Courts and Space—The Final Frontiers

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Courts and Space—The Final Frontiers"

Release Date: April 25, 2025
Host/Author: Commentary Magazine
Featuring: John Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, James B. Meigs

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I. Introduction

The episode "Courts and Space—The Final Frontiers" delves into the intricate intersections between environmental activism, legal battles, and space policy. Hosted by John Podhoretz and Abe Greenwald, with contributions from Tech Commentary columnist James B. Meigs, the discussion spans from high-stakes lawsuits against prominent environmental organizations to critiques of NASA’s space endeavors.

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II. The Greenpeace Lawsuit and Environmental Activism

A significant portion of the episode centers on the 2017 lawsuit filed by Energy Transfer against Greenpeace concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline project. The lawsuit alleged that Greenpeace financed radical elements within the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests, leading to disruptions such as trespassing and equipment sabotage.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (03:36): "The various charges... included civil conspiracy and defamation, accusing Greenpeace of funding the most radical elements in the months-long protest."

The court's judgment against Greenpeace was monumental, risking the organization's financial stability and sparking debates about the limits of activism within legal frameworks.

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III. The Evolution and Impact of 'Direct Action'

Podhoretz and Greenwald explore the concept of "direct action," highlighting its transformation over decades. From early environmental sabotage like Earth First's tree-spiking to modern-day protests that often border on illegality, the discussion underscores a shift towards more confrontational tactics.

Notable Quote:

Abe Greenwald (06:51): "With the change on the left really beginning in 2015... this notion that it was time to go beyond respecting the niceties of the law to first principles."

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IV. The Convergence of Activist Groups and Methods

The conversation touches on how various activist groups, regardless of their specific causes, have adopted similar disruptive methods. Whether it's environmentalists, pro-Palestinian activists, or other leftist groups, the tactics of blocking infrastructure and provoking confrontations have become commonplace.

Notable Quote:

James B. Meigs (21:46): "It's interesting that all the activists... their methods now have blended."

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V. Private Industry's Legal Pushback

Energy Transfer's lawsuit against Greenpeace is portrayed as a potential turning point for private industries facing activist opposition. By holding Greenpeace accountable, Energy Transfer aims to set a precedent that deters similar actions against corporations.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (13:21): "Energy Transfer... says, 'We have a fiduciary responsibility to our stockholders.'"

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VI. Critique of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)

Transitioning to space policy, the discussion critiques NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) as an expensive and inefficient program. With costs soaring over $4 billion per launch against NASA’s $25 billion annual budget, Podhoretz argues for dismantling the SLS in favor of partnering with private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (30:35): "It's so expensive that there's real doubt about how much this thing can do. NASA's inspector general estimates... $4 billion each time it's launched."

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VII. The Rise of Private Space Companies

Highlighting the success of SpaceX, the episode contrasts private sector agility with NASA’s bureaucratic stagnation. SpaceX’s frequent and cost-effective launches demonstrate the potential benefits of a public-private partnership in advancing space exploration.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (43:24): "SpaceX is the world's most successful launch company... we're approaching two orders of magnitude in cost reductions with their experimental new Starship."

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VIII. China's Aggressive Space Ambitions

The podcast underscores China's rapid advancements in space, emphasizing the need for the U.S. to maintain leadership to prevent China from setting unilateral rules in space exploration.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (36:54): "China is really on the march... They have a space station in orbit and plan to land their taikonauts on the moon by 2030."

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IX. Concerns Over Elon Musk’s Influence

A discussion on Elon Musk highlights the potential risks his unpredictable behavior poses to the perception and stability of SpaceX. Podhoretz fears that political backlash against Musk could jeopardize public-private collaborations essential for future space missions.

Notable Quote:

John Podhoretz (49:06): "If everything Musk touches is considered illegitimate... Congress might push to shut down these crucial partnerships."

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X. Recommendations and Concluding Remarks

In a lighter note, Greenwald recommends the TV series "Brave New Worlds" starring Anson Mount, drawing parallels between optimistic space exploration narratives and the podcast's themes.

Notable Quote:

Abe Greenwald (58:50): "It's an optimistic vision. The classic Star Trek... an optimistic idea that we were people going to go out into space and find out what was out there."

The episode concludes with reflections on the necessity of embracing risk in space exploration and the imperative to modernize strategies to keep the U.S. at the forefront of space innovation.

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This comprehensive discussion on "Courts and Space—The Final Frontiers" offers listeners an in-depth analysis of the ongoing battles between activism and corporate interests, the future of space exploration, and the intricate dynamics shaping these arenas.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[Abe Greenwald]

Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, April 25, 2025. I am Jon Bodhoritz, the Ed of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[James B. Meigs]

Hi, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

And joining us today, our Tech Commentary columnist writing his column now, I know, is it six years?

[John Podhoretz]

I don't know if it's quite that long, but it's been a good run so far.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, it's been and good run, you know, covering things from COVID to space to environmental regs to panics to how we interact as humans with the high tech revolution. This is James B. Meigs. Jim, welcome back to the Commentary Podcast.

[John Podhoretz]

Great to be back.

