What does the US election mean for NASA?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What does the recent US presidential election mean for NASA? We'll get into it this week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Every four years, the United States of America holds a presidential election. These elections impact the priorities and funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA is the largest space agency on our planet, and through its international partnerships, the agency helps shape space exploration around the world.

This week, we'll detail what we know about the upcoming Trump administration's plans for human spaceflight and The Science Mission Directorate. I'll be joined by Casey Dreier, our chief of space policy here at The Planetary Society. I am always grateful for his insights into the complex world of US space policy. But before we get too deep into the details, we'll look at one example of the ways that NASA's budget impacts its workforce. Delays and cuts to the NASA budget have led to another round of layoffs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Jack Corelli, our director of government relations, will explain why it happened and what the residents of the United States can do to help stave off future NASA layoffs. Then, Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, joins me for What's Up? And a new random space fact.

If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is near and dear to my heart. I've had a lot of friends that have worked there over the years and it's really near to our headquarters in Pasadena, California. Some of my favorite space missions have come out that facility, but on November 12th, 2024, JPL sent their employees a memo announcing that they were going to lay off about 5% of the staff that week. That's about 325 people. The affected staff members were told the following day whether or not they would be staying at that NASA facility. This round of layoffs comes on the heels of a more significant layoff that happened in February of this year when 530 employees and 40 contractors were let go from their jobs. For a look at why this happened and what it means for other NASA facilities, we're joined by Jack Corelli, our director of government relations, calling in from the US capital. Hey, Jack.

Jack Corelli: Hey, Sarah. How's it going?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, not the greatest considering that we're talking about layoffs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is right down the street from my home. And not to get personal about it, but so many of the people that I know and love have been laid off from JPL in the last year, and it's been really heartbreaking to see.

Jack Corelli: Yeah. It's been a significant downturn for the lab and really NASA centers all across country, but JPL obviously had the major layoffs earlier this year, 530 civil servants as well as many hundreds more contractors. And then just, yeah, this past week had another round of layoffs, which I think takes us just under 1,000 lab employees laid off by the end of this year.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So, we spoke a few months ago about what caused the previous layoff, and it was in large part due to delays in passing the budget for NASA. But what's the scenario now? What led to this layoff?

Jack Corelli: Well, if you listened to that episode recently, this is going to sound like a refrain. It is the same situation, very similar situation at the very least as what we have faced all year long and really the past couple of years for NASA and space science in general. It is not a great time. Currently, as I'm sitting here, there is not a funding deal on the books for the full of fiscal year 2025, which started last month, for those calendar nerds out there, that starts October 1. And so, we are now almost two months without an actual budget. We're running on what is called a continuing resolution, which just basically keeps funding at the exact same level as the previous fiscal year. So, we're operating functionally at FY 2024 levels. And what that has done and what we've seen at JPL, and again, like I said at other NASA centers as well and their partners, is it makes it difficult for these places to plan ahead, to know where they're going to need workforce in the coming years.

One of the great parts about working in the space industry is that these are long-term projects. Right? They don't just take place over the course of one fiscal year. These are multi-year, in some cases, maybe even up to a decade of investment. And so, that is some job stability if you're working on one of those projects. But as funding dries up, so do those long-term plans. And so, JPL, unfortunately, did not have the resources in the near-term future to keep employing those 350 employees. And again, that's on top of that 530 that were laid off earlier this year as well.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Altogether, that's a huge loss for this NASA center. Is this something that we're seeing at other NASA centers across the country or is there a reason why we're seeing it hit JPL directly right now?

Jack Corelli: So, the reason we're seeing it so publicly at JPL right now is because they are an FFRDC, a federally funded research and development center. And so, that's a little bit different than the way that other NASA centers are organized. It does give JPL the flexibility to grow and shrink its workforce. That does mean shrinking, right? In situations such as this. And it can change its workforce size in a much more fluid way than if it was entirely government employees at other NASA centers, but that doesn't mean that other NASA centers aren't changing in size.

One of the big contributing factors here is a lot of work that is done by NASA is done by contractors. So, you do have your government employees working on space missions, but they're often paired with contractor teams. And so, those contractors are also seeing their contracts terminated. So, they obviously work for L3Harris or BAE Systems, or some other major contractor for NASA, and so, they're not being fired by the government or being laid off by their host center, but their contracts are being terminated. And so, we're seeing that at more of the other centers, but we are seeing changes, workforce reduction at NASA centers and its partner organizations all across the country. So, this isn't just directly affecting JPL, it's affecting centers and partners all across the country.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, for everyone who's listening to this and wants to take action to help this, because I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that care deeply about this and want to do what they can to support the NASA workers. What would you say are the steps that people should take to try to help?

Jack Corelli: Yeah. So, I think there are two main steps. This is currently only for folks who are US residents. So, we on The Planetary Society's Action Center, so planetary.org/action, we have two actions that are live right now, if you haven't submitted letters for both of them. One of them is encouraging Congress to enact a budget that has robust funding for planetary science and space science in general. There are a lot of projects in the pipeline. It's a really exciting time to be part of the space community. There's a lot of really cool projects, Dragonfly, Mars Sample Return, the notional idea that we're going to send an orbiter and probe of the Uranus system sometime in the 2030s is really exciting. And so, we need that funding in this current fiscal year, in FY 2025, to get that work restarted and started. So, we want to make sure that our members of Congress are hearing from us.

