Space Policy Edition: The Challenges of Change at NASA

Casey Dreier: Hello, and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the chief of Space Policy here at The Planetary Society. This month, I am delighted to have maybe one of the most valuable people working in space policy reporting today, Marcia Smith, the founder and editor of Space Policy Online, a website that I visit, or utilize, or reference nearly every day in this job. Someone who's been around in the space policy world for decades, has worked at the Congressional Research Service, and has been a part of a number of broad NASA studies, and studies on the civilian space program. Marcia's experience is nearly unparalleled in the field, and she joins us this month to discuss the idea of change, and what prevents, or enables change to happen at big bureaucracies like NASA, particularly in the context of incoming presidential administrations, the point where we find ourselves in right now, in the first days of 2005, as the second Trump administration nears its start.

Marcia and I discuss beyond that, though. We look at the state of Artemis, how decisions are made within NASA, and just the role of NASA, and its self-identity as its struggles to implement its probably most ambitious program since Apollo. It's a wonderful discussion, and I was delighted to have her. I cannot recommend her website enough, spacepolicyonline.com. You can find her on Twitter, and Bluesky, and other places on social media. I recommend you follow her if you don't.

Before we get to that, though, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Day of Action, our in-person congressional visits event hosted by The Planetary Society, and scheduled for 2025, on March 24th. I strongly encourage you to join me, and my colleague Jack Kiraly, as we lead our team of fellow members and space fans here at The Planetary Society to meet with your members of Congress, their staff, representatives, to really represent, and get this message out of space science, and exploration, to demonstrate merely by our existence, of showing up, that people care about these things.

This is our annual event. We've had very positive responses from those of you who've joined us in the past. This, of course, is going to be a very important year. It turns out, by the just quirks of how the congressional process has unfolded this year, that we will have two budgets likely in context in play when members of The Planetary Society come to Washington DC for the Day of Action. We'll have the end of the continuing resolution of the fiscal year '25 budget, which is still unresolved, happening right around the end of March. Then we'll of course have the start of the fiscal year '26 budget process that may be released by the incoming administration by that point. So, we have lots to talk about.

There's also a lot of new members of Congress. There's of course a new administration. There'll be probably a new NASA administrator by then. Lots of reasons, lots of reasons, very practically, to come out with us to Washington, DC if you care about this stuff and if you can join us. I hope you consider it. You can learn more at planetary.org/dayofaction. We'll give you information on how to book your travel, where to stay, and on top of that, we will book all of your meetings with members of Congress. We will give you other events. You'll get opportunities to hang out with me, my colleagues at The Planetary Society, and of course your wonderful fellow members of The Planetary Society. So please consider it. Day of Action 2025. That's on March 24th. You can register online at planetary.org/dayofaction. Now we move on to our interview with Marcia Smith, the founder and editor of Space Policy Online. Marcia Smith, welcome to the Space Policy Edition this month. I'm delighted to have you back.

Marcia Smith: Thanks so much for inviting me. I look forward to it.

Casey Dreier: So, Marcia, you have years of experience following space policy. You've seen a number of new administrations and, Congresses come in, and there's always, I'd say, some degree of talk of change, and improving the process of, in this case, we'll probably limit ourselves mostly to civil space, about how space works and what NASA does. This incoming administration, I'd say this is turbocharged, that there's a lot of talk about new ways of doing business, and this is kind of wrapped up in Elon Musk's overall, let's say, DOGE effort. How likely, or do you see change happening at NASA? And we'll start with that big picture question and we can drill way down from there.

Marcia Smith: Well, I think the big question is who wants change, and what change are they looking for? Because I think there are a lot of folks who don't want change. It's taken a long time to get to where NASA is today. They're already facing challenges with the budget, which is always the big Damoclean sword that's hanging over the space program, and I think that there are a lot of folks who just want to stick with the plan. They might want to accelerate it, find out why things are taking as long as they are, but the general direction, the overall policy, I think there's a lot of instinct to just keep going, instead of having another hard turn, as we've had so many times in the past, and we've all done it before, and we all know that it leads nowhere. So, I think there's a lot of desire just to keep going on the path we're going on, and get it done with finally.

Casey Dreier: I've told people before, or reporters when they've asked that, Artemis was maybe the only example of a human return to the moon program that has survived a presidential administration change in history, basically. I mean, the original Apollo survived, I guess, Johnson to Nixon. You can arguably say maybe it didn't, and he just finished it up. But, nothing else from George H. W. Bush, to George W. Bush, to anyone else has really survived that transition. So, Artemis did, and you're right. So, that was a very rare event, and messing with that now could threaten that political base. Do you see the idea... Is this part of this discussion? Or is there just this idea that it's not perfect, and so therefore we need to change it to be perfect? Where does this desire for change come from, do you think, during administrations coming in?

Marcia Smith: Well, a lot of that is, of course, is new presidents want to put their own stamp on things. But in this particular case, Artemis already has the Trump stamp. I mean, it was Pence as head of the Space Council who really did it, but it was during the Trump administration. So, he would basically be supporting his own program. He could always say that it changed during Biden, and therefore we don't really need to keep it. But it is his program, and I think that people are disappointed that it's taking so long, and I think there are different viewpoints on why that is. There's a lot of criticism of SLS, but there's also some concern about these public-private partnerships, the whole spacesuit thing, and Starship... Yes, it's making progress, but it's not ready yet. And do you wonder, is it really going to be ready by 2026, or 2027, to actually land on the moon and take off?

It's important to remember that the contract with SpaceX does not require them to take off from the moon. It's only to land, to show that they can land. And I'm betting that there's going to be a lot of people who want to demonstrate the taking off part as well, before they put humans on it. So, I think there's frustration at the length of time it's taking, and the money that it's taking, but I'm still not sure that the frustration is with the overall goal. There are the folks, Musk is one of them, and Trump has the same point of view, that we need to get on to Mars, and there is a big concern that they're going to throw out moon, because it's taking so long, and just go back to Mars, which is basically what Obama wanted to do. He was going to skip the moon, been there, done that, and so we're just going to go to Mars.

