Bill Nye Takeover

How can we build a new Moon program while slashing science funding? Bill Nye takes the host’s chair alongside Chuck Nice to tackle one of the most urgent issues facing our future in space with Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, who’s been tracking and analyzing NASA’s funding for years.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  Coming up on StarTalk, it's about time we talk space policy.

• 0:04Bill Nye?

  Well Neil, Neil, I have some thoughts on that. Bill Nye here, I will be guest hosting this week. Turn it up loud!

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:27Chuck Nice?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And on today's show, we have...

• 0:36Bill Nye?

  We have me, I'm Bill Nye, you're Chuck Nice.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, damn.

• 0:42Bill Nye?

  Well, it was pretty good, man.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Did you think it was okay?

• 0:44Bill Nye?

  Yeah, it was compelling, yeah, it's compelling. I won't say you have a future in it, but it was, it was pretty good.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  With an impression like that Chuck, you have a future in selling women's shoes.

• 0:54Bill Nye?

  Uh, that could be. So with that in mind, uh, we now segue seamlessly to talking about how we explore space practically.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 1:06Bill Nye?

  And by this, I mean, today we're gonna talk about funding space exploration. And right now, we're at a remarkable time in the history of NASA, the National International Space Administration, where people want to cut the budget for science just about in half. And whose problem is that? Everybody's problem. And so today, as you may know, Neil deGrasse Tyson was once on the board of the Planetary Society, as am I even now.

• 1:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:41Bill Nye?

  And Neil apparently was responsible for voting so that I would become the CEO, Chief Executive Officer, 15 years ago.

• 1:52Bill Nye?

  And since then, the Planetary Society has developed a strong, reliable, remarkable policy arm. And we have here today, a guy I consider among the world's foremost authorities, if not the world's foremost authority, on NASA budgets and NASA budget policy. Ladies and gentlemen, Casey Dreier! And the crowd goes, wow, it's pandemonium!

• 2:22Speaker 03

  My usual welcome, yes, thank you.

• 2:25Bill Nye?

  Apollo's drones are rioting in the streets! So Casey, you have analyzed the NASA budget extensively.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I have.

• 2:32Bill Nye?

  And what's going on right now?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Uh, it's real bad. I think that's the...

• 2:37Bill Nye?

  No, you're judging it, you're judging it. Why do you say it's bad?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  I think that's, that's actually the most objective and kindest way I can put it. I mean, you're looking at NASA being proposed to be cut by 25%. That's the largest single amount of cut ever in NASA's history.

• 2:51Bill Nye?

  What about when Apollo ended?

• 2:54Speaker 03

  It was smaller per year than that.

• 2:56Bill Nye?

  It's now it is?

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, now is the biggest. It's bigger than it was during, like, after Apollo. So we're, we're cutting NASA, the proposal is, by more than we ramped down NASA after we ended the moon program.

• 3:08Bill Nye?

  So we ended the moon program, we had a contraction.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:12Bill Nye?

  And now what we have is a contraction that is greater than that.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  It's like falling off a cliff.

• 3:16Bill Nye?

  Like falling off a cliff.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  But instead of ending a moon program...

• 3:18Bill Nye?

  Proposed.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Well, proposed, but instead of ending a moon program, we're nominally starting one up. That's the opposite, right? That's even worse. It's like a bad idea, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then of that, of that big cut, half is directed at, at science.

• 3:31Bill Nye?

  Half of the cut is directed at science.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:35Bill Nye?

  So we then have to, for the listener who's excited about space policy, who isn't, we have to distinguish between human spaceflight and... What would be called scientific exploration?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:47Bill Nye?

  Is that accurate?

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, NASA science is anything motivated by science that doesn't have humans involved in the process in space, right? They obviously do all the science here on Earth. But this is things like space telescopes like Hubble.

• 4:00Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Things like Mars rovers, these are things like New Horizons, the probe that's out beyond Pluto right now.

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  All the stuff we love.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Earth observation satellites.

• 4:09Chuck Nice?

  Which is even more important.

• 4:10Bill Nye?

  So, speaking of Earth observation satellites, how much of this, these proposed cuts, has to do with what I would call Earth science?

• 4:19Speaker 03

  It would cut Earth science by more than half.

• 4:21Chuck Nice?

  And for me, what is Earth science?

• 4:23Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so this is when you put a science mission up in space and just point it back down. And so you're observing things like water distributions, gravity anomalies on Earth, weather, large-scale climate, carbon monitoring, all the things that kind of give us the sense of how our dynamic planet evolves and our system works.

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that sounds a little important.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  It's very relevant to most people, yeah.

• 4:48Bill Nye?

  Well, the other thing, just from a scientific standpoint, everybody, the big thing, the big questions we ask, where did we come from, but are we alone in the cosmos? That's a big question. So, when we look at Earth, we're wondering what it takes to have living things.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:03Bill Nye?

  We only have one example of a place with living things.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:07Bill Nye?

  So, the argument, as I will present it, is that by studying Earth, now we have something to compare everything else we find to with which. And so, of course, although we're talking about policy, we would never discuss, we would not discuss politics. No.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 5:24Bill Nye?

  No.

• 5:24Chuck Nice?

  We don't do that here?

• 5:25Bill Nye?

  No, yes.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  That would be absurd.

• 5:27Bill Nye?

  How much of that is, has to do with climate change, disinterest, uninterest?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Substantial, I think. And there's, I mean, ironically, what was originally called the Mission to Planet Earth, was this expansion of NASA Observation of Earth started under the last years of the Reagan administration and George H.W. Bush, under two Republican presidents.

• 5:47Chuck Nice?

  Those woke bastards. You kidding me?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Reagan, man, I know.

• 5:52Chuck Nice?

  Reagan. God, what a libtard he was.

• 5:56Bill Nye?

  Thank you Chuck for that reference. But in other words, Casey, you're saying this goes way back.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting. It wasn't originally part of NASA's primary focus. Right? Even though NASA's original, everyone of course knows the 1958 NASA Act, right? Passed by Congress.

• 6:11Bill Nye?

  Oh, everybody knows that. No, but especially if you are a StarTalk listener, you're aware that NASA, National International Space Administration was created for a reason, and that reason had to do with Sputnik.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Well, that was, yeah, that was the motivating reason to form a federal agency. But when they were creating it, one of its, you know, Congress listed out the statutory responsibilities of the space program.

• 6:32Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  One of which is to observe phenomena in the atmosphere and space. So that's the core, that's like actually, yes. Yeah, they didn't know about other atmospheres and other planets yet in 1958.

• 6:42Bill Nye?

  That's remarkable.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  And so this is, I mean, they really expanded this in the late 80s. And Earth science has become this major field again, and you have these data sets now that they've been tracking various aspects of Earth for over 40 years. And that continuity is really important because then you see these long-term cyclical changes. You understand that there's substantial deviations from that. You're monitoring temperature and again, carbon and all these other, you know, key indicators of the health of the planet. You do this by kind of this constant focus on it. And that's, that's why they created a specific part of NASA's science.

• 7:14Bill Nye?

  Well, the second letter is aeronautics, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So if you're going to study aeronautics, you presume you would have some interest in the atmosphere.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  The air.

• 7:24Chuck Nice?

  Right, the air.

• 7:25Bill Nye?

  And so, yeah.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  We put the air in aeronautics.

• 7:28Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, for reals. So I took us down a climate change digression.

