Bonus: GTDS: NASA and the Commercialization of Space

Following the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the government had to rethink space exploration. In 2006, NASA launched the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, allocating $500 million to encourage American entrepreneurs to develop cost-effective cargo and crew transport for the ISS. Today, private enterprises like SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab are ubiquitous. Yet none of this progress would be possible without substantial government assistance. Joining us is Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society and one of the world's foremost experts on NASA's budget and the political economy of space exploration. His data-driven analysis has been cited by The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post, and NPR, and in 2025 he received a SpaceNews Icon Award for his work. Casey joins us to unpack what the data actually shows about the tradeoffs of commercial spaceflight — and what's at stake if the government cedes too much control. The government gets a bad rap. But the roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, and the letter in your mailbox are all government too. Hosted by Professors Greg Jackson and Lindsey Cormack, Government That Doesn't Suck is a seriously researched, fact-driven podcast examining the dreams, machinery, and real-world impact behind American government, one episode at a time.

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• 2:55Speaker 00

  It's 3:25 in the afternoon, January 14, 2004. We're in the nine-story, glass-encased exterior NASA headquarters at 300 East Street Southwest, Washington, DC. Outside, there's an arctic chill in the air as temperatures hover just above 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But here, inside NASA headquarters, the reception for President George W. Bush is warm and inviting. It's a big day for the folksy commander-in-chief, one that will define how the United States approaches the future of space exploration. After getting to the moon at the behest of John F. Kennedy, the American space program has made some incredible achievements, and endured unspeakable tragedy.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Most notably, the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, and in 2003, less than a year before this day at NASA headquarters, the explosion of the Columbia Shuttle. With that in mind, the government wants to bring renewed focus and energy in our missions to the heavens. And today's presidential speech on January 14, 2004, is the first step on that journey. George Bush walks onstage to a thunderous applause, arriving to join NASA Administrator Sean O'Keeffe at the podium. W, as the son of a former president, is affectionately called to distinguish him from his father, is smartly dressed in a crisp, dark suit with an American flag pinned on his lapel. After Sean delivers some opening remarks, he hands things over to the president.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  With Americans watching live on TV at home, George starts things off by telling everyone in the room how honored he is to be here, and how they exemplify the country's greatest values.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Daring, discipline, ingenuity, and unity in the pursuit of great goals. America is proud of our space program. The risk-takers and visionaries of this agency have expanded human knowledge, have revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and produced technological advances that have benefited all of humanity.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  And now, inspired by all that's come before, the president lays out his vision for the future.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  To achieve this, W lays out three specific goals.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started. We will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project. We will focus our future research aboard the station on the long-term effects of space travel on human biology.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  I can only imagine what everyone listening to the live broadcast must be thinking. A whole new world of possibilities for scientific experiments and pushing human boundaries. But before we let our minds wander too much, the 43rd president has another step to tell us about.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Our second goal is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008 and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle will be capable of ferrying astronauts and scientists to the space station after the shuttle is retired. But the main purpose of this spacecraft will be to carry astronauts beyond our orbit to other worlds.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Once those are in place, NASA will move on to the final piece of the puzzle.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Now, that last mark won't quite get hit, though Artemis 4 is scheduled to land astronauts back on the moon sometime in 2028. But in the immediate aftermath of George W. Bush's rousing speech, Congress approves the $16.2 billion he asked for to kickstart that vision. Without a doubt, space exploration has grown and changed since President George W. Bush gave that speech 22 years ago. And not all of that change is how or what we expected. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, it was clear that the government needed to rethink its approach to the stars. The president's goals of completing the International Space Station—or the ISS for short—creating

• 7:55Speaker 00

  the Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Artemis mission have all been achieved. But our present contains one major development not projected by W: the privatization of space. In 2006, NASA introduced Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, described by NASA as "a new era in spaceflight." $500 million were allocated from NASA's budget for, to quote again, "stimulating commercial enterprise in space by asking American entrepreneurs to provide innovative, cost-effective, commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the International Space Station." And six years later, in May 2012, the SpaceX Dragon made history as the first commercial

• 8:38Speaker 00

  spacecraft to bring a shipment to the ISS. Since that flight, private companies have become ubiquitous beyond our atmosphere. SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, the list goes on. From taking William Shatner into 0G to bringing internet access to people across the globe, space is becoming commercialized in ways that might have seemed impossible to George W. Bush and his contemporaries back at that 2004 Vision for Space Exploration speech. And none of it could have happened without a little—or a lot—of help from the government.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Welcome to Government That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  And I'm your professor, Lindsey Cormack. Today, I am so excited. We are talking to Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy at the Planetary Society. And something that I'm excited about to talk about with Casey is the idea that we have gone from a NASA that is predominantly run by the government, funded by the government, operated by the government, to a space program that has some overlap with commercial space entities that are doing some of the heavy lifting for us. I'm also excited to talk to Casey because Casey, you have an approach that appreciates that government can do good things. And oftentimes, you bring people along in that. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what you do at the Planetary Society and how you see those interactions with government?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  There are aspects of government when it comes to space that is absolutely essential that the private sector or philanthropy will just never do and historically has never been able to do. Primarily, this is scientific space exploration. This is sending the Hubble Space Telescope up, right? There's long-term exploratory science with uncertain returns. Perfect role for public investment.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  When you say we're sending the Hubble Space Telescope up, you're saying that's something only government can do because no one commercial entity would be able to bear the costs upfront? Or why is that a thing that government can do?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It comes down to the returns, right? In terms of, this is fundamental scientific research. This is the predicate of our post-World War II era of the role of public investment in science. Fundamental research enabled by the public sector that may have spinoffs, it may have hardware value, there may be workforce benefits. But fundamentally, the outcomes, you know, no one is going to pay on a commercial sector for what's the atmosphere of Jupiter looking like today. Where is the origins of the cosmos? This is fundamental curiosity-driven exploration science. And there's just no commercial market for that. We had a great test case of this in the United States before World War II. Ground-based telescopes

• 11:18Speaker 02

  and space exploration, you know, we can call it in those days, lagged behind Europe and other parts of the world that had royal astronomies. There was long-term efforts to try to build a US infrastructure for astronomy that never panned out. And so we were left with private sector or philanthropists building ground-based space telescopes. And they built a number of them, some of them pretty big and grand. There's Hubble himself, Keck Observatory, these kind of wealthy titans of their time spending equivalents of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they would build these great instruments, but then they would never pay for anyone to use them. And that's also kind of the fundamental aspect of this, is that the aspect of building something as an individual tends to be as a monument or putting your

• 11:59Speaker 02

  name on it, and then you're less interested in running it, doing the actual day-in-and-day-out science. And this is what has been revolutionized by public investment in science, basically, again, since this post-war era.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Who do you credit giving the shift to for that? Like, who in the United States does finally get that kickstarted into, hey, we're lagging behind to, okay, now we're going to be leaders in this?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that really goes back to the whole World War II experience, right? Where technology basically helped win the war. And the Van of Arbusch, who wrote Science, the Endless Frontier, one of my favorite founding documents of fundamental science policy, saying that fundamental science, exploratory science, uncertain outcome science, not applied science, is actually critical to the long-term health and survival of a nation, security of a nation, not just for public health, but also for, you know, they just come out of, if the Nazis had gotten the atom bomb, World War II would have gone very differently, right? Inventions of radar, other fundamental technologies, even things like penicillin in terms of treating troops. All of these types of fundamental investments

• 13:01Speaker 02

  fundamentally changed the US relationship and this idea of this kind of growing and active federal government. He wrote this report to Roosevelt. Five years later, they created the National Science Foundation, and then this kind of big flow of public funding into fundamental research that then led to NASA and National Institutes of Health and other agencies came from that.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  So in the National Science Foundation, that's a topic that we're getting to later on in this season. In the way that this kickstarts space, is it something where money then goes to universities? Or is money going to some other sort of industry partner? Or how does it get started?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  So space gets kind of, this is great. I love this word because it's this weird mix. Because space, particularly, again, we're talking about mid-century. The US, through Operation Paperclip, got the Wernher von Braun and the German rocket scientists that had created the V-2 rocket. And they just let them play with it in the White Sands deserts, desert facility for a couple of years in the late 1940s. Scientists from various parts of the country heard about this and realized, you're sending rockets up, kind of glancing, they're not going into orbit, but they're kind of touching, you know, the edge of space. Maybe we should put something on those. What happens up there? What does it look like up there? And it was this kind of very organic realization that, from pretty kind of modern,

