Space Policy Edition: Do we need a philosophy of space exploration?

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show where we explore the politics and processes behind space exploration. I'm Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy here at The Planetary Society. Why do we explore space? This is perhaps one of the most simple questions that we hear all the time as space advocates and, honestly, one of the most difficult ones to answer. There is no single response that captures the full breadth of motivations and reasons for why we go. And I'm not alone in struggling with this, even elite committees on the National Academies of Sciences have struggled to answer this question succinctly and have proposed long lists of varied reasons that are all very good, with no single overriding reason topping them all. It's also a question that I'm not totally sure we'll ever have a clear answer. I think part of the problem is in its very framing, space is not a destination, it's a medium. It's like saying, "Why we go to the ocean?" The question doesn't make sense really without some context of what you're trying to do there. Do you go to swim? Do you go to do research? Do you go to sunbathe? Do you go to fish? All of those are valid reasons, but there's no one reason that drives everyone to go to the ocean, right? Space is the same idea, but I think space is so new to us as a species, in terms of accessibility, and so novel that we tend to flatten this vast range of possible activities and destinations and challenges of being there into a single word, just space. So how can you ever answer that simple question, that seemingly simple question when you are literally trying to consider infinity. Space is really big, there's probably not going to be a simple answer. However, my guest this month, Ryan Faith, a policy expert and currently research student in his PhD at the University of Southampton, thinks there is still value in thinking deeply about this and of pursuing some sort of defined philosophy of space exploration. He believes we need to think clearly and carefully about what we're doing in space and why as a collective, as a nation, as a democracy. He has a recently published article called Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond that I very much recommend, it's free to read and access. We will link to it in the show notes, where he examines the benefits and pitfalls of certain types of approaches and narratives and philosophies that we have established for space travel, particularly around the Apollo program, both as a means to an end, ones that derive value from the action of exploration itself. And I think he identifies some very real issues if we mindlessly glom onto or adhere to certain approaches or arguments or narratives or philosophies that theoretically could lead to dead ends or self-destructive pathways that ultimately provide budget cuts and program cancellations once initial goals are met or even by maybe alienating the very public that pays for the effort. We touch on a variety of subjects in this conversation, so you don't have to read this article in advance, we touch on it, but it is free online and I do recommend reading it. But before he joins us, I want to mention just very briefly that The Planetary Society, which is the organization that produces the show, is an independent member-supported organization. This show and all of our other work happens because of those of you who become members or donate to our efforts. If you're not a member, please consider joining us, just starts at $4 a month at planetary.org/join. It's very easy, we have all sorts of great reasons to join, particularly our online member community where people like me and my colleague, Jack Kiraly, and others hang out and talk space all the time. Really great opportunities, they're an interesting space to be, but also you just really enable all of this work that we do. We don't take big corporate donations, we don't take government money. We're an independent organization because of our membership. So if you are already a member and you are listening to this, first thank you. Honestly, thank you. You enable me to do the show and us to do all of our great work at The Planetary Society. If you can, consider increasing your member level to support us even more, that's all at planetary.org/join. I hope you consider it. And now my guest this month, Ryan Faith. Ryan, welcome to the Space Policy Edition, thank you for being here.

Ryan Faith: Very happy to be here. Thank you.

Casey Dreier: So the reason you're here is specifically one article, which is called Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond, which looks at some ways to evaluate a philosophy for space exploration maybe to put it in a very broad sense. This article is online, our members can read it for free. But to start from this big picture perspective, why do you think we need a philosophy for space exploration and what problem would it help solve?

Ryan Faith: So there's been in the various chunks of the space community for the last 50, 60 years, this notion that NASA should be doing this or we as a species should be doing that. And it's these fights over direction at some level, right? But a lot of them are taken apart it very rigorously at a technical level, but not taken apart rigorously in any other dimension because we are talking, let's say, "Oh, we should go put people on Mars and this program or that program or just send rovers to Mars and skip people." But those are really debates about how and so what's the essential underlying activity? So to be fair to the space philosophy community, which I cannot claim to be a member of, is I'm using philosophy as a shorthand to just say a very disciplined and rigorous and careful way to think very clearly and carefully about what we're doing. And so to bring it by way of example is an HBO series from the late nineties about sending a man to the Moon, about the Apollo program. They have a little vignette where these guys are sitting in the executive office building in the basement and they're saying, "Well, we can get more rocks if we send a robot." And the other guy says, "Yeah. But wouldn't it bug you to see the Soviets plant a flag?" And he goes, "Yeah." And then the scene ends and it's like, "Well, why is any of that true? Why are the rocks more or less important? What is the inherent value of planting a flag that makes it interesting?" You had on a while ago Michael Griffin and he has his acceptable reasons and real reasons. So I'm trying to really, when I say philosophy, I mean dig into the real reasons.

Casey Dreier: So I think the idea of this paper and which sets out, I think, a broad area of discussion, it doesn't solve this, right? It's a starting point. You dip into Aristotle's definitions of telic and atelic reasons for doing things. So that's why Aristotle is coming into this, but you're saying this is one of the tools which we can use perhaps to address these foundational motivational aspects of going forward. So maybe just address what you're looking at with this paper about how that would help and what telic and atelic are in this case.

Ryan Faith: Okay. So the paper, as you say, uses this telic and atelic as an example. And the reason where I'm going through that process is that I discussed the Apollo program and everybody has their theory about why the Apollo program fell off a cliff in 1972. We were retrenched and then the shuttle period was very messy and all this stuff. And there's all of these different narratives have their heroes and villains and good guys and bad guys and explanations. And what I point out in the article is that Kennedy's framing of the moon challenge is to be there first, but not to be there a second time. So that the failure of careful thinking baked in really early to the Apollo program to suggest that maybe this is a case where this would've been different. From that I then pivot to talking about the Artemis program and use Aristotle's notion of telos, which is basically he's got four different kinds of cause and effect relationships and telos is the final cause. Okay? So the telos of a hamburger is to be eaten, where are we going with it? And that the Apollo program had a great telos, a great telic narrative. Okay? We're going to put a guy on the moon and he's going to have a flag and he's going to be Neil Armstrong and he's going to say, "We came here in peace for all mankind," and then we're done. And that drops you off the edge of a cliff. The counterpart to telos is this idea of atelic activities, which are really the stuff that's much more about the voyage than the result. One raises a child not to get to the point of it that they're 18 and you can kick them out of the house eventually. And that's stepping stones and guideposts that occur along the way, but the process of raising a child is to raise the child and not for some other end.