[Abe Greenwald]

So Jim, you have a piece in the new issue, may issue of Commentary that the subject of which we discussed and in fact that's one of the things that encouraged us to decide to do this piece called Greenpeace Pays the Piper, which I think is an important moment in the discussion of the intersection of environmental activism and leftist activism and government action and private industry, in part because it does not implicate Trump, the Trump administration executive orders or anything like that. This is the story of a lawsuit that began in 2017 against Greenpeace involving the laying of a fracking pipeline in the Dakotas and how the efforts to stop it at the Standing Rock, if you remember the. Right, that's, that's the name of the reservation, the effort.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. And the efforts to stop it then turning out to have been essentially ruled by a jury, by a jury of peers as being a. How would you describe it? I mean, not a conspiracy because it's not a criminal case.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it's a civil, actually the various charges that were in this civil suit by Energy Transfer, the company building the Dakota Access pipeline, included civil conspiracy, also defamation. And basically they accused Greenpeace of funding some of the most radical elements in this months long protest in which, as is so typical of these kinds of protests, you had a lot of peaceful protests. In fact, the local tribe really tried to keep it peaceful, the Sioux tribe that started it. But then you had a lot of outsiders flooding in, including some pretty rough antifa style activists. And the charge was that Greenpeace was kind of under the table, funding those people who pushed the protest to trespass, destroying equipment, blocking roads, threatening pipeline workers, things like that.

[Abe Greenwald]

So the result of the lawsuit was a colossal judgment against Greenpeace that should it stick at the dollar levels that the, that the court determined will bankrupt Greenpeace, which is, I think, the most venerable of the activist environmentalist organizations around the world and which has been intermittently involved in these extralegal activities. Famously a standoff in the. The South China Sea or the Indian Ocean or something like that with, With a French freighter that actually blew up a Greenpeace boat in the.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, yeah, this is a really. There's a great podcast called the Rest is Classified. And they, they did an episode on this. The French, I guess the French equivalent of this. Their CIA actually targeted a Greenpeace boat that was interfering with, I believe it, nuclear testing in the Pacific. And so they actually went with some scuba divers and, and set a bomb to sink it in the harbor. I mean, it was an outrageous act of. I'm on Greenpeace's side on this one. It was an outrageous act.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

And I believe at least one person was killed. It was a. It was a, it was a huge shocking.

[Abe Greenwald]

But, but, but the thing about Greenpeace is that it is an activist organization, unlike a lot of environmentalist organizations, you know, believes in kind of a little bit like by any means necessary, we need to halt these activities before they destroy the earth. A lot of American environmentalist groups use the law as it stands to do things like purchase land and therefore take it off the chessboard for development. They do things within. Drawing within the lines or using. Using the fairly using pieces of American legislation like the Endangered Species act or other things to achieve their aims, but all above board. And that what was different about this energy transfer story was that in. In line with the change on the left really beginning in 2015, I think with Ferguson, Missouri and others, this notion that it was time to go beyond respecting the niceties of the law to first principles, which is, you know, the ends justify the means. And there's going to be no way to stop this energy transfer pipeline except by scaring the hell out of energy transfer, raising the cost to an unacceptable level for them to build it. And then maybe they would just abandon it or get rid of it. And this one CEO basically said, I'm not going there. Like, this is you. You. This is not the way the world is supposed to work. You don't get to come and intimidate me out of doing something that is bay what my company is about. And B, that doesn't follow any rule of law that we can possibly discern from your activities.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, yeah, You've seen this movement for a while, what they call direct action. This is a very common phrase among the activist progressive left, meaning it's not enough to just talk about or protest something we don't like. We have to find some way to stop it, to put our bodies on the gears of the machinery. And, and they'll often say non violent direct action. But when you dig into what they mean by direct action, they mean things like blocking highways and occupying buildings and, and fighting, often fighting police. So it, it, it often and typically does involve law breaking of some kind, sabotaging construction equipment. And this is an explicit goal that they have. And I think that what the energy transfer suit shows is it's very important to draw a distinction between legitimate legal protest. And even you could, you know, even some forms of, let's say you go somewhere where you're not supposed to be and you get arrested. But you know, when Martin Luther King did it, they got arrested peacefully. He said you had to be joyful, you know, and you weren't fighting the police as you got arrested. You were making a point that the law was unjust and, and therefore your arrest was unjust. You weren't throwing things at the police. And, or as I said on some interview I did, you know, when Rosa Parks sat on the bus, the, she sat on the bus, she didn't firebomb the bus.

[James B. Meigs]

And there's also, when you see the countless images of environmentalists squatting, sitting down on highways in front of trucks and what they're, they're basically challenging daring drivers to hit them, to run them over. That's the, that's the, it's a provocation, you know, that they're looking for. I mean, I'm sure they don't want to die or maybe some of them do, but it's, it's to the point where you can't even imagine that it hasn't happened yet, you know, that, that someone hasn't just driven right through because.

[Abe Greenwald]

So direct action has taken many forms over the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, some of the earliest forms of direct environmentalist action by the, by the, I think now now disbanded group Earth now, because I think a lot of people in Earth now went to jail.

[John Podhoretz]

Our Earth First.

[Abe Greenwald]

Earth First. Excuse me. Thank you. Yeah, it was to spike trees, like to put hammer nails into trees so that when a logger came to cut the tree down, the, the saw would hit the nail and, and you know, explode or you know, the, the tree would go up or the logger would be Injured or disabled by the, by the confrontation of metal on metal.

