Is NASA Worth 25 Billion Bucks? with Casey Dreier

23:50You have your too hot, your too cold is Mars. Yeah, Goldilocks. Yeah, your Goldilocks. You have your Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold. So Mars is the opposite problem. Its atmosphere functionally went away. Yeah. And so you have these two outliers of like, what can happen in these catastrophic climate changes? Neither planet started like that. And so these types of things like, oh, our own climate can change too, and it can be dynamic, and it could potentially change in really radical ways. Do you think there are climate deniers in Venus and Mars? It's always like, I mean, you would have to accept that at a certain level if you deny climate is changing here on Earth, right?

24:26But I mean, it breaks our expectations to realize things. Like even again, looking out into space, mathematics was invented basically to track the motions of stars. Geometry was true. So space already did us a solid, right? Inventing math for us that we can then apply to create the modern world. I know Neil deGrasse Tyson told me this. I asked him if aliens were to come to Earth, what language would they speak? Oh, look, they're coming. They're coming in these sirens that we're hearing right now on this podcast in New York City. But I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson, if aliens were to come to Earth, what language would they speak?

24:57And he said, oh, math. Easy, math, math. I'm like, well, I got to learn good math. My trigonometry, my calculus BC is really struggling these days. We all better brush up on it. Well, it's like everything that we've sent out of the solar system, right? Like the golden record on Voyager, you familiar with that, right? They put other plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft. Explain what it is. We've got a bunch of great music. It actually is a ton of great music. It's the word for hello in like 140 languages. But imprinted on the cover of the record is a representation of the spacecraft and where the Earth is.

25:29And they identify where the Earth is. There's like basic binary things that they create. They use mathematics as a fundamental language, and they try to identify the location of the Earth based on pulsar timings of various nearby pulsars. And so we've literally written ourselves a language of mathematics onto spacecraft we have sent that will never come back from the solar system. So that's our effort to try to have some sort of universal. Because at the end of the day, you know, there's atoms. And every atom has a discrete number of protons in it. So every advanced species will have to know how to count.

26:00Okay. Right? Because the physical things of which we're all made up on are quantized. And so everyone will have count. Before we spoke, we counted, I guess. Well, we have to think, yeah, that's true, I guess. We have to at least conceive of number. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that things are, you have discrete quantities of things that everyone can agree on the same number they are too, right? Because that's the other thing. No matter what cultural background you are, you can count to three as, you know, means the same thing. Yeah, exactly. We can all agree on what that means. One hopes. One hopes.

26:31All right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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27:06Numbers are numbers, people. I want to spend the second part of this conversation really diving into what's happening right now in the United States as it relates to all of this. You have convinced me now space is important. We should be investing more in science as it relates to space. Explain to me right now what's happening with this political conversation. Because when we spoke a few weeks ago, on the table was a Trump budget proposal that would have cut NASA funding by 25%. bringing it to levels that were lower at any point then. 1961, before the first humans went into space. Yes. And you were alarmed.

27:48Yes. Even as a non-single issue voter, you were very alarmed. That seems bad to me. I mean, it is bad, right? And within that, science would be cut in half. Right. And that's a lot to cut in one year. And as we were taping this, there's been pushback on that proposal from the administration. So all of a sudden you're seeing congressional representatives across both parties saying, hey, you know what? We don't really want to cut NASA by 25%. So what's up right now on September 26th as we're taping this? Which might be different than when people hear this. It very well could be different. We have both houses of Congress, House and Senate.

28:24They make their own budgets, and then they have to eventually kind of work out the differences between the two, but they start making their own in response to what the proposal was. And both House and Senate, which are, again, controlled by the president's own party, flat out reject that level of cuts to NASA, which is great. I mean, this goes to why it's not a partisan issue, right? And this level of rejection, it's rare to see that level of rejection among the party these days. And it just needs to kind of get over the finish line. So we've seen a lot of progress. In a sense, we've made the case successfully that this is a bad idea.

28:56And to do so would be to undermine a lot of these things we just talked about. But again, that's also this deeper symbolic Like, are we a country that goes out and does this, or do we just kind of stop? Yeah, and let someone else do it. And let someone else do it, or just, you know, they just found hints of a potential biosignature, potential sign of life on Mars. It is wrapped up in a little tube ready for us to bring back to Earth. We can test that. We have a hypothesis to test, was this life or not? When will we know? Well, we'd have to bring it back, which this budget cancels the effort to do it.