He envisioned orbiting Mars, not landing on Mars, orbiting Mars in the 2030s. I think even that would be a challenge if you want to protect astronaut safety. And I think ultimately, with these human spaceflight missions, the key is going to be how much risk are you willing to take? Is that one of the changes people are talking about, to lower NASA's risk threshold? Because that would certainly speed things up, but I'm not sure that NASA wants to do that, and I'm not sure the American public would be willing to do that, if they really understood what that meant. So, again, I'm still curious, what change is it that people want? Change just for the sake of change, because I'm the new guy? Or in this case, he's not really the new guy. "I'm the returning guy, and I'm going to do a lot better than the Biden administration, and so I'm going to put my stamp on it." Is that the reason for change, just to change? I'm not sure about that.

Casey Dreier: The point of risk I think is well taken. It's easy to say we should accept more risk when we haven't had to deal with the consequences of the risk blowing up in your face, I guess figuratively, and literally. It's...

Marcia Smith: Not since 2003.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. And those have been traumatic events, I'd say, for the country as a whole. But going back even further, you make an interesting point about, this is Trump's policy, is Artemis, that is being executed, I'd say functionally unchanged during the Biden administration, but is it really Trump's policy? Maybe it was Pence's policy, and I almost get that impression, that Pence was such a focused figure on space, particularly in his role in National Space Council, and the people he had working for him all shared this, I'd say broad, almost pre-Trump political view of a highly engaged US in global affairs, and almost a Cold War era kind of US leadership role in the world through coalitions, and having this new administration come in is almost a very different sense of that, that Trump himself is obviously the same, but the people around him are very different, and certainly his vice president is very different. And so, I wonder if we almost have to look at this incoming administration as at least in the space domain, significantly different, and that also, I guess, the role of Elon Musk.

Marcia Smith: Yes, and I think it's interesting that you point out that this was really Pence doing it. It was Trump who signed the Space Policy Directive One that put the moon back in the pathway, because Obama had taken it out. So, you would think that because Trump at least signed Space Policy Directive One, that he was in favor of moon, but he did make that comment on Twitter at the time, that he didn't know why NASA was spending all this money on the moon, we should just go to Mars. So he obviously is a Mars advocate. I think that there is a desire to stay ahead of China, and if you go to Mars, you certainly will be staying ahead of China. But again, it's a matter of how much risk you're willing to take, if you want to get there by 2028, which is the year that people are throwing out there, because obviously we're not ready to do that with any degree of safety for the crew. So, I'm really not sure that's realistic at all, even though a lot of people are talking about it.

But I think that it could go either way, in terms of Trump's support for this, and Musk will be an important component of it. He of course has a company that's earning money from NASA to do Artemis. It's not just the Lander, but also they have a logistics contract to support Gateway. But I agree with you that the worldview of the incoming Trump administration, I don't think is, I was going to say welcoming. I probably don't want to say welcoming. It's not as interested in the international component, and that really was what was behind Gateway. The Gateway Space Station around the moon was a way to bring in international partners, because A, it continues the partnership of the International Space Station, except for Russia. And it gives them actual things to do, components to bring to the program so that they really feel that they're part of it. And if you did away with Gateway, which a lot of people are talking about, then I'm not sure how you have that international component, and I'm not certain how strongly the incoming Trump administration feels about that international component.

Casey Dreier: I've always felt that Gateway has been misunderstood, to that exact point. The architecture for Artemis was optimized in a sense politically, rather than from a pure blank sheet engineering goal, almost like maybe Apollo was. But it says something that I think that then Artemis, it has been the one return to the moon program that has made it past... Further than any other one has, maybe because of that. And I wonder if that's in a sense the source of the frustration that a lot of influential people, at least in the space community, sometimes share the frustration of not moving fast enough, and then seeing the complexity of the architecture as the source of what to blame for it, rather than why we have this to complain about in the first place. Is there just a disconnect, do you think, between this ideal sense of, it could be more efficient, it could be faster, we could be there by now, we could be spending less money that is divorced from the domain that it exists in, which is the politics of spending taxpayer money, which has to build a coalition willing to approve that?

Marcia Smith: Well, I think you do need to have that political coalition, so you need jobs in a lot of different states and districts in order to win the support. But I do think that there is a more fundamental bipartisan support for US leadership in space. So, I think that that's the underpinning of it for all the members of Congress who don't have space in their states and districts. It is not only the space crowd in Congress that supports this, but you support it in a budget context. The budget is always that Damoclean sword. And so, when you have to make choices, when you have the Fiscal Responsibility Act, NASA gets hurt just as much as all the other agencies and departments.

So, those are the choices that have to be made, and they're going to be doubled down on in this incoming Congress, and administration. You could already see the fights building up, even between Republicans in the House, and Trump, over how much you're going to have to cut, and debt limit, and all those other discussions. And so money is one of the pacing items as to how fast you can go. The thing that was really holding things up for Artemis II and III was this heat shield, and NASA has not done a good job of explaining why it took two years to figure that out. I wish that they were more transparent about the process, and about the report that the independent review panel came out with.

Now, I understand that there are concerns about ITAR, and what's in the report, and you don't want to give other people access to information about how we make our heat shields, and I understand that, but it seems to me there should be some way for them to do a better job of explaining not only what was wrong with the heat shield, what they're doing to fix the heat shield. There are some people who think NASA made the wrong choice about continuing with the heat shield that they already built for Artemis II. And so, there's still a debate about that. But fundamentally, I think that NASA needs to be more transparent about what all the delays are from. Biden was the one who said when he came in, "I'm sticking with 2024." It didn't last more than a year, and they said, "No, no, it's going to be 2025," and now it's slipping and slipping and slipping. And I think that NASA needs to do a better job of explaining that. There may be really good explanations, but I couldn't explain them, because no one's explained them to me.

Casey Dreier: Are you willing to speculate about why that hesitancy exists within NASA to have that openness with what's going on? Because you're right, it felt strange that it took so long to figure that out, and then they said that they had figured it out, but then didn't want to tell anybody for a while, I think [inaudible 00:16:55] Melroy was... But I even go back, I mean, we launched... We. The country launched Orion on an un-crewed test flight in what, 2014, in order to test the heat shield.

Marcia Smith: Exactly.