[John Podhoretz]

Certainly the chainsaw would be, would be wrecked. Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. And, and so that, that was, that was one early form of direct action against like an individual employee of some large company. Right. It wasn't his fault that he got hired to cut a tree down. And yet, and so if we move forward over the next 20 or 30 years, we have the adoption of these tactics outside the world of environmentalism, maybe starting with the G20 in 1999 in Vancouver, but moving forward to Ferguson. You know, the, the kinds of provocations that, as Noah Rothman detailed in commentary in 2016, where leftist protesters would be attempting to draw Trump supporters or Trump rally people into fights to, in other words, to create the conditions under which they would be attacked so that they could claim that they had been attacked. And then, of course, George Floyd, 2020 and the mostly peaceful protests that involved setting, you know, half of downtown Minneapolis on fire and the like. So we have this world in which direct action, and I haven't even mentioned the big one, which of course is the encampments, which are now back at Yale and City College and efforts to put them back up at Columbia, all of which existed as a provocation, say, we're going to do this patently illegal thing on our campus, go ahead, make our day, come arrest us, come tear us down. Or saying to Jewish students you vilely insulted yesterday in New Haven or the day before yesterday, Jewish students were prevented from walking on campus yet again. Pathways on the greens were blocked off and people started throwing water bottles at them, literal water bottles at their heads. Obviously that's a direct criminal action, that's assault. But, but the whole effort here is to create a riot like that, that they're not just throwing them, throw them, they want. The response, which I think is Abe's point, is it's not just enough to make your statement. And of course, there are many ways to peacefully protest Israel if you want to peacefully protest Israel. And there are many ways in which that peaceful protest is actually violent and involves the encroachment on the rights of other people, like to walk freely on public streets. And here we are. And this question of whether a civil society can allow or afford to allow these weird exceptions for leftist general action where they get to do whatever it is that they want to do, claiming free speech or love of environment or something like that, and all of that is supposed to be a get out of jail free card or a permission for anarchy card. And of course, the media go along and Other activists go along, and the Omni cause is furthered in this way. And that's why this suit against Greenpeace is so potentially like a pivot point, at least when it comes to private industry. Because a lot of these things we're talking, or I'm talking about now, involvement people doing this in places where the people who need to enforce the law are kind of on their side, university administrators, people like that. Right?

[John Podhoretz]

But RDAs in cities like Minneapolis and New York and Oakland.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, who don't want to prosecute. Right. Who don't want to prosecute these offenses. But here you have energy transfer, and energy transfer exists to build a pipeline. And this very rich, massive, worldwide organization has decided to try to put its finger on the scale to make this as difficult as possible. And the company says, we don't have to take this. We don't have to let you do it. We're not political actors in a state worried about you voting us out of power. We have a fiduciary responsibility to our stockholders. This is how we make money. If we don't do it, we're going to go out of business. Sorry, like, we're gonna come after you for everything you've got. And maybe we can present a precedent for others to do the same so that the atmosphere changes. In which a lot of these organizations have felt it possible to act with relative impunity.

[John Podhoretz]

I think one of the really key things here is just discovering how this all works. You know, a lot of these organizations that fund these activist groups, they do it through various back channels and grants to other organizations. So, you know, whether it's the Rockefeller Brothers, the Ford foundation, these supposedly legitimate mainstream nonprofits are. If you dig down, the money is flowing here and flowing there. And in the case of Greenpeace, they. The. The process of discovery in the civil suit showed lots of emails and texts of how they were raising the money, what they were spending it on. One of the things they spent money on was these things called lock boxes. These are big PVC tubes, like heavy duty plumbing, with a thing inside that people can latch their hands to. So one person puts their arm in one side, the other person put their arm in the other side, and they create this kind of human chain that is very difficult without injuring people, for the police to come in and cut open. Sometimes they wrap it in metal or concrete. So they sent all these lockboxes, 20 to 30 lock boxes, to the protests. And the protesters used it to attach themselves to heavy equipment and other things. So clearly it was abetting a particularly extreme form of trespassing, which, which would prevent the work from going forward, subject the police to an incredible amount of hassle. And as you say, I think sometimes there is the hope that along the way somebody will get injured as the police are trying to cut these stupid things off these protesters. And that'll be a big victory for the movement. Look how abusive these jackbooted thugs are to our peaceful, nonviolent protesters.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, Abe, I think people forget that I remember this very well because of my story of my son's. Son's bar mitzvah. My son's bar mitzvah took place on October 28, 2023. So it was, you know, two, three weeks after October 7, and it was in. We had to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn for the party on a Saturday night. And the Brooklyn Bridge was shut down that Saturday night, 221 days after October 7th, for a protest against Israel's monstrous behavior. And so it took people two hours to get to the party because the Brooklyn Bridge was two weeks, three weeks after October 7th. All over the country, people were shutting down highways, shutting down the i5, shutting down the 110 in Los Angeles and elsewhere. And the purpose of these shutdowns was not just to have mass action, it was to encourage, as has been the case with a lot of this direction, action put enormous pressure on cops. Like, one thing goes wrong and a cop gets brushed somebody's arm, brushes a young cop who is already freaked out, and he turns around and takes out a truncheon and hits somebody and then everything goes crazy and the whole thing, this didn't happen. But the anxiety level that we subject our public safety officers to, who are then in the position of not only not protecting us against this trespass, but protecting themselves against being pushed too far and therefore becoming the subject of the crime rather than the enforcer against the crime that is being committed of the trespass. Like, it's just not fair. It's like fundamentally a horrible thing to do to these people who are like, putting their lives on the line to protect public safety in the United States. Hey, it's John here. I want to talk to you about a new advertiser, one I'm very excited about because of my experience with their product, Brooklyn Betting. So Brooklyn Betting, this is true of a lot of podcast advertisers. Want you to sample their wares. And so they sent me a mattress. The mattress that I needed in my house was one for my 14 year old son who had been complaining that his mattress was uncomfortable and that he was having trouble sleeping. We got him the Sedona Elite from Brooklyn Bedding slept on it the first night, got up the next morning, said, this is the best thing I've ever slept on. And then a couple of nights later, he went off for a sleepover and I slept in his bed to sample the wares. And let me tell you, this is one quality comfortable mattress. And shouldn't be surprised by that because Brooklyn Bedding has been around for over 25 years, known for its top of the line comfort and quality without the luxury price tag. It's got different firmness, options, heights, dimensions, including non traditional sizes. They're designed and custom made by the best master craftsmen in the industry with free shipping in the US from their factory in Arizona. Free of fiberglass, by the way, which can be harmful to your health. Unlike other mattress brands, they ensure their entire facility is free of fiberglass. Sleep on your Brooklyn Bedding mattress for up to 120 nights. And if you don't love it as much as my son and I do, they'll help you return it or pick out a different one. So go to BrooklynBedding.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. You have to use my promo code on the very last page of checkout to get this discount. That's Brooklyn betting.com and use my promo code commentary for 30% off site wide. Brooklyn betting.com promo code commentary.