Casey Dreier: And that gives us a framework for thinking about, I think, that you said the pitfalls of various ways of explaining and asserting these foundational motivations. So telic activities they're more like a narrative and I would even say probably more compatible with intuitive ways that humans think about things as discrete chunks, right? So there's an end, there's a means to some kind of end and then that's what you do. And when you communicate something, why are we doing X? Why are we doing Y? It's to do this, right? I think this is this intuitive cause and effect aspect of our cognition that then, as you point out, what happens when you do it and then the motivation dissipates and then you had this whole civilian space apparatus suddenly seeking out, "Well, what do we do next?" And trying to reimagine itself in this post-telic context. But atelic have this ongoing thing that has its own challenges as well. In a way, this is what we hear Bill Nelson when he goes before Congress they say, ""Why are we doing Artemis?" And part of it he says, "Oh, because we're explorers" right? It's like, "Oh, we're going to explore things." And so-

Ryan Faith: Right.

Casey Dreier: ... we're doing it to explore. So we got to explore things, which is kind of true, but circular, right? And somewhat unsatisfying-

Ryan Faith: Right. Oh, exactly.

Casey Dreier: ... at the end of the day, maybe as a motivator, because I think of our intuitive desire for cause and effect.

Ryan Faith: We process things through narrative just because that's how we do. But it's like the joke about the dog that chases cars faces a terrible problem when they catch the car. What do you do with a car that you've now got your teeth sunk into? And you've pretty much hit it on the head is that you've got this one school of thought that says, "We do this because we do this." And the other is to say, "Okay. We're doing this to achieve a discrete end." How do we think about these two things in conjunction with one another?

Casey Dreier: How does this play out in the political system? So you've worked within it deeply, you were staff at the House Science Committee. Where do you see narratives or even types of narratives come into play in the decision process on the inside? How important is it to have a clear narrative at that level? Or is this an outward facing, public facing problem of narrative in a democracy?

Ryan Faith: Well, there's narratives showing up in a couple of different ways. And from my writing, working in the defense community as I've been exposed to their universe and their epistemology a little bit, and I would say that we have the five Ws, who, what, when, where, why, and how. And we're very good about talking about how but to do how better we need to understand why. Okay? But to understand why we have to understand what we're actually doing at some more useful level because once you have a grasp of that, you can develop what sometimes is called a theory of victory. From theory of victory yields strategy and from strategy yields narrative. So you're at the end and then you say, "Okay. This is..." Going back to the Apollo program as a classic example, is in some respects it was very complete theory if you throw in a lot of assumed and unspoken parts. You just throw in the assumed and unspoken part that beating the Soviets was important. Being on the moon was important, that this was a legitimate competition and not a waste of money. So you throw all that assumed stuff in and then you get to these proverbial tales about janitors saying, "I'm here to put a man on the moon," right? If you start off and just say, "I put a man on the moon," then the janitor is like, "I have no idea how mopping does this." So it's trying to get as far upstream as you can on process and that's something that's hard to do.

Casey Dreier: Well, it's hard to do when you have something so... And this is where my conceptual difficulty comes in at a certain level of approaching this question, this trying to assert some kind of foundational why. I'll just quote something from your paper that says, "For space exploration to pursue its full potential there must be a deep and rigorous engagement with a concept from everyone and for everyone, in other words to best explore space, society needs to have a communal conversation on exploration's value, impact, and meaning." And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I think, again, something that predicated this conversation, again, was this question of, do we dwell on this almost too much in NASA's case for civil space? And is this a function of wanting there to be one umbrella, simple, straightforward explanation that gives us license to do this activity that just may not exist? As you well know, as everyone knows who's listening to this, people have grappled with this question for a long time and there's no obvious single answer to it, right? And so is this just going to be a frustration of mismatch of our desire as humans to have a simple narrative for why we do things? Or, I think, maybe from your perspective, are we just not approaching it from the proper position in advance?

Ryan Faith: I don't think we're going far enough upstream in the reasoning process because sometimes in conversation philosophy is used to mean like explanation. Okay? And we're way far away from the explanation. We're nowhere near an explanation, that's going to take however long to take. We have to pull on the thread very, very far and go as far upstream as possible. So when we talk about, let's say, the activity of sending a person into space is that you're taking a human and you're shooting them out of the human world, the world of all living things and putting them in a place for which they specifically were not built, designed, or evolved for some purpose. Now, is it good or useful in general to have artificial temporary habitats that we put outside of Earth? Is it worthwhile or useful to try to create large habitats like terraforming or whatever else? We've changed our relationship with the rest of the universe and we decided that we're going to interact with it physically, which we couldn't do before 1957 really, we were just passive receivers. So now that we can go out and engage the rest of the material universe, to what end does it make sense for people to be there? I don't know. Is it to generate science? To take an example is, a lot of folks who are very excited by the new space, the whole universe of new space stuff is that they'll say, "Okay. And then we'll do this and then we'll be doing asteroid mining," right? And an outside observer doesn't understand that the implicit point of asteroid mining isn't to make money, the implicit part of asteroid mining is to draw presence and draw people out into space. So the asteroid mining is merely the means to the end to push humans out into the universe, right? But nobody ever says that back half, they say, "Oh, it's to make money." And then somebody comes in from the other side and they say, "Oh, you just want to go make money in the space." No, that's incidental to their purpose.