• 14:23Speaker 02

  a lot of scientists not coming from big established universities, but state universities, flight centers, NASA didn't exist at this time, so this was, you know, kind of inheritance of aeronautics research and information that they had been starting to do through the war. And they started to put, what if we put a UV spectrometer that goes up on the top of a rocket and can look at the sun without having the atmosphere in the way? This was all kind of happenstance. And then it wasn't really until the late 1950s where you had this intersection of kind of this Cold War growing paranoia, the invention of the atomic bomb by the Soviets, paired with the existence of ballistic missile or intercontinental ballistic

• 15:05Speaker 02

  missiles. Suddenly, the US's oceans weren't so big and protective anymore. And when Sputnik went up and it was, you know, a proxy for, hey, the Soviets could place any sort of heavy object over the United States at any moment, within minutes, that's what kickstarted this. And so it was fundamentally a government-driven initiative through a national security lens that really started the space program. And because of that hardware requirements, it's very difficult to go into space, right? A rocket is a controlled explosion that's pointing down. Anything goes wrong, even a little bit, you don't have a rocket anymore. You have pieces everywhere. Space itself was so unknown, there was no viable and no pathway, really viable pathway at all, for private sector individuals to go into space or to

• 15:50Speaker 02

  support that program. At the beginning, it was fundamentally a government-driven initiative.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  And then also, it seems like it's really costly. Like, it seems like at the start, it takes a lot of money to get any of this off the ground, literally.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Well, it depends what you mean by costly. So this is where I always like to, I mean, the entire Apollo program. So one of the things that I've done, I've published research on, is building out, rebuilding the cost of Apollo using, you know, very detailed analyses and inflation adjustment. Today's dollars, it cost about $350 billion to do Apollo, right? And that was from the start of Apollo in 1961 through the end of Apollo in 1973. $350 billion is about what the United States spent in 1969 in Vietnam, right? So in terms of what we're spending, it's a lot of money to you and me, but in terms of what the government is spending elsewhere, modest. Apollo was not, I'm not saying Apollo was cheap, but it's also, we have to see that in context. Eisenhower, when he started NASA, when he

• 16:44Speaker 02

  signed the legislation to law and the agency kind of came into existence in 1958, he was very hesitant to go for a big moon program. He wanted a more modest program. And this is where they really started to push, what about the uncrewed, the robotic scientific missions? Those are comparatively cheaper. You don't have to bring them back. You don't have to bring a bubble of Earth with you out into space. You can do actual science with them. There's a huge, at its core and has continued through the history of NASA, this tension and discussion between how much should we invest in human spaceflight, which is more expensive because you have those higher requirements, and robotic stuff, which have much more practical things, but tend to kind of trigger the national geopolitical

• 17:24Speaker 02

  aspects less, right? They engage in that a little less effectively. And so Eisenhower wanted a very modest space program. He didn't approve a big human spaceflight effort. He just had a little test program with Mercury. It was John F. Kennedy kind of coming in after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, needing a big turnaround in US policy and his domestic policy. Jörg Gagarin had just gone into space, looking for, and they have memos of this, like, can we do something in space to show up the Soviets? Going to the moon was kind of the only way to do that, to start both from zero. And that's really set this expectation of what NASA does. And it was, you know, again, expensive compared to doing

• 18:05Speaker 02

  basic rocketry or scientific activities. But again, in the scope of what government spends, it's pretty modest.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  And I think something else that you pointed out is like, if we compare this to military sort of spending at the time, it also is surprising to me that Eisenhower specifically didn't make NASA some sort of military agency, didn't say like, you know, anyone who's ever fought in a war knows that you want to have the high ground, what higher ground than space? And instead, it seems like for most of our history of space exploration, it's been under the idea that it's going to be peaceful, internationally oriented, and something that's going to benefit all of humanity. Do you feel like that has stayed the same? Or are there changes that appear in sort of that ethos?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  I think for NASA, it's largely stayed the same. And that's a really core insight that I think is really important that there's this. And I think there's a broader public maybe misconception that there's this tight integration or that it's all one big aerospace industry. And part of it is, you know, it's not completely false. You have big contractors like Boeing or Lockheed Martin that do both. But NASA is chartered and was intended to be. And I think this really came out of that Cold War era activity, which was we don't want space, you know, we can go into space, we can develop big rockets, which we could put, you know, nuclear weapons on, but we're not, right? So it's a, it's both simultaneously, it's a symbol and a proxy for capability. But it didn't, they didn't want it to be provocative at the same time.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  You don't want to make the Cold War worse. And so you explicitly make NASA distinct from the Defense Department and make it its own civilian run, civilian managed. This was very important to Eisenhower and others at the time in order to make NASA, in a sense, also a projection of US values, right? This openness that NASA explicitly will do its tests in the open compared to Soviets who would only announce the, a success after it had succeeded and not mention the failures, that it would share information openly with the world, scientific information, you know, from the probes that the United States pays for is shared freely with anyone else in the world once the data comes back. And it was designed to kind of, again, you have to see it in this Cold War context that set these values.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  But again, those values have stayed. And I think it's actually one of the reasons that NASA has remained popular up to a certain point within the political class and members of Congress and others that see it as this American symbol that can then be presented forward to the rest of the world.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Something that I did in preparing to talk to you about this is I looked at how members of Congress were talking about space exploration. And what I found is that within the Republican Conference, there's actually far more chatter about space exploration than in the Democratic Caucus. And my sort of guess on this is that when we think about where bases and production facilities are for these, they tend to be represented by Republicans. Is that something that you have any insights on or thoughts on?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Indeed, it is. I actually just did an article about this for our magazine, The Planetary Report, and it's a, some analysis I've been working on that I hope to publish later this year. If you look at the actual representation, so NASA's spread out into 10 different centers across the country. When NASA was created, they kind of just pulled a variety of like the, oh, the Redstone Missile Arsenal from Alabama. No, now that's the NASA Center. They pulled some aeronautics and flight research areas. Okay, that's part of NASA too, right? The first day in NASA aeronautics. Then they also, as Apollo happened, they said, well, we need to build rocket testing facilities. We need to build a, at the time they called that a manned spaceflight center, but now it's called Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. Where would they build those?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Well, at the time, it was Southern Democrats dominating the appropriations chairs in the, in the US Senate. And that kind of Southern Democrat through and with also Democratic leadership in, in the White House, kind of mixed with their Southern strategy to build up infrastructure and lift up the economic fortunes of the US South, kind of dovetailed together. And so all the new, the new NASA base centers that existed, that were built for Apollo, they're all in the US South. Texas, expanding out in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, so forth. And so we've had this political inversion during that time, right?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Right from the 1960s to now, that functionally flipped the control of those, representation of those areas from Democrat to Republican, I should say, to your point. And at the same time, the two science centers, so the NASA centers that really do a lot of science, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, tech for, for people really paying attention, it's an FFRDC, a federal funded research and development center, not a full NASA center, but we'll call it that one for now, and Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, those became more Democratic. And so there's actually been the ideology of the representation of these NASA centers by science and the ones that do human spaceflight have diverged over time, or actually the most divergent that they have ever been right now.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  And so I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing, so space isn't inherently partisan as an issue, but it's becoming parochially partisan.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Sure. In the sense that it's like you can bring dollars back to your sort of base.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Investment in your community, jobs for people who live there. That makes sense to me.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's old school. It's like, it's a throwback politics because it's not hyper partisan, you can still have the old, this kind of, what you said, just like it's dollars and cents into our districts. And that has been a great help, a hindrance sometime for what NASA has done, but that's the defining political issues is that parochialism still. And just because the larger sorting of our political system, it has become, particularly with human spaceflight, much more of a Republican parochial issue than a Democratic one.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  This is something that I'm really glad to chat with you because you do have a handle, not only on like the technical history and the how to of space exploration, but you also have a really close handle on the like, what the politics are behind the scenes, how you can influence policy yourself. But I want to put a pin in that and go back to sort of working through a timeline, which is we have Apollo, we decide to do it because it's hard, not because it's easy, we succeed, we get on the moon. And then there's sort of this moment of like, okay, what next? And in a simple read of it, it's like, well, we're going to go for some sort of shuttle system. We're going to be flying around space and doing things. And then eventually we get to the ISS. And then there's always talk about Mars. In your sort of understanding of this, what is the movement from Apollo to the shuttle to the ISS? And why does Mars get left out?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  So that's a lot. Feel free to run with it.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And interrupt me at any point, please. But no, I mean, this is just such a fascinating story, all of this, because there's this concept called, a paradigm called the Von Braun paradigm. So, you know, Wernher Von Braun, our rocket, German rocket scientist, ex-Nazi, who came to the United States and led the rocket development program in Alabama, helped build the Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the moon. His whole, you can go back to him in the 19, as a kid in the 1920s. He was a sci-fi, he's kind of this Elon Musk era, like sci-fi fan who sees this inevitable future for humanity in the stars. And he was working in rocket clubs when he was in his twenties. And then he worked with the Nazis arguably because, hey, they'll fund my rocket research. I'll just look the other way on these other things.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  He was kind of an opportunistic individual than the American. He intentionally gave himself up to the Americans because he thought they would support his rocket research better. He was savvy about that and they did. But he was during the 1940s, when the, before the big space age had started, he wrote popular sci-fi books about the Mars project, about humanity's destiny at Mars. And the way that we build out this big path to Mars is you build a space, a reusable shuttle that will take you to a space station, that then you can build a moon base, and then from there you can build a base on Mars. And so it was always seen as this, you know, you get down the cost of, of going into space through a reusable shuttle to a station, to the moon, to Mars. He's kind of like stepwise out. That's the kind of the rough Von Braun paradigm.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  And Apollo kind of mixed up that plan because it was always, you know, going to the moon is, is hard and it's dangerous. It's, it does take a lot of resources for space. And, but because of this unique mix of geopolitical factors and political, just internal domestic political factors that came together at the right moment that kicked off Apollo, Apollo kind of jumped the queue, right? And we went to the moon first.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  It sounds like it's part three. It's like, that was the third part.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so Apollo kind of happened faster than anyone ever thought it would. And so when it was time to say, what do we do after Apollo? This thing called the Space Task Group, led by Vice President Spuro Agnew at the time, this is under Richard Nixon, sat with Von Braun and a bunch of other luminaries and NASA representatives and say, okay, what do we do? Well, they took that budget line they had for Apollo and just kept drawing it forward and say, okay, we'll do our reusable shuttle and, and station next. And then we'll build, you know, this moon base from Apollo and then we'll go to Mars. And so this was this big project. And it's like, well, if you keep it at Apollo levels, we can probably get to Mars by the late 1990s. But if you up it a little bit, you know, we could probably get to Mars by the mid 80s.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Nixon saw that and did the equivalent of laughing them out of the room. I mean, this is Nixon by this time was, was not that interested in space. He had, he was worried that, you know, Apollo 13 had spooked him. He thought it would hurt his reelection chances if there was a disaster while Apollo was happening. He wasn't impressed by all the stuff that they were doing anymore. There's a period between, you know, at the beginning of his presidency, he had that Earthrise photo taken by Apollo eight astronauts hanging in the Oval Office. By the time Apollo 15 was rolling around, it had disappeared, right? It's this kind of this interesting symbol of how he'd lost it. And so he wanted to start cutting.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  My understanding is that Nixon really held astronauts in high regard, like sort of thought about them as like heroic frontiersmen of the American experiment.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  He did, but not enough to keep sending them to the moon. So he just, all that he wanted to do, so I mean, this was a situation, they were cramming down, NASA lost, you know, from its peak, lost about two thirds of its budget in about five years. And his budget office kept cramming them, their budget down. So they had to start canceling Apollo missions to the point was there's a discussion, do we even do human spaceflight at all? And that's where Nixon's love of astronauts came in and said, look, we have to keep astronauts. I don't want to be the president who stops Americans from going into space, but we can't do all this, you know, you've had your fun, boys, was kind of the attitude. Now it's time to be reasonable. And so the compromise was that he agreed to start the development of the space shuttle