[James B. Meigs]

And it comes at a time where cops are already sort of wary of stepping in. Post, post. George Floyd, the, the pro Hamas protesters circulated pamphlets about how to draw cops in to a confrontation that would, you know, that would put them in jeopardy. It's interesting that all the activists, various activist groups, the environmentalists, pro Palestinians, whatever it is, they all their methods now have blended, right? Like they're all, they're all blocking highways and bridges and doing that. And their causes have completely blended as well, right? So you have Greta Thunberg protesting Israel, you know, out there with her pro Hamas garbage. So I'm curious though, if this carries over to the paying the piper part, right? Like, does Greenpeace paying the piper? What is the. Is, is there a sort of a broader effect here for the other groups because they are so intertwined? You know, is this, is this, does this send that message or does it not? Or is that sort of considered a separate, you know, are they together up to that point?

[Abe Greenwald]

Omni cause is the death star, right? And Greenpeace is The is the Greenpeace, the spot where if you shoot the little missile in from Luke's, from Luke's plane, you can take out the entire Death Star. Right? Because there's this flaw in the organization. There's this one spot and flaw where if they are in fact all connected and you, you know, and you, you, you hit one part of the Omni cause, you start a chain reaction that destroys the rest of the Omni.

[John Podhoretz]

Cause if only it were that simple. It's probably more like the Borg, you know, a loosely connected, a network of semi autonomous actors who, who are all unified in kind of a common cause and a. But you could segment off different parts and they would continue to function. So I don't think we're. This is not going to be a one shot thing. I think where what we might see coming out of this is a growing awareness that the invulnerability that these groups have assumed, you know, they've assumed that the press won't pay attention, that the courts won't pay attention to, to the ways that they are quietly or sometimes secretly funding illegal activity. That invulnerability is now threatened. So that might begin to change their behavior. But it will take more cases like this. There's another one down in Atlanta going on. It's a big RICO suit against a bunch of the people who organized in a very similar fashion against this. This planned police training center they called the, was called Cop City. Stop Cop City. I followed this at the time, it was around 2020. It dragged on, on and off for, for a couple of years and still going on in some ways where they used bolt cutters to break into the construction site. They claimed that not only were they, were they fighting against police violence because this was going to be a training center to train police to, you know, do militaristic policing, but they were also saving this so called forest on this, this land that was owned by the, by the city or the state and had been, it had been a prison facility in the past. So they pull all these causes together. While I was doing a big article about Biden's environmental justice policies. One of the groups that they were funding is a climate group based in Oakland. And on their website they have a big page devoted to Stop Cop City. And they had this charming little illustration of these kind of childlike activists who, who are gonna save the planet and save the forest. And one of them is holding a pair of bolt cutters. So here's this group getting federal funding supposedly for environmental causes, and they're celebrating the trespass and the violence that was taking place and encouraging people to help fund these activists who were attacking police and attacking the, you know, burning construction equipment at this. At this facility. And so, you know, I think that that RICO suit may, like the Greenpeace suit, drag a lot of information out. Who paid for these people to come and camp out in the woods for months on end? You know, who. Who. Who helped elevate this small local issue in the outskirts of Atlanta into a national, even an international cause? How do you know? How do these networks work? If it. To the extent that it's speech, that's fine. You know, people can decide and publicize something. They're opp. But to the extent that it funded illegal activity, I think it really deserves to have a little daylight shown on it.

[Abe Greenwald]

So we. We find ourselves in the middle of this giant rolling controversy involving the deportation on the plane to. Of the Venezuelans to El Salvador, including one, you know, the, of course, wrongly detained, wrongly flown out man, Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran national who had been. Who had been provided with some form of asylum by an immigration court in 2019, meaning that from El Salvador, on the grounds that he had a reasonable fear of persecution in El Salvador, meaning that he could have been deported to any country on earth except El Salvador, and they ended up putting him on the plane to El Salvador. We now have this incredible set of confusions here, which is, are these people getting deported because of their views or because of this? And they did. What about due process? There are important constitutional issues like due process, and then there are issues that are simple, like actual matters of law, which is that if you find. If. If an elite, if someone here in the United States illegally is illegal and has and has not entered in any way, shape or form into our system, by which I mean has any legal standing because they filed a suit or they filed an asylum claim or something like that. It is the policy of the government of the United States that that person does not exist within the borders of the United States and can be removed. And there they. There is no due process per se, because as a matter of law, they are not present in the United States except as illegal actors. And therefore, 15 million illegal aliens don't get due process unless. Unless they have sought some form of legal standing in the United States. If. If they have somehow put in a piece of paper that says they want to be here and. And then they've been released into the. You know, into the country, as happened with millions of people under Biden that standing may be a little different, but like basically the 230 people aside from Abrego Garcia who are on that plane do not have due process rights as we understand them. This is not a huge, we do not have a human right to due process. By the way, like that Declaration of Independence doesn't say you have, you have a, you have a human right to due process under law. We understand due process under law being the centerpiece of the rule of law, but in all of these cases, what you have is an assertion of rights and the assertion of rights that all Americans take for granted. That may not apply to some people. And you have a right to assembly, right. That's First Amendment. You have a right to speech. That's the First Amendment. You don't have the right to close a bridge down. That's not the First Amendment. You know, you don't have a right to spike a tree because you care about the environment. That's not speech and that's not assembly. That is vandalism. That is, you know, that is, that is the depredation of somebody else's property. And common law says you can go to jail for stuff like that. JIM Moving, moving on from this to one of your other favorite topics, which is space. Since we talked about the Borg and we talked about Star wars, now we can talk about actual space. So you have just completed a remarkable paper for the Manhattan Institute called US Space Policy the Next Frontier. And this is a very interesting public private question that you raise here, which is that we have, we need to be thinking very seriously about the next 40, 50 years in space, particularly with China as our leading adversary, and that our governmental policy in space is very confused. And some of it is innovative and some of it is incredibly high bound, and some of it is showing the way in the future, and some of it is based on bad old ideas that we need to discard. And so you lay out in this paper a particular project of, of NASA's that is, in your view, a huge hamper to getting on with what we need to be doing outside our outer atmosphere and with the moon and with space exploration in general. Can you tell us what that is and how it needs to be stopped?