The other action, and this is for building that long-term political support for NASA and for space science is encouraging your member of Congress to join the Planetary Science Caucus. This is the only dedicated congressional caucus for space science, and so, we are trying to build our ranks there and encouraging members of Congress. In case anyone noticed, we did have an election a couple of weeks ago, and so, the Congress is going to look a little bit different, there is a chance, about a 14% chance that your member of Congress either is retiring or did not win re-election.

So, obviously in the waning days of this 118th Congress, there's still a little bit of time left to get folks to join the caucus. But for the folks that will be returning, that 86% of people that will be returning, we want to make sure that they know that they have a home in the Planetary Science Caucus, that they care about future of exploration of our cosmos. And we're working on some great stuff with our current caucus co-chairs, Representative Don Bacon from Nebraska and Representative Judy Chu from California who represents the Jet Propulsion Lab in Congress. We're working with them to make sure that we have that robust and balanced planetary science and planetary exploration program at NASA in the future.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And I wanted to take a moment to congratulate you, Jack, because you recently won the Advocacy Association's Top 20 in 2024 award for your advocacy work. And I can just say after having you on the team, just what an unbelievable asset you've been running around DC, speaking out for these missions we love. So, congratulations on all of that. That's amazing.

Jack Corelli: Thank you, Sarah. Yeah, it was a great honor to be nominated and to be selected to be part of that illustrious group. Just really looking forward to getting back to work, right? End 2024 and look to 2025 working with our existing, returning, and new friends in Congress and the administration, to advance space science. Because you said it best, it's something we can all be proud of, right? And I think at this time we need things like space that bring people together. And so, what better time than now to get involved in advocacy?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well said. Well, sorry to bring you on the show, it's such a dour topic, but it makes me feel a lot safer and very grateful in my heart that we have people like you in Washington, D.C., speaking out on these subjects and trying to help all of the amazing people that work at these NASA facilities to keep their jobs and make these missions possible.

Jack Corelli: It's my pleasure, Sarah. Thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: If you're a resident of the United States and you want to sign the petitions that Jack mentioned in this conversation, I'm going to put a link to our Action Center on the webpage for this episode of Planetary Radio. Filling out the form takes literally two minutes. It's really light lift, but I've seen how powerful these petitions can be when we have enough people sign on.

And if you're deeply passionate about protecting NASA's workforce and the science missions that are currently underfunded or on the chopping block, one of the most effective things that you can do is to join us in our in-person Day of Action in Washington, D.C. Last year was my first time participating in person and it was a deeply rewarding experience. We gathered together for one full day of training and taught each other how to most effectively advocate for space exploration, before going to the US Congress the following day and meeting with legislators and their staff. We set up all the meetings so you don't have to do any of the planning.

These in-person conversations are among the most powerful ways to actually affect meaningful change when it comes to NASA's budget and priorities. It's those face-to-face conversations that can sometimes really change hearts and minds. It's also a really comfortable entry point if you want to learn more about how to advocate for other issues that are meaningful to you. And registration is now open for the upcoming Day of Action, which is going to be held on March 24th 2025.

This year's Day of Action is going to occur in a swiftly political landscape. On November 5th 2024, Donald Trump was elected for a second presidential term and the Republicans now have a majority in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. This is going to give the Trump administration a substantial leeway to enact its policies, including those that pertain to space exploration and NASA funding.

The Planetary Society is a nonprofit organization with members all around the world. By law and by design we are a nonpartisan organization. For almost 45 years, we've worked with the members of the US Congress and presidents to help shape the future of space exploration. In a time when the political divides in the United States are so deep it's heartening to know that space exploration still has the power to bring us together. It bridges the gaps between us and motivates everyone to pursue a deeper understanding of ourselves and our universe. The love of space and the passion for discovery is part of each and every one of us no matter where we fall on the political spectrum.

I've been asked a lot in the past weeks what a second Trump administration is going to mean for NASA. Thankfully, my excellent colleagues on The Planetary Society's political team are already working to connect with the incoming Trump administration. Our chief of space policy, Casey Dreier, published an article last week detailing what we know about the upcoming Trump administration's plans for NASA. It's called What to Watch for in a Second Trump Administration: Good for Space, Bad for NASA? I can think of no person I trust more to take an objective look at what this means for the future of American space exploration than Casey. There are new variables at play during this iteration of the Trump administration. For example, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's appointment to the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. I want to note that this is not a department of government as the name suggests, but rather an external commission tasked with identifying inefficiencies in government bureaucracy. There are also broader proposals that are going to be impacting the United States government workforce and US residents, but we limit this conversation to discussions that directly pertain to NASA. Here's Casey Dreier with an analysis of what we know so far. Hey, Casey.

Casey Dreier: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, there's a lot going on in the world of politics, and that means a lot going on for space policy. How has the last week been for you and Jack as you've been navigating trying to figure out what's going to happen next?