Casey Dreier: And what happened there? So, is this something you've seen consistently over the years? Or is this a more modern development about not being willing to share as openly what's going on, particularly with the human side of spaceflight?

Marcia Smith: Well, I think that it's not just NASA. I think government agencies in general, either they don't want to share the information, because they don't want to be criticized, or they think that the public wouldn't understand it because it's really technical, or that on the other hand, it's so obvious the public should understand it and they shouldn't have to go into a lot of detail. So, I don't think there's any single reason why they're doing it. And I think NASA believes they are being transparent. You hear it from the leadership all the time. "Oh, we're so transparent." But, being on the outside, it doesn't feel transparent.

Casey Dreier: Has there been, in general, do you think, a shift of how NASA sees itself, to the extent that it's even a coherent identity, either through leadership, or the civil service, or just as an institutional attitude of the organization, as commercial space has grown in capability, and I wouldn't say aggressiveness, but just more bold in what it's able to do, in the sense that, does NASA see itself still as the single place to... The source of spaceflight for the country and that commercial space is just a tool that it uses? Or do you think there's some sense of competition, or at least not necessarily threat, but challenge to its existing kind of relationship to the public? And I wonder if that's related to not wanting to be more open with some of these failures, of wanting to project this NASA... I mean, the NASA brand is this brand of competence that we've inherited from the Apollo era of this, failure is not an option. Does that hypothesis fit in with your view of things? Or do you see a different path, a different way to explain some of this?

Marcia Smith: I actually feel that NASA has embraced the commercial sector, and certainly Jim Bridenstine brought that in when he was administrator. And I think that Nelson and Melroy have continued that during their leadership. So, I don't see them as projecting a concern that the commercial is going to overwhelm them, because they know full well that a lot of that commercial development is because of NASA.

And these companies, it's buried down in budgets, and everything, that a lot of the early technology work is done through grants, or contracts with NASA, through the space technology mission director. They're doing a lot of stuff, really innovative stuff, and I think these companies would not be as far along as they are in many cases without the NASA support. So, I think the companies recognize how important NASA is, and NASA recognizes how important the commercial sector is. So, I don't really see a conflict there. So, again, I'm still not sure why it is that NASA is taking so long to do some of these things, but I don't see it as a fear of being overrun by the commercial sector.

Casey Dreier: Does it maybe imply that there isn't actually a concern about competing with China, or that has not taken seriously as a potential failure? Or do they feel like China isn't as far along as some outside observers claim? I mean, there doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency, and does that betray some kind of deeper awareness, or just confidence that maybe is or isn't misplaced in that sense?

Marcia Smith: I don't know. I wish I did. Again, getting back to the heat shield thing, where it took two years for them to figure that out, and then they had to delay the launch. And all along, Nelson has been saying, "We have to get there before China. We have to get there before China. They're going to get to the South Pole, and block off places and say that we can't go there." And in his most recent discussion about the delay, he made this interesting comment about how even if China did get to the moon first, he didn't think they'd be going to the South Pole, because it's easier to get to the equatorial regions, and what's really important is to preserve the South Pole, and that's where the United States is going.

And so, I don't know if he was sort of signaling that he's recognizing that maybe China may get technonauts back on the surface before we get astronauts there. I don't know. And I do think that NASA... It's because of Challenger, and Columbia, never mind the Apollo fire back in 1967, that astronaut safety is their linchpin, and they are not going to do anything that recklessly endangers astronauts. And when safety is your highest priority, that takes money and it takes time. And so, if that is your guiding star, making it as safe as possible, then you're going to take the time you need. And companies may not do that.

So, SpaceX's philosophy, launch fast, fail fast, whatever their phrase is, you can do that because there's nobody aboard those rockets. And so, if they land up in the ocean, who cares? And they've got another one sitting there waiting to go. But I think it's different when you're launching humans, and you can't rely just on, "Okay, so what if we lose one? Well, we've got another bunch of astronauts sitting around waiting to go." I mean, you can't do that with human beings, and that's what NASA is dealing with, is human beings. The next launch is going to have four people on it, and they just got to be really careful. So, again, it's not that I think that safety should be less of a concern. It may be that the incoming team, the Musk team, which I think has a different philosophy about safety, they may see it differently, but I don't know that the American people would see it differently, at least if something bad happened.

Casey Dreier: I always felt that NASA has had a unique burden of being a national symbol on top of that, where NASA's failures are always talked up as... You can see like the think pieces saying something's wrong with the... It's something indicative of deeper wrong with the country, or it's... If you're seen so reverently, and you fail, or you lose astronauts, then the consequences I think conceptually go beyond just the immediacy of the tragedy, to say something bigger, or more symbolic. And I wonder if that's where for commercial space, they don't have that burden. They can blow up things. They haven't lost astronauts, thankfully, but they can fail in a way, I think, maybe they have the grace and the opportunity to fail in a way that NASA doesn't have. And I wonder if there's a structural difference between how a public institution is seen, and overseen in a sense by Congress and others, versus even just using public money to fund a private organization, gives them a certain amount of leeway to do, or try harder things in a way that doesn't have to succeed.

Marcia Smith: One of the things I think is very interesting, and we won't know until what happens, sad to say, is whether or not the public reacts to an accident of a private astronaut mission differently than when NASA astronauts have died. I think that the NASA astronauts as viewed as heroes trying to advance the United States, and its position in the world, and I'm not sure they see the commercial astronauts, the Jared Isaacmans, or the people on the Blue Origin New Shepherds, I don't think they see them quite the same way. There are people who are climbing Mount Everest or doing bungee jumping or whatever. They're doing it to fulfill a personal need, not a national need.

I don't know that they're going to react the same way. I mean, I think those of us in the space business just sort of assume there is going to be an accident with the death of astronauts, because that's just the way the world works, and these are very risky missions, no matter how hard you try. And I don't know how the nation will react when it's going to be a private mission, and not a national mission.