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but before we get off of that, let me just, let me just.

• 7:36Bill Nye?

  Set it aside.

• 7:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay, good. We're not going to get off of it. But I would say, and I'm just conjecturing here, that when you're looking at 40-year long-term trends and, you know, things that happen in the atmosphere, one of the things that you're going to discover is that our burning of fossil fuels is a deleterious activity with the health, to the health of the planet. Right? So could it be that if I wanted to support the multi-multi-billion dollar industry that pays me a lot of money, could it be that if I wanted to support them, I would get rid of that information?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  It's certainly, yeah, you, how do you? If you can't monitor the status of the planet, then it's harder to track kind of the impacts and changes to it. Now, it's this type of stuff, again, it's, I wouldn't necessarily even make it that strong of a one-to-one connection. Okay. There's a deeper political... That was me doing that. Well, I think, but it's fair. There's a deeper aspect of this that's certainly part of that motivation. Okay. And, but ironically, you know, we're talking about these other parts of NASA science, Earth science isn't even the thing that's cut the most. I mean, so that's where I was saying, there's something kind of going beyond this.

• 8:49Bill Nye?

  What is cut the most?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Astrophysics.

• 8:51Bill Nye?

  Astrophysics?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the actual, like, just looking at...

• 8:54Bill Nye?

  So, and then Neil's not here. Coincidence?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:57Bill Nye?

  Perhaps not. So, everybody just understand, if you're just tuning in, Chuck is here, per always, but our guest is Casey Dreier, who works nominally, you work for me.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Nominally, yes.

• 9:12Bill Nye?

  Some disclosure, but I just do what he tells me. He has studied the NASA budget in a way that is extraordinary. You have written software, you've used artificial intelligence. Tell us about your wonky nerdiness.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Well, I'll start with my, I'm the chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, and I'm also, I'll just plug, host of Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, my podcast on a monthly basis.

• 9:38Bill Nye?

  Which, for those of you, I'm sure it's your primary podcast, and this is your secondary, of course. Space Policy Edition is...

• 9:45Speaker 03

  I promise it's way more exciting than it sounds.

• 9:47Bill Nye?

  Well, it's very important, so, look, everybody who listens and watches StarTalk will be ultimately interested in the NASA budget.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 9:57Bill Nye?

  Because NASA is the largest space organization, at least on this hemisphere, in this hemisphere, and how does it get funded so that we can make these discoveries in astrophysics, or whatever else it might be? Back to you.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Well, funding's part of it, and I think there's also just motivations. I'm interested in why things happen. I always say, you know, all these missions that we just talked about offhandedly, you know, to study the Earth, to look deeper into space, to go to Mars, someone has to make those decisions. Someone has to rally and provide resources to build them, have to design them, think really hard about them. Those don't just happen, right?

• 10:34Bill Nye?

  And I just want to emphasize to everybody, the word "mission"... Is not code, but a shorthand for the spacecraft itself. And all the things that happen on the ground and all the people employed on the ground to enable the data to come down here. Back to you.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they don't happen in isolation. Ironically, they don't just happen in a vacuum, right, in space.

• 10:55Bill Nye?

  See, see what he did there?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Let's see.

• 10:57Bill Nye?

  The vacuum, space. You got it? You with us, Chuck?

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  You know, it's a little difficult to keep up, but I caught on there.

• 11:04Bill Nye?

  No, it isn't. Go ahead, please, Casey.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  So again, I'm interested in the why. And so I love the outputs, of course, too. And I want to get more of those. And I think by studying the whys of how they come together, the incentive structures, the reasons why things actually manifest themselves, right?

• 11:22Bill Nye?

  You're talking about in the US government?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and particularly in the US here, because it's the largest and it's where we live and spend most of our money on it. How does this idea that this forms like some sparking neurons in one scientist's brain end up cascading to build something, multi-billion dollar spacecraft out of metal and silicon and what have you, and then launch to a different planet and return this data and discover something completely new? It's that process from neuron to building the spacecraft that I think is so valuable, but also fascinating. It's like physics. Why do things happen? You try to model why that happens to understand it better.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:16Chuck Nice?

  So there are people right now, not in this audience, and I know it's not this audience, but there are people who will hear what you just said and then say, but so what? What's that got to do with me? How does that help me?

• 12:30Bill Nye?

  And doesn't cutting the budget leave more money for the rest of our important things?

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, why are we, and this is the term, wasting money on going to another planet, or getting to Mars, or looking at exoplanets, all this stuff that you guys

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Do you're wasting money. We could be using that money for something else. That's that's the argument that you hear most commonly against.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:57Chuck Nice?

  Spending money for something like NASA.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Or that we don't have the money.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  Or we don't.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  So we can't spend it. So it's I always like to put this in context, right? And I know Neil has said this very eloquently before, but you know, NASA is just this tiny, tiny fraction. So if you want priorities, most of the money the US government spends is on healthcare, national defense.

• 13:15Chuck Nice?

  Military.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  And support for and social support, right? So social security, Medicare, Medicaid, military, all that stuff. It's vast, three quarters of all spending is that. And then NASA is this your little sliver, less than a half of a percent. And then of NASA, right? A third of NASA roughly goes to science. So you're talking about a third of less than half of like 0.1% of every tax dollar. Right? You're talking about fractional pennies at this point. So it's not a lot, right? In the scope of when you're spending $6 trillion, right? This is akin to, you know, we spend more money on pet food in this country than we do on sending things into space. For scientific reasons, right? We can afford this.

• 13:51Chuck Nice?

  I mean, dogs, dogs gotta eat, man. Come.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So we can afford. Very fancy pet food places.

• 13:57Bill Nye?

  We can afford this, and yet there is a movement to not even spend this money.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Correct. There's an overall desire to kind of cut, cut, cut. Without really consideration of what does that mean more broadly? And I'd say to your to your question, Chuck, it's more of a there's there's practical reasons why we do space. And I think we talked about some with with climate. You know, we want to understand why we can live on this one planet and not others. And by understanding other planets, we've learned how unique and rare our planet is. You look at Venus and Mars right next to us. Those are your two kind of worst case scenarios. You either get way too hot with global warming, which and global warming was actually an idea spurred by observations of Venus.

• 14:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, Venus is you can make an argument that in the modern era, climate change on Earth was discovered on Venus.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  I think.

• 14:42Chuck Nice?

  And is that because Venus has runaway greenhouse?

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 14:45Chuck Nice?

  Effect?

• 14:46Bill Nye?

  Boom, boom, boom.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  And it was our imaginations as humans are so limited that we actually we need to go out and look. Because then we're surprised about what can actually happen.

• 14:54Bill Nye?

  Especially my old boss, am I right?

• 14:59Bill Nye?

  Limited imagination. No, go ahead.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  He is the problem.

• 15:02Bill Nye?

  It's a solid joke.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  But by going out and looking at these things, we're like, oh, this can happen. Things like dark energy, you know, these things about what we don't know surprises us by definition. And it's that surprise that pushes us to modify and improve our understanding of the systems in which we inhabit as humans, which is the cosmos. And so we are behooved to try to understand them better. So we can live better in it, you know, and then there's, I'd say, a deeper philosophical thing of, do we want to be people who are looking forward to new things? Or do we kind of hunch over and just swipe on TikTok for the rest of our existence as a society?

• 15:37Chuck Nice?

  I know what my vote is.