Casey Dreier: Well, it hasn't been the quietest week for us. There's been a lot to think about, and I think that's really the key here is that we don't have a lot of ... Beyond obviously the results of the election, that obviously we'll have a second Trump administration and at this point of recording, we now know Republican control of both houses of Congress. That gives a lot of opportunity for the next Trump administration to enact their agenda, but we don't have a detailed policy outline for what they intend to do with NASA, and we don't have an idea yet as we record this, who they intend to nominate for NASA administrator and other leadership positions.

So, I think that there's a lot to think about, but not a lot that is actionable. But we'll get into it. There's a lot we can start to look for in the coming months. So, we're going around talking to a lot of people, identifying our priorities. And the real thing for us is as an organization, we're not a partisan organization, both legally and by nature, right? We want everybody to be excited about space. So, Jack and I are preparing a lot of outreach material for ... There's a lot of new members of Congress coming in that we're going to be talking to and explaining about space exploration, planetary science.

We're going to be preparing a document for the incoming transition team for NASA and the incoming administration, proposing a number of our values for scientific exploration, human exploration at the Moon and Mars, and finding opportunities really to promote that where we can. And that's going to take a lot of energy and focus regardless of what the personnel and policies ultimately end up being, because there's a lot of exciting things to talk about. So, we have our work cut out for us, but that's why we're here. That's why Jack is based in DC. That's why we have people working full-time here at the society to spread this information and make sure we engage on your behalf as members and supporters of the organization. That's what we're aiming to do for the next few months.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And we did have four years of a previous Trump administration to give us a little bit of clue to what the priorities might be. What are some of the things that happened during his first term that might give us an indication of what's going to happen next?

Casey Dreier: So, that's the big question about how the consistency ... The first Trump term was great for space, both national security and civil space. So, Planetary Society, we're just going to shunt off most of the national security, but it's worth mentioning obviously, that the Space Force was created, that it became the sixth branch of the armed services. That was a huge development.

But for NASA, it was very good too, we got Artemis out of it. We got six space policy directives issued by the White House that asserted the Moon as the goal for human spaceflight, that did a number of efforts to streamline regulatory environment, clarify orbital debris management, encourage nuclear power in space, and a number of just broad, very good policy that I'll note was completely accepted by the incoming Biden administration.

We had very good leadership under NASA with Jim Bridenstine. I mean, obviously he was a Republican, but I think really respected NASA as an institution and did a lot of groundwork to establish a bipartisan buy-in during that first Trump administration with the Democratic Party, which succeeded. It succeeded, and it was the first human lunar exploration program that survived a presidential transition since Apollo handed off from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon. And arguably, you could even say Nixon didn't really run with Apollo. He took the landings and then wound it down by the end of his first term.

So, the first Trump administration, if we just take that and grab the Excel spreadsheet cell and extend to the right, would be very good. If they take that same approach, if they hire smart policy people who are dedicated and believe in these institutions, I think we can have a very productive space policy going forward. The question is, of course, who are those personnel going to be? We know Jim Bridenstine won't be coming back. And we'll see what type of policy approach they intend to take. And then we'll just mention here and then we'll follow up, I'm sure, later, that you have this Elon Musk factor floating around that adds layers of complexity to my mental model of how to anticipate politics going forward-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though.

Casey Dreier: ... in this next administration.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. But it was really heartening to see the Biden administration take the Artemis program and continue running with it. And I do hope that this next administration continues to support this program, given that they started it. Do you think there's any chance that they might not continue on with that program?

Casey Dreier: What do we mean by chance? I think the most likely scenario is that things move forward largely unchanged. That's the most likely, but I'd say that's maybe 60%. So, not overwhelmingly likely, not guaranteed, but most likely. What has changed, particularly with the presence of Elon Musk and then also with the broad discussion of government efficiency, cost-cutting, workforce reductions across government. There are edge cases that are now much more likely than they ever were, but going up to maybe 5% from zero. And they could be profoundly impactful on the direction of the space program, on NASA, and maybe even Artemis, right? I'd say the chances of the SLS getting canceled are higher now than they've ever been, but that still doesn't mean they're likely. And so, this is where it's hard to ... It's like if you have a very high impact but low probability event, it's still worth taking seriously, and there could be very big changes coming down the line. It's just hard to say exactly how effective that will be.

The key here, I think, is that we are in the transition period. This is the high point of any administration, right? Where they're not in power yet, but will be. And so, they can say all their goals and optimistic things before the messy business of actually implementing their policies in a Democracy occurs. And the role of Congress is going to be the big question. Artemis is facing a lot of challenges right now. And any administration coming in, and this would've been true for a Harris administration, would have to take a very close look at that program to say, "Clearly, it's kind of going off the rails. The schedules are slipping. The costs are slipping." SLS has launched once, it's been three years since that launch. We don't know if Artemis II will even launch next year given the issues with the heat shield. We have huge technical challenges in Artemis III, the gateway is way behind schedule.