Casey Dreier: That's a really interesting point, that distinction of motivation. Yeah. Astronauts are seen as they're... By doing what they're doing is almost a self-sacrifice to the nation. The two astronauts on the station now who missed Christmas with their families because Boeing's Starliner wasn't able to bring them back, you're right, there's a noble intention that gives any loss a deeper tragedy. And in the best case, you're saying at least they were doing something noble. And I think that was the critique of the Challenger loss, that they were carrying a communication satellite into space, and not doing that kind of noble advancing of space exploration.

Yeah. And I guess we can look to that submersible that imploded the other year. And it certainly was a tragedy, and it was covered by that, but then it just kind of moved on to other things. There wasn't a wholesale reconsideration of private tourism down to under the ocean. Maybe the consequences would be more in a market, suddenly the market for tourists dries up for a while. But that does go, I think, to an interesting distinction that I'm wondering if you've seen, what was it, 1984 was the Commercial Space Act of one of the-

Marcia Smith: Yes.

Casey Dreier: And so, this idea of commercialization of space has been a consistent policy functionally of the US government for 40 years now. And it's really, I guess, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, maybe only in the last 15 that it's really taken hold, at least in a visible way. And I guess when I was posing that kind of distinction of NASA's self-identity as a space agency, I am talking about things like this, that the idea of going to space isn't now just seen as this noble intention. It is a tourist activity. It is something to challenge the individual, rather than extend and represent the collective goals and symbols of a nation.

And the more you have this commercial activity, the more space as a concept, and I wonder if this will translate in the political realm, of space as kind of the sacrosanct effort of a nation changes, that it becomes this more mixed, it's just another area of economic activity, and you'll have accidents, and disasters, and achievements, and successes, but not through a singular focusing point of the NASA as a space agency, but now opened up to this broader milieu of individuals. And I wonder if that ultimately takes away this sense of NASA as a representation then of the people, or of the national goals, that in a way that ultimately undermines, to some degree, its political support, because it's not as, in a sense, that noble intention has been diluted by this broader level of access by regular individuals, not regular wealthy individuals, at least initially.

Marcia Smith: Well, I think that as you see the commercialization of space, commercial space stations, maybe in another six or seven years, I think that it is going to become more regularized to have these activities of companies rather than NASA. But I think the point is that NASA is still supposed to be the one leading the charge, doing the things that the commercial sector won't do, so that NASA will always be in the front of the pack, leading the way, doing the high-tech, really hard stuff, so that 10, 15 years later, the commercial sector can backfill it. So, I still think that NASA would have a very strong role as being a national leader in space exploration, even if you have a lot of commercial space stations or a lot of commercial astronaut flights.

Casey Dreier: I wonder though, if that's the essence of it? I guess I'd put some amount of money on the idea, if you asked a random person, "Who is the innovator in space right now?" It would not be NASA, right? Based on the rocketry.

Marcia Smith: Probably true.

Casey Dreier: And that idea is something that I want to be true, and I think is the right way to approach the public space agency. But when we have SpaceX so visibly pushing boundaries, and we have to admit, it's one, very specific, it's in launch, right? And NASA does lots of different things, including putting the things that go on top of those launchers. But this idea of innovation, that's what I kind of sense... I don't know if I worry is the right word, but I'm concerned for NASA, and it's losing this role of the innovator, because it's being visibly outpaced in this one area of launch by SpaceX.

And I wonder if that's actually what might be where the change effort to the extent that it does or doesn't happen, might be focused, of realigning. Can you reorient the agency to reacquire that identity as that technological, advanced, taking big swings for wild ideas, and what you would have to do to achieve that, both from a, in a sense, PR perspective, but also literal realignment of resources within the agency? Is that potentially the path forward here? And do you even agree with my claim about SpaceX as kind of occupying that role now in public conceptualization of space?

Marcia Smith: Well, SpaceX is getting all the publicity, and let's be honest, that catch was awesome.

Casey Dreier: It was. Yeah, I mean, it's not wrong.

Marcia Smith: It was totally awesome. So, I certainly understand why the public is thinking that SpaceX is out there being the innovator, but I think that for whatever reason, and NASA has tried for all the decades I've been following NASA, to get the public to understand all that it does. And it does a lot of technology innovation, but somehow it just doesn't get into the news. And they publish these spinoff books, and everything, and members of Congress will love those spinoff books, because when they get asked, "Why are we investing in NASA?" They can hand out these books, but it doesn't make a big splash. It doesn't get on the evening news.

So, I wish that there was some way for NASA to more effectively communicate with the public. And it's not that they haven't tried, heaven knows they have tried, about all of the innovation that they're doing. So I think that NASA is very innovative, but the public doesn't know about it. And you get someone like SpaceX doing something that's wildly innovative, and it does get all the news, that it sort of makes people forget about NASA, if they even knew. And I think that, again, as hard as NASA has tried, I think the average person doesn't even know there's a space station up there.

NASA is always so proud to say, "If you were born after 2000, there's never been a day that you haven't had astronauts in space. And I think most people have no idea." And it's not that they don't try, it's not that they don't have websites full of all the science that they've been doing on the Space Station up there, but it just doesn't seem to grab the public interest the way something as dramatic as Starship does.

Casey Dreier: I wonder though, that NASA just needs to try more dramatic things, like publicly big things, rather than doing... I mean in addition, let's say, to doing radically new thruster development, or those hull thruster pictures look cool, or nuclear thermal propulsion or something. But I remember Curiosity landing, and to another lesser extent, maybe Perseverance, right? Those were very dramatic moments that I think did break through to a certain extent, maybe even... I remember. And so I'll just asterisk this as a memory that I think is true, but we should double check that NASA's public outreach for the public response to Perseverance Landing was actually a bigger... More consumed by all their internal metrics than the Crew One launch with Bob and Doug in terms of total media penetration, and social media sharing, and all those things. And because I think just landing on Mars with Skycrane is just an inherently dramatic thing that we've seen once before.

So, maybe NASA... Again, I go back to this reorientation. Does NASA just need to really... Should that be maybe a part of how we think about how we should set our policies in the public space agency? Should we try to encourage that through expectation, and maybe allowing more failure, but trying these bigger swings, in order to not be usurped by these private companies who have the ability through the... In a sense, the more idiosyncratic aspects can come out, because they're not collectively run. They're through the ambitions of one individual for the most part. And so, you can do weirder things, because individuals can be kind of weird, whereas a public agency has to be responsive to this broad political coalition that kind of tamps down on the weirdness. So maybe NASA should just do more crazy things.