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, that's a very good summary, John. So for more than a decade, in some ways, for 20 years in different forms, NASA's been working on a giant Apollo style rocket intended to facilitate missions beyond low Earth orbit. We really haven't been beyond low Earth orbit with astronauts since the days of Apollo. And it's really something if you look back to, you know, your and my childhoods and we assume that, you know, by the by, by 2010 we'd have hotels on the moon and you know, and be sending deep. Look at the movie 2001 if you want to see a look, an image of, of what we thought the future was going to look like around, you know, the 1970s.

[Abe Greenwald]

So yeah, 2001 posits a manned mission to a moon of Jupiter.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right. That's right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Is this monolith on this moon of.

[John Podhoretz]

Jupiter like the monolith is on our moon? Actually, the monolith is on our moon.

[Abe Greenwald]

But they are going to Jupiter.

[John Podhoretz]

They're like, correct, correct. So, you know, but you know, you can take a Pan Am kind of space shuttle to the moon as a commercial flight. And those assumptions weren't crazy, but none of that happened. So today we are trying to get back to the moon and then to Mars. And they've been building this giant rocket called the space launch system SLS. And it's just a huge boondoggle. They've spent about 44 mil, excuse me, 44 billion on this SLS rocket, plus this Orion capsule, which is basically an oversized version of the Apollo capsule that, that carried our astronauts to the moon. And it's only flown once without any people on board. It's supposed to fly its second flight with astronauts on board next year to just make an orbit around the moon and come back to Earth. And then ultimately after that, hopefully a mission that will land Americans or a crew, an American and Canadian crew on the moon for the OR will carry a crew to the moon, two of whom will go down to the surface of the moon. And, and so that's very exciting. The problem is it's so expensive that there's real doubts about how much this thing can do. The NASA's inspector general estimates this giant rocket will cost over $4 billion each time it's launched. NASA's entire annual budget is only about $25 billion. So, you know, you can just do the math and you can see they can't afford to fly this thing more than maybe once a year. And even then, it's an incredible waste of money. While NASA's been working on this project, they've also had this very innovative program called Commercial Crew that was started way back before the space shuttle retired. In the aughts, there were people at NASA who were fed up with this slow moving way of building space hardware. And they said, why don't we just charter rockets built by private industry? The way that a sports team or rock band might charter an airplane. And it was a really innovative program. They put out some seed money to Boeing and SpaceX and other companies to develop the spacecraft that could carry first cargo and then astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX was the overwhelming kind of winner in that competition. And they've been flying cargo and astronauts to our space station routinely now for years, saving billions and billions of dollars in the process. It's so much more cost effective for NASA to hire these services instead of building and owning its own rockets. So my recommendation in this Manhattan Institute paper is let's just get NASA out of the rocket building business. Let's shut down this SLS program and continue working with SpaceX primarily right now, but also Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and other private companies not just to build rockets and space vehicles, but to build space probes and all kinds of other things. The good news is there's a lot of people at NASA who want to do this. They've been fighting to do this for years. A lot of the problem is that Congress doesn't want them to do it. When the space shuttle shut down, there were all these workers and NASA programs involved in running that very inefficient program. So the senators from the states and representatives from those states really insisted that NASA build another rocket. In fact, they even demanded that it use components from the space stations, you know, including those boosters, remember the booster that blew up, you know, that, that failed and, you know, and caused the Challenger disaster. They had to use that. They had to use the same liquid fuel rocket engines and other components from the shuttle in order to keep those workforces working. It's totally backwards way to build anything. It's mandated by Congress. So one of the challenges here is how do we convince Congress to stop insisting on what in one article I've written, I call a flying pork barrel, this SLS rocket, and let NASA focus on what it does best, which is research and mission planning and running missions, but hiring the hardware and working in public private partnerships with these innovative private space companies to do the work of building and flying these vehicles.

[James B. Meigs]

And meanwhile, Jim, as you point out, so NASA is hampered by this boondoggle and by various restrictions and whatever sclerotic systems it has in place. China is not worrying about such things. Right?