Casey Dreier: Well, yeah. This, again, touches on these broader motivational aspects, but again, I think we tend to just bifurcate. We can already see we're talking a lot about human spaceflight. And this is one of the questions I had for you after reading this article was that, again, my difficulty with this concept as being a ultimately productive or solution-oriented path is because I wonder if we confuse or mix up the fact that space is just a medium, it's a place, but we act like it's just a single thing, right? But space is a medium for different types of activities. And most biggest bifurcation to me... And we'll just set aside all of national defense because this is a civil space nonprofit, which has its own thing. But for civil space, why we go into it, I think just human spaceflight, which we've been talking about and then robotic spaceflight or scientifically prioritized spaceflight are almost just two completely separate activities that deserve their own foundational motivations and maybe their own philosophies. And can we even unite these two because they happen to occur in space? But they seem to me so profoundly different. Obviously you can do some science with humans. There's robotic stuff that helps human spaceflight, but that's all post hoc incidental stuff, right? And this is not a new argument, they're just very different things. And so maybe do we conceptualize space wrong in this case, in this whole framing because it's so new, because, as you said, we suddenly gained access to it. And the access until very recently has been mediated by governments because the cost of entry was so high. But it's not like we have a single philosophy for sailing on the ocean, right? We have a variety of different federal agencies and activities and things that happen to happen on the ocean, but there's no ocean agency exclusively for all activity in the ocean, right?

Ryan Faith: I believe I understand where you're coming from and the way that I would contract is how I'm thinking of it is that you've got two overlapping problems or two overlapping phenomena. One is that the technological sphere, the Earth, quote unquote, the human world has gotten larger and extends geo, it includes our little haze of satellites. Okay? And space activity within that domain typically takes care of itself, we don't have to really think about this in some deep profound way. Maybe we do, I don't know, it's not my brief. Then we've got this other, how do we apprehend and understand everything else in the universe that's beyond the human world? And by my reckoning, when we talk about exploration, what we're talking about doing is engaging a place with the intent of making discoveries to give it more value and to give it meaning and essentially make it more relevant to everything inside this human world, right? And so when we look at going to the moon or going to Mars or right now the balance are, is will we learn enough about the moon by going there for however many years, and same with Mars, that they'll become part of our human world, become routinized and become just like, "Oh, that's because the McDonalds at Neil Armstrong Station is better than the Burger King at Yuri Gagarin Station," right? Or will all of those bodies perennially and forevermore never be part of the human world? Okay? So are we basically isolated? Are we on Alcatraz? Okay? So that's the first big question. Now when we get into the programatics of sending humans versus robots is it brings into mind two things, two anecdotes. One is the proverb of the blind man and the elephant is that one blind man feels this big thing. "Ah, the elephant's a big floppy thing," because he's got an ear. He's like, "No, an elephant's a rope," because he got the tail. Another guy get the trunk, he says it's a snake and so on. People who are viscerally excited about seeing, let's say, the volcanoes on Io. When the Voyager was coming through it saw that little plume in the images, it's sparking something that really speaks to them. It's working for them because it's a real reason, that plume is interesting not because it's science, but because it's somehow speaking to their real reasons.

Casey Dreier: It's the sublime. It's a sublime experience to see a volcano on another world.

Ryan Faith: Yeah. So sublime is actually one of the things... Interesting that you've had these talks on it because sublime has been penetrating my thinking a lot over the last couple of years. And that's not the same as but perhaps a distant relative to, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could go walk on the moon and stay in a moon hotel some day?" Okay? It's different part of the elephant, so to speak. And, I think, my observation about the space community has been that we tend to fall prey to what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Faith: So it's like if we, let's say, just blew up the human spaceflight program and it was only robotic, right? Sure as death and taxes, it would turn into giant pitch battles about the really useful work of Earth observation versus wasting money on astrophysics. And if we blew up all of that, it's going to keep fractionating, right? So we've got to figure out what this elephant is and say that for you the elephant is the trunk and for you the elephant's the tail, but we're all pro-elephant here and we should work on elephant policies, not tail policies or trunk policies.

Casey Dreier: That kind of sums up what you're pitching in this article, right? We need to define the elephant.

Ryan Faith: Yeah. At least close enough. Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Well, I think this is a really interesting point because we're seeing some of this fractionation right now. For the first time in 10 years NASA's budget is shrinking, not growing. And then you add on the pressures of inflation and workforce and all these costs going up. And we are seeing, I think, some serious tensions start to develop internally, right? That the battles have been happening between various disciplines as opposed to facing out. I think this is to your exact core thing. And perhaps this brings it back, again, to this overall arc of your argument, which is without some kind of grand motivational connecting tissue, without our elephant in mind, we don't know how to organize ourselves together or we don't have anything coherent beyond our individual motivations or our individual solipsistic experiences in terms of how we engage with space. And I think we are seeing that absolutely right now. And so going back, again, to this big argument, how do we try to approach something like this? Again, I go back and forth. And obviously The Planetary Society, there are tens of thousands of people who care so much about particularly space science, but exploration, to be members and to support the work that we do. And there's huge public interest, but at the same time there's a lot of other people just aren't interested in that. So how do we engage in enough people to reach a tipping point into a broad community engagement or what's the practical aspect of how we build some sort of consensus here for what we're doing? I see a problem too about do we even have the luxury of reevaluating the fundamental motivational aspects of what we do while we're already doing things? Because there'll be a huge incentive to just draw a circle around everything we currently do and say, "That's what we do," and then look to justify it after the fact. So I see two fundamental challenges here. How do you think about those?

Ryan Faith: Well, so the first problem is how space interacts with the non-space community, right? Is the vast majority of people, they're interested, they're curious, but they're not going to spend... They don't wake up saying, "In what ways does the sublime interact with the Voyager program," right? That's just not on their agenda.

Casey Dreier: They don't? Yeah.