Marcia Smith: Well, doing crazy things costs money, and they're a little money strapped, and doing crazy things with taxpayer money is a little more risky, as you just said, than if you're doing it with your own money, or with your buddies' money. And I think this whole idea of it being one guy doing crazy things, that does put a single point failure in the system, because that one person, whoever it may be, is human like the rest of us, and something bad could happen to that person.

Casey Dreier: Yep.

Marcia Smith: So, when you're relying on an individual to do something, that individual could change their mind, could have an accident, anything could happen. So, with an agency, you don't have that either. So, there are different factors in play when you're looking at the commercial sector versus the government sector. And I'm not sure there needs to be a change in what the country expects of NASA, because I think NASA is very popular. I think they're getting what they want out of NASA, for the money that they're willing to spend on NASA.

And again, not to harp on this too much, I do think the challenge with Artemis is how long it's taken between Artemis I and Artemis II, and the fact that they haven't explained why it's been such a long time, but if they had launched Artemis II a year after Artemis I, I don't think we'd be having this discussion, to be honest. It's just that it's been stretched out so long, and every time you turn around, it's getting stretched out again, without a really good explanation for that. And on the other hand, you have SpaceX who doesn't have these constraints, and there aren't any people on Starship, that he can just keep launching these every couple of months, and if they get caught or don't get caught, so what? It's a totally different environment that they get to work in, versus the government.

Casey Dreier: I mean, is there some inherent advantage then? You outlined, I think, just in that response, the comparative advantages, and disadvantages of an agency, that the agency has a certain consistency of... That actually, by not embracing the individual, allows it to not depend on any one person for all the personal failings, health reasons, or anything that can happen to the individual, that is itself subject to oversight. It can't just do crazy things with taxpayer money, because as you point out, there's literally whole books put out by congressmen who hate spending money on finding crazy sounding things, and using that as a cudgel against those agencies.

And you also have the slow, deliberative process, because there's a broader responsibility back to the public. And you can contrast that to private agencies where you have... Run by an individual, particularly SpaceX or even Blue Origin. I mean, those are private, they're not publicly traded, there's no shareholder responsibility. They're kind of at the whims of their head, the founders of them, and that allows them to be more dynamic, and take wilder risks. But then as you point out, there are single points of failure, and the individual... That's in a way, not a way to run a multi-decadal commitment to trying to do something in space.

So, I keep going back... This has actually been an area of interest for me, of this inherent tension between these two, how these systems are set up. And I think we're seeing that tension grow, where people start to expect the vivid public displays of wild ambition through the commercial space industry that we're starting to see, contrasted with the more methodical, but reliable long-term commitments coming from a public agency. And I worry that the impatience, in a sense, while real, and particularly with Artemis, starts to translate... Frustration gets expressed in other ways, and we see an accelerated effort to turn more of NASA's responsibilities over to commercial sector, in order to avoid those aspects of public run, or organizationally run programs, in order to make them free for that individual representation of them, to allow them to be faster and weirder.

But then at the same time, you've kind of traded away the essence of having this public agency, that, "Why are we doing this in the first place?" Does NASA just then become a pass-through agency to private individuals, and commercial entities who are able to be that faster agent? And I think a lot of people almost want to see that this day. So, that inherent tension, I feel like, is unresolved, and may be unresolvable.

Marcia Smith: Well, I think that that is one of the ongoing debates right now, and I have no idea how it's going to turn out, because I think there are... I wouldn't say it's a lot of people, I'd say there are a few people who see NASA returning to its roots as NACA, which was basically a pass through agency, did technology, and passed it on to the aviation industry, back before NASA was created, and they think that NASA should return to that role, because the commercial sector is so advanced. But I think there are other people who still look at the commercial sector as something that can come and go. Again, they're run by individuals, and they can change their minds, they can get out of the business, they can do whatever they want to do, and that's why they want to ensure that there is a fundamental government capability, in case the commercial companies go bankrupt or whatever happens to them.

And that's been one of the arguments about building SLS, even if they're... And people keep saying, "Well, why do we have SLS, when we had Starship?" Well, we didn't have Starship back in 2010 and 2011, we didn't even have Falcon, really. It was just getting started, Falcon 9. So, there really wasn't a competition between them at the time SLS was created. But I think that there was a recognition there was a commercial sector out there, but people wanted to make certain that there was a government capability, and US workers who are trained to do these highly technical skills, so that in a pinch, if the commercial sector isn't there, you still have this foundation of the government workers. And I think that there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that you need to have a government capability, because the commercial sector is not entirely reliable.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Do you feel like there's an over optimization on cost right now in the public discourse? Because I think, again, you bring up these broader national, political, even workforce benefits that come from certain types of programs that aren't, or almost are a requirer of a higher cost in a sense. And this focus on cost reduction tends to be at odds with a lot of those. And I wonder if that's where this... By reducing cost, and minimizing cost, and just kind of turning things over to industry, we've lost some kind of inherent national capability, or not even necessarily lost it, but as you said, don't have it guaranteed anymore. But, the discussion always seems to focus on just cost, cost, cost. And as you point out, there's just not enough money. I mean, that's an inevitable consequence of that, are those intention, this idea that there's a broader set of value, and returnables that are not as quantifiable as number of dollars spent, and therefore, just become harder to express in the broader political, and policy discussion as opposed to just reducing cost as much as possible.

Marcia Smith: Reducing costs, that has to do with congressional appropriations, and that is such a big picture. NASA is such a tiny piece of that. I'm not sure the political establishment is looking at the impact on NASA itself of some of these costs. I mean, the people who are really deep into the weeds of NASA know about it, but I think more broadly speaking, when they talk about reducing the debt, and therefore you have to cut government spending, or when you look at, you mentioned the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE thing, they're looking at government efficiency and everything. And Musk may be looking at NASA, but he's looking much more broadly, just thinking there's a lot of government waste out there.