[John Podhoretz]

China is really on the march, you know, in space in all kinds of ways. They have a space station in orbit. They say they're going to land their taikonauts on the moon by 2030. They've taken a very aggressive approach to space. A decade and a half ago, they did the most destructive anti satellite missile test in history, scattering debris all across low Earth orbit. They don't care anybody else thinks, and it really is a threat. And I think this is an area where US Leadership is really important to establish a kind of, you know, a standard of peaceful and careful exploration space that doesn't litter orbit with dangerous debris and doesn't allow people to militarize space. You know, there's a number of space treaties that we've helped pioneer, including under, under the first, the first Trump administration that encourage international peaceful cooperation in space. And in the first Trump administration, and we attracted a lot of other countries to want to work with us on our moon program and other things as part of this peaceful effort. I worry a lot of that is threatened by this more bellicose, chaotic second term, which seems to be sending the message that we not only do we not need our allies, we don't really even like them very much. So we'll see how that moves forward. But allowing China to get to the moon first, Texas Representative Bruce Babin says if China gets to the moon before we do, they're going to write the rules of the road up there. There's some, as we've discussed, there are a couple of places on the moon, especially the South Pole, that are especially attractive to setting up lunar bases. We don't want China to get up there and just dominate that terrain. That stuff has to be, I think, shared kind of the way we share Antarctica for research for now. And so it's important that we do establish our right. It's kind of like the right to navigate in the oceans. We need to establish our right to navigate in space. And it doesn't mean China can't go there too. But we should be setting the rules of the road, I think, according to the traditions of free navigation that we've established so far. Even in working with the Soviet Union and the Russians, you do say, and.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think it's important to point out that you're not calling for a sort of doge, like immediate cessation of this project. You're saying we're building it, it's been built, enormous amounts of money been lost. Use it for two missions. If it's going to be active next year, let it fly twice and then retire it, because we're not, we're not going to go through this whole thing with nothing to show for it. And there are missions planned and those missions should go forward. So you're not sort of like coming in and saying, all right, let's just take a wrecking ball to this, to this giant, giant rocket.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, I mean, I would be happy.

[Abe Greenwald]

To take a wrecking ball.

[John Podhoretz]

I know, I mean, I mean, you know, you're saying realistically. But realistically, the smart thing to do.

[Abe Greenwald]

Is to let it fly a couple of times and then move on from this misbegotten approach, that, that, that was a, was a terrible mistake. I am reminded, not because I have to go to my insane pop culture brain, that There was a TV movie and TV series in the late 1970s called Salvage with Andy Griffith, who played a junkyard, a very successful junkyard dealer in Alabama or Georgia or something like that, who gets his hand on some discarded Apollo stuff at his junkyard and decides to build a private rocket to go into space. And this is, I think 1979, it was turned into a TV series for a season or something like that. And I've long thought that somewhere in the American consciousness, just as Star Trek created the generation of aerospace workers and inspired Bezos and Musk and people like that to want to go to space, that show got into the heads of people my age or, you know, 10 years younger if they were 10 or 11 years old. And we're like, well, why can't I fly a rock? I could build a kit car. Why can't I build a rocket to go to the moon? And it is kind of the question that you raise in all of the stuff that you write here about space, which is why did we go this huge government way? Obviously if you're Kennedy, you're going to say, we need to go to the moon in eight years. Which is what he did. You can't then say, okay, we're going to go to the moon in eight years. You all figure it out out there. We'll just, we're standing right behind you. That wasn't, that wasn't going to work. It's certainly not in America in the early 1960s. But we took this terrible, you know, top down statistics approach to this incredible innovation, as though that's the worst possible way to innovate is to involve 535 members of Congress and an entire bureaucracy to do something fleet, clever, innovative, move fast, break things, try new things, all of that. And, and this is an opportunity to put, to close the door on that era. The last of the top down. The government is going to build this thing, build it, run it, you know, pay for it, do things that aren't realistically sound for political reasons and go along with it.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, you know, it worked for Apollo. It really hasn't worked ever since. The space shuttle was really a big disaster, not only because we had two horrific fatal accidents, but because it was just too expensive to fly frequently. So we've really, for 50 years failed to build a reliable, affordable space transportation system. Meanwhile, SpaceX is the world's most successful launch company. They're bringing prices down by not just an order of magnitude, but we're approaching two orders of magnitude in cost reductions with their experimental new starship that they're testing. And we expect to be the backbone of future moon and Mars missions. So, you know, rapid progress is possible. And when we look at what they're doing with starship and really what they've done with the Falcon 9, which is their workhorse rocket in use really every few days right now they're launching a couple of missions a week at least. So if we look at that, we can see just how slow and backward looking NASA's efforts have been. And again, I want to stress there are many people at NASA who didn't want it this way. They were pushed into it by Congress and they were trying to do something more innovative. NASA was actually proposing shutting down the SLS program under Obama and trying to, trying to get that, that shut down so they could rely on these private vendors. So now we have an opportunity. Trump has nominated this guy, Jared Isaacman, who's really interesting and well liked entrepreneur who has self funded two really ambitious private space flights on, on SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, including one that involved the civilian spacewalk and a daring novel orbit over the poles. Real space exploration, just privately funded. This is, this is way beyond space tourism. And so he's, he's had his confirmation hearing. He did pretty well in the confirmation hearing. I've got a piece up at City Journal if you want to read about that. He got a lot of pushback from Congress, from senators who want to make sure that the current program, which is called Artemis, isn't cut and that a lot of them started by listing all the NASA programs in their states, you know, and like can you promise me that this division of that division will never get shut down? And he, he, he danced around those questions very well I thought and, but he's almost certain to be confirmed. That confirmation may happen as early as this, as next week, but he will have his work cut out for him not only managing this massive transition at NASA, he's got to manage Congress and sort of sell them on retiring SLs, but he also has to manage the White House, which, as we've all seen, has this tendency to sort of cut first, ask questions later. They've already made a proposal to make some, some very broad and sweeping cuts to NASA's science program. These are the unmanned space telescopes and Mars rovers and other science missions. Before Isaacman even gets in there to sort of manage the process, they're making his life more difficult by announcing all these sweeping cuts, some of which might be good. And we could cut some of these programs carefully. You know, I mean, there have been budget overruns in those programs too, which are outrageous. But, but, you know, give the guy a chance to use his entrepreneurial managerial experience to, to, to manage this and don't just hand him a massive problem that he's got to cope with the minute he takes that position.