• 15:39Bill Nye?

  All right. So hang on. Let's talk about something specific. You talk about, let's talk about something specific that's near and dear to me. Obviously Chuck, Mars. Yes. Planet Mars. I knew you were about to blur it out.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  I was about to go there.

• 15:52Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So right now, as we're recording, just last week, a paper that had been published over a year or about a year.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  No, the paper just came out. The discovery had been.

• 16:04Bill Nye?

  The discovery.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, the initial discovery.

• 16:05Bill Nye?

  Explain that. Yeah. Please.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  There is a rock on Mars that the Perseverance rover studied. Oh, yeah. This is the, what's called the, they call it a potential, potential biosignature. But it's the most promising potential biosignature.

• 16:20Bill Nye?

  What makes it promising? What are we looking at? Leopard spots?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  They're called, yes, the technical term, the casual term leopard spots, but what they, they found on this piece of rock is, they found biologic, you know, kind of organic traces overlaid.

• 16:33Bill Nye?

  Carbon, carbon.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Carbon, yeah. Carbon compounds, which are the building blocks of life, overlaid with various, kind of these shapes and patterns in the rock that on Earth are always made by biological systems. Systems, right.

• 16:48Bill Nye?

  And so it's not, yeah, exactly. Little bacteria. Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  And so if we had found this rock on Earth, we'd obviously, the bacteria made this.

• 16:56Bill Nye?

  Oh, that's what we'd say. We'd say bacteria.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  There'd be no obvious other explanation on Mars. So they can't fully say that it is because there, there are some unlikely, but possible, what they call abiotic, natural ways to make this, that they can't completely rule out. But we have a sample of this thing that if we wanted to, we now have this paper put forward, a series of hypotheses that we can test. We have to do them here on Earth because we need the big expensive equipment to do it. But we have the ability right now. There's a piece of rock on Mars that we could bring back and say, was this life?

• 17:25Bill Nye?

  And it's in a tube.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  It's in a tube, ready to go. Helpfully, helpfully ready to go.

• 17:29Bill Nye?

  There is no plan to return these.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Yes, so we have this and the White House budget canceled the effort to bring back those samples.

• 17:37Bill Nye?

  What motivated canceling that? Chuck's thing about, what are you wasting money on?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  That, yes, money is a big part of it. This belief that, oh, humans will just pick it up anyway, so I guess why bother having robots do it?

• 17:50Bill Nye?

  So, if I may digress, Chuck.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 17:52Bill Nye?

  Surveyor 3?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Surveyor 3.

• 17:55Bill Nye?

  Exactly, I'm glad you brought that up. So, you ever heard of Surveyor 3?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 18:01Bill Nye?

  Before we landed humans on the moon with Apollo, sent a few spacecraft that weighed, the footpad, the cool-looking pancakey footpads, had the same, about the same weight on them on the moon as was planned for the lunar excursion module, the thing taking the people. So, landed Surveyor 1, 2, and 3, and then Apollo 12 astronauts in the cool go-kart?

• 18:29Speaker 03

  No, they didn't have the go-kart yet, they landed next to it. They didn't have the go-kart until Apollo 15. Of course, right, everyone knows.

• 18:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, he does know that, he's the wonk man. So, they walked over to it, Moon walked over to it, and brought back a piece of the camera, a camera-related...

• 18:47Speaker 03

  They'd cut off some pieces of the spacecraft.

• 18:49Bill Nye?

  And brought it back to Earth, and I was a kid during this, oh my goodness, microbes have survived for two years on the moon.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  They found microbes, yeah, they found some potential microbes on it.

• 18:59Bill Nye?

  But then it turned out...

• 19:00Speaker 03

  It was our microbes?

• 19:01Bill Nye?

  That we just contaminated it here on Earth, just screwed it up.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Now, I don't think there's any fear of that on Mars, though. Well, there's, I think the fear is the right word, or a concern, maybe, is the thing.

• 19:13Bill Nye?

  My fear, or anxiety, or taxpayer arms of kimboticness, is if you send people, you're gonna contaminate it. You're gonna make a mess, and then will you be able to determine, distinguish between what may have grown the leopard spot...

• 19:31Bill Nye?

  Patterns or what humans brought by accident. And this is not rocket surgery. This is obvious to me.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Dirty little secret. Every astronaut's spacesuit leaks. It's constantly leaking little bits. And, you know, we're just these walking bags of bacteria and viruses. Right? And so it's just we're walking around on Mars. You just like shooting off little viruses and bacteria just in this air around you. It's functionally impossible to do what's called planetary protection. This idea that you have to not infuse another planet with your own biome. And as humans, you know, so when we send robots, we bake them at 500 degrees. You know, for three weeks to kind of kill everything or cover them with acid.

• 20:10Bill Nye?

  Sort of kill everything.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And but with, you can't bake an astronaut at 500 degrees.

• 20:15Bill Nye?

  Although there's a few.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  If you do, they are delicious. They're a lot less effective as an astronaut.

• 20:22Bill Nye?

  Whoa, that's getting a little weird. Just a little. So anyway, this argument is clear. To StarTalk audience, I can make this argument that you can't send people. We'll contaminate. You won't be able to distinguish what you were looking for from what you brought by accident.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Well, there's a number of reasons you can't have people necessarily do it. Because it's also where you land on Mars. Can humans get to where they sent the robots? Maybe not. They landed in this big rocky crater. Humans will have to land in a big, flat, the safest possible space.

• 20:52Bill Nye?

  Big runway.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Can you get close enough? If you're landing in a big rocket, will you just kick up so much dust and debris that you damage everything? There's a lot of problems with this. Plus, more to the point, at no point in history ever has adding humans to a space mission made it cheaper or happen faster.

• 21:09Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  That adds complexity.

• 21:10Bill Nye?

  Makes sense.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Because you're bringing bubbles of Earth with you to keep you alive for that amount of time. And also, we require a lot of maintenance. We are quintessential high maintenance. I have a toddler right now, so I resonate with that very strongly.

• 21:25Bill Nye?

  So with this in mind, the last budget proposed for bringing back.

• 21:31Bill Nye?

  These rock samples, this is an acronym everybody loves is MSR, Mars Sample Return.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I think it's the worst, just the worst name.

• 21:40Bill Nye?

  What would be a better name?

• 21:41Speaker 03

  You know, that's a great question that I don't answer. Can I just be the critic on it without having to offer a solution?

• 21:46Chuck Nice?

  Bring back better.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Bring them back. Well, I have my Mars Sample Return, Bring Them Home, uh, T-shirt on right now. But I always think sample makes people think of like the doctor, like.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  The Bring Them Home is pretty cool.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:57Chuck Nice?

  Cause that, that elicits a different type of Bring Them Home.

• 22:00Bill Nye?

  And the word home is evocative.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. I mean, there's, call it just something cool, like the, the Athena mission. I don't know, right? There, there's just, it's, sample return just sounds very, you know, clinical.

• 22:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  And kinda, kinda static where this is a really ambitious.

• 22:15Bill Nye?

  Is it a true fact or a false fact that the last bid was 11 billion dollars, right?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  That was one of the reasons that, that things were, there's, there's deeper technical reasons to do this. Because you're not, lots of novel technology. You have to land, go back to where there's a rover now, land next to it. Somehow get the samples onto a rocket that you land on the surface of Mars that can sit there for two years on its own. And then.