• 28:39Speaker 02

  as a way, as this says, like, if we do it for, you know, for a certain price, then, then it will lower the cost of spaceflight. Then maybe we can build a space station, but all we're going to, we're not going to build the station now, we're just going to build the shuttle. And so the whole design process, you moved away from this kind of geopolitical, goal-oriented space program to a, what can we do with the money we're allowed to have? And you created a capability without a purpose, which was the space shuttle. The other thing that was convenient for Nixon was that at the time, California was, you know, a, a purple state, as we would call it now, and keeping a bunch of aerospace jobs in Southern California, which is where all the shuttle contracts went, was good for him for his reelection purposes in 1972.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  And so the shuttle was basically moved forward as this compromised approach to kind of keep aspects of human spaceflight going, but to no longer go for these big leaps and technological advances.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Okay. So when we get to this shuttle discussion, what is it that we think it's going to cost? And then is there a difference between what it actually costs?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  So interestingly, the cost was set by the Bureau of the Budget at the time, now the Office of Management and Budget, as roughly, I think it was $5.2 billion in 1972. It cost exactly $5.2 billion when it was finally finished in, according to accounting purposes, in 1982. But they shifted, what happened was, is then they shifted all the stuff that should have been development onto ongoing operational costs that created really high operating costs for the space shuttle at the time.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  What do you mean by that? It's like this was going to be capital to fund like the actual building of it, but then it gets pushed?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, or think about it as like operational design. So they had hoped to initially make a space shuttle as a two-state, fully reusable rocket, where you would launch a space shuttle up and it would land itself and the booster would fly back down, not fly back down, but splash into the ocean, they'd recover it. You ended up having it be partially reusable in order to save upfront development costs, right? So you didn't have to make a large new booster, you had this big fuel tank that was always discarded. It just became a much more complex system in order to keep the development costs down at the cost of ongoing long-term operation cost, right? So it undermined the intent of keeping, lowering the cost of spaceflight in order to lower the cost of its development.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  When they're talking about this, is there like some sort of metric where they say, you know, every time we take the shuttle up, it's going to cost $200 million? Or what's the sort of like ongoing notion of how much it costs each time you use a shuttle?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  So the shuttle, I'm trying to remember this off the top of my head, but the shuttle, you can say on average, the shuttle costs about $5 to $6 billion a year to operate. And that was pretty much a fixed cost. It didn't matter if you launched it nine times, or if you launched it two times. There's a big standing army of people who got paid either way, that would facilitate, refurbish all the stuff with the space shuttle. And they could never really get that down, they tried to get that down much, and obviously the more you would fly it, the lower your marginal cost rate would be. But when they really tried to push that, you had the Challenger disaster. Right before that, it flew nine times in a year, that was its peak flight rate. Early studies of the shuttle said it should be flying 24 times every two weeks, basically. Like this was what they were-

• 32:00Speaker 03

  When you say early studies, is this like stuff that we used to pitch it? Or was it like, where did that-

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is stuff in the 1970s saying, you know, this is why it's going to be so great. There's one independent study that NASA technically didn't do, but they said that it'll launch 50 times a year, right? Every week. Launches will cost $20 million or something like that. It'll be, but in retrospect, nothing is cheaper when you have humans in a spacecraft, right? Because you have to keep them alive, you have to keep them safe, you have to bring them back, that just adds hideous amounts of complexity. And this, basically this mismatch between ambition and what the government funded, right? About kind of kneecapping the development ability to do really strange, like big, bold things, you say, no, it will never cost more than this to make, and so NASA kind of, okay, we'll slot in what we can into this.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  And they gave a lot of compromises during that development. They also would do things like, they reached out to the Defense Department to say, hey, is this relevant to you? And the Defense Department, well, maybe if it does this, and they said, okay, it does this now. And the Defense Department never used it, but that added, it made the shuttle a lot bigger and heavier than it originally was planned to be. And so it added further costs, right? Operational costs. So they gave a lot of, it became a very compromised political process to keep this system going that had been established through Apollo. And without, again, without a lot of focus and intent on what are we going to do with it? And that kind of mired, you know, you can kind of see after that why we had a space