[Abe Greenwald]

You've written two or three pieces I, I can't even remember now because you've written, I don't know, 60 pieces for, for commentary or something like that, but you've written two or three pieces about, about Elon Musk and the, and the incredible complexities posed by Elon Musk, his personality, his approach to things. And I'm wondering, given your extraordinary respect for SpaceX and what it's done and the kinds of things that it can do in the future, whether Musk's behavior over the last three months and turning himself into an incredible lightning rod figure of controversy and somebody toward whom one of the two major political parties has now become a kind of tar baby and also a fundraising juggernaut, as the enemy of everything that's good and true and beautiful. And we know that Tesla, among other things, has lost vast amounts of value in the stock market over the last three months. Whether Musk's behavior at Doge and with Trump and on X and this kind of unrestrained ID person that he is, libertarian ID in some fashion, whether that is going to do real damage to the, to the larger cause, that is, what will, what will make him a legend in history if he can in fact, fulfill a lot of the ambitions that are properly what he should be engaged with, as opposed to, like whether or not there should be 200 employees cut from this department or 400 employees cut from this department.

[John Podhoretz]

I worry about this a lot. And yeah, a couple years ago I wrote a piece about Musk's combination of engineering and entrepreneurial brilliance and personal kind of erratic behavior and impulsive behavior and worried about the implications of it. I'm very worried about it for space policy. I get into it a little bit in My report, because for a long time US Space policy has been an area of certain bipartisan agreement. I mean, Trump won a lot of bipartisan support for his space policies, including starting the U.S. space Force, moving military operations under its own command, that, that were really quite popular and have endured. But now if everything Musk touches is considered illegitimate, and if NASA becomes seen as sort of a fiefdom of Elon Musk, then you can imagine a future Congress, you know, after the midterms, there's certainly a future Democratic presidential administration is saying, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna shut down everything Musk built because it's all illegitimate. And, and why government subsidizing this guy with all this money? The fact is, the money that NASA pays SpaceX is such a good deal for taxpayers, it's ridiculous. But it's hard to give that message when the guy whose name is associated with it is kind of almost deliberately and with great enjoyment just trying to piss off everybody that doesn't already back him. So we've added this political, intense political valence to space policy where it didn't really exist before. That's going to make things a lot harder in the future. I worry. And, and I think, you know, you already see people like Rachel Maddow saying the government just has to end all these contracts with all of Musk's companies. Well, that's Rachel Maddow, but, you know, but you might, you're going to see that opinion spread to others. And, and, and I think that, that this could really be a bad thing for US Space policy. Because in many ways, for now, for the moment, SpaceX is just about the only game in town for heavy duty launch services to low Earth orbit. And for some of the services we need to get to the moon. Blue Origin's coming along. The United Launch alliance has some capabilities, there's other companies coming up, but Nobody can touch SpaceX for just freak frequency of launches and reliability at this point. So if, if all of a sudden we, we, we back away from SpaceX means we back away from a manned space program.

[James B. Meigs]

And Musk has no room for error now with this stuff either.

[John Podhoretz]

Right?

[James B. Meigs]

I mean, if, you know, the second, God forbid, something goes wrong, then it's really a pile on. It's like, you know, the, the crazy guy sleeping on the floor at the White House.

[Abe Greenwald]

Wow.

[James B. Meigs]

Who would have thought that, you know, his, his rocket would blow up or whatever. Of course, we got to get this guy out of serious things, you know.

[John Podhoretz]

That'S such a good point, Abe. And actually There are people, including the, the pioneering blogger Rand Simberg, who's also a really good space analyst, who wrote for me at Popular Mechanics and who I always talk to on these issues that, you know, who argue that we've tried to make the space where I'm too safe. And we have to accept more risk. We have to accept that, you know, it's possible to send a mission to the moon and they don't come back. You know, if you look at the history of exploration and humanity, these explorers were willing to take on enormous risk. If we're really serious about moving quickly, we have to understand that there are people who are willing to do that. And, and that's, I'm not saying we want to be reckless, but we, but we need to tolerate a certain amount of risk. And you see that SpaceX, in developing their technology, they're willing to launch these starships and watch them blow up, you know, and get the data and learn from it, tweak it, and then just launch it again two months later, rather than saying, oh, we had a problem, we need to stop for two years and work on it till we're positive the next launch is going to go flawlessly, by, by moving quickly and being tolerating and learning from failure. That's how they've advanced so fast. But if that happens in a NASA mission, you're absolutely right. The blowback from that would be intense.

[Abe Greenwald]