So, given the fact that NASA's budget is going down and likely will continue to go down for reasons we can talk about later, there has to be some sort of attention of, "What's going on with this program? Can we get this back on track?" What does getting back on track look like? Could be any number of factors. I think the overall goal of sending humans to the Moon will continue given the fact that there's so many international partners bought into it. And also, particularly for this administration, it's maintaining technological capability and parity with Chinese ambitions, which is going to drive a lot of geopolitical strategy and motivation. And even if you want to also, we can talk about Mars, but the US is unlikely from a political level to accept an increasing Chinese presence at the Moon without matching it in some way. And that will be true no matter what.

And so, this is where, does the SLS continue? It's becoming a very salient question. There's a lot of speculation at this point, and I'd say a lot of the big, prime contractors behind the SLS program are reasonably a little leery, right? For their future going forward. I don't have any love for SLS personally. I'd also say I'm probably the most sympathetic person out there to why it exists. I occupy the very lonely hill of explaining the democratic, small D democratic, political coalition that exists to enable projects like that and being okay with it broadly.

But the SLS program has done everything it can to try to upset people. It's just been very poorly managed. It has been profoundly expensive. It is clearly no longer on the cutting edge of anything. And how long can that sustain in an environment where interest rates are relatively high and the cost of government debt is growing? And you have things like Starship lapping it multiple times on the tech development front.

So, they've done nothing to help themselves in terms of performance. They've done everything they can to undermine their own arguments for existence, but at the same time, you don't want to underestimate how profoundly solid the congressional support is for that project. As recently as October, when the Republican-led House of Representatives passed their NASA Reauthorization bill by a two-thirds majority, so not just Democrats voted for it, it was a bipartisan bill. In that NASA authorization, it contained a reaffirmation of the SLS as a whole section of it. And they'd say, "We love this program. It will continue." That was a month ago. If the Trump administration wants to cancel the SLS, they would fight with their own party on this because SLS's primary NASA centers are Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Florida, those are all represented primarily Republican states, and that would be the coalition they'd be picking at. So, there'd be question of do they want to fight their own party for this and do they have the energy to push that through?

I mean, don't forget, the Obama administration tried this in 2010 with a 60-seat Democratic majority and lost that battle to cancel Constellation fully. And that's how we ended up basically with SLS. So, not saying it can't happen, I'd say probably again, the chances are the highest it could, but doesn't mean it's likely. And I have to see again, how pliant this Congress will be for these types of things. And that will be a big question moving forward.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. The main linchpin of this confusion for me is the role of Elon Musk going forward, because just recently the Trump administration appointed Elon Musk, who's the CEO of SpaceX, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who is an entrepreneur, to be the leaders of this new initiative that they're calling the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. His influence here is going to really dictate whether or not they try to push forward with canceling the SLS, because I could see a scenario where the Republicans in Congress are fighting to keep SLS, but Elon Musk is saying we should cancel it because they know we have Starship.

Casey Dreier: Indeed. Yeah. So, let's talk about this a bit because Elon Musk as is his want, has shattered various norms in terms of aligning himself with one political party and then actively and very aggressively campaigning to get Trump re-elected. And has been seemingly closely now embraced by the Trump incoming administration and Trump himself. That is a, I mean, again, a historical, very unusual situation, but Elon Musk now has, at the moment, incredible influence and access to the president-elect, and we talked about this appointment to the Department of Government Efficiency. So, the question is, yeah, how effective will he be as an advisor and what will he use those abilities for? You already mentioned there's a massive series of conflicts of interest in terms of his own businesses that don't seem to be much of a problem for the incoming Trump administration. We'll see if that presents itself further along with Congress.

But again, let's put that all aside and let's focus a few steps at a time because I think this is one of those areas where either he could have massive historical influence or it could fizzle into nothing. And I think there's been a lot of breathless coverage about the former, but it's not as exciting to speculate that the latter may be more likely. There's a couple reasons. Let me list the case for fizzling. So, the case for fizzling is, so the Department of Government Efficiency, first, it's not a department, despite the name. Departments can be created by Congress or ended by Congress. A presidential commission has no power. What it can do is write a report. And what they seem to be saying it's going to do is it will put out some sort of set of recommendations by July 4th of 2026, which would be the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. That's two years from now, almost, right? A year and a half from now. That's, so what, 40% of the way through the next Trump administration? Those recommendations would come after the budget cycle had already started that year, and at best would not be implemented until the fiscal year '27 of the final two years of the Trump administration. So, already you're looking at just a reminder that this will be putting out a report to Congress in two years for them to then act on. That doesn't strike me as saving $2 trillion of annual spending in the US government, which is what they said the goal would be out of a $6 trillion budget. Trump himself has said Social Security, Medicare, and defense are off the table for cuts. Those three things amount to half of all federal spending, which is 6 trillion. So, you've cut off half. So, you're finding $2 trillion out of the remaining 3 trillion. You basically don't have a government anymore in terms of what's left. So, it's probably not going to happen at that level.