• 33:27Speaker 02

  station, that came in 1984 with Reagan's addressed to Congress, State of the Union speech, where he announced space station freedom at the time is what it was called. And because what it did is it justified having a space shuttle. Space shuttle was built to build a space station. So you're kind of, instead of doing these projects in parallel, you're linearizing them and doing them one after another. But then the space station says, okay, well, we have to use whatever we've now built with the shuttle, and it better fit within that. And that became its own kind of long-term development issue that we can talk about if you want.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  You're saying in the sense that like, there's only so much space that we can put things in to take it up to, okay, okay. And so if it were optimized differently, you're saying those things might have been planned at the same time, so that you could build a vessel that can take the pieces that are requisite to building it?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, or just design the two things in accordance with each other. Like what are our needs for a space station? Because once, there's a lot of this, and I want to emphasize here, we're really talking about the human spaceflight side of NASA. There's a whole other parallel NASA science side that rarely has any of these problems because science questions are, in a sense, you can all agree on what your major science questions are, right? If you get enough scientists in a room, what are the biggest science questions of the day? Enough time passes, you can at least get a rough kind of agreement on, okay, these three things are like the big unknowns. That drives the program of science, you have uncrewed robotic spacecraft to do that for you, and you execute on those. Human spaceflight, after Apollo, without that geopolitical reason, never had this kind

• 35:00Speaker 02

  of forcing function of what is our priority? What are we trying to do? And so for the longest time, NASA was building capabilities, and then when it came time to define what they would do, they could never agree on it, and they tried to make it do everything. And then it kind of did everything not very well for human spaceflight. So it's a fundamental difference in kind of how we are, what are we doing with a human spaceflight and science programs? And they are really, truly, honestly distinct. Most of, the vast majority of science at NASA is done by the robotic spacecraft, very, very little.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  That stuff is like much less in the public imagination, in the sense that we don't have a human story, we don't see this. And I think this might sort of bring us to an inflection point, which is when the Challenger explodes. So Jan 28, 1986, I'm born the next day, so that day is like always with me and sort of my history. My guess is that in seeing the sort of heartbreak of how this sort of like well-planned system in a foible human enterprise might go wrong, really changes our capacity to want to fund this more. Was that the case? Or was it something where people were like, you know what, no, we have to put more money into it and figure out how to do it better?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  I'd say it's broadly the latter, but with an important correction, important kind of, first part of what you were saying is part of that, is it made actually the language and politics around human spaceflight even more kind of grand and ineffable, right? And becoming less, ironically, less practical. So Challenger was, the astronauts died carrying a commercial satellite. So we want to talk about commercialization later, it actually starts in 1984 with the Commercial Space Act passed by Congress, and it was a big initiative within the Reagan administration to say that we should have unleash American entrepreneurship into space. And the space shuttle, it's your delivery truck. So we're going to like start selling commercials, launch opportunities on the NASA-run space

• 36:58Speaker 02

  shuttle. It will be, and it was actually designated as the single launch vehicle for the entire United States. So there was, all other rocket lines were scrapped, including for the Department of Defense, everything would launch on a shuttle, because the shuttle had to launch a lot, so therefore, you know, it's one of those kind of strange political, circular political decisions.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  So let me pause you there. When you say that they're offering that to commercial entities, is this for people who are trying to build satellite systems for communication or navigation? Or is that what it is?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Yes, so at this time, it's primarily communication. So communication satellites were just starting to become commercialized in the 1980s, and there was experiments with commercializing Landsat, kind of Earth observation in this period as well. And so they were seeing this potential as very, very small market at this point, very theoretical. But communications was always and remains, actually, the one actual market in space is things that go up and point back down so it can bounce off messages that we send to each other. Like that's basically the primary marketplace for space assets. And after Challenger, they said, these astronauts died carrying what? They died carrying a commercial asset, like was that worth their lives?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  And so it was, that actually started to diverge again, where the shuttle was now reserved only for important national priorities, like the Hubble Space Telescope, or eventually the International Space Station pieces that it would launch. And all commercial stuff was shunted over into uncrewed launch vehicles, you know? So this is where you recreated your military-run rockets, the Atlas V and the Delta series, and those would be the things that would carry, you know, commercial assets into space.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Okay, so that does sort of like then do this different sort of splitting trajectory of things.

• 38:49Speaker 00

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• 40:01Speaker 03

  When we're moving from like Shuttle to International Space Station, how does that debate go down? Like, who are the big players who are saying, "We want this"? Is there anyone who says, like, "No, this is a waste of our money"? Or like, what's happening behind the scenes as that gets kicked off?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so this is where you see this kind of institutional inertia, right? So I mentioned this whole space task group and even the Von Braun paradigm, this idea of, I mean, you could, 2001: A Space Odyssey. What does the main character do at the first half of the movie? He gets onto a space plane run by Pan Am and goes to a space station, right? Before going to the moon. So this idea, you know, the 1950s Collier's articles that first popularized space to the American public, space stations, right? So the space station was seen as an inevitable next step by NASA and the people who really into space. And the Shuttle, it was the post hoc justification for having a space shuttle. A space shuttle was made to build a space station.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And so it became this institutional focus of NASA to try to secure a space station. And basically, as soon as the Shuttle moved out of this development period into what they would call operations at that time, they started pushing really hard. And that's when Reagan administration approved it. And immediately because building a station is hard, what do you actually want to do there? It's worth a little digression, if you'll forgive me, which is this idea. The way that we talk about space, I think, is really interesting because we talk about space as if it's this uniform thing, when really it's like talking about the ocean. And if you could, you know, you can, so you can kind of replace space and ocean sometimes, and it brings it like, if you say, "Well, why do we go to the ocean"?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know, there's a lot of reasons to do it. Like, are you a commercial fisherman? Are you going for leisure? Are you going on a boat cruise? Are you going to study the Marianas Trench or something like that? Like, there's a million reasons to do it, but there's no single reason that you go to the ocean, because the ocean is this vast place. And space is even bigger. It's literally infinite, right? And so when we talk about we're gonna go to space as like, well, we need a single justification, it's this, I think, category error, because it really depends on what you want to do. That's just a big place. There's lots of different things to do there. And so when NASA was first talking about, "We need a space station", well, what do you do? Well, you can kind of do anything you want. So how do you, how do you kind of find agreement?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  And this is that kind of coalition issue, where human spaceflight just doesn't have these forcing functions that drive consensus about what the activity and output should be, because it's fundamentally a symbolic-driven activity. And so for the space stations, it's like, they have always, same stuff we're talking about now. Well, we'll make novel materials in zero gravity, zero G. We'll study human health. We'll service satellites in orbit. Maybe we'll have a space telescope that will point at the ground and look. And it turns out that when you actually start to do the work and make those things happen, a lot of those are kind of orthogonal to each other in reality. Like, you can't have a hardware and satellite servicing place on your space station if

• 43:07Speaker 02

  you want to have a precisely pointed and perfectly still space telescope pointing at, you know, distant objects for weeks at a time, right? Because the vibrations from one will jiggle the other.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  I'm glad you said that, because I was like, is that because something's going to jostle it around?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, right? It's like, they become completely distinct. And also, I'd argue that a lot of the vision of human spaceflight, about what humans should do in space, is firmly entrenched in mid-20th century ideas of the centrality of humans in technology. Most of this kind of vision of space, particularly with humans, was created before we had computers, right? And so...

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Well, this is something we talked about the other week, where I was like, "The Apollo mission gets kicked off before we have pocket calculators." Like, the idea that we're gonna do this precedes rolling suitcases in airports. And I was like, "That's wild to me."