Ryan Faith: Unfortunately. And they don't know why. So they come for the photos and they come for the quick hits, right? And because people are, let me see, very miserly processors, they'll take the tweet over the in-depth argument. So when we fight amongst each other, we're just providing ammunition for people not to care. Okay?

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Faith: So I can take the entire discussion of how we should use human robotic pairing in the exploration of the Mars surface and say, "That's stupid because we shouldn't bother." It dissolves something very quickly. The second is that I don't really know that there will ever be the proverbial one rationale rule them all that will have this one ring and-

Casey Dreier: A grand unified theory-

Ryan Faith: Yeah. I don't think that's going to happen.

Casey Dreier: ... of NASA or something?

Ryan Faith: But where I think it is possible, and let me walk through three examples, is in human spaceflight, it's pretty clear that there's ultimately a special pleading at the core of it. Okay? It's like, "Well, it's inspirational. There's all these things. It's good for technology." But it's not unspoken, but I think widely recognized that there's a "because it's good" sort of special pleading, this makes it unique. Now, if we look at commercial, let's say the difference between commercial communication satellites and asteroid mining. Okay? One of these groups can get loans from banks and investors, the other cannot. One is returning revenue, the other cannot. So you have this division, right? So why do these people want to go mine asteroids? If it was to make money they'd be making cases that looked a lot like for communication satellites. So they're doing in effect just making a special pleading that this specific kind of commercial activity is somehow worth the risk or it's more valuable or that it'll pay off. Okay? That we should go beyond our world for some purpose. When we look at science and we take, let's say, a billion dollars, which is, I think, for human spaceflight only enough to send somebody's leg to the moon roughly, and we want to go put that on science missions for space is that I can hire a lot of botanists and mathematicians and material scientists for a billion dollars. So if the goal is to spend money to produce science space is an expensive way to do that. So again, at the bottom of it you're making a special pleading. Okay? To come back around to your earlier argument is that I think in all three cases is you're looking at an acceptable versus real reasons, that all of them have real reasons that are really hard for us to get our hands on, really hard for us to drill down into. And so it's not necessary that I would agree with you that the best way to do this is a outer planet's orbiter versus a Venus orbiter, which is more exploratory and better at real reasons. We'll say, It's to get to the point where you can say, "Okay. There are real reasons that we both like this that are good, fight this battle first, then fight amongst yourselves." It's to go by analogy to the Air Force, right? There's the people who love their bombers and there's the people who love their jet fighters and the people who love their satellites and so on and so forth. And it's like while they will fight tooth and nail amongst themselves for funding, they recognize the first and highest priority is to get the Air Force more funding. And it's even better than getting the Air Force more funding is to get the DoD top line increase. So they're pushing this back because they have, I think, a more coherent way of thinking about what they do.

Casey Dreier: So is it a function of... I guess, maybe to restate that, you've been inside, again, the political system, let's just say American democracy and our political representatives, is that the level that we're talking about here? Do you think that's a good enough facsimile for broad public engagement to engage and integrate basically policymakers, the elected representatives? Does that basically serve as the stand-in of community agreement, or do you think this needs to be a grassroots style level of engagement with the public? Where do you see the value of the representative political system?

Ryan Faith: We can allude to hot button social issues and not mention any of them explicitly. And take any of them that come to mind is that we know the philosophical underpinnings because they're hammered out at the Supreme Court and then the Supreme Court issues this decision that's some arcane judgment on the applicability of the letter T to the rest of the alphabet, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you go down the street and say, "So what do you think about this issue? What do you think about that?" Because they have a way of accessing it, right? And then that floats up through the political process, right? And it becomes a common language and common frames of reference. My hope would be that for space is that we can develop the ways of thinking about it enough that people can have their big smart thoughts over here and write really long dry papers, but there's then something that people can latch onto, right? That it doesn't have to be grassroots, but I think it has to be accessible because the politician at the end of the day has got constituent Bob coming up and saying, "Well, why do we spend money on this?" And during Apollo you could say it was to beat the Russians and that was this entire self-contained argument and you were done, right? It's really hard for this guy to say... It's like, "Well, tell me more about what your interests are and then I can tell you what the one soundbite is." But there's not a common denominator soundbite that you can really easily defend.

Casey Dreier: Do you think NASA is unique in this situation? Do people sit and argue about the profound meaning of the Department of Transportation and needing to define a fundamental motivation beyond its asserted responsibilities by Congress? Or is this something unique to NASA and space itself? Do people talk about why we do other federal agencies and why they have the responsibilities they do?

Ryan Faith: Sometimes, but it's rare. That sort of came up a little bit during the healthcare debate about 10 years ago.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Faith: Broad social issues, but it's not very common certainly. And I think that that's, in a sense, a good sign because it tells us that we're doing something that actually can trigger debate, that can trigger this engagement, right? So it's not that this is being unfairly imposed on NASA. It's just that there's no point in talking deeply about the philosophy at the top of Department of Transportation. Maybe it's just not amenable to it. And let me sneak through this sideways a little differently, is that when we talk about space, if I could wave my magic wand we would get rid of the word. It's terrible, terrible, terrible word linguistically. Okay? Is the department of things that exist in three dimensions, the national agency of exploring things that exist in three dimensions isn't useful. You have space heaters, office space, real estate space, mind space. If we were to use the really horrible clunky phrase of the entire rest of the universe that exists, then NASA is the agency that's involved with the entire rest of the universe that exists. And when we figure about how would we like to interact with the entire rest of the universe that exists, beyond our air, that invites big questions. And I think it reframes what NASA does in a more useful way. I don't know that NASA has to be the home of the philosophical debate. NASA is just the brightest star in the constellation right now.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Faith: And so it's an approximate target around which stuff occurs.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. That's interesting. Framing it that way then... Oh, well, that's a hard thing to define what to do in infinity, basically.

Ryan Faith: Right.

Casey Dreier: It's like, so we're going to cordon off our little finite little globe. And then what's the Infinity Agency responsible for? Well, it might be hard to summarize that in a sentence or two.