• 22:37Bill Nye?

  Why two years?

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Cause it takes two years to get to Mars and come, right, and land and come back. You have to launch on these cycles. And then it has to launch itself, go into orbit, rendezvous with itself with another spacecraft, all autonomously. And then come back to Earth without, you know, getting anything dirty with.

• 22:52Bill Nye?

  So it's not seven minutes of terror, it's two and a half years.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  I mean, it's incredibly difficult. It's all stuff you have to do if you want humans to go to Mars.

• 22:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Ultimately anyway.

• 22:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was saying, it's a, it's a, it's a great dry run for when we go. But more importantly, and I don't know if you can answer this.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:08Chuck Nice?

  Are there benefits that we would glean from doing this that have nothing to do with the Mars mission? But that would end up spilling over into our everyday life?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. This type of stuff, when you set extreme limits for yourself, why do people run triathlons? Why do people run marathons? Why does Mercedes, you know, build cars for F1 racing, right? These are extreme, they, they seek out extreme conditions so you can practice and train yourself to be extremely good at something and have high precision, have high capabilities and. Figure out how to do really hard things. So it makes your manufacturing better. It makes your engineers better. And it motivates and challenges people to pursue these incredibly difficult things. That then go out and just make the world better through their own, you know, spin off businesses and technologies. You need a goal like this, right? It just sets this bar. And these types of, again, autonomy, right?

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Robots know how to do things is kind of a big deal right now, right? We're figuring out how to do that and there's huge reasons to do that.

• 24:09Bill Nye?

  So you threw in the word reason. Why does anybody want to bring these rocks back? Bring these rocks home in the first place?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Well, the life question, right, is a big one.

• 24:20Bill Nye?

  That's it for me. Well, if we were, I claim if we were to discover life on another world, it would change life on this world. That's my claim.

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Could that be a fear for many people though? I mean, let's be honest. If you find definitive proof, okay? Evidence that there is life or was life on Mars. And then you look at the whole, you know.

• 24:46Bill Nye?

  How do we fit in?

• 24:47Chuck Nice?

  How do we fit in?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:48Chuck Nice?

  There's going to be a lot of people who are going to be very upset. Because their origin story changes. It's like saying Spider-Man didn't become Spider-Man, you know, when Uncle Ben got shot.

• 25:03Bill Nye?

  When did he become Spider-Man?

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's when he became Spider-Man.

• 25:07Bill Nye?

  That's documented.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  That's documented.

• 25:10Bill Nye?

  All right, so hang on now. With this said, I went down this road or I believe took you down this orbital path. Presuming that this was worth doing, right? But there are people, scientists, engineers in the Mars X or rather planetary exploration community. If that's a thing. Who think this isn't really a worthwhile use of our intellect and treasure.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Oh, anytime you get a bunch of scientists in the room. And I'm sure you've heard it on this show. They will never fully agree with each other, right? I mean, they are contrarians by nature. And so there's ongoing and vigorous debates about how to prioritize things. But I think, you know, it's been through this very long-term and ongoing processes to try to, you know, there's a whole thing, a bunch of scientists every 10 years get together. It's making it sound like some papal conclave, right?

• 25:59Bill Nye?

  Well, it almost is.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  It kind of is, they get together, it's more open than that, they don't go into a secret room.

• 26:04Bill Nye?

  Do they wear the hats? They don't wear the hats?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  You know, they don't let me in, so I can't say.

• 26:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you can't say, there you go.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  But it's through the National Academy of Sciences, right? And it's through, they argue for about 18 months about what our priorities are.

• 26:15Bill Nye?

  And they argue by email or something?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  They get together, they go to conferences, they have formal ways to get together, and then they argue in person, and they say, these should be the biggest, actually, what they do is, these are the biggest questions. And I think this is what's interesting about separating science from human space, about how we decide what to do. Science, because it's measuring real things in the physical world, you have some external set of conditions and realities that constrain what you do, right?

• 26:41Bill Nye?

  Give me an example, you're talking about measuring temperature.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Well, you have like a bunch of scientists, you have a bunch of contrarian scientists in a room together.

• 26:47Bill Nye?

  No, you don't.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  And that would just be, how do you resolve? I think looking for life on Europa is more important than looking for the history of geologic evolution of the cosmos, you know, in dark matter or dark energy. Well, they can get together in a room and they can say, what are the biggest questions? Because as a field, they generally know what that is. These are the biggest unknowns that we've learned in the last 10 years. And because those unknowns exist beyond the opinions of somebody, right? Because again, science is measuring some objective reality, you will eventually find some version of consensus to say, these are actually the biggest and most important questions, right?

• 27:26Bill Nye?

  So what happened with Mars sample return?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's, it is set as the priority, and I think it has been a long-term priority, because again, it has all these benefits. I think the problem with Mars sample return is that there's so many various justifications for it, that there isn't a single one that you can just say.

• 27:42Bill Nye?

  So do I have to get in charge, Chuck? Is that what it is? That's pretty much what the answer is. We're gonna find out if life started on Mars. Mars was hit with an impact or this fell to Earth, and you and I are descendants from Martians, that's where we're gonna go find out. Right.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Do you guarantee this as the outcome?

• 27:58Bill Nye?

  I guarantee that we will evaluate that, we can evaluate that hypothesis before we send people and contaminate it.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:04Bill Nye?

  So with that said, there's this proposed cuts, cut, cut, cut. Meanwhile, people at the China National Space Administration are going...

• 28:14Bill Nye?

  Chuck, I disturbed.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 28:16Bill Nye?

  Take it Chuck, take it. That was a fabulous reaction.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm just.

• 28:20Bill Nye?

  For those of you listening only, Chuck grabbed his face.

• 28:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Bill Nye?

  And that would, you know, this very troubling image.

• 28:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'll put it in the words of a very wise leader who said, "We invent all of this and then we don't, we don't have it. It's not here. China. China's killing us. They're killing us." So, I mean, you know.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Who could that, who were you talking about?

• 28:46Bill Nye?

  So, the China National Space Administration is doing all these missions that are almost one for one.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  They actually have a Mars sample return mission going in 2028. Well, I mean, so.

• 28:56Bill Nye?

  Maybe I did offhanded remark. Expand on that, please, if you would.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think so, maybe just to step back and say, even if you don't buy the China competition or don't, you know, want to have that kind of geopolitical thing, it is the framing of the administration right now, that there is a, and even beyond that, a new space race with China. There's just a hearing in Congress framing it, literally that way. So it doesn't make sense that they're, in order to win a space race, they cut our science budget at NASA in half.

• 29:24Bill Nye?

  Well, why isn't the argument that getting to the moon is what matters?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Well, the moon, yeah. The universe is a lot bigger than the moon and Mars, right? Like, there's a lot more to the universe. If you say you want to, you know, become or retain the leadership, you know, over China or any other country, you can't just decide other parts in space don't count, right? It's like, no, it's like, no, no, no, no, going to Mars sample return, that doesn't count. Jupiter doesn't count. Anything further out, that doesn't count. Only the moon counts. That sounds like, again, a two-year-old determining, you know, making things up on the fly so that, so that you can.

• 29:57Bill Nye?

  And you have a two-year-old now, so you're.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  I resonate very strongly with irrational claims very strongly held.

• 30:04Bill Nye?

  How often have you said to your two-year, you have three kids? How often did you say, "Your claims are irrational, young man"?