And then again, the recommendations they do make ultimately have to be approved by Congress, and Congress loves talking about cutting waste until the waste happens to be a key district in one congressman's set of responsibilities. And that's where we get down to this is why it's so hard to do. So, that's the case for this may end up just fizzling out. We have to just keep in mind what's actually being proposed here is a government budget cutting commission. There's been a number of those and those have all failed.

Could it happen? Yes, of course. I mean, it could. There's one rub to this, which is the Trump administration is arguing that it has to reinterpret the Impoundment Act, which was a law passed by Congress that says, when Congress appropriates money, the executive branch has to spend it. That was done in 1974 as part of this broader set of reforms of government spending. The Trump administration seems to imply that it's going to argue legally that that law is an unconstitutional declaration of control over the executive branch by the legislative branch.

This is getting a bit technical, but the point is what they're arguing is that the president should have the ability to not spend money on programs he sees fit despite what Congress says. Very few legal scholars accept that and think it's likely, even with a conservative Supreme Court. Obviously, we will find out if that passes muster. But if that changes, then that would make this more likely. If the president, particularly one who doesn't have to run for reelection, asserts that he can spend no money on the SLS anymore, even if Congress gives him $2 billion, that's the end of the SLS program. That would be a very radical change of government and the role of Congress. My guess is that that will not happen. But again, this is where we start going into these contingencies.

Republicans also won't control government forever, and they'll have a midterm election in two years. There's a good chance that we have very narrow margins of Republican control in the House and Senate, far narrower actually than Trump's first term, at least in the House. And there's a shot, I have no idea, but it's not unlikely that the Democrats could regain control of one chamber of Congress, or both, in two years.

There seems at the moment, particularly from the Department of Government Efficiency perspective and Elon Musk's perspective, zero attempt being made to form any sort of bipartisan consensus on what to cut. And that's easy to talk about now when there are preferred parties in power. But let's say you do grant the president ability to zero out funding of projects they don't like, and you develop only antagonism with the opposition party, eventually that opposition party is going to come back into power and then everything they've done will probably be undone if there isn't any kind of formal congressional action around it.

And maybe you can cause a bunch of disruption, in the ideal case, but by not making any sort of consensus, they're not thinking beyond a two to four-year timeline. And taking this all the way back to space stuff, you can't build space missions on a two to four-year timeline. This is why the first Trump administration took such a nonpartisan approach to space policy because they knew you needed to create buy-in that will endure over administrations. So, that's the big pitfall of this, and that's my argument for this may fizzle.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back with the rest of my conversation with Casey Dreier after this short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: We're talking mostly about human spaceflight initiatives right now, and there's a lot more to what NASA does than just human space exploration. There's the Science Mission Directorate, all of these scientific goals that we're trying to pursue, and that's where my main concern is. I think there's clearly an interest from the Trump administration to pursue these human spaceflight goals, and those are important, but there's so much science that we want to get done and some key missions that have really been on the rocks lately given the budget cuts for NASA. And as we heard earlier with Jack, there have been many layoffs at a lot of these NASA facilities.

And you even pointed to it earlier, there's this interesting situation where a lot of the human spaceflight facilities are located in predominantly Republican states, whereas scientific institutions tend to be more in places like California and Maryland, more Democratic states. So, what do you think the priorities might be for both of these things, the balancing of the money for the Science Mission Directorate versus human spaceflight?

Casey Dreier: I'm also very worried about NASA's science program. And I need to be careful because I want to emphasize that my worry comes from fundamental institutional preferences at this moment. And I'm not asserting that the Republican Party is against space science. They haven't been, honestly, broadly. Earth science, that's different. That's unfortunately become a partisan issue. But the rest of space science has generally done pretty well. The last Trump administration, space science went from 5.8 to $7.6 billion over four years. One of the largest, if not the largest increase in space science spending in a presidential administration.

The dichotomy that you mentioned there about the representation, that's not an intentional one, that's just kind of how it happened to fall out, right? California used to be a Republican state back when JPL was established. That's where Reagan came from, and so forth. But it just happens to have worked out that NASA's science-focused centers now are generally located in states with broadly Democratic representation in Congress, and then the same for Republican.

Again, the whole thing has shifted, has inverted. When the human spaceflight centers were established in the early days of Apollo, those were all Democratic-led Southern states in terms of Congress. Lyndon Johnson, of course, senator of Texas, and then obviously was vice president. You had John C. Stennis as a Democratic representative of Mississippi helped establish what became Stennis Space Center, and so forth. So, that's all inverted. Regardless, what the point is that the political representation ... When you're in Congress, if your party has the majority, you are much more able to influence the policy process. You can functionally, particularly in the House, mostly in the Senate when it comes to spending, you can shut out the opposition party if you want to.

That means that through no broader philosophical issues, the interests of states led by members of the party in the majority will just have more say. So, right from the bat, things are stacked against the interest of the NASA science centers merely because the parties that are representing them are broadly locked out of power. Now, it's not completely hopeless, right? And in the last Trump administration it started that way too. Appropriations tends to be more horse-trading and bipartisan because most appropriators know that they will be out of the majority themselves at some point too, so they want to maintain generally good relationships, but the things are just already stacked against it.