Ryan Faith: Right. Because I had on my wall a little picture of the pale blue dot and then you have a little circle around pale blue dot. You say, "Okay. Every other congressional committee's jurisdiction is here. And this is everything else, is this other subcommittees' jurisdiction."

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Ryan Faith: And one of the things that I want to make sure we don't get too far off in one direction is that I think this gets a lot to how we think about regulation and value and how we conduct ourselves. Okay? We've got a big interest in space debris, that's finally getting some air time. So when we think about how we conduct ourselves and what norms we set, again, this goes back upstream to, well, what are we really doing? What are the essential values? So this is why philosophy is upstream of how we choose to regulate, how we choose to organize, how we choose to talk about strategy, how we build narrative. We just don't have a common foundation upstream there to really do that with.

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: So NASA does have a list of responsibilities, right? As you mentioned in the article, put in by Congress and added to over the years. NASA has a mission statement and a strategic plan. And so nominally there's things, "Here's what we do and here's what we're supposed to do." Why is that not enough in this case? What are we trying to add here to define this elephant of what? The cosmic agency... trying not to use space, would be?

Ryan Faith: The Infinity Agency.

Casey Dreier: The Infinity... I like that one. Yeah.

Ryan Faith: Everything else, the Department of Infinity.

Casey Dreier: Infinity minus Earth.

Ryan Faith: Infinite paperwork. Infinite budgets.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Ryan Faith: Infinite cost growth. So in the last couple of years I've written a couple op-eds for SpaceNews, and part of that exercise was to start trying to think about space in a little bit different way, right? Because we can charge in the front door and say, "Okay. Well, these are my five priorities, these are my three rationals." I'm like, "Okay. Let's put all this to the side and let's play with the idea that perhaps one of the most accurate authors of the space race was Tom Wolfe." And not the most accurate factual, but maybe the most accurate poetically. Okay? You don't have to buy into his entire paradigm, but his choice of use of language was spectacular. Norman Mailer, again, was another great one. Oriana Fallaci. And it's a little bit like your guest was talking about a couple episodes ago, was talking about the sublime in the moon, right? So what if we just for second step over to this axis and try to appreciate it? And that suggested to me that there are ways that seem to be very potent and effective that about talking about space if we come at it from the side door, so to speak. And that was helpful in letting me understand what getting upstream of it would be. The science community doesn't want to put a camera on it because it wastes payload in space and it doesn't return good scientific results. Okay? And if we had a very, very strictly, narrowly defined that the only purpose of space is to do science, we wouldn't put a camera on it. But we put the camera on it and that turns out to be the face of public engagement and it raises it in the public consciousness. And that's, in a sense, providing better what your customers really want. And if I try to come back and put that in legislative language in a very naive way and I say, "Missions should have cameras." You might accidentally get right. You might actually get results that are useful, but you're not... What's the real thing here?

Casey Dreier: I wonder how much of this challenge is a function of how our civil space program came to be in the United States, that NASA itself was a conglomeration of a variety of field centers established for other means, right? There's also the first A in NASA, right? In addition to doing space, NASA also does aeronautics. It just added in there as well. So it had absorbed all the old NACA facilities, a variety of science facilities, some army missile ballistics facilities. And so there wasn't this sui generis genesis of creation of the space program. It was assembled and cobbled together from various other things done for very reactive purpose, at the time, in the context of the Cold War. And then left to float along afterwards to figure out what its purpose is within this broader context that has been evolving as particularly as technology has been changing with the new commercial sectors, other nations entering space. That's all in a dynamic process. We tend to look for justification post hoc from a non-ideal creation story, right? And I wonder if it's interesting to contrast this with, let's say, a company like SpaceX or Blue Origin, which is a 21st century creations, both of them, that had, in a sense, greenfield development or there was no inherent, there was no existing infrastructure to absorb, there was no existing ideas to serve. Both of these were products of, in a sense, maybe more along the lines of what we're talking about here, a core philosophy of two individuals. Jeff Bezos is millions of people living and working in space and Elon Musk's extend the light of humanity into the cosmos. And you see maybe an interesting contrast between those two. And both companies have a clearer version of what they do and what they're trying to do because of that. But also they're not public agencies and so their responsibilities are far less and they're allowed to, in a sense, have narrow focuses, directed focuses and clear things delineations that say no and yes. And I wonder perhaps it's, again, a function of are we applying expectations and desires for clarity to a domain that is inappropriate for it, which is public discretionary agencies in a representative democracy?

Ryan Faith: So I think your examples of Blue Origin and SpaceX are spectacular in that they are examples of things where you can trace a discernible philosophy or maybe it's rigorously developed with a team of 16 philosophers or not. But there's a point to it, there's a directionality, there's a narrative and a middle, beginning, and an end. And you might not like it, but at least what you're disagreeing with. And looking back at the founding of NASA is that we had this weird post World War II situation to where mankind had tapped the forces of, well, the supernatural. We tapped atomic weapons as a fundamental force that's beyond our ordinary ability to understand. At the same time, we tapped our ability to go beyond Earth. So we're dealing with these two phenomena. We ended up writing the Space Act a lot based on the Atomic Energy Commission because it was like the Supernatural Agency of Fire now, the Supernatural Agency of Infinity. Okay? We'll, let's go do this. And you're right, it just borrows from everybody and their kid brother. So it is clearly not a clean sheet design. So one of the things that I have been looking at is how do we have discussions on these sorts of things or how do we have these kinds of debates in places and in things that already exist? And it was one of the reasons I mentioned the Supreme Court is not necessarily because I want to give lawyers even more angels dancing on the head of those pins, but because it's a form in which people debate philosophy, if you will or get debate at first principles level. While the Department of Transportation, far as I know, it doesn't have these deep existential questions.

Casey Dreier: I'd love it to hear about it. If anyone knows if they do, let me know.