• 30:10Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I can't count them. I can't count how many times I've said that. So with this in mind...

• 30:14Speaker 03

  It's an excellent way to argue with a...

• 30:15Bill Nye?

  China Space Administration is planning to do this...

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Mars sample return.

• 30:20Bill Nye?

  And we'll talk about stuff besides Mars, everybody, but just this one thing. They're gonna do this similar mission.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so how about this? The person, the same people that we spoke of hypothetically in the beginning of the conversation, and they say, "So what, they beat us."

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  "Big deal." "So what, we lose our hegemony in space." "Big deal." "What's it mean?"

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually frankly, a really good question. Because I don't, I mean, I tend not to really go in on the pure competition aspect of it. I think there's a symbolic aspect of what do we choose to do as a nation? That is peaceful, and cooperative, and ambitious. And space science is all of those things. It by definition requires us to work together in groups of people because it's so complicated. It requires us to work with our allies, you know, very closely. And it says, it's wildly ambitious and optimistic. It's like, we're gonna go, "What's on that red dot in the sky over there? Well, let's, you know, roll up our sleeves and figure it out."

• 31:16Bill Nye?

  So along this line, you say it's cooperative. Right now, so during the Apollo era, as I like to point out, when I was young, during the Apollo era, it was a government effort. Everybody who worked, NASA was considered the best job in the world for a few years. But now, we have these commercial companies competing with each other, not working together. Address that, man of long...

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Well, commercial can do a lot of great things. They can make it cheaper to launch things into space. They can make satellites that bounce our internet signals back to us. They can make things that look at, you know, at Earth, you know. They do things that go up and point back down. That's what commercial does. And because that's where the market.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  Because there's money there.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  There's money there, right?

• 31:58Bill Nye?

  Well, why is there money there?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  People like to hear themselves talk like, are we not the most like insular creatures? Right? Like, we are self-absorbed, so everything is just... Again, I go back to this TikTok, and sorry, people like TikTok, but I'm an old man now, and it's just swiping, and social media is like the lunchroom in the high school cafeteria, right? And you're, it's all this, who's saying this, and who said that? Oh, this person has a beef with this person, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is the most kind of internal and closed, kind of self-obsessed driver of human interest. Space is literally the opposite. It literally pulls us out and away from ourselves a little bit.

• 32:35Bill Nye?

  So about the competition.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  And have a bigger perspective.

• 32:39Bill Nye?

  No, no, it's cool, man.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  But so, so commercials, so people will pay for, again, practical things. I need to have a communication satellite that can beam, you know, this amount of data to like the Indian subcontinent for this expansion of broadcast market that I have. I want to learn about, you know, trends in agricultural development in various places, right? But go beyond that, there's no market to say, how does Jupiter work? Right? What is the nature of dark matter? Is there life on Mars? And I can say, you know, we've had a lot of private space companies and individuals, they've been happy to send themselves into space, and they've been, you know, or small, you know, tourism in various ways, and they built rockets, and they built a lot of things,

• 33:20Speaker 03

  but there's no one of them, not a single one of them, has ever built a science mission with that money. Not a single one of those companies has ever decided to just go and figure something out, because it's not even, it's not their fault, that's just the wrong incentives, right?

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Well, they have investors, and they need a return.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 33:38Bill Nye?

  So along this line, Casey, you have talked about guys who built telescopes in the early, early days. Built telescopes.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Space exploration before we had rockets.

• 33:48Bill Nye?

  Just a little digression there, if you would.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  So, in the United States, we didn't have public funding of science, basically, until after World War II.

• 33:57Bill Nye?

  Because science or technology turned out to be so valuable in winning awards.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it turns out, oh, there's actually like a fundamental, yeah, the nuclear bomb, or any number of things, and rockets themselves, right? Dual-use technology. But before that, it just wasn't seen as a responsibility of public investment to do, it was private sector responsibility, to do scientific research. And that works up to a point, but when you start doing really complex things, like going into space, it's hard for any one person to do that. So before we had rockets, you can say space exploration was basically looking through big telescopes. And there was a...

• 34:30Bill Nye?

  Which was amazing.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was revolutionary. I mean, the bigger, the technology enabled bigger and bigger lenses and mirrors. And, you know, there's kind of this prestige race among the equivalents of billionaires at the time. You know, these, like, Yerkes and Keck and some of these other people whose names now grace these telescope, ground-based telescope level. And they use their money to build these big space, you know, telescopes on the ground to put their name on them. And what they would do, generally, they'd like, they'd cut the ribbon, they'd say, "Ha, you know, I'm such a great, you know, person, and I've built this thing for the benefit of humanity." And they take off and they never fund anyone to actually look through it. And that's the difference, right? So you can get sometimes an individual to build a thing. Because I think our brains like to focus on a physical thing.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  But the ongoing activity of something is really hard for a person to take a lot of attention to. Which is why we built this into the public sphere, right? We have funding, it's not just enough to build a mission to Mars. You have to pay scientists to figure out and look at the data, right? Without any data, none of those missions mean anything, right?

• 35:31Bill Nye?

  The telescope without making sketches of what you see or taking pictures of what you see.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Right, it's like the equivalent of a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it.

• 35:59Bill Nye?

  Now, along this line, you've referenced Jupiter, you might have said, I think you said Europa for a minute. So there's different opinions in the science community about which place to explore with how much money, right?

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, until basically all this money was cut by the White House, right? So that's like, I think that's really pushed a lot, those are internal, you know, it's like, we have a certain amount of steady funding, let's kind of figure out where to put our efforts.

• 36:23Bill Nye?

  And you say that was a good process, or good enough?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the best, you know, it's an ongoing process, but it's an open and deliberative process. There's always going to be disagreements, but the point is that you have these external factors of just the big questions. What big questions are we trying to answer?

• 36:37Bill Nye?

  Where did we come from?

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Functionally, that's like, they are, they're all related to that. How did these things form? Why does the solar system the way it is? How did life arise? What is the, again, the nature of dark matter, dark energy? These are all frontier science things, and that's what you bring up in terms of China's space ambitions. Their scientific program is ramping up to answer the same questions.

• 36:56Bill Nye?

  They're like people in many ways.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Well, and so, I mean, they're driven by the same, you know, and there's all these aspects of national pride, and are you going to be the nation that discovers the future or not?

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but they also, you have to remember, well, we all have to remember, that their government invest in these technologies that don't, we did it. But that's what I'm saying. So Bill Nye, people, years ago, on this show, predicted the future that we are living in now, where he said that it was going to be imperative that we develop battery technology, and I never forgot that.

• 37:35Bill Nye?

  Wow, I love you, man.

• 37:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I never forgot that. And now the Chinese, they dominate battery technology because where we did not invest, they did.

• 37:46Bill Nye?

  Yeah, Casey, what about that?

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Batteries are very useful in spacecraft, right?

• 37:53Bill Nye?

  No, but seriously, China has, like, mission for mission.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  There's a very strong one-to-one correlation between what China's developing and what we have proposed to cancel in the United States.

• 38:04Bill Nye?

  Proposed to cancel.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's like a needless ceding of this kind of competition to other nations, not just China. I mean, we would, the US would become, you know, second to not just China, but Europe and Japan and other places.

• 38:17Bill Nye?

  So, but the thing is not just human, we're not talking about human space.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  This is all the space science stuff.

• 38:21Chuck Nice?