And as I said, NASA is such a tiny part of that, I'm not sure how much people are thinking about that when they're thinking of, "Well, what happens to NASA if you cut it?" If they think about it at all, they may think that just delays the programs overall, not that it's actually going to lead to cancellations. Of course it is leading to cancellations, especially in the science area, but I don't think that that's really top of mind when they're making these decisions.

Casey Dreier: Shifting back to this idea of maybe not radical, I mean, talking about change, not even necessarily as a change of Artemis, but just how NASA does business in this context of efficiency, and the incoming administration's, at least media focus of reducing regulations, improving speed of... All these kinds of workforce... All the stuff that may or may not happen, I'd say putting aside the fact that we don't know if or when they'll happen, I want to talk about how change does happen, and how you've seen it happen or not over the years, and we'll again, limit it to NASA. Can you think of major points in your experience where you've seen somewhat dramatic change, not even necessarily programmatically, but just how NASA itself is run, or works?

Marcia Smith: Well, certainly, over the decades that I've been following NASA, there have been a lot of changes. I'm not sure if they'd be dramatic or not, but a president comes in, and chooses a NASA administrator based on what presumably he wants the NASA administrator to do. So, some NASA administrators have been very low-key, and don't really see NASA as being very forward-looking, and that's happened in some of the past administrations. And other times they bring in someone who is really full of energy and wants to change the world. So yeah, there've been a lot of changes. The dramatic changes usually are in human spaceflight, because that's what people pay attention to the most. And certainly, when Nixon came in, and ended the Apollo program, that was a big dramatic change.

And then Reagan came in, and Jim Beggs was the administrator, and he was determined to do that next step from what the Space Task Group recommended, which was to build a permanently occupied space station. And Jim Beggs just made that his cause. And so Reagan got that done. So that was a big dramatic change. But then you had all the budget problems in the late 1980s, and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, and then you had the Challenger disaster, and all these other things that sort of leveled out the space program. And then the space station took forever to get built. It was supposed to be done by 1994, and construction ended in 2010, sort of. So, it was a whole bunch of different factors.

But the big dramatic changes, at least in human spaceflight were when Nixon came in, when Reagan came in, Bush came in, the second Bush, George W. Bush came in, and sort of got started on Constellation, but then again, he had this big economic collapse. And so Obama, even though he was in favor of human spaceflight, he said, "I don't have that kind of money." So you had these big changes. There have been quite a few dramatic changes, and some of it is the function of money, and some of it is the function of the desire of a president and his team, and then they have to get some sort of acquiescence from Congress.

I don't think we need to go through the whole history of what happened when Obama sort of changed course there, very suddenly, and didn't really get along with Congress all that well on that, which is how we ended up with the space launch system and Orion. But anyway, there have been a lot of ups and downs over all of these decades. We've been on an up really since the first Trump administration, and part of that was because money was available, and now you're seeing money leveling off, because now the focus, at least of one part of the Republican Party is debt reduction. And so, I'm wondering if we're sort of on another cusp of a downturn, because whatever goes up, does come down. So, there could be big changes with this new administration. I don't know. I think the biggest change is going to be budget, because there's such dysfunction in Congress. Can they even get appropriations bills passed? I think that's going to be the big problem in the near term.

Casey Dreier: I do want to talk about budget, but first, thinking about those aspects of change that you mentioned, a lot of those are programmatic, and a lot of them are due to exogenous events, it seems like to me. So you have a shuttle disaster, or, I mean, I don't know if landing on the moon itself is exogenous, but the Cold War kind of simmering down, or in a sense with the Space Station ending, and then having an opportunity to ISS to come in through partnership with Russia, to be relevant. And then budget itself is almost an exogenous event. Like NASA's programs depend on having money to do it, and if you can't do them, then those things just don't happen. It's almost tautological, but at the same time, NASA doesn't control its own budget.

Thinking about how... And we can maybe shift into this incoming administration a little more too, with Jared Isaacman coming in, you point out, you're right, NASA's had steady budget growth starting from 2014 up until 2022, every year went up a couple of percent. And that is a growth... That growth allowed them to say yes to a lot of things, including a lot of things in science. But the last couple years, with a flat, and now slightly diminishing budgets, you're seeing that the things they all said yes to no longer fit into the existing portfolio. And I think you're right, the budget issue is the more quotidian, and predictable, and less dramatic and exciting challenge, but to me is the most pressing issue that NASA is going to be facing.

And I wonder, through diminishing budgets, that that enables some sort of internal restructuring, or reallocation, or a different way to approach even just internal workings of the space agency, is that comparable? Is that worth looking to the '90s with Dan Goldin, where you had a similar situation where NASA's budget was going down during the whole balanced budget era, and he kind of embraced that and said, "Let's do these smaller missions, let's have NASA work more efficiently?" Was that used in a sense to change some [inaudible 00:49:27] through some of these internal bureaucratic structures that can serve to stymie, or slow, or to disrupt the process of adapting to new situations within the space agency?

Marcia Smith: Well, Dan Goldin's reign certainly was dramatic inside the agency, but looking back on it now, I'm not sure that I saw that the agency changed functionally after he left. And there was a lot of unhappiness because Space Station was taking so long. And of course, when George W. Bush came in, they suddenly found out that there was a $4.8 billion overrun on Space Station, which didn't bode well for those early years of the George W. Bush administration.

I think NASA as an agency, and its view of itself in all the decades I've been following, I think the biggest change there was when Bridenstine came in, and embraced public-private partnerships. And I do think that that has endured, and will endure as long as these companies come through, but I don't take that as a given. So, what have we had? We've had commercial cargo, that is a success. Commercial crew, one of two is a success. All the other things are pending. We don't know that these are going to work out, and work out for the costs that they agreed upon.

A lot of these fixed price contracts, like Starliner, and that's only one example of it. The companies really regret it. I mean, you hear about it on their quarterly financial calls about... And it's not just in NASA. There are DOD contracts that they finally agreed to do fixed price, because people are so fed up with these costs plus contracts, and they are losing their shirts over it. So, when you want any company, whether it's an entrepreneurial company, or a traditional company, to get them to do a program with you, you've got to come up with a deal that they're willing to accept. And so, if NASA and the rest of the government says, "Okay, only fixed price contracts from now on, no more cost plus contracts," they may find that there's nobody to work with. So, I do see that as a change, a shift in... It's not really a shift in focus, it's shift in attitude towards the commercial sector.