Ryan Faith: I can make some up, but I'm not being paid by the hour on that. But the DoD has a lot of debates about, "Okay. What does conflict mean? What does war mean? What does this mean? How does information warfare fit into it?" So there are some precedents, but I'm going through in myself and interrogating how we do this midstream, right? And not only how do we do it midstream, how do we do it in a way that's not just by fiat because I don't think we'll come up with one true answer, but maybe we'll come up with two or three categories of answers that are more or less harmonious at some level. They are going to change because pretty ignorant about infinity because it's a big place. Okay? And our understanding is going to change. So how do you do this in a way that allows for that engagement and is interactive and it becomes a process of development rather than just an answer producing machine.

Casey Dreier: Right. Yeah. It's interesting. And, again, you bring up the Supreme Court almost as an institutional example, but notably that was kind of created in the context of something new, right? At the establishment of the country and writing out the Constitution. So yeah. We don't want to mention that how challenging this is going to be. And, again, I keep going back to this domain issue of where we apply these expectations because something that I took away from my discussion with Mike Griffin on real and acceptable reasons, and something that's been stewing in my head is that the real reasons are really the domain of the individual. And these spiritual, sublime, curiosity, all these things that touch... They're all solipsistic, they're all something that literally you just experience. And maybe you can extend that out to a broad public sector agency if you have a very strong monoculture of that everyone around you is going to share similar reactions to those same ideas. But we don't have that in this country. We have a very diverse and increasingly polarized, I'd say, multi-polarized country. And so there's a reason why we have acceptable reasons because at some level, you have to assert some kind of common truth. And it's easier to assert common reality through numbers, through measurable things. And obviously that's facing its own challenges, but at least conceptually you have acceptable reasons because those are what work in diverse policy systems where people are coming to you not necessarily sharing your fundamental values. And this is where I see the success of things like SpaceX and Blue Origin, having these clear definitions of what they do. They are themselves expressions of individuals, right? Of very powerful individuals, but individuals nonetheless who have the ability to assert, "This is what we do and not this." And NASA just does not have that option. And this whole system that we... I know we're not talking just about NASA, but our whole Federal government, it's just not set up that way, right? It's this ever expanding and evolving dynamic, forward two steps back kind of a system that we have in our messy democracy. And, again, I wonder if we're applying... And maybe that's where some of these tensions come from because we have, through a somewhat reactionary process, created this weird, wonderful Department of Infinity in the US government that we wouldn't just do now, right? And we are then left to grapple with this inherent tension of its existence that wouldn't naturally otherwise exist with it.

Ryan Faith: So there's a roundabout route, but bear with me. In his book, American Technological Sublime, David Nye uses Apollo as an example of this technological sublime. It's not talking about the going to the moon, but the launch itself. And in the introduction of that book he makes an interesting argument about these public displays as a civic religion. And one of the notes that he makes, which is really interesting, is that if two people are experiencing a sublime event they only need to agree that it's sublime, they don't need to agree about what it means or why it's that way. So two people could be standing next to each other and watching Neil Armstrong get out on the moon and be blown away from it by completely different reasons. Okay? And that goes basically to how he looks at defining the sublime, is a rupture of scale between what we see and what we know is that we know that the moon's not a real place, it's just up in the sky and now we see this guy walking on it. Now it's a place that people walk. And that's the rupture that creates the sense of sublime.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Faith: You've had guests mention this before, so I'm not going to dive into it too deeply. But I think that when we get far enough upstream is that it becomes a place to... If we can't understand the elephant, we can understand some things about the elephant such that we can say, "Okay. It makes sense that there's ears on this and it makes sense that there's a trunk." Okay? Without necessarily having to have a detailed skeletal structure. Now coming back around to Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk is I would submit that they are also two cases of people for whom the philosophy is motivated, not originating. Okay? I'm not sure that Bezos sat around one morning as a kid and says, "If only there are a way for millions of people to go be somewhere else." It's like when somebody says it's to ensure the survival of the species, is that because they're sitting around and they're troubled about the survival of the species and then after a great deal of study and consideration decide that space is the way to go? Or are they space people first who are trying to figure out why what they already want is a good thing? Okay? And where this comes back down to the acceptable reasons is, one of the things that was interesting about this debate and discussion of acceptable reasons is... Well, two ideas is, one is that in the modern era, we've become very uncomfortable about our relationship with uncertainty. And so we outsource a lot of that discomfort to certainty merchants. So it's not that the acceptable reason gives me a better answer, it gives me a way of not having to worry about it. Where you come back through is an interesting quote from Kierkegaard, and he points out that there's no faith without uncertainty. Without risk, there's no faith. You can't have hope. All of these other things fall off the back end. So something when we talk about the real reasons is recognizing that acceptable reasons inherently cannot do the work of the real reasons.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Ryan Faith: Okay? And we know something about the real reasons. We know that we are pretty certain of the sublime and this rupture of scale in the sense of going beyond ourselves. One of the questions I've been baffled by is that, let's say, 500 years from now and you've got a million people living on the moon or whatever, will that being on the moon be ordinary then? Will it be boring? Or will it still be cool because it's in space? If we expand the human world out that far, it will still count as space? Or is it not really real space? And we just don't have a way of thinking about that. Again, I don't want to overemphasize the DoD, but we've got, in that universe, you've got people going back to Thucydides writing about the Peloponnesian War, right? And you've got Clausewitz and the writing about his theories of war. And so you've had this long history of people writing these very heavy texts. We benefit from a couple thousand years of people contemplating at length how to beat each other over the head and kill each other. We don't have a couple thousand years of people thinking about what it means to leave the world of living things and to cross over the River Styx into the realm of the gods and set foot in the celestial domain. And man, it turns out we got a lot of make up work to do.