  Everything. And let me ask you both then. So, if we're ceding these areas to other nations, does that mean that the scientists and the brilliant minds that go along with those projects go to those nations?

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And the partnerships between nations. So, all of the things that we, the White House has proposed to cancel, more than a dozen are with our closest allies, nominally, right?

• 38:44Bill Nye?

  European space.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  European Space Agency, these missions, these joint missions that we've made commitments to, we're just abrogating those commitments. And we're saying, "Sorry, folks, we are no longer going to fulfill our commitments."

• 38:54Bill Nye?

  So, there is no one within the administration pushing back against what, the way you described, but it sounds extraordinarily short-sighted.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  It is extraordinarily short-sighted. So, yeah, strangely enough, Congress itself has actually been doing the right thing on this.

• 39:07Bill Nye?

  Tell us about Congress.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Which is not a phrase I say often, but they've actually been doing, they-

• 39:10Chuck Nice?

  Whatever they've been doing.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  They, both House and Senate, which are both Republican-run, same party as the president, have put forward their own kind of funding bills for NASA next year as part of this whole ongoing annual process.

• 39:20Bill Nye?

  So, can you wonk it for us?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 39:22Bill Nye?

  There's something called the President's Budget Request.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  President's Budget Request, the PBR, if you will.

• 39:27Bill Nye?

  So, then what happens?

• 39:28Speaker 03

  So, the budget, the President requests, "Here's what I want to spend next year for NASA." That sets the baseline of argument. And then the House will put out what's called an appropriations bill and say, "Well, here's how we would appropriate money in response to your request." And then the Senate would do the same. They vote on theirs, they reconcile, they kind of iron out the differences between the two.

• 39:48Bill Nye?

  They have a meeting in some smoke-filled room?

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, the proverbial kind of agreement to get an agreement. And then, you ideally pass it by the Congress, and then the President would have to sign it into law, right? So, that's like the ideal process. This is your spherical cow of legislation.

• 40:04Bill Nye?

  So, do you get the spherical cow?

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  I don't know the spherical cow.

• 40:07Bill Nye?

  It's hilarious. Casey, physics major, tell us about the cow.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Let's see if I can do this joke. What is it? A farmer comes up and goes to a university and says, "My cow isn't producing enough milk." How can I get my cow to produce more milk? So it goes to the biology professor and the biology professor goes through this long process of understanding that, you know, he explains to him, you know, if you give these types of foods and things, we understand these kind of process works and he does that. And that'll help your cow get more milk. So the farmer goes, okay, okay, that's a lot. And then he goes to, what's the other one?

• 40:38Bill Nye?

  An astrophysicist.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  An astrophysicist. I'll just do it in two instead of one. And he goes to a physicist and says, my cow's not producing enough milk. What do I do? So physicist thinks for a while.

• 40:48Bill Nye?

  Let's go a year. He goes away for a year.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  A year and he draws up a bunch of stuff, comes back, okay. And the physicist goes, all right, I figured it out. Here's how we get your cow to produce more milk. He said, step one, assume a spherical cow.

• 40:58Bill Nye?

  First, we assume a cow is a sphere.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A cow is a sphere.

• 41:03Bill Nye?

  It's so funny.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is hilarious.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  For any physics major, yes.

• 41:06Bill Nye?

  So the reason planets are round, you guys, is because of gravity. And the reason asteroids are not quite round, they don't quite have enough gravity. So with all this in mind, Casey, so the president's budget request this year was extraordinarily low.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  Destructive, yeah.

• 41:21Bill Nye?

  So destructive.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  draconian, unstrategic, wasteful, needlessly destructive.

• 41:26Bill Nye?

  Wow, tell us how you really feel.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  These are the polite terms.

• 41:29Bill Nye?

  So along this line, is it, as an observer, is it a bargaining technique? Just to go into the meeting saying, we're going to give you half what you asked for and so that they would reach three quarters of what you asked for when they split the difference?

• 41:43Speaker 03

  No, because this predates this whole process. The person who runs the budget office in the White House called a shot three years ago when he published a report saying he wanted himself to cut NASA science by 50%. This is, this is deeper.

• 41:54Bill Nye?

  You're talking about the Voughtster, Russ?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Russ Vought, yeah, the director of the Office of Management Budget, who we don't have to go into this level of detail, but that's what the space policy edition is for. The, but the point is, is that...

• 42:05Bill Nye?

  But the StarTalk listeners are interested in how we got here, man.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  There's a deeper level of animosity clearly being expressed towards federal investment in science that I think is profoundly short-sighted.

• 42:17Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  And ignores the wild benefits that have come from, again, this very brief, in one person's lifetime, the United States went from not funding science barely at all to having, you know, winning most Nobel prizes in science, right? That all started again, and started in the late 1940s. It was 1950 when the National Science Foundation was created. It all came from this, a report by this guy, Vannevar Bush, the president of MIT, to Franklin Roosevelt, saying, we won World War II because of science. He called science the endless frontier. And through science, public health, national interest, national defense, industry, market, everything, but we need to do this fundamental stuff that, that markets and private individuals cannot do.

• 42:56Bill Nye?

  Article one, section eight, clause eight of the Constitution, Congress is to promote the progress of science and useful arts since 1787.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 43:06Bill Nye?

  Casey, you made it on.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  It's kind of a slam on other arts, isn't it?

• 43:09Bill Nye?

  Well, useful arts to me is

• 43:11Speaker 03

  What are the non-useful arts?

• 43:12Bill Nye?

  Is making stuff.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:14Bill Nye?

  Bridges.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:16Bill Nye?

  What did they do?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Engineering.

• 43:18Bill Nye?

  So now, Casey, you threw out a word which I dig.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:21Bill Nye?

  Can you describe why these cuts are you view as unstrategic?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Well, again, it's, so you're, you're destroying the fundamental research base of the entire country, right? And it, this goes all the way down to whether students can be trained to become scientists and, and good thinkers, or engineers. It breaks again, all these alliances with our allies. It pushes them to work with other countries who are more reliable. So we're actually pushing allies away. We're becoming more insular. We're destroying our own ability to do this research. And, you know, through this broader attack, I'd say on universities and academia, we are undermining like the very, this kind of like powerful engine of insight, discovery, and economic growth that we've created in this country.

• 44:03Bill Nye?

  So specifically, I wanted to ask you about sending humans back to the moon.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  So in, in that sense too, by, well, and also, and so there's a pivot to sending humans to Mars.

• 44:13Bill Nye?

  If your strategy is to send people to the moon, this is unstrategic.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  It, it also again, tried to disrupt a ton of the other political investment and in the political consensus behind going to the moon. So that's the other thing. You know, nothing happens, space at NASA is inherently, it's a product of politics, right? We are in a democratic, nominally still democratic society, and we have the ability and the right of every representative to have some kind of valid reason to support. You need a coalition of people to support you.

• 44:42Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Why are we going to go back to the moon?

• 44:44Bill Nye?

  Right, I can't just be one person.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  It cannot, it should not be one person, right? And, and it cannot just be a one person. And so you need to have something that builds a coalition of people who agree with you.

• 44:54Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  And you have all sorts of reasons, people have all their reasons for wanting something, and you have to accept that. That's just a product of our system. And so. Our current effort to the moon, it's not the most efficient, it's not the cheapest, it's not the fastest, but it is politically stable. And that's like your, that's your zero is law.