And it's not just NASA, because NASA started embracing it, and then DOD said, "Oh yeah." And so, DOD has now embraced it, but I still consider it myself to be sort of a trial run, because a lot of these programs are still in the works. And you just saw where the Space Development Agency had to delay some launches, because their contractor, their public-private partnership partner had supply chain issues. And so, they've had to delay these launches of these really critical satellites by six months. So, I think the jury is still out on how all of these are going to work out in the long run. I'm not sure we can forecast that today. So, you have the incoming administration saying all these things, and oh, by the way, every incoming administration I've ever seen says all sorts of things, and very few of them actually get accomplished by the end of either one or two terms. So, it's all pretty much up in the air.

The Musk ingredient in this one makes it particularly interesting, because a space guy, but I think that he's looking at his role much more broadly, as someone who's going to change the government, and space is just a small part of that. So, I really think the jury is out both on whether or not the public-private partnerships are going to work out, or is everyone going to be really happy two or three years down the road that NASA didn't change, and NASA is still there as the reliable guy, or gal, who's still there, developing the new technologies, and helping us stay ahead of the world of space. So, the jury's out on that. The jury's out on what's going to happen with the new administration. What do we know on December 30th, 2024? They don't even start work for another three or four weeks.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I can't be in more agreement with you about the commercial aspect. I think that is the under-discussed part of this, is that what happens when they fail? And the expectations I think have been set so far probably out of reality, based on SpaceX's incredible success, that SpaceX, I think is in a sense treated as the default assumption of outcome, that every company will be more like a SpaceX than a Boeing, where probably it's going to be more Boeing than SpaceX, just in terms of statistical outcomes, because we're moving into areas of performance, and requirements that we don't have good commercial demonstrations of, or we've never been done before. Unlike low earth orbit as you point out, or cargo, it's completely experimental.

And you mentioned, and I think it's worth mentioning a little more deeply, the spacesuits issue with NASA, where you had two fixed price contracts for lunar spacesuits. One of the companies dropped out because it was no longer financially viable. The other one seems to be hanging on by a thread financially, and if those go under, NASA is out of luck. There's no other... Where do you go? Versus, I mean, we had cost plus contracts for a reason. Those weren't completely just made up. They existed for a reason back in the day, so you would not put companies out of business to deliver on things that had never been made before.

I wonder, this exuberance about fixed cost has been, again, it's kind of based on, in a sense, SpaceX's incredible success. And everyone else is, as you point out, kind of pending. CLPS even, we still haven't had a successful lunar landing. And that fixed price contract to land Viper went from 180 to 320 million somehow. That's pretty amazing for something that's fixed, almost doubling. Has this, do you think, been too trendy, or is there some aspect of this that is just seen as so... It's easy to sign those contracts on the NASA side because it allows them, as I said, to over optimize for cost, and then we'll just assume it works out? Do you see this era as maybe tampering down eventually, once we do have failures? I mean obviously it's only going to increase in the next few years, but how do we accept failure in one of these areas, if it does happen? And how do you think that changes our approach to it as a space agency, and as a nation?

Marcia Smith: It's too early to say. So we had this one example with Collins dropping out of the space suit contest, and... Not a contest. They actually had an award, and you see these other programs slipping. How long can Boeing hang on? What if they spend 1.6 billion of their own money on Starliner? And it's great that they're telling Nelson that they're still committed to it, but companies are companies, and those are publicly traded.

Casey Dreier: And only so many companies could absorb that level of cost, of loss too, right?

Marcia Smith: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Like Astrobotic couldn't handle that level of loss. That's a big, and established company. I wonder if SLS is almost backfilling the coffers to handle... It's a backdoor subsidy for a Starliner, but you're right.

Marcia Smith: And ISS operations.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Marcia Smith: Because Boeing operates the Space Station too.

Casey Dreier: Right.

Marcia Smith: I don't know, but I'm assuming that they're all in like little stovepipes, and that you can't cross the money amongst them. But in any case, it's a challenge. And I think that we have not learned yet how all of this is going to turn out. You brought up CLPS. So one of the CLPS companies went bankrupt, Master, and there were all the SPAC companies. They may not have had NASA contracts, but those special purpose acquisition corporations, everybody was exuberant about those a couple of years ago. And Jeff Paust at Space News I think did a little summary of them. There's one or two of them left, I think.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Marcia Smith: So, you can get exuberant about these things, and "Oh, yeah. Fixed price contracts. Why isn't the government doing that all the time?" Well, as you said, there was a reason you ended up with cost plus contracts, because companies wouldn't take the deal otherwise, because they knew they were out there building something brand new, and they couldn't project what the cost was going to be. So they had to come up with some way to ensure that they were still going to be able to make enough money to be profitable.

So, it's still an experiment in the works, and I don't know if the incoming administration is going to try and change things dramatically. Jared Isaacman, who, if he gets confirmed by the Senate, he probably will, he is a very good businessman. So, he doesn't have any government experience. I think that's going to be quite an awakening for him to find out that the NASA administrator doesn't get to decide to do very much, because he gets told what to do by the White House and Congress, so we'll see how much he likes the job. But I think that he would understand this, and understand when you can do fixed price, and when you need cost plus. So, I think he's a pretty good choice for NASA administrator. I just hope he isn't too surprised at how little power he has.

Casey Dreier: I point out to folks that they're called the administrator very intentionally, rather than the NASA director, or CEO, that it's-

Marcia Smith: Exactly.

Casey Dreier: ... They're administering policies. So, given the incoming administration, what do you think his biggest challenges are going to be, assuming Isaacman is confirmed?

Marcia Smith: Shoehorning the programs of record into the declining budget that I expect Congress is going to give them, nevermind starting new things.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Marcia Smith: And you can say, "Oh, well, I'm going to revamp this program, like Mars sample return, and I'm going to come up with a cheaper way to do it," and I'm dying to see what they came up with. They were supposed to put it out by the end of the year, which is tomorrow. So, we'll see how they managed to take what turned into an $11 billion program, and shoe it into something that's "affordable." But I don't even know how they're going to fit that into the budget. So, as long as the Congressional emphasis, because they're the ones with the money, as long as their emphasis is on debt reduction by cutting government spending, and NASA is part of those cuts, I just don't see how they're going to make a lot of progress.