The other thing, human space flight, that's the national priority. It is under Biden, it was under the first Trump, and I guarantee you it will be under the next Trump administration as well. So, if you have an overall shrinking budget scenario, which I do think is likely, given, as I mentioned, the cost of debt right now, and then also the number of policies proposed by the incoming Trump administrations regarding tax cuts, are going to be very expensive and will need to be offset by spending cuts in order to manage not just debt but inflation, which I think we've all learned has been politically quite poisonous. And so, there'll be a lot of motivation for broad government cuts. Even putting aside Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, there'll just be less money probably to go around.

NASA tends to go in the same direction as overall discretionary government spending, which is what Congress controls every year. So, if that goes down, NASA probably goes down, and that's what we've seen again in the last couple of years with these spending camps. What we've also seen is because human space flight is the priority, singular, or at least Artemis, when the NASA budget has gone down, Artemis's budget has stayed the same, meaning that other departments or other mission directorates within NASA need to compensate and pay the price to maintain spending in one area, that has been NASA's science project.

And so, even under a Democratic administration, science has suffered, and I would say that is likely to be the dynamic going forward. And that becomes a very bad place to be when you're trying to start the next generation of flagship missions and all these missions, combined, again, with inflation costs, workforce costs, aerospace supply chain costs, it could be a very tough time. So, I'm worried about this, and this is where in my article ... This is I think the most likely, the most consequential, and also, ironically, the most boring compared to all the other exciting wild stuff that's happening. That's, I think, the most likely thing that we need to look out for is just this dynamic that the money for NASA will go down, it'll be preserved for human spaceflight and science will pay the price.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: There's another thing to take into account, which is that even if they try to keep a certain portion of money for the Science Mission Directorate, depending on whether or not the Trump administration enacts the tariffs that they're hoping to accomplish, that could change the price of actually building these spacecraft. And that could ultimately impact whether or not any of these programs are feasible.

Casey Dreier: Tariffs are generally inflationary. That's just an economic 101 conclusion. And so, yes, putting tariffs on things that impact the aerospace supply chain, that's another area of worry for me, I guess. And again, we don't exactly know what type of tariff situation will actually happen. This is a situation where having Elon Musk as a close advisor to Trump could actually be very good for this, particularly for aerospace. You've already heard him speak when asked about it, if tariffs have to happen, he points out you have to give time for companies to adjust their supply chains. You can't just levy them and expect change to then happen without major cost increases. So, that, I think he'll be a good tempering force for that instinct.

Obviously, there's a number of other factors that they'll be weighing in terms of what policy they're trying to achieve with this. But yeah, it's one of those things that we haven't had to worry about too much, that should now become a big source of uncertainty given that our supply chain ... I mean, we're talking about basic metals, right? These things we can't necessarily source here. And that's already seen a lot of growth over the last few years just because of inflation. And that, really, that just then has all of these downstream impacts of that even if you keep your budget the same, you're losing your buying power because things are just getting more expensive.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm wondering what JD Vance's impact as vice president is going to be considering that the vice president is always the chairman of the National Space Council.

Casey Dreier: He just hasn't talked much about it publicly. He does have, as Ohio senator, have NASA's Glenn Research Center in his state. Glenn is primarily focused on aeronautics with some space and nuclear, plutonium and other kind of power systems involved in that, radioisotopic power. But yeah, we just don't know.

And that's my other big question here. In Mike Pence, the vice president under the first Trump term, loved space, personally, and that was obvious. He took a particular interest in it and I think was very important into driving a lot of that space policy that came out of the first administration. That's very unlikely to be replicated with Vance. Even if he has a modest affinity for it, he clearly doesn't have a big focus on it. Will that be how he wants to spend his time in his portfolio? I don't know. We will see.

I think that's going to really impact how the National Space Council certainly moves forward. And National Space Council doesn't have to exist. They restarted it under his first term. Will they do it under his second term? Probably. In that situation, people who have led ... the executive secretary runs the Space Council for the vice president, but the power and influence of the Space Council comes from this inferred power granted onto it by the vice president based on their relationship and influence with the president.

So, when they're trying to align policies among the federal bureaucracy, among all these other federal agencies that have their own needs and goals and desires, the ability to say, "Hey, we represent the president's interest via this clarity from the vice president," enables them to be effective. If they don't have that, if there isn't a confidence, it's very ... I mean, this is all kind of high school cafeteria popularity stuff, which is strange enough, how a lot of government works. There's nothing formal here, right? The vice president acts as this conduit of implied influence. If they don't have that or they, themselves, don't show that much interest or focus in it, the effectiveness drops, I think, considerably. And then it becomes, how much can they work within that limited situation? So, again, that's something we'll find out.

The vice president also probably would weigh in on who the executive secretary would be of the National Space Council and who the staffing would be. And those will all be things I think that will help clarify where this is going once we start looking at personnel, right? That old phrase, personnel is policy, is very accurate. You'll see the type of individual tapped for these positions, how they're going to fight and represent those positions within their government to the president himself, or not, based on the type of individual they are. So, I think that'll add a lot of clarity when we see these individuals appointed to these positions.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, there's a lot that's up in the air. We want to make sure that we can go to space, do the science, have the human space exploration initiatives, and do so in a way that takes all of us along together.