• 45:11Bill Nye?

  Describe what he means, Chris, it's been going on for decades.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  It's survived, it's the first effort to return humans to the moon that has survived a presidential transition.

• 45:18Bill Nye?

  So where did it start?

• 45:21Speaker 03

  It started under the first Trump administration. He actually had really, the first administration had really good space policy.

• 45:26Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  And

• 45:26Bill Nye?

  He was about, he was all about it with Space Force and the whole deal.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Well, there's, yes, Space Force got a lot of it, which is arguably actually not the worst policy, but then creating Artemis, Project Artemis.

• 45:36Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  And the Biden administration carried that on, unchanged. What else did Biden and Trump agree on?

• 45:42Bill Nye?

  Huh?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  And so like the fact that, well, cause you know.

• 45:45Bill Nye?

  Nothing.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  I mean, as we, as your listeners know, right, the motions of the planets do not follow convenient political cycles, right? They don't go on two and four year cycles of, of, of politics. You need to have someone to pass this baton off on.

• 45:59Bill Nye?

  Cause you can't do it in four years.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  You cannot do it in four, you can't do it in two or four years. And so you need to build some consensus of someone to carry on that progress. And if you want to send people back to the moon and then go to Mars, which is also in this proposal, despite cutting NASA's budget so much, while destroying such a popular part of the agency and this broader, not even making an effort to build a coalition around it.

• 46:20Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  It will fail. And so it is, it is an anti-strategy. Who will carry this forward? Right? Cause why would they bother to do it? There's, there's no groundwork established that anyone else agrees with this, right? And so by destroying the coalition we do have and then not making one for this new idea, you end up wasting money in the, in the immediate term, destroying this huge thing that we have built support for, and then undermining their own goal in the long term. Which is why it's an anti-strategy.

• 46:49Bill Nye?

  Specifically, certain listeners, viewers may remember the Ares program and the constellation program. So I went to Cape Canaveral. They built a giant gantry tower, steel welded things, rivets, spray paint. Giant thing to hold up a giant rocket. And the rocket was gonna be all solid motor, a solid rocket motor.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  First stage solid fuel, yeah.

• 47:14Bill Nye?

  And then people realized the thing was gonna be a wobbly mess. And is that accurate?

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it, it, yes, it was the last gasp of what George W. Bush's return to the moon program was this, right?

• 47:27Bill Nye?

  So, hang on a second, is the current Artemis program not derived from return to the moon?

• 47:33Speaker 03

  One piece of it is, the Orion capsule, which is going to launch with astronauts in it next year. But the space launch system, big rocket, no, that, that's not derived from, from that. That's all different stuff.

• 47:44Bill Nye?

  All right, so let's talk about the space launch system.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 47:47Bill Nye?

  So the other organizations, everybody, this has to do with cosmology and exploring space. SpaceX, Blue Origin, European Ariane rocket.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Rocket Lab, Firefly, all these new rockets, yeah.

• 48:03Bill Nye?

  Are working, largely, by and large. Space Launch System.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  It's fun.

• 48:10Bill Nye?

  Go ahead.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  It's fun. I mean, it's just, it's the, it's the big government moon rocket that this is, so this is why Congress mandated. This is the first rocket to be mandated, written into law. It's illegal for the US not to make this rocket.

• 48:21Bill Nye?

  2010 or something?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  2011, yeah, 2010, it was written into law that NASA had to make this rocket using existing shuttle components. It's a way to basically, you know, when they retired the shuttle, they wanted to keep their workers in their states working on space stuff, so they build this rocket out of the same shuttle.

• 48:35Bill Nye?

  And this is part of what you say, the inefficiency of NASA, but is inefficiency necessarily bad?

• 48:42Speaker 03

  It is, it's depending what you're optimizing for. Do you optimize for political stability? Then yes, you like inefficiency because then you spread your money around the country.

• 48:52Bill Nye?

  There are 10 NASA centers for a reason.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  There's 10 NASA centers, big contractors and contract, like Utah is really invested in the space launch system because they build the solid rocket boosters there.

• 49:01Bill Nye?

  Because it's more than salt.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  That's just like where they happen to, yeah, create that, you know, that's where that company happened to be established. And people don't like that, I mean, I understand the frustration. And then they say, oh, well, we should have SpaceX, which does things a lot cheaper, which they do. And a lot faster, which they do. But there because there's an irony when in because they're so much more efficient, they have a much, much smaller footprint around the country. So their political invested political coalition is a lot smaller. So they're actually at cross purposes, efficiency and political stability in terms of, you know, kind of, does my district benefit from this moon program? And so these are the types of inputs that I think are really fascinating. Why do we have this rocket that costs roughly $4 billion per launch, right?

• 49:42Bill Nye?

  Four billion dollars per launch.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  To launch the full stack with the Orion. Expensive. It launches once a year, which is crazy low at most, right?

• 49:50Bill Nye?

  You know SpaceX has over 100 launches this year.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:55Bill Nye?

  And it's only, it's only September.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Well, you have then, yeah, then you have Starship, right? Which is the whole space, like, which is like, everything will be made obsolete by Starship, which it might be. But the reason why it persists, and they, so the Trump administration tried to cancel this rocket this year. But you know what happened is that Ted Cruz, no critic, no real critic of Trump, completely wrote into their, a separate bill, nope, you're actually going to fund this, you're just going to spend a billion dollars on this every year.

• 50:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, see, that sounds like it's more like a jobs program than advancement.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  It is, but, but I like to say, space is the only industry that is ashamed that it makes jobs. Like, great, I love jobs. Like, doesn't?

• 50:29Chuck Nice?

  That's true, because defense is nothing but a jobs program, too.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  There's a lot of jobs.

• 50:33Bill Nye?

  No, no, defense, they make stuff to defend.

• 50:36Chuck Nice?

  Well, this is true, but I'm saying there's, there's a lot of defense when you look at almost, when you look at $800 billion, there's a lot of waste there.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Almost a trillion now.

• 50:47Chuck Nice?

  Almost a trillion now, yeah. There's a lot of waste there, is what I'm saying.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  So, I mean, this is my contrarian self, right? And this is, I'm frustrated by it too. And this is like, I don't necessarily defend this way of doing things, but it's, the incentive structure selects for these types of programs, right?

• 51:00Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Based on this, this distributed representative democratic system we have. And if that's, if that's the tax, in a sense, of getting a moon program to survive for the first time, that the fact that we will be launching astronauts around the moon next year? Fine.

• 51:13Chuck Nice?

  So let me, let me just make a public service announcement if I might. Because what you're saying right now seems to be that if you can incentivize the, your representative to fund NASA, NASA will be funded. And believe it or not, when you reach out to the people that you vote for and tell them, "Hey, man, you better do this," they actually do take note because quite as it's kept, we're the boss. Okay? I know nobody wants to actually believe that.

• 51:47Bill Nye?

  They work for us.

• 51:48Chuck Nice?

  They work for us. So if you reach out to them, and I'm talking about our StarTalk audience, and say, "I do not want to see NASA decimated. I want to see as much money as possible that can go to NASA."

• 51:59Speaker 03

  And to be science.

• 52:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. And to studying the Earth. I want money there.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:04Chuck Nice?

  They, believe me.

• 52:06Bill Nye?

  So along that line.

• 52:07Chuck Nice?

