of SpaceX, particularly Space X, but also these kind of other Earth observation platforms and so forth and said, well, what if we just expand this everywhere and that's kind of the big unknown to say there is no market right now at the Moon. Right. There's, there's no real desire or you know, you go to the moon and there could feasibly be future things to do there, but there's not one right now. So NASA is still, it's a monopsony for most of it that NASA is the only buyer of these kind of so called private and commercial markets out there. And they're, they're offloading and they're, they're kind of setting a lot of fiscal risk onto the companies that provide these services. And NASA's done this with the spacesuits for the moon. NASA's done this for the lunar landers themselves. These are commercially procured lunar landers from, from SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA has done this for payload delivery onto the surface of the moon. You know, you name it. Basically everything has been a fixed price or somewhat kind of a milestone based payment, this kind of modern relationship. But what that actually does is that it offsets the risk, but it also introduces new types of risk that NASA's not used to dealing with primarily so they depend on these companies to eat their own overruns. But not every company is a SpaceX run by the richest person in the world, or Blue Origin run by the second richest person in the world. Some of these smaller companies that are providing the spacesuit capabilities or the payload delivery services to the moon, these are small. They could easily go out of business. Right. They don't have the kind of big amounts of capital that SpaceX and again, blue Origin do. But I think we're also seeing a reputational risk. Elon Musk may surprise you is somewhat of a divisive figure these days. Jeff Bezos is as well. And I think what shifted where NASA was always a kind of a group effort, a national symbol that it's something that we all do together, or it owes itself to the taxpayer. What SpaceX does is up to Elon Musk, and what Blue Origin does is up to Jeff Bezos. And those are idiosyncratic personalities, to say the least. And I think as those personalities fuse into that activity of space, you actually have what space being associated maybe more with Elon Musk these days and Jeff Bezos than NASA. And I think we're not really prepared to think about how that changes things, because my entire life, your entire life pretty much up until the last few years, has been a situation where NASA's mediated that relationship to space exploration to the public, and it doesn't have that anymore. Another complete answer for you.

B (22:27)

That's a very complete answer. And I actually share your concern, both in terms of the opportunities of private companies. And you're completely right about the reusable rockets and how that has lowered the cost of launches and therefore created lots of new opportunities. But there are some risks, and I want to suggest one other possible risk, which is in addition to space exploration, there are new efforts underway in terms of space tourism, space mining. Trump is putting a lot of money into space defense. So the question I have, and the worry I have is how can we balance all those things with space exploration itself? Is there a risk that scientific discovery gets devalued? Not because people don't think it's important, but there's so much money going into these other things. Tourism, mining and defense.

C (23:21)