Casey Dreier: Absolutely. And I hope this isn't coming off as dire. There's just a lot of things we don't know and a lot of change that could happen. And this is where I go back to still probably at the end of the day, the likeliest thing is that not a ton changes. It takes a lot of work to enact lasting change in our system. Congress, ultimately, it has responsibility for spending money. And with the filibuster in the Senate, changes to policy are a lot harder. You need a 60-vote threshold for policy. You don't need that for spending money.

And so, they would have to gain some level of consensus for policy changes. And that becomes a lot harder when you're proposing dramatic change. And again, given fact that so far we have not seen an inclination from the DOGE setup, or even really Trump himself, to present some sort of consensus approach to these dramatic changes to government, you see it will be difficult, and even if they managed to pull some of them off, if politics changes even in eight years, the party in power will have the ability to change things back.

And so, this is where we have to just keep a level head. And that's what I always like to hope with the society, that we are that kind of level-headed space policy position. But at the end of the day, I want to just emphasize what you said, Sarah, is that our job and my job, Jack's job, all of our jobs as members of the organization is to share the opportunity that space presents to us, to demonstrate that the public cares about the bigger values of space exploration, of space science, that we want to see missions going to the solar system, to look for exoplanets, to send humans further than they've ever gone from Earth before, that these are things that we can do. And in so doing, we as a nation derive broad benefits, not just in a practical sense, but I'd say, spiritually, to our values, to our knowledge of the cosmos and how the universe works. These are all huge opportunities.

And at the end of the day, just to really abstract things out, we have the CEO of the world's most capable space commercial company as a close advisor of a president who wants to send humans to Mars. That's a pretty exciting opportunity. I want them to use that opportunity to build a consensus for that, because there is a pitfall of when a party in power tightly associates itself with any particular position, naturally that induces opposition in the opposition party, merely by saying the opposition party needs to define itself against those in power. Right? And what I worry about happening is that Mars becomes coded as a right wing or a Republican ideal rather than a national goal. And that would be the worst outcome in some ways because that's a lot harder to fix in the long term.

And so, there's big opportunities if they want to pursue that consensus building. Space maintains that unique, I think, position in government. Space could be the area to start building a consensus around something. That first Trump administration ended up being a lot better for space than a lot of people may have initially thought. And I think there's an interest and prioritization to space that we've established itself. I think the big key moving forward, for those of us who support not just space, but NASA, and I think in my article I make that there's maybe an increasing distinction between those two. We shouldn't, depending one's politics, blindly reject any reforms to NASA.

NASA itself, as we've seen at the NASA at a Crossroads report that came out from National Academies ... I had Norm Augustine who chaired that committee, on my Space Policy Edition show last month. He pointed out there's a serious number of management challenges to NASA as an agency that they need to begin to grapple with. And we're seeing that, SLS is a version of that. The collapse of Mars Sample Return is another, I think, expression of those management failures.

And NASA needs to begin adapting to a world where it is not the monopoly in terms of the national access to space. Its own policies have been almost too successful in creating this commercial space sector. NASA needs to really understand what its role is as a public institution, what it serves to the public, and to focus on what the commercial sector can't do and deliver on that. And that I think is really, we have an opportunity, and again, the best case here to say, "We should reform aspects of NASA. We should make it work better. We should make it more efficient. Do we need as much workforce? Do we need as many NASA centers? Do we need as many programs? Are there opportunities to make it more efficient and work better?" Those are all, I think, very legitimate and very important questions that we need to ask.

And it's whether that gets sucked up into a much more hostile political environment or if it becomes an opportunity for consensus. And the society will argue for consensus and the society will argue for, again, our values, exploration, scientific inquiry, peaceful collaboration, international partnerships. Again, the act of going into space makes us better as people. And that, I think, will continue to resonate. And this is why, again, we work every day to do this and why I think the society is unique with its broad membership base and ability to bring regular people into the political process to represent these positions.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks so much for sharing all of this with us, Casey. And I'm sure as things change, we'll have you back on the show to talk about it. And for anybody who's just now getting into space politics, please listen to Casey's once a month Space Policy Edition. It happens every first Friday of the month. And every single time I listen to it, your insights open my mind to whole new things. I really appreciate that part of the show, and I hope that other people start listening because it's a gem.

Casey Dreier: Well, thank you, Sarah. It's a joy to do it, and I think it's ... Space policy, if you could not hear from how much I like to talk about it, I can literally talk about this for hours on end. And I think it's endlessly fascinating. And at the end of the day, we are talking about policies that mediate our relationship to the infinite, and that's a pretty fun area to play around in mentally and intellectually and physically, right? Because we have the ability to go probe the universe and interrogate the natural cosmos out in front of us, and just see what's there. It's really just a function of do we decide to do it or not?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, here's hoping we do more and more of it all the time. Thanks, Casey.