• 43:56Speaker 02

  The, one of the most, I think, generous and beneficial investments of the Apollo program itself was miniaturization of the flight computer of the, like, into, from a room into a shoebox. And that was itself, that was done at MIT, that was a roughly, off the top of my head, $20 billion R and D project to try to miniaturize that, to make that work. And it, you know, and it has less RAM. It's like 20K of RAM, or it's like this insane small amount of computing power that they had to work with, but it was revolutionary at the time, right? And I think the difference is, is that you see these early ideas of what a space station is, and they're all human-tended, because there's this, there's zero idea that a computer could run things for us, that humans wouldn't be in the loop somewhere.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  And this kind of human centralization of our ego, in a sense, and our, and our vision of how we must be a part of this, means that, like, when you, when you have humans alive in a place, it's actually, kind of undermines the ability to do effective science, because, again, you're breathing, you're sweating, you're exhaling CO2, you know, you have to take showers, you, you, you know, we do all the things that humans do that we have to deal with. And that tends to get in the way of just doing the work. And then we have now very capable automated systems, like the Mars rovers, that are, you know, can drive for hundreds of meters themselves on the surface of Mars, for hundreds of times less than it would cost to put humans there, right?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  But at the end of the day, the space station, kind of for a while, fell apart, was falling apart as, and it programmatically, because it was, the budget was growing, it's becoming more complex as they really thought about it.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Well, and are we also having to negotiate with Russia or other international players on this?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  So this is what saves it, actually. So this is where you bring back geopolitics once again to save the human spaceflight program, because the Soviet Union collapses between the time of the announcement of space station freedom, and then also the start of the Clinton administration. And so you had this post-Cold War period, where suddenly you had two issues. You had Soviet Union opening up, or no, Russia opening up, but also financially collapsing. And so all of their rocket engineers suddenly needed jobs, and did the US want them to stay in Russia, or maybe take a job at North Korea, make, building ICBMs for them, or Iran, or whatever kind of threatening country you can imagine at the time.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Also by, so that there became this US policy of investing in Russian aerospace in order to keep that both contained, but also give insights into their capability. And it became this kind of post-war, post-Cold War, symbol of unity that, and this is where, so space station was refashioned into the, what we know now as the International Space Station, with the Russian rocket capability and engineering capability, designing some of the core segments. And actually, the first segments launched into space were Russian segment. So that's really what gave it purpose. And it was because of that, that it actually survived. I mean, this wasn't, it was politically pretty uncertain for a while. It survived a vote to cancel it, or to strip it out of funding or authorization legislation

• 47:05Speaker 02

  in the US House of Representatives by one vote in 1993. So it was very much touch and go. But once it happened, it's now kind of untouchable, right? I'll be surprised if they ever let it die programmatically for these parochial reasons that you talk about. So it was really in this 1990s, it became recharged with this geopolitical purpose, post-war, Cold War symbolism. First pieces were launched in 99, operational by, well, you had people staying on it, I think, in 2001, but...

• 47:34Speaker 03

  And is it, is it meant for two people, or is there another number of people that are meant to be on it?

• 47:38Speaker 02

  It can hold up to 12, I think, at a time. So there's a US segment and a Russian segment. I think, and I think the most that they've had up there is roughly 12. I think on average, there are six to eight total.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's normally manned by a handful of people, or a little bit more?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's been continuously occupied since. So it's actually the longest time that a human heartbeat has been in space, as NASA likes to say. Like, for many people, their entire lives, there's been someone in space. Anyone born, I guess, after 2000, there's been someone in space.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  That's an interesting way to think about it. I think that also might be a good sort of point where we can start to pivot. If you were before, like, born earlier, you probably think of space exploration as something that is exclusively the pursuit of a government, whether it be our government or the Russian, USSR. And then I think if you were born maybe after 2000, it sort of looks like something that private, commercial enterprises take the lead in. And that's like where we see, you know, videos of rockets going, bases being, you know, used to land rockets. And so when does that sort of thing really change? My guess is it's around 2006, but is there another, like, with, I think it's called COTS? Is it, is that what it's called? What does that stand for?

• 48:50Speaker 02

  The Commercial Orbital Transportation System. So, also a play on commercial off-the-shelf in government procurement parlance. So it was a pun internally. They liked it. There's also a program called C-3PO, Commercial Crew and Cargo Procurement Office, or something like that, I forget the exact, so they, NASA likes their little puns with this. But yeah, it was roughly around then. So SpaceX starts in 2002, I think, from Elon Musk. And, you know, this is a very different Elon Musk than we know now, right? He's got PayPal money, but he's far from a billionaire. And he's, he starts Tesla, or he joins Tesla a few years later.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  His story is that, you know, he kind of looked up plans about what's NASA's Mars plans and didn't see any and it's like, what? So I'm going to build my own rocket. You know, it was always kind of his stated goal. But it was really in 2005, four, five and six. And so that's when, so at this point NASA had, was kind of recovering from the second shuttle.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, this is, we, we have to talk about Columbia then, right? Because Columbia is 2003. And so SpaceX, I didn't, I didn't realize SpaceX precedes Columbia. And then there is sort of maybe like a perfect storm of, we got to figure out a different way to do it.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so what, so what happened with Columbia or the, the consequence of Columbia where, so the shuttle at this point had been flying for more than 20 years. And Columbia revealed that there is a fundamental, non-fixable design flaw to the space shuttle. It is inherently dangerous, which is, it's that, you know, you think about rockets, most of the things sit on the top of the rocket. Space shuttle sat on the side, right? It's really weird. And there's a number of reasons, again, kind of going back to these design compromises NASA had to make in the 1970s.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  When you say sat on the side, you're saying the shuttle is here, the rocket that is propelling is next to it instead of top bottom.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, you have your, your big boosters on here and then the shuttle kind of sits on the side. It's, it's a really unique and beautiful rocket configuration. There's nothing else like it. But there's a reason most, you know, people don't do that because when you're, you know, when you're a rocket going up, you drop things. So the big fuel tank for the space shuttle holds liquid hydrogen. It's incredibly cold. It's like negative 400 degrees. So they have a ton of this foam insulation that they had to put on this giant fuel tank. The spacecraft itself, when you fill it with these hyper cold propellants, they tend to condense from the hot Florida humid air, ice on the sides of these rockets and other things that all kind of shed off. Remember the launch of Apollo 13 movie, like all the things kind of dropping off the rocket.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  But it was really, in this case, the foam from that big central tank, sometimes it gets brittle or cold or old or worn and a chunk can fall off. And in this case, a chunk fell off and as the shuttle was accelerating up, it hit, you know, a part of its wing. Just hard enough to create a little dent in that wing. That when it was re-entering the atmosphere, allowed this super hot plasma from your re-entry into the side, inside of the space shuttle and caused its breakup. And so the fact is though, like, that's why you put stuff on top. So with your shedding all that stuff, it's not hitting you. You're sitting above it.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  But the shuttle had that design flaw. So that revealed this, again, fundamentally, there is a, there's a failure mode to this mission, to this spacecraft that cannot be fixed.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  So I'm glad you're saying that there's this like fundamental technical problem because I think in some popular imaginations, people would say it's like a cultural problem, like a NASA's sort of approach to

• 52:22Speaker 03

  not desiring to say like, it's our fault.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Well, it's, I mean, it's certainly both. And I think there is operational lessons you get from it because they saw it impact. I mean, that NASA saw it hit. I mean, there's actually frankly, nothing they could have done beyond maybe trying to scramble and launch a second space shuttle, but that's almost impossible to do that quickly. And that was certainly, and the problem in the Challenger era too, right? That they're taking risks in order to hit a flight rate. That is not feasible and they, when you take risks, you know, sometimes bad things will happen. So this isn't to exonerate NASA entirely, but there is, I mean, the point is though, that it revealed that at the end of the day, the shuttle has a design flaw and it should not keep going. And so this is under George W. Bush. And so this kicked off this whole, George W. Bush is called Vision.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  I wonder how many people remember this besides me. The VSE, the Vision for Space Exploration. This is George W. Bush saying, we're going to go back to the moon. We need a goal again. We need to have purpose in human spaceflight again. And as part of that, we need to retire the space shuttle. As soon as it finishes assembling the International Space Station, we retire the shuttle. You take all that money you save from not running the shuttle more and you put it into new moon rockets, new lunar landers, and we'll be back on the moon by 2020. That was constellation program. So they had the situation where the official policy was, we're now pivoting towards the moon. But we'll have a space station, but without a shuttle to give it cargo, right? Because you, you have a space station, you need air and water and food and scientific equipment and whatever you want to do, it has to be brought up there continuously, not even to mention people.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  You just need cargo. And so NASA didn't have any money. And this is also when the Iraq war happened. And so suddenly NASA's promised budget kind of evaporated for, for all this new stuff. And NASA said, okay, well, we don't have a space shuttle here in a few years. We're focusing on the moon. Going to orbit, that should be kind of straightforward by now. What if we have some kind of commercial partner? What if we just pay for a delivery service? For cargo to the space station. That was caused this commercial orbital transportation approach. And so and the trick was, and this is what was completely different novel was like NASA, we will give you a fixed amount of money. We will not own the hardware. We will pay you then for deliveries.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  If you win, like if you pass kind of a series of milestones and show that you can do this, you'll get a big fat contract to resupply the space station for the next 10 years, right? Worth billions of dollars.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  And so wait, when you say NASA will give you a fixed amount of money, wasn't it also the case that whoever was competing for this had to bring their own money to the table too?