Yes. And I don't think we even have to speculate about that. I think we functionally saw. Well, at least on the Trump administration side, last year, they came out with a budget proposal to literally cut NASA's science activities in half. 47% cut, which would have turned off roughly a third of all operating spacecraft. Science from Earth orbit out beyond Pluto literally just turned these spacecraft off to tumble into darkness. Eviscerated funding for fundamental research destroyed it actually cut to zero percent completely. Would have ended NASA's education programs and outreach programs to, like, rocket clubs, you know, and small grants for high school students to, you know, go to launches and to start learning how to be. Or undergraduate institutions and training. So we don't have to speculate too much because it was all seen as, you know, this shift was all very much onto the commercial side as a consequence of that. And then, yes, I think the. In terms of the kind of the showiness or the newsworthiness of. Or the desire. Right. Of, you know, can you make money in space? Can you go and turn space from a, you know, this kind of. I guess I'm a Sagan child of Sagan. I guess for anyone who remembers that this space was this wondrous, awesome thing, like in the original sense of awesome. And it was a, you know, you can go back to Arthur c. Clarke, this mid 20th century relationship of space to the human psyche, which was this transcendence, right, that going into space would literally make us better. It would turn us into angels, right. 2001, the Space Odyssey. That it was something profound of space. And there's something that just sits really wrong with me when space just like, actually, no, it's actually about resource extraction, right? And that's like the motivating thing. And it's not that there can't be that obviously, like there should spaces. It's one term for like this huge expanse, right? Literally infinite. And we have a situation where, yeah, like, of course there can be economic benefits from space. Of course there can be, you know, resource allocation and. Yeah, it's a lot cleaner to, you know, we don't have to mess up the Earth if you want to do resource extraction in space. But to shift it as your sole motivation, I think really misses the point and actually removes a really important fundamental relationship, I think, of what space is, right? It's, you know, you go back, space is literally the heavens, right? We figuratively. But this is also, you know, we're sending things into the heavens. And we, our entire species for its entire existence up until 70 so years ago, could only literally could only dream about what that was and what was up there. And now we have this ability for ourselves to traverse our figurative heavens and to learn and explore and understand vast things that we have never could have even imagined before. And the world, the universe and cosmos are stranger than we ever possibly imagined. Is bigger than we ever possibly imagined. That's really good for the. I think the society to have a source of just new and generative information, to have an opportunity to confront the infinite. That's a good humbling activity. Right. For people who like to meditate or any kind of, like, relationship to the divine, space is almost kind of like a secular role for that. So to treat it merely as this kind of practical, extractionary, what does it do for me, I think really diminishes the opportunity we have there. And that's where I see this kind of broader shift of science embodies that first part. Right. Science is what's out there. Let's find out. Oh, look at that interesting dot in the sky. What if we built a robot to go there? That's basically what Mars is. That's really, truly inspiring and uplifting to know we can do that. And to diminish that, to destroy that, to abandon it completely, not only is, you know, has immediate destructive consequences and practical consequences to our nation, but says something really bad about our kind of collective soul, I guess, for lack of a better term, that we would see something so big and promising and uplifting and turn our backs to it.

B (27:26)

And this is one of the things I really appreciate about the Planetary Society. Both you and your colleagues try to keep us focused on the inspirational side of space, the scientific benefits. I know some people in the group were active on the NASA budget cuts front and speaking out against that. And kudos to you. And actually that effort turned out to be very successful because Congress has restored at least some, almost all of it.

C (27:54)

Yeah, I think NASA budget went instead of going down 47%, got a 1.7% cut last year, which is amazing to

B (28:01)

think that that actually happened. But I know you and your colleagues actually were a big part of that. So thank you. On the part of those of us who are space fans, the last thing I want to cover with you is the other thing that is happening in the space world other than commercialization is the militarization of space. So there's a lot of competition between the US And China. We know China plans its own moon mission by at least 2030. I'm curious how you see this rivalry between China and the United States. Does it matter who gets there first? And should we be concerned about the militarization of space?

C (28:41)