  It means something.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so I'll just plug planetary.org. So I mean, one of the things we do is try to, this is a nonpartisan grassroots effort that we try to do. For the most part, you know what? Congress has agreed with us on all the things I've just said. Congress has largely agreed with. And it really speaks to the, this is not something to completely despair over. Right? And because it's generally still, with exceptions of things like earth science unfortunately, but generally still non, it's political but nonpartisan.

• 52:32Bill Nye?

  Political but not partisan.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so if you just participate in that process, and we've done this for years and we've had a very good response.

• 52:40Bill Nye?

  How would a visitor to planetary.org participate in the process, Casey?

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Funny you mention that, Bill. And what was that website again?

• 52:49Bill Nye?

  Planetary.org.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Well, we have a link. Save NASA Science is our big campaign to do this. And it's been a huge, we've had hundreds of thousands of people respond. And we've had dozens of other organizations, thousands of scientists.

• 53:02Bill Nye?

  We send, we, our members and people who visit the website, send emails, they write paper letters, and they...

• 53:09Speaker 03

  They go to Washington DC with us. Over 200 people will be joining us in Washington DC.

• 53:13Bill Nye?

  So 200 people who take the time, they take a day or two off from a job, often fly on a plane to Washington, sometimes drive, take a train. And that we organize it so that they can visit their congressional representative, their senator, and make just the case that you're describing.

• 53:34Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 53:35Bill Nye?

  So, check us out, you guys. It is also very rewarding. I think everybody who participates gets a lot out of it. You really walk the halls of Congress, you really meet with your representative, you meet their staffers, some of whom are old enough to drive, and you, oh, in New York, that's a reference, people operate motor vehicles, many of you don't. And so, it is really a cool thing, that with Casey's leadership, with our other guy in DC, Jack Corrali, we have been able to build this very well-organized effort. And furthermore, when members go to congressional offices, Casey, you have created what we try to call

• 54:18Bill Nye?

  "tools" to help people take it.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Well, we want to empower people.

• 54:23Bill Nye?

  Empower?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, you want to walk in and to say, you can say, you can go in and say, "I want this." And that's totally legitimate. You're not a

• 54:31Bill Nye?

  I want this.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Expert. But if you can make the case saying, you walk in and say, "Oh, here's actually NASA's real economic impact in your district. Here's NASA's science impact, specifically."

• 54:39Bill Nye?

  So, you have written software?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  We have pre-generated, we've done all the analysis for people, all this stuff to show that there's an impact here, right?

• 54:47Bill Nye?

  So, if I'm from a congressional district, I go to planetary.org and I find?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  You can go to dashboards.planetary.org, and you can find, or save our [email protected], and you can find your state and district, and you can find out how it impacts your locale, because that immediately establishes relevance. Something happens here because of this, and if we don't do it, it goes away.

• 55:06Bill Nye?

  How many congressional districts are there?

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Well, 435 congressional districts, and 50 states.

• 55:12Bill Nye?

  And 50 states, so that's 100 senators.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 55:16Bill Nye?

  So, you can go in, either with the ideas or the numbers in your head, or you can print out the numbers, and you can present them to your representative and senator, and say, "This is the effect in our district. We want to fund NASA science, we want to explore planets, and China National Space Administration..."

• 55:35Bill Nye?

  We'll kick our empanage if we don't do something.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  So we give you, yeah, I mean, it's whatever works best for you and was with best for your representative and what resonates. And the point is that there's a lot of ways to argue for this and that it's also in so doing, it's anti cynicism. It's like a good antidote to cynicism, frankly, like most people come out of this and this is because you don't run into these partisan walls, you are there really just trying to express your passion. And that's at the end of the day, what we all have and what's so unique about this is that this isn't just, and you know, as Bill, you said, we're independent. I don't get any bonuses if we go to Europa or Jupiter, unfortunately, right? We are, we don't have anything to gain but seeing the incredible pictures or sharing in the knowledge that we find. And that enrichment, that that is an access, I think, to the sublime that we do not get

• 56:23Speaker 03

  from pretty much anything else in a secular world today. And that's why I say it's the antidote to like scrolling on Tik Tok or whatever endlessly is that there's something bigger and grander and just waiting, literally sitting on the surface of Mars, waiting to be known.

• 56:34Bill Nye?

  Surface Mars is one example.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Europa. Just whatever, right? And we have the ability to do it.

• 56:40Bill Nye?

  And sell it us, we're all for all that.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  So you're not just there talking about a specific thing, you're saying in so do in this, doing this action, we ourselves become better.

• 56:46Bill Nye?

  So let me just, let me just add this, you guys. Planetary Society was founded by the famous Carl Sagan, the guy who gave Neil a copy of his book, gave him a ride to the bus station, but Neil chose not to take his course. I can't, you'll have to take that up with him. Carl Sagan, Lou Friedman, who was an orbital mechanics guy at Jet Propulsion Lab at the time, and Bruce Murray. And Bruce Murray was the head of the Jet Propulsion Lab during these famous, famous missions, Viking landing on the surface of Mars and Voyager, the famous Voyager spacecraft who did the, that did the grand tour of the solar system, the golden record, which is still flying out beyond the heliopause into the cosmos.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Delacraz now, yeah.

• 57:30Bill Nye?

  He was the head guy during all that. And he famously was asked. Why are you building these spacecraft? What are you gonna find? We don't know what we're gonna find, that's what, we're building them. And to that point, all four of my grandparents were born in the 19th century. They were born in the 1800s, I'm of a certain age. All four of them. They did not know there were neutrons. They did not know there was relativity. They did not know that one day we would have mobile phones that depend on both special relativity, the speed of the spacecraft, and general relativity, the Earth's gravity, affecting the speed of clocks. They did not know any of that.

• 58:12Bill Nye?

  And all of that is derived from space exploration, and in the case of relativity, largely from just the telescopes, or just the beginning.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  They didn't know about Pluto.

• 58:22Bill Nye?

  They didn't know there was a Pluto.

• 58:23Chuck Nice?

  And there still isn't a Pluto.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  There's a Pluto.

• 58:26Bill Nye?

  There's a Pluto.

• 58:29Bill Nye?

  So anyways, you guys.

• 58:31Chuck Nice?

  I'm starting my own.

• 58:33Bill Nye?

  So to take it back to Casey's point, with all this talk, all this concern about NASA budget and funding, international competition, what could a person do about it? Casey?

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Well, again, planetary.org, there's links right on the homepage for our Save NASA Science campaign. It'll catch you up on the news, it'll give you ways to write in your member of Congress, you can call them if you want, catches you up on talking points, and then, whenever you want, you can join us, we go to Congress every year.

• 58:59Bill Nye?

  Sometimes twice a year.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Sometimes twice a year, and so, you can sign up, I have a Space Advocate newsletter, and then also subscribe to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, to keep going into all the depths and nuance and reasons for why we do these things. And then, the more you know, you know, the better you're gonna be.

• 59:14Chuck Nice?

  I just saw a star go across the room.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  How appropriate for where we're at.

• 59:19Bill Nye?

  So, really, you guys, a lot of times on StarTalk, we talk about cosmology and astrophysics and so on, and the discoveries that have been made about anthropomorphic star ripping the guts out of the star cluster, or the planetary nebula, or something. But this is the practical information about what it takes to support NASA science, so that we can make these discoveries and work to answering the two deep questions, of where did we come from, and are we alone? The search for life. Keep looking up. Thanks for listening.