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  It was, and it's nearly matched?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they had to raise substantial private funding on their own side. So that was a requirement of, and, and that was actually one of the reasons, one of the, you know, I think they had chosen three initial companies. One of them was removed from the competition because they couldn't raise that private funding.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  This one has a kind of a funny name, right? The one, I'm, I'm forgetting it, the one that gets removed?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and I'm also.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Okay, great. So we'll remember it and then say.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  They haven't done much, they haven't done much since. But the other one was at the time Orbital Space, Orbital Sciences, which is now part of Northrop Grumman. Which did succeed. They actually have a rocket that no one knows about. But SpaceX was one of those companies. NASA put in about half the money to develop what is now the Falcon 9 rocket, this medium lift rocket capability. SpaceX put in the other half.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  When you say the half, what's the total?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  It's around, I think NASA put in around 400 million, 396 million is what NASA contributed for that development portion.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  SpaceX has to bring its own like 450 to the table or something?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Plus anything else, right? So that was the deal. Like if it, you have to bring in a substantial amount and then, hey, don't come back to us if you need more money, right? And that was always the problem, right? That you're, and the reason is, you know, you don't want to put companies out of business to bid on a moon lander that no one has ever built before in human history, right? So it would, you say, okay, we, here's what you think it's going to cost. We understand this is hard. Oh, it's going to cost more. This weird thing happened. Okay. You know, there's incentives to not do that, right? You get bonuses if you don't go over your budget, but fundamentally the taxpayer is on the hook. This is the whole kind of contracting thing that incentivizes honestly, you know, kind of expensive bloated space projects. And so this was an attempt to kind of, you know, and this is George W. Bush. So this is kind of fitting into that.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Wait, hold on, you just said something. When you say incentivizes bloated space projects, what do you mean by this?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  And so when you have what's called a cost plus contract, that you, if you pay cost plus overruns. The contractor that is delivering this project to you does not have an incentive to stay on budget, right? They'll make more money over time if it goes, if it runs over. And it's not like they're necessarily intentionally doing this or anything. It's just that you need to deliver something that has to work. So it's, why not just put all the money up front and, you know, they know the program officers at NASA and they say, okay, well, you know, it's going to cost more than we thought it was going to be. It's more complicated than we thought. Members of Congress like to direct funding based on where things are located, right?

• 57:18Speaker 02

  So you're hiring lots of, you know, just have lots of people and, and, you know, kind of this big standing army that, that fed the space shuttle kind of contract was a very big political focus. And so there was just, it's just a, it's a incentive structure that does not incentivize delivering on cost, right? And so the, the argument was if you can shift that incentive to say, if you go over budget, you're paying for that, not me. And I'm going to cancel you. And if you can't do it, then fine, you're gone. That shifts that incentive. And that's kind of what was the ethos that SpaceX really embraced from the beginning. That they found ways to do things more cheaply, that they found ways to not depend on this large kind of contracting aerospace contractor base.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  They vertically integrated things themselves. Their supply lines and their design systems in order to have total control and try to minimize the cost because they knew they're not getting more money from NASA. And that's now been, you know, that's kind of where we're moving in the space program to see where else that can work. But this was the great success story of doing that for the first time.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  So they give, the federal government gives money upfront. Do we also give things like access to like bases and pads or other machinery or what? Is there anything else like hardware stuff?

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So space, NASA in particular has a unique vehicle called a Space Act Agreement. That was granted to it when it was created as a way to kind of engage with industry. It's used a lot now as well, but yeah, you can use NASA facilities. NASA has these giant wind tunnels. You can have NASA technical expertise, right? Because NASA wants you to succeed. Ideally, right? They want cheap rockets for themselves as well. But yeah, there's a huge amount of infrastructure that exists. Testing facilities, particularly for rocket stands is a, is a big one.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Okay. And then when we think about this from a taxpayer, someone who doesn't pay like a ton of attention to space policy. I can see the argument for saying like, look, this is a lot of money to give to a private company, but perhaps it's cheaper than if we were to do it all on our own. Would that be a reasonable argument?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's absolutely correct. So they, they, so ultimately after this Falcon 9, this kind of workhorse rocket from, from SpaceX was created.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  NASA pays, you know, they won the contract to supply the space station. They've, you know, NASA's paid out to SpaceX something like $12 billion in that contract.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  I think SpaceX says 22 billion. I think they say. Yeah, it's like NASA, Department of Defense, Space Force, reconnaissance stuff, all that piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  But it is in our, and so the, they, they have done studies in like a comparable rocket. And I mean, we've seen this run many times before NASA's past. A comparable rocket through old classic contracting thing probably would have cost twice as much, if not more, right? And, and been later. So it, you know, SpaceX, we have to be a little careful though, because SpaceX is a weird outlier, right? Like it is, it is, we, we use it as the quintessential example of commercialization of space. But it's not the average outcome. It is the extreme best case outcome for a situation like this. It is like a five sigma outlier in terms of how well that they've performed.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  For every SpaceX, there's been dozen other companies that have gone out of business or produced a much, I mean, the alternative, Northrop Grumman now are Orbital Science that, that created the the, the other launched cargo delivery service to the space station. They never bothered to commercialize it. They never went out of their way to do reusability that they just, they've done their like 12 flights to the station and, and they just kind of left it as it is, right? That could have easily been the other outcome here.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  So are now, are we in the situation now where SpaceX is like the only game in town?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  It is in fact, yes. So that's, so then that's the other, that's the rub to all this, right? Is that, yeah, we've saved some money, but there are clearly some trade offs that we have made as a nation even, um, that access to space is now functionally facilitated by one individual, right? Not, and you could, I mean, it's a company publicly traded technically now, right? But it's still a very tightly controlled publicly traded company. Um, there's really no, cause I mean, in the process of SpaceX's wild innovation, particularly around reusing its launch, its boosters, uh, and landing them back and not having to drag them out of this water and scrape off, you know, all the salt water and, you know, messes things up. It put every other launch company out of business in the United States, which we're

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  all kind of teetering on viability anyway. Um, it, it completely revolutionized the international launch market. Most of the commercial launches by the time SpaceX came around were all going to, uh, Europe or Russia or India, because they were having much cheaper launches than anything offered in the United States. So it kind of single handedly brought back launch, uh, competitive commercial launch to the United States. But at the same time, no one else has matched them at all, like not even close.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  So then when we think about like what the risks are to having no plan B or having no other player, is it, is it possible that SpaceX says, you know what, we have the institutional knowledge now, we have the hardware now, sorry, government, you're not paying us enough. And they like ratchet up prices or is the contracting that exists with them, does it like prohibit that from happening?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Uh, it depends what contract it is, but we have seen a steady increase in prices for the Falcon nine.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Okay. Where like they come to the government and say, sorry, this is how much it costs. And we have to say, well, no one else can do this and we can't do this. So I guess we're going to pay you more.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, and it's, it goes beyond that even. I mean, you had Elon Musk himself threaten to stop. I mean, they own now the only way to send astronauts to the International Space Station, the United States, right? They're, they made a, a crew portion of this. Uh, Boeing's competitive version of this still hasn't launched successfully. That it has, uh, serious problems. And so you had last year when Elon Musk was beefing with President Trump, that he threatened to turn off the production lines for the Dragon Crew capsules. And now no astronauts get to the space. He tweeted, I mean, this isn't theoretical. He tweeted this out there or posted whatever it is on X. He, that was true. He could have, I mean, I'm sure maybe they would have nationalized SpaceX at that point. It would have gone kind of this nuclear response. Um, but he controls access to space for functionally