Yeah, so I'll have my opinions on this. And then there's actually, there's like. What's driving a lot of this today in politics is definitely the great power, competition theory or motivation is back. Right. I think there's been a latent, particularly among broader space community, a lot of people in government, there's a latent almost desire to return to this Apollo era because they see, oh, you look at Apollo, spurred on by Soviet advances in space exploration and JFK sets this goal of going to the moon, returning before the end of the decade, and you have a huge marshaling of resources on the order of mobilization for a war. It was a massive mobilization of resources. NASA was built overnight. Functionally, its budget increased by 100% the first year, then another 100% the following year. It peaked about, if you Just remember inflation, NASA's budget peaked at about $70 billion a year, or almost three times what it is now. And it fell almost as fast. Right, because as soon as you win the race, what do you, you know, why do you keep spending that much money? And NASA fell to a much smaller portion, but it had this expectation of, you know, what if we just had that again? And so there's a latent desire to see geopolitical great power conflict as a way to get attention and resources for space. It's working, I think, for Artemis for sure. It is definitely the organizing focus of this administration, but also a good number of members of Congress. And it's always now pitched as a race with China. Interestingly, when Artemis was initiated under the first Trump administration, competition with China was a big part of it, but it wasn't framed as a race. And that was wise because we had a race and we won, and then it didn't really work out well for the space program beyond that. But it's a very effective way to kind of get attention for it. China's definitely has a very ambitious and very capable space program that it is putting huge investments into. They're easily the second most capable nation in the world after the US now in space leapfrogging Russia, which is declining and they are going to the moon now, is that what happens if they get there? Well, they can't get there first because the United States got there first over 50 years ago. But if they get there first again, this is where my. I don't think it will be a huge deal, personally. A number of other kind of political commentators are framing everything that we can't let this happen. The moon's a big place. There's lots of place for people to land. Resources are spotty at best, and we don't exactly know where they are. There's a lot of theoretical vehicles. I'm more worried that. And arguably China Itself doesn't consider itself in a race. They're doing what they're going to do. So it's kind of a one sided framing is kind of the other. Funny thing about this, but that said, this all is kind of a proxy for militarization. So I mean, a little bit of history, space has always been a source of, you can call it militarization or national security maybe is more appropriate. Way back when Sputnik first launched in 57, the Eisenhower administration was actually in some ways relieved because that then set this expectation that you could fly over other nations in space, right? They almost didn't want to go first because you had this idea of airspace. You can't just fly into another nation's airspace, but in space you're orbiting, you can't help where you go, right? You're just in an orbit and you're high enough up and you have to orbit other nations, which means you can spy on them, you can take pictures, you can listen to communications, you can, you can do whatever you'd like. So by launching Sputnik first, the Soviet Union set the precedent that you can fly over other nations, at least in space. And immediately there on out, the Eisenhower administration initiated a secret space program to create a variety of spy capabilities in space for monitoring the Soviet Union. And that has continued independently of NASA over the last 70 or so years. And so a lot of like military communications, validation of nuclear weapons, treaties, you know, you name it. Actually the military even contains its own independent weather satellite system just for its needs. There is kind of a separate and completely independent space program run by the dod, now known as Space Force, which runs actually the GPS system as part of the Space Force system. So that's always been there. I think what's changed in the last, I'd say 15, maybe 20 years is that there's more of a conflict awareness, potential conflict of space. So it's not just monitoring. Now the Outer Space Treaty forbids weapons of mass destruction in space, but anything in space, when you're orbiting again, you're moving 17,000 miles an hour. Everything is what they call dual use, right? So a peaceful satellite launched by Russia. If you get close enough or just decide to smash into your enemies or your adversary's spacecraft, you're suddenly a ballistic, right? You're moving at ballistic trajectories, you can destroy them. Signal jamming, right? Other types of activities you can do. And I think with the war in Ukraine, there was a huge shock to the global system when they realized how important constant battlefield access was for communications, and not just from big military satellites, but now commercial companies like SpaceX is Starlink. Right. If you're going to operate drones in, you know, these all kind of new autonomous systems and send these very accurate missiles everywhere, you need constant and high data bandwidth, high levels of observation in space. And I think Ukraine clarified in a way that no other event had in recent memory how critical it was to have space assets that were also resilient to these types of attacks. And that has really upped the game, I think, the political discussion, and unleashed a lot of money and a lot of desire to kind of put more into space. And then, of course, now it's being seen, China's now going to do that to counter us and Russia's going to do it now to counter both of them. And so you start seeing kind of an arms race in space again, not with nuclear weapons, but with these other types of kinetic and other military vehicles.

B (34:53)

Well, Casey, this has been terrific. I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us today. I appreciate both the history lessons that you have provided as well as your sense of the current situation. At Brookings, we write regularly about space exploration as well as digital technology. And you can find more information on our Brookings Tech Tank blog, located at brookings. Edu. Thank you very much for tuning in.

A (35:20)

Thank you for listening to TechTank, a series of roundtable discussions and interviews with technology experts and policymakers. For more conversations like this, subscribe to the podcast and sign up to receive the Tech Tank newsletter for more research and analysis from the center for Technology Innovation at Brooklyn.