Casey Dreier: If you had to say, what is your most optimistic take? And we kind of gave the more pragmatic, and realistic one that clearly I agree with, I think that's going to be the big challenge. Do you see a path where he comes in and can dramatically reformulate how NASA works internally, along with these larger movements of... We mentioned the Doge aspect, but just within this larger context, there seems to be some level of interest in addressing the bureaucratic structures of government. And do you see an optimistic take, where that works out to NASA's advantage? Or do you see that as, can you even make that one in a clear way? Do you see that happening in any viable future?

Marcia Smith: By that, do you mean ending NASA centers?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, in front of [inaudible 01:00:25].

Marcia Smith: Or getting rid of NASA headquarters?

Casey Dreier: We'll expand. Sure. Yeah. It's like doing a BRAC for NASA head... Centers, and yeah, simplifying things.

Marcia Smith: Yeah, yeah. Well, we all know how popular the BRAC process was. Right? And Congress said, "Never again."

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Marcia Smith: And that was for the defense, military bases for those who don't know what the BRAC was, base realignment and something, closure.

Casey Dreier: Something, yeah.

Marcia Smith: Yeah. And there have been efforts in the past to close NASA centers, but members of Congress get elected by their constituents, and they are beholden to their constituents even more than to a president. And so, when you try to close a NASA center, and people are going to be out of jobs, if you had the private sector come in and have the same number of jobs, so anybody who was working for the government can just shift over to their private sector, that might ameliorate it to some extent. But there are some people who just are really proud working for NASA, and they do not want to work for a private sector company, by the way. And so, they want to continue having these NASA centers that are so historic. They mean so much to the community, and they're proud to work there. So, members of Congress are going to have a really hard time justifying any effort to close a NASA center. So I don't expect it to happen, because people have wanted to do that in the past and it's never gotten anywhere.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. If you had to say for listeners who, again, I think there's a lot of, I'll say exuberance out there about the realm of options that are now possible for... Again, the fact that we're even talking about NASA center closures as a concept, to be clear, in which it hasn't actually been floated by anybody literally, but just the realm of discussions we've heard. What should a listener who cares about these things, what would they look for to show us these are serious things happening, versus just talk about radical changes to the space agency going forward? What are the giveaways, or what are the clear-eyed way to kind of analyze some of the range of claims, and news stories, and op-eds that are coming out to help people in a sense, track and calibrate their own understanding of what will be happening in the next few years? What recommendations do you have, besides reading space policy online, obviously?

Marcia Smith: Well, the place to look obviously is the president's budget request, and what Congress does with it, because almost everything you want to do requires money. And so, presidents who want to change things have to ask Congress's permission to do that, if it involves money. You can have executive orders. Presidents can do things by themselves through executive orders, but they can get challenged. And maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough, but I don't think a president could close a NASA center just by an executive order. I don't think that's possible. I don't know what the limits are on executive orders, but I think it's going to have to be done through the process that goes through Congress. And so, you're going to have to convince enough members of Congress that that would benefit the nation by doing that. And that's a tall order. But the president's budget request, I think will be the first place we see what they actually have in mind.

Casey Dreier: Follow the money. It's always the-

Marcia Smith: Follow the money. Always true.

Casey Dreier: I say, if you want to look at the real policies, you're free. The words don't cost you any money to say them, but you can only spend a dollar once. And I always point people... This is why I am always so interested in how money is spent and where it's spent, because that ultimately tells you, I think, what the real priorities are. So I think that's good advice. Follow where the money's going or not, and that, I think, cuts through a lot of the hype about some of these things. But I think, again, there's these broader... As you point out, I think what has been lacking in a lot of these discussions have been there is still a Congress, and I think we just saw, going through this kind of drama at the end of this year, where it was briefly uncertain whether the government stay open, there's a number of people within the president's own party who are willing to not fall in line.

And you have a very narrow Congressional majority, Republican majority in both houses of Congress. So, there is still a Congress and they still have power, and you can't just assert that the impoundment clause doesn't apply anymore, and that you can just not spend money. They may, but that, I guess, that will, as you point out, will be challenged. So there's a whole process, which I think the essence of the slowness can sometimes be to the benefit, and change is hard, I think, but it can change. And I think you pointed out, there's a number of, over time, dramatic things that have gone on within NASA as itself, and how it's organized itself, and how it's pursued its programs, but at the end of the day, they still need money to operate, and people.

Marcia Smith: And those commercial companies need NASA to have money.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Marcia Smith: Because NASA is developing some of the technologies that they're using, and they are contracting with these companies. So, they need NASA to survive and thrive also.

Casey Dreier: Very good point.

Marcia Smith: It's a partnership. That's what they're called. Public-private partnership.

Casey Dreier: Also good. Right. If NASA went away tomorrow, most of the private companies would go away too. Maybe SpaceX is big enough at this point.

Marcia Smith: NASA is the customer, and it's the technology innovator.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Marcia Smith: They just don't get the credit for it.

Casey Dreier: So, that's the thing we need to figure out then, the ongoing challenge of NASA to embed itself in public awareness better. Marcia Smith, thank you so much for spending time with us today, and walking us through the ins and outs of these things. We will revisit some point, maybe at the end of next year, and see if wild change has happened, and we're all living on the moon, or if we're still talking about some of the same challenges, we can reevaluate that. So, thank you so much. I was delighted to have you today.

Marcia Smith: Thanks so much for inviting me. It was great fun.

Casey Dreier: We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month, with more discussions on the politics, and philosophies, and ideas that power space science, and exploration. Help others, in the meantime, learn more about Space Policy, and The Planetary Society, by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds, and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio.

You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at [email protected]. Or, if you're a Planetary Society member, and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio Space in our online member community. Mark Hilverda, and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor, me, Casey Dreier, and Merc Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our Space Policy Edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent non-profit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based, and anybody, even you, can become a member. They start at just $4 a month. That's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org/join. Until next month, ad astra.