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  the entire United States, um, and most of the world, actually.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  What are the international players? What are the other sort of versions that are happening?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  So China's probably the most comparable. Um, China's been really up, increasing their investment in space over the last 25 years. They are pursuing their own reusability components. They're, they have their own versions of, you know, quote unquote, commercial, um, uh, rocket companies going forward, but they launched, uh, 80 times last year, something like that. They, they're putting a lot of stuff into space and they're really increasing their capabilities, both scientifically, they have their own lunar program, uh, that is kind of where they have their own space station now. And they're again, military and kind of national security wise for them are also putting a lot of investment into that. So that's the most comparable. You have Europe, which has its Ariane rockets that are kind of struggling to, it's a national or consortium, kind of continental priority for them to

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  maintain their own independence of launch. Um, India is kind of the other big player as well. And then you have Russia, which has a, uh, decrepit and decaying, uh, remnants of their space program and don't have much else going on, except for the International Space Station, though they are capable of launching quite a few military, um, systems for themselves.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

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• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  Okay. So we've, we've covered a lot of ground. We haven't got to Mars yet. Can you tell me why you think Mars sort of came off the table or is it on the table? Do you feel like because of who's sort of running what we're doing right now, maybe that is going to be the next frontier?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  I'd like to say Mars is on the table, but I think Mars is further away now than it's, than it's been in a long time. And that's ironic considering, yeah, it's ironic considering because Musk has talked about it, but you, I've, you can look at the number of times he's mentioned Mars in his tweets, um, which I have, and they've dropped it as NASA's focused on the moon. And that's kind of where, uh, Trump's focus has gone as well. Um, Mars is too far away to pull anything off during his second term. Uh, you, it's, it is dramatically more difficult, um, to get there and back with humans, uh, than Elon's pivot towards data centers in space and AI, kind of seeing where the big investment money was coming from. You know, I've, I've kind of joked that, you know, pity

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  the poor SpaceX engineer who joined the company thinking they were going to lead humanity's glorious settlement on another world to now designing data centers to generate, you know, adult material on Grok, you know, for people like instead.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  So when you, wait, when you say that, you're saying the, the sort of like, um, goal is to have like moving orbital in space data centers instead of rural America data centers?

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  SpaceX's big pitch to investors when it went public, and that's their claim that they'll have a $30 trillion market, um, uh, to access, uh, once they start getting data centers in space.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  This will betray how little I know about space, but is there ever a worry that we've like put too many things in space? So then like people who are like trying to study it, have a hard time seeing it because there's like a bunch of stuff whizzing through?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a serious issue that's growing worse by the day. So putting data centers even aside, SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites. These are what's called a mega constellation. They're the largest single satellite operator in the entire world. They have something like 10,000 or 12,000 satellites. They launch 25 at a time, or was it 60, lots of dozens at a time every two or three days. And other, China's doing a version of this, other companies like Amazon are trying to do their version of this, thousands of things at a time. And yeah, I mean, orbit, so when you're orbiting, you're kind of stuck by basic physics. You have to be traveling at least 17,000 miles

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  an hour in order to not fall back down to the earth. There's only so many, you know, it's a shared resource above us about where you can fit all of these things because you're moving 17,000 miles an hour. You don't want to hit something else moving 17,000 miles an hour, right? If you do, you create millions of debris for people who remember the movie Gravity, right? That is a real thing, Kessler syndrome, worst case scenario, obviously, but it gets even tighter out, what they call GEO, the geostationary orbits. This is where weather satellites and national kind of security satellites that they orbit at the same rate that the earth moves.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  So they like stay in the same position as the, I don't know why I made the earth go like that, but yes, they come with it. Yeah.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so, but, and there's really few, there's only a few thousand slots for things that can sit in that ring.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Who governs that?

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  No one technically governs it. It's all done through kind of international consortiums. And nominally, we have the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by the US and Soviet Union, most other spacefaring nations in 1967.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  And that's what we still sort of agree under, even though one of the biggest signatories is no longer a political entity?

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, it's, it's all, it's all, that's a good question. I don't know how they kind of resolved it within the collapsed Soviet Union, but Russia, I mean, everyone still kind of abides by it. It's pretty basic. And most of it from there on out has been through kind of international consortium integration and planning, right? So it's, it's kind of like a spectrum, you know, spectrum is a shared resource in terms of radio spectrum, like you have to have, allocate certain amounts for certain types of uses. But yeah, so you're astronomer on the ground, you're looking up with a telescope, and now you're seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of little reflective satellites whizzing by you at a rate you've never had to worry about before, particularly for if you're looking for things like asteroids that are coming, that could be coming, you know, in Earth's direction. It makes it much harder to find those. You're doing large sky surveys, you're trying to take big pictures of the night

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  sky. Now you have hundreds of these streaks of light kind of all polluting your, and they also pollutes spectrum, so they give off radio signals. So that's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And some of these data center concepts that they're promoting, you're talking about huge, you know, hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters long spacecraft, because you have to have these giant radiator panels to give off the heat in space in order to get rid of all that kind of compute heat. So you're having these very big, which means very bright, large things. And if you make thousands of those, suddenly you're kind of, the night sky fundamentally changes. And so there are a number of night sky consortiums, things led by scientists, but also kind of naturalists, right? People who want the night sky for themselves that are,

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  that are trying to work against this, but it's, it's a tough uphill battle, given how fast some of these companies are moving. And obviously not the most sympathetic licensing regime to stop this kind of stuff at the moment.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  I have two more questions. Question one, for a listener or for someone who doesn't know that much about space policy, what would you say they should do to learn more?

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own podcast, The Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Planetary Society, my nonprofit organization that I work for, is all about kind of sharing that kind of activity. There's a great website, spacepolicyonline.com. That is run, it's kind of, it's newsy, but it covers this really well. There are online courses, and then there's, you know, some, some great books that we could recommend that kind of go into the, the history of some of these things.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Give me your top three. What are the three books that you like?

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Let's see, boy, how do I choose? I'd say the, this is where I'm going to have to go up the top. I mean, I have all my books behind me. The Heavens and the Earth is a great overall history of the, kind of the first 10 years, this kind of the up to the Apollo decisions. That's probably the most kind of detailed political science analysis of this, this period. And that's just so insightful. And it's still one of those books that I think still drives a lot of the fundamental discussions in terms of space policy. The other one is called Robots in Space by Howard McCurdy and Roger Launias, which is in some ways somewhat of a dated book,

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  but has an amazing two thirds overview of the history of robotics and, and the relationship of human society to robotics and how they used it, how are they used in space science? And this has, they have great insights about kind of how you look at like how Star War, a lot of how we talk about robots in space is like this kind of Edwardian servant role, right? You think about like C3PO or R2D2, and these kind of weird implications from that in terms of how our own culture interfaces with this. I think that's a really, a really wonderful one. And then I think there are, I mean, boy, where do I even choose for the third?

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  I mean, if you want to pick your favorite two, that feels.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Let's not say two. I mean, I could keep going on, but it's, immediate recall honestly is one of my weaker things off the top of my head, but I'm happy to give you a longer list that you can post with this.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Excellent. There's only so much space in the brain. Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Again, from the heavens, heavens to the earth, and robots in space are two, two, two strong recommendations there.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  And the last thing I want to ask you is the name of this show is called Government That Doesn't Suck. In your estimation, what sort of grade would you give America's approach to space exploration?