Casey Dreier: That's certainly rich territory for discussion. I want to bring this a little bit back to Artemis because that was a big focus of this paper and this is going to be connected. And I think we are looking at Artemis today, which is succeeding, I'd say politically. Which is, as I pointed out before, really no small feat. Just pretty astonishing. That's a huge deal, actually, that we are where we are, even if we're facing all these technical challenges still. So you bring up Artemis in the context of Apollo in your paper a lot, but I feel that Artemis is more similar to something like the International Space Station than it is to Apollo because it is, I think, presented as this atelic, continual, unfinalizable process of expanding human presence to the moon. And ISS really wildly succeeded in the rearview mirror when you think about it, right? If you just set aside all the promises they made in the 1980s when they were making a space station, if you define success as a program existing, which maybe that's the wrong metric. But as a program existing it has lasted 40 years almost. And we're just seeing maybe now going to finally end in 2030, but even then that's a great run. And we've spent akin to an Apollo budget over those 40 years on the ISS. And the ISS... really, it didn't go anywhere new. It didn't have an exploration component really to it. You see this whole struggle of what we're talking about, but they pushed it through, I think, because they went into this practical domain of how do we build this into a bureaucratic system? And now you have this atelic program that exists, and maybe debatably contributes something, but not a ton, as much as you would've thought to this entire endeavor. But that's where Artemis is coming from, right? And so we can have things succeed without clear foundational motivations. And so is that good enough for Artemis or do you see this as leading into a dangerous place longterm for stability of the program?

Ryan Faith: The Artemis-ISS comparison is actually fascinating in a couple of points is that, one, is that you had mentioned early on that the point of Artemis is to extend human presence to the moon. It's like not as such. That's not something that's acknowledged. It's that we're going to go [inaudible 00:53:36] we're going to do science and do these very... We're going to go land there so we can walk around. And it's like, "No, what you're doing is looking at this in this broader frame." And that's an example of thinking about it philosophically right there. And when you look back at the ISS, if you apply that tool to that situation, is the ISS is supposed to do all of these things, but the ISS as fundamental accomplishment, which creating a quasi permanent livable universe in the realm of death beyond our skies. It's a base camp on the other side of the River Styx at which we happen to go do science and have all of these other productive things. And where these things come back around is when we look at experiments for Artemis, is that there's a recent announcement... not too long ago, about one of the missions having a greenhouse that they're going to have a little growing plant on it, right? Okay. So check this out, is that you're going to establish life on another world. And your choice of [inaudible 00:54:34] not sending Americans, but you're trying to send a representative slice of America writ large to the surface of another world to find life-giving water to grow things. And you're starting to build up all of these antecedents. And so think about Artemis as on that axis, and then the way that you start thinking about what you do there changes and the way that you think about discussing it changes. Okay? Because if you just have it as a purely atelic way to do science, okay, or whatever the thing is, is you still end up with a special pleading problem that it's just good to do this. So yeah. It's not good to do this because it's good to do this, it's good to do this because it is good for life to exist. Life as a net positive. It's good for places to support life.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. As I was describing the ISS, having its existence be its success is somewhat of a dismal praise. It's just like living by any means. And I think something absent of meaning in the long term, you get something like the ISS where what do you claim as the big success? And I think actually maybe that's longest lasting impact is basically taking some of this Promethean power and giving it to individuals through commercial space contracts. But that wasn't anywhere in the realm of possibility when it was pitched or created. And I think that's the essence. Maybe that's the danger, in a sense, to the extent that it's maybe even not a negative. But just without having this clear foundational goal of what you're doing, you don't have anything bounding then what you do or don't do. And I think maybe that's to your point here, right, about what we're going to do with Artemis if there's no clear framing or direction to it, is its existence then therefore becomes enough? Or do we get anything out of it in the long run?

Ryan Faith: Right. So first of all, I would still consider ISS to be part of exploration in a broad sense, just because that's not a place that we know, we're still learning about how to live there. Let's say we cut all of the high-minded stuff and we just try to get very reductionist. Okay? The thing that you really want out of any mission of exploration is that it should create a reason to explore. Okay? That it feeds itself. It's a self-fueling process. And coming back now to the broader questions is if you don't understand why it is that you're there, then it's very hard to go searching for a reason to be back. If you've got your astronauts on the lunar surface and he's just banging at stuff, but there's no understanding of utility, other than just presence, then he or she cannot find a reason to go back. They might stumble across one and then post after the fact say, "Oh, it turned out we want to go back because there's an alien naval base here." I'm like, "Well, okay, great." But doing the mission and then saying afterwards, "Wow. I sure hope that worked, let's see the data." It puts you on shaky ground. This is one of the reasons that in that article I talk about the importance of norm setting, establishing our relationship with the rest of everything else that exists and how we conduct that and using it as a forcing function because it might be enough to carry all the freight, but at least it helps answer some of the mail on why you're back. Because simply being there in and of itself has a value.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. And I think having that bounding line to say what we do and don't do, then the more I think about it, the more interesting this comparison of ISS becomes. You mentioned in your article about the ad hoc decisions that NASA has to do and various levels internally within NASA has to do without an overriding philosophy that can lead to situation that potentially undermine public support. And you highlight the issue with increasing privatization of space activities. And if we're not careful, does the public just perceive as this is a big handout to commercial entities for profit motive returning to the moon? And that's an interesting point because, again, the practical considerations that NASA has been making has been purely cost risk internally because it just hasn't been able to get the money. But I think NASA has actually been trading a lot of other types of existential risk that has not been considered because it's not, in a sense, it's not within this philosophy to think about. I'm actually reading a book that I mainly disagree with, but I find it interesting called Astrotopia, I don't know if you've heard of that one?

Ryan Faith: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Casey Dreier: By Mary-Jane Rubenstein. And you're seeing a version of that reaction to this development-

Ryan Faith: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: ... where we are empowering, again, these same very powerful individuals with even more unprecedented levels of capability without necessarily really thinking about the long-term implications of that or for the perception of space activities in general, right? Which the goodwill that we have as a nation towards space and it generally is very goodwill, has been created through the activities of a public agency, not a private one. And so I see this becoming very relevant as we go into Artemis, which is really leveraging this commercial partnership, and hoping we have these commercial activities. But as you said, if it saves them money, it saves them cost. What other cost is NASA going to pay in the long run for this?