Casey Dreier: Anytime, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Now, let's check in with Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist here at The Planetary Society for What's Up? Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hiya, Sarah. Hiya. Hiya. How you doing?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Doing all right. Definitely talking about some heavy subjects this episode. And I know we both live in the district where JPL is, so it's been kind of a bummer watching what happened since the layoffs.

Bruce Betts: Well, yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Bruce Betts: No, that's always a bummer, to say the least.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But JPL is just such a fantastic facility and all the spacecraft that they've built throughout all the decades have been monumental in teaching us about the universe, which is why we care so much about whether or not these people are laid off, right? Because their missions continue to completely blow my mind.

And there was a topic that came up in one of our most recent Downlinks, which is our weekly newsletter, that really pointed to this, the value of these spacecraft decades after they've collected their data. And it was particularly some images from the Voyager spacecraft of, it was a crater called Valhalla Crater, I think. And they were comparing that to some other old data from the Magellan spacecraft on Venus, and finding cool new ways to interpret craters on Venus. So, I wanted to ask you a little bit about this story because the images are awesome, but also it's just some good science.

Bruce Betts: Well, that remains to be seen as people evaluate it going forward, but it probably is. Valhalla is a nice warm place on Callisto. It's not actually warm, it just was warm in Norse mythology, I believe. A little distraction there.

So, Callisto has this very large basin, multi-ring basin, and it has a certain look to it in terms of the rings, and they have seen similar morphology, similar look of a very large crater basin on Venus, the rings and the structure, which is actually gets the name tesserae, I believe, although I'm sure I mispronounced it from my ... I got to brush up on my Latin. How is your Latin? You know like 47 languages, is Latin one of them?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I did not study Latin, unfortunately.

Bruce Betts: Okay. Well, nevermind. The point is, Callisto, they think that morphology was driven by having subsurface liquid water during the impact, which actually is something that affects other places because this morphology and the fact that you have that on Venus makes it look like you have liquid under the surface at the time of impact. Now, the important thing is it's not going to be liquid water. They're talking molten rock basically, in some stable kind of way.

So, I don't know. I mean, the details are interesting, but I will broaden this to the old datasets can be very useful. I mean, it depends. Some things, some instruments and observations get superseded, but many of them don't in planetary, because it's really hard and expensive to send spacecraft out there, and they have different instruments and you may not get the same capability. You may, you may get a high-resolution radar instrument at Venus as we expect coming up. But since the '90s and Magellan, that's the highest spatial radar really looking through the clouds that we've got at Venus. So, that's still extremely useful.

They're still extracting sample return information out of lunar samples that were collected by Apollo in the 1970s. So, as our instrumentation gets better, our computation gets better, our knowledge gets better, we can go back and look through these datasets and even physical samples and learn new stuff that will blow your mind.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's really cool. And I cannot wait until we have more data from places like Venus, then we can do the kind of science of comparing these two datasets. But until then, we're still picking through data from ages ago, which is why-

Bruce Betts: Well, it depends on what you study. If you're studying the surface and the radar, you have much more recent data, particularly of the atmosphere from Akatsuki and Venus Express. And so, it again, depends on your dataset and what you're looking at.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yep. Well, just up to hope for the VERITAS mission and the DAVINCI mission to get there and add to that dataset. And then, of course, we're going to have all kinds of new information about the moons of Jupiter coming out soon, so we can compare all of these cool craters.

Bruce Betts: You know what it might be time for?

Speaker 6: Random space fact.

Bruce Betts: So, anyway, on to super, super, super weird things. I haven't talked about neutrinos in a while, but just in the amount of time I've been babbling here, hundreds of billions of them have just passed through you. So, that's weird. These things don't interact with matter hardly at all. They come out of solar, the nuclear fusion process, they come out.

But for today, I just wanted to focus on the really weird part, that three types of them, that they change between as they're headed from the Sun to the Earth. And so, that's why we were detecting a third of what we thought we were detecting with detectors that were sensitive to one as opposed to another. I did enjoy, I believe, it was The Sky at Night, the long-running show on BBC, their website, quoted the concept that it's kind of like the neutrinos are being a cow or a pig and a chicken simultaneously and just kind of flip in between them, and then you get a third. So, they're just bizarre. Neutrinos intrigue the heck out of me and kind of freak me out.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: They really do. The fact that they can fly through light years of lead without ever stopping is just borderline not okay.

Bruce Betts: My old professor of physics, either it's an observation or a joke, depending on how you look at it, which he pointed out that over the course of your lifetime, they're so non-reactive that even with the billions going through you every second, you will absorb on average roughly one during your lifetime. And he pointed out that you die once during your lifetime. Coincidence?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Coincidence?

Bruce Betts: You be the judge.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Funnily enough, the problem in college that I got the most wrong during a final was the calculation of how many neutrinos are going through your pinky nail in a second. I divided instead of multiplied in some place and I was off by 43 orders of magnitude.

Bruce Betts: That's awesome.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Still got partial credit.

Bruce Betts: But unfortunately, it was 43 orders of magnitude smaller than what the assignment was worth. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about whether you just felt a neutrino tickle your pinky or not. Thank you and good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with an update on the progress from the United Arab Emirates' upcoming mission to the asteroid belt. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise.

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