Look, the Apollo program, which I think, you know, I believe the dollar amount in current dollars for the Apollo program, which lasted for 13 years, approaches a trillion dollars. It was something like $2,000 per American in $1970 for US to get to the moon. And one of the reasons that the program died the minute started to die, and then died like five years later the minute we got to the moon, which is that that was the goal. The goal was achieved. And then convincing people that we needed to keep going back to the moon to dig up more rocks was like, well, wait a minute, we just spent this colossal amount of money. We did what we said we were going to do. Tell me what we're doing now. And it's like, well, we're just going to keep going back there. And the entire national consensus toward that unbelievably expensive program just fell completely apart. And there the risk stuff was people were willing to, like, that was viewed as a great sacrifice. When, you know, when Apollo 8, you know, when the astronauts of Apollo 8 died on the launch and, you know, terrible things happened and they were heroes, sort of like military heroes who died for the country. But if you're going to spend that kind of money, taxpayer dollars on Challenger or whatever, the demand for perfection sort of goes along with the national expenditure. It's like a national humiliation. If the Challenger blows up and it turns out it was because of a piece of plastic that was wrongly, that wasn't properly tested or something like that. There is no margin for, if it's private, the risk is taken on by investors, by personnel who are paid for this, and by the risk of becoming, by going broke. Right. I mean, if you have SpaceX and SpaceX goes bad, SpaceX goes out of business and everybody loses their shirts and everything goes haywire and nothing happens. That's the cost of, you know, a private enterprise that is viewed as unreliable, unstable or unsafe or unworkable. And that's where we need that. You know, it's like the assumption of risk. Ran Sandberg's point. There is no assumption of risk if the federal government is paying for it. You're paying for 100% outcome. But, you know, we're not implicated in whether or not SpaceX fails or succeeds. It's one of the reasons that Musk can be worth a hundred billion dollars, in part because of SpaceX or whatever he's worth. It's because he's assumed the risk or he's talked people into giving him money to assume the risk. And all in all, that is a much safer and easier way to innovate because every single American taxpayer isn't footing the bill. Right?

[John Podhoretz]

Absolutely. And even when we're talking about missions where it's. The federal government is sponsoring the mission and paying for the mission, but we're relying on private vendors like SpaceX to, to launch the rocket and in cases with many other companies that NASA is working with to build the lunar rover, to build the probe, to build the space telescope. Imagine a world where all of that cost a tenth or a hundredth of what it costs today. So instead of sending one like James Webb Telescope, that's cost billions and has been worked on for a decade, you can launch one every month and, you know, little ones, different ones, arrays. Instead of one, you know, perseverance rover on Mars, you could send up 40 and let them roam around and two or three of them break. It's not a big deal if, if a couple of rockets don't make it. It's not a big deal. When we're talking about human missions, of course, the stakes are a lot higher. But if humans were going to the moon every couple of weeks, sooner or later, if something goes wrong, people are going to understand that better than if you wait years and years and years and years for the one mission and then that goes wrong, then that becomes a crisis. And I'm not belittling the value of human life, but I do think we need to recognize that, that space exploration is dangerous, it will continue to be dangerous, and there are people willing to face those dangers, but we need to be doing it much more frequently in order to have that kind of calculation make sense to people.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, so with that in mind, I'm going to make the last commentary recommends of the week. And I'm put in mind of this because we started playing science fiction and TV games and because I've been watching, as I mentioned last week, an old show on Paramount plus that was on AMC called Hell on Wheels, which is about the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad at the end of the Civil War. And this traveling town that goes along, tent city, basically, that goes along as they are building the Union Pacific Railroad. And the show starts in Kansas as they are mapping the route through the Rockies to get to the ocean. And this haphazard, classical, sort of Deadwood style or, you know, this community of barely civilized people, Civil War veterans. You know, there are freed slaves, there are shanty Irish, there's a couple of, you know, depraving capitalists, hookers. And our hero is this former, this Confederate soldier who had freed his own slaves, came home to find his wife had been raped and hanged and his son burned on his plantation. And he is, his mission is to go find the Yankees who did this and kill them. And he's been going around America finding the people who did this to his wife and ends up up in this town, Hell on Wheels, as it's called because he is actually on the hunt for his wife's murderers. And then he becomes the foreman of the, of the project and all sorts of hijinks ensue. And it's a great show. It's very, it's very brutal, but it's, it's a great show. And its star is a guy named Anson Mount. And in another world, Anson Mount would be Clark Gable or something like that. He's incredibly good looking, he's incredibly charismatic, he's incredibly focused. And the reason I'm bringing this up is that he is 10 years after this, after the, or five, 10 years after the Hell on Wheels went off the air. I'm still in the second season. I ran for four or five seasons and I don't even remember having heard of it. At the time when it ran on amc. He is the star of the latest Star Trek show on Paramount plus which is called Brave New Worlds. And he is fantastic on brave new worlds. 10 years older, he's playing as a 50 year old guy. And the story of Brave New Worlds is. It's the mission just before Star Trek begins. So he is the captain, Captain pike that you see in the pilot episode of Star Trek who has been through this terrible. And is like crippled, you know, sort of like ruined person in this weird wheelchair. Wheelchair get up. Whom they, they go and try to save from these aliens. And the setup of Brave New Worlds is that he has had some weird temporal experience, Christopher pike, in which he learns of his fate. He knows that five years down the road he is going to end up in that chair, having been had, his body destroyed. And he nonetheless is running this mission on the Enterprise. How does he do it? He encounters the young Kirk. There's this whole crew, young crew and it's light and it's funny and it's clever. It's had two seasons, it's gonna have a third starting in June. It's the best as far as I can a. It's the best Star Trek series since forever. And this guy, Anson Mount is like, like I say, in a different age, like Timothy Oliphant or Walton Goggins or something like that. You could see how these guys in the classical movie era would have been, you know, Robert Mitchum or you know, or as I say or Gable or one of those kinds of figures, charismatic, good looking, less is more Steve McQueen types. And so I'm recommending Brave New Worlds again, optimistic vision. The classic Star Trek. How Star Trek did this to create this world of people who wanted to go do aerospace is that it was this fundamentally optimistic idea that we were people going to go out into space and find out what was out there. Because we had hopes that everybody was going to love peace and freedom and we could learn from them and they could learn from us. And of course, almost all science fiction became dystopic after this and is kind of a bummer. And this is back to kind of good cheer. So that's Brave New Worlds on Paramount with Anson Mount. Go seek Anson Mount out. He's something. Jim Meggs, thank you so much as ever for your enlightening and an interesting commentary on all things commentary.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it's always a pleasure, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay. And for Jim and Abe, I'm John Pothor, it's Keep the Caliber.