Ryan Faith: The development of commercial is fascinating in a way because it strongly echoes the debates about international cooperation. Do we legitimate it in some ways? Are we saving money? Are we controlling risk and all of this stuff? And in the same way is that I think we can legitimate what we do by bringing commercial actors on board and we can reduce our risk and reduce our costs. We've got to be very thoughtful about how we do it, right? It's been years since I've looked at the poll, but there is a poll from late sixties, early seventies about an international space station and it was asking, "Would it make sense for the US to build a space station of its own? Would it make sense for the US to build a space station cooperating with the Soviets? Would it be worthwhile to make a space station with the UN and everybody all around the world could go?" And people like the US and Russia joint cooperation a lot more than they like the international.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Ryan Faith: So there's something going on there and I'm not sure what it is. And I think going forward the two things that have to be done with respect to commercial is, one is, there's a misapprehension that people are doing it to make money. Well, they're doing it to make money only insofar as it leads to this other goal, which is extending human presence, making it part of a human world, an exploration, right? They're just trying to not charge everybody so much for doing it. And so even the way we've talked about it, like you say, in this very narrow prescriptive way of like, "Oh, it saves costs and saves money." It collapses the focus. If we say that it is really that we want to make the moon a human world, a human world of its own, then of course you've got to bring people on board. You've got to bring everybody on board, that definitionally calls for broadening of engagement. And the point in the article I make about the lunar habitat is that at the most symbolic level is the habitat is something that if people are going to have a problem with anything we do on the moon, it's going to be the nuclear power and the habitat that are going to attract all the criticism and all the attention, right? If it's Elon Musk is running the reactor on the moon, people are going to go nuts because that's just how our system is. If Elon Musk is running the landing pad, that's okay. That's part and parcel of it. So Promethean fire and the ability to sustain life, your two supernatural powers on the moon are going to be the focus of attention. And that means that what we're seeing is that they're interacting with the real reasons for space in a way that a communication system isn't, for instance.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm. It's triggering some kind of intuitive response.

Ryan Faith: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Some kind of, in a sense, emotional or, again, right brained even though... It's a crass term for it, but just this right brained response that, by definition, we have trouble elucidating because it's not in the language center of our brain. So, again, I think actually some of this commercial stuff raises, again, the utility perhaps of having this broader philosophical foundational conception of what we're doing and why. And I think we're clarifying, we're not just looking for one pithy sentence, right? We're looking for a deeper level of engagement perhaps and a more mature or thoughtful kind of outline of what we're trying to do. And maybe just say, going forward, you lay out the importance of having a longer and engaged communal discussion, some of the pitfalls of these different types of ways to analyze why NASA is doing things or not. What would you like to see?

Ryan Faith: Let me answer that in two ways. I'll give a tactical example to illustrate the point you're making about this different way of thinking. Okay? Is that the decision that Artemis is going put the first woman and the first person of color on the moon, if it's presented like that, is inherently logical to this crowd. And to this crowd it's obviously not, right? And so when you look at, for instance, political language is that when you start talking about belonging more than diversity, then that changes the framing. Okay? And if you take this broader perspective, then the purpose of Apollo as per Marburger's fantastic speech some 20 years ago is his existence proof that a human could go to the moon, could go into the celestial realm and return from the experience. So if we broaden out, then we're not talking about Americans going to the moon, we're talking about America. So now that they are emissaries of our entire national project for all its good points and bad points and whatever else. And that the reason that we're sending America to the moon is to make the moon a human world that not tomorrow and maybe not in a hundred years, maybe not 500 years, but it's posing the question of are we on house arrest or not? Are we on terrestrial house arrest or not? And it's gambling that maybe we're not. And so then having America do it changes is symbolic. And then looking for water isn't like, "Well, it's going to improve fuel efficiency and it's going to make sure we can build propellant depots to go to Mars." Like, "No, you're looking for water because that's life. You're growing things because that's life." And it changes the business. Now in terms of the second half of your question, practically, what does this turn into? Is there a big thought tsar tapped or something like this, is I'm exploring that because there's a couple ways that we, this country... Well, two things I want to point. A couple of ways in this country that our organizations can engage that. And I'm still working through it. And the other one is that at least one of your listeners is going to notice is that I'm making this all very America focused. And that's not because I think America is the end-all, be-all to the whole thing. It's just the system I know reasonably well. And where I'm ignorant about what we could do with NASA, I'm far more ignorant about what we could do with UNOOSA. So it's like America's the simpler, easier case. And I think from a practical perspective, it would be who us to understand what we think before we start trying to talk about how we want to engage the rest of the world or what they think. So this is the intermediate baby step. NASA has done remarkable work in the Artemis and ethics report and has been getting the ball rolling and is really trying to get to grips with this. NASA though isn't sort of by culture or statute a deliberative agency. It's not a philosopher shop. It's hard to wedge in. So this might be the Department of Infinity handles all of this stuff. I don't know. The Department of Infinity is my big black box of, "I don't know how to do this." And so I'm putting a lot of stuff in that black box for right now, but I've been working towards trying to come up with a couple ways to get at it a little bit more concretely.

Casey Dreier: Well, when you've reached those, let me know, we'll have you back on to talk about them. Look forward to picking this back up again. Ryan Faith, thank you so much for joining us on the Space Policy Edition this month.

Ryan Faith: Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you very much and best of luck in your continuing mission, sir.

Casey Dreier: Thank you. Thank you again for joining us this month. As always, you can find all the episodes of Space Policy Edition, as well as our weekly show, Planetary Radio on planetary.org/radio or on every major podcast distribution network on your phone or computer. If you like the show, please subscribe. Please share it. And give us some positive reviews on Apple or elsewhere. It really helps us be found by others and get the word out. The Space Policy Edition. This show is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based and anyone in the world can be a member. Those memberships start at just $4 a month. Great deal. Less than a cup of coffee once a month. planetary.org/join. Until next month, ad astra.