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Am I including, so I'm going to include science, all of it, the stuff that we didn't talk about as much.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  I give it a B+, frankly. And we talked a lot about the side that has the most problems, which is the human spaceflight side. But again, the side of NASA that sends rovers to Mars, that has the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope that are like peering back to just a few hundred thousand years before, after the universe, after the Big Bang. You have missions that study this, that get closer to the sun, you know, almost enough to kind of fly through the solar corona. You have missions that are bringing back samples of asteroids that could bring back, you know, potential biosignatures from Mars. I mean, that works incredibly well. It is, it's a third of what NASA, of NASA's entire budget every year to run over 100 spacecraft from the sun to beyond Pluto. Everything that we

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  know about planets, basically, in terms of how they look and what they act like, and showing them as worlds, not just points of light in the sky, is a function of a spacecraft that has been sent there to take pictures and gather data for us. These are just, these are the things that really motivate me to see more of in addition to human spaceflight. I'd love to see more human spaceflight, but we need to, you know, have this more balanced approach. So that works incredibly well. It's been really clear with its, what it does, and it's the part of NASA that has know that, all this kind of commercial station, I think maybe one thing that's really important to emphasize here, SpaceX does not build science missions. They're not sending science rovers to Mars. They're not building space telescopes.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  Elon Musk himself is not funding a mission to Venus to look for life in its atmosphere. They're not doing that. They could, but they don't, right? In fact, until two months ago, we had no examples of any philanthropy. Eric Schmidt, CEO, former CEO of Google, recently announced he'd build a Hubble-class space telescope. I hope that works. But that would be the first example of its kind ever, of that succeeding. And so there is no alternative to this. No one has been willing to do this because the outcomes are uncertain. You don't know what you're going to find. And, you know, there's a, you know, Jeff Bezos may take his own ride into space, but he's shown no inclination to figure out if life exists beyond Earth, right? Or to study the sun, you know, or the earth climate itself.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  So you're saying those pursuits seem to be more in the realm of government?

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And not even seem to be demonstrably. It's like we, there's, there's no, that's what I'm trying to emphasize. There's, there's, the capability now exists. And ironically, the way that we, politics is talking about funding in terms of taking money away, that NASA science is facing a 47%, 46% cut this year. They want to grow human spaceflight. They're, they're moving public money into the things that private individuals have already demonstrated their interest to fund themselves anyway, and taking it away from the part that no one has shown any interest in funding, that there's no replacement for. And so that's the part that works the best, that could do better, could do even more. And that's where

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  I give it, that rounds everything up to a B+, I think, for space overall. If you think about it, it's pretty amazing how much we've done.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  We've spent a lot of time looking at how we got here, but now we want to force you to think about the future. Where should space exploration go next and who should do it? The options that you have for these questions are NASA, billionaire, or both. Who should be responsible for sending astronauts into orbit?

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Both, because we need all the options we can get.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Okay. Who should be responsible for building a moon base?

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  NASA, because that's a public interest. That's a national interest, and it should not be an individual's whim about what our national outcomes are.

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Who should be responsible for deflecting an asteroid?

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Definitely NASA. You don't want to pin that on one person's idiosyncratic attitudes about what an asteroid is or isn't doing.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Who should be responsible for mining the moon?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  I don't want to mind the moon.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  I thought that might be the answer. No one?

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  I mean, look, billionaires, I mean, let billionaires do that. That's a, if they want to do that and find a way to make money. There is no motivation to do that because the moon doesn't really have anything super useful. Billionaire wants to spend their money figuring that, they're welcome to it.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Who should be responsible for rescuing stranded astronauts?

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Both, because that's a fundamental commitment under the Outer Space Treaty that people who are citizens of the countries who are assigned it are bound to do.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Who should be responsible for building the first Mars settlement?

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  I think we've seen a lot in the last few years that suggests that a broad national activity that has lots of ways to have take in feedback and take in democratic inputs would be a preferable way to live on Mars than under the yoke of one individual person who controls the air you breathe.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's maybe a NASA.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  Let's call that a NASA.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  And then last one here. Who should be responsible for searching for alien life?

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  I'll say both, but I think we've seen, given the option, that it's really NASA's the one that's going to do it. And again, I want a discovery like that to be made public and be shared freely. And that's what, why we have a public space program, right? To bring everyone along on this and to not hide anything about what we do.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  What does the private sector do better than NASA?

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Launch, launching things into space.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  What should private companies never be allowed to control?

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Access to space on the behalf of an entire nation.

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  What do space fans refuse to admit about privatization?

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  That it comes with costs that aren't just money.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  What do critics of billionaires in space get wrong?

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  That I'd rather them spend their money on going into space than building a fifth yacht. They're not going to do the things you want to do anyway, so you might as well do something interesting with it.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  What is one plausible space disaster that no one is prepared for?

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  A catastrophic loss of the International Space Station because it's 30 years old almost at this point, and something could happen any day. And that is a massive chunk of metal that would not burn up completely in the atmosphere if it came down.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Oh, so we'd be like getting like little ISS rain on us?

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Not little.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Full-tent, fiery.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Heavy.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  It's a big issue. We're actually building a spacecraft to de-orbit it. But if anything happens before that point, you don't have any options.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Okay. And this is the final question. 50 years from now, will people look back on this time as the moment that the government unlocked space or the moment that the government handed over space to private corporations?

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Probably the moment when government handed over their control of space to private corporations.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Casey, I'm so happy you're, Casey, you're so good at this because it seems to me that you're like a very committed public servant in the service of science communication, space communication. But I also love the stuff that you're doing about bringing people to Congress to talk to people, to show them like what it is to have your own political efficacy and pushing things even marginally forward. It's excellent.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Thank you. That's very kind. And I was going to say, I think, given your background, you're, I could see you being particularly interested in that. I think it's, I call space a good starter topic for engaged citizens.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Well, it doesn't feel, it's not abortion.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. You don't have that kind of partisan rigidity.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  And so it's an era that you can still kind of go in and just make a good case. And most people, there's no anti-space, you know, group out there trying to undermine you. You're not locked into these, you get into these like human versus science, but most people still like it.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  And that's a really luxurious place to be. And, and one of the things we get the most from people who do come to our days of action in Congress are, they come out just feeling better about our democracy, which is kind of my, my sneaky goal with all this is to just make better citizens. And it's a good topic to not get bitter on fast, right? So it's a good way to start doing that.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Is space expensive?

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  I don't think so. You can take NASA's entire budget history, everything the United States has spent on NASA, adjusted for inflation, add it all up and apply it to this year's budget deficit, the single year deficit against the United States spending. And you would just barely cover this one year's deficit from NASA's entire history written out of existence, right? You spend on every, let's see, NASA, you spend NASA's budget every six days or so on social security in this country, every 12 days or so on Medicare. Like, we have our priorities, right? Like, we're spending where we want to spend, which is primarily military and social services. NASA is less than one-third of 1% of our annual expenditures.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  It is, you could, again, you could cancel NASA tomorrow and it would, our savings and the government expenditures would round to zero.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  That sounds like an incredible bargain.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Casey Dreier, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I feel like I learned a ton.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Good. I could go on and on, and I do it frequently on my podcast, but thank you so much for having me. This is great.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That's our episode for today. Be sure to follow along so you can see all the upcoming episodes. As with every episode, we do not push for any specific policy or policy agenda. We merely want to inform you with the facts and history of our time so that you, me, we, can do a better job of holding our government accountable. It takes all of us to do this. Government That Doesn't Suck is hosted by me, Professor Lindsay Cormack, and co-hosted by Professor Greg Jackson. The show is produced by History That Doesn't Suck in association with Pave Studios. Executive producers are Greg Jackson, Dossie McCraw, and Max Cutler. We are part of the Rewind Network. For more information, go to gtds podcast.com.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

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• 1:26:24Speaker 02

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• 1:27:05Speaker 02

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• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Sean Collins, Stacy Ritter, Steve Williams, The Creepy Girl, Thomas Churchill, Thomas Matthew Edwards, Thomas Sabbath, Tim and Sarah Turner, Todd Curran, Tom Bostovka, Travis Cox, Walter M. Ames, Wesley McKee, William Durham, William Curry, William Thompson, and Zach Jackson. Join me in two weeks or I'd like to tell you a story.