29:27How much does it cost to bring that little dial back? We're not sure. Probably$6 to$7 billion altogether. $6 to$7 billion. Over the course of 10 years, though. And then we will know. And then we will know if that was life or not. Yes. So, I mean, we have the strongest hint. And there's also like Jupiter. There's a big ocean moon in Jupiter. Yep, Europa has a big underground ocean. There are things that we can do right now, right? But I think that, for example, again, we have this potential biosignature on Mars. If we want to, we can validate if that's life or not. Right, but that's under threat right now in the current negotiation.

29:59Completely canceled in this idea. So do we see this and say, again, this is why this bigger symbol. We are presented with the most exciting potential find in the history of science, like life beyond Earth. I guess we'll see. We won't do this. That would have been interesting. Oh, well. There's something really sad about that to me if we don't do that. Part of it is like paperwork, I think. When people get bored by the paperwork, it's like everyone's excited, and we're like, yes, we would love to know if there's other life in the cosmos. Yeah, we're curious about it. Yeah, we like GPS. But then they're like, can you fill out the forms and dot the T's and call your local congressperson?

30:39Well, this is why we have, yeah, right. Well, I mean, this is why we have good engineers to do it for us. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to get through that sometimes. But also the paperwork of how this stuff happens in Congress. And like, so what, you know, there's that famous Schoolhouse Rock thing where it's like how a bill becomes a law. How does an idea for space science become a dollar toward that idea? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that process of, I mean, I go over back, how does it start in the spark of some guys or some woman's brain as a spark of neurons to say, let's do this mission to bring back a sample from Mars.

31:11And then it has to incite enough neurons in other people's brains and this cascading consequence to finally have someone write that down, you know, make someone's neurons fire to write this down into a piece of legislation. But I mean, saying that all happens, we want to do this. You have to work with these parts of Congress that have responsibility for funding NASA. Which are? It's the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee of Appropriations, as everyone, CJ is. But there's just, you know, the government's funded. They break it up into 12 committees because it's so big. And so this is the one that does NASA, also does Justice Department for some reason, and Commerce Department.

31:41It's kind of all thrown into a grab bag. And it's in these, you know, if you're a member on this committee, you basically get to kind of say what your priorities are. You get a chunk of money from your appropriations leadership, and you can apply it to NASA for various things. Usually, the White House will request to start a new program, like in this case, Mars sample return, and then Congress will give them money to do it or not. And then they'll go through it, they'll vote, and then the president signs it into law. But that has to happen every single year. It takes a long time to build a spacecraft.

32:09You're not just going to the Walmart and swiping Uncle Sam's credit card and buying a spacecraft off the shelf, right? I would like to go and buy a spacecraft like that. That would be a really cool story. I feel like when I was seven, I would have liked to go buy that. Yeah, the Rover store. Yeah. I don't think my credit card limit is sufficient to afford that. How much is a spaceship? It depends what you want to do. I'd say it ranges from half a billion to about$5 billion. Okay, yeah. I can't afford any of that range, so that's a good range. Put it on credit. We like it. Maybe one day I can buy the Mercedes F1 car.

32:40Something to aim for. And also, you said Nixon took it out of the hole. Basically, for a long time, NASA was considered almost like a national security initiative, right? So they got top priority. They got whatever money they needed, and they got top priority for resources and personnel. And then when Apollo ended, he said, nope, you're just like everyone else. So now NASA is just like everyone else still to this day. So it doesn't have, despite, we do have like a U.S. Space Force happening. Which has a bigger budget than NASA now. Yeah, which is related to the Department of Defense. Yes, it is a branch of the Armed Services.

33:09Right, or Department of War, as it's called these days. That's called Department of Defense. Right, and you're saying Space Force has larger budget than NASA. But can Space Force do what Space Force needs to do without NASA? Probably. Really? Yeah, because they're the national security priority. That's where the money is. But all the science and the exploration and the knowledge that comes out of NASA probably informs what Space Force is up to, right? It can help. Right. But, I mean, NASA specifically was set up to not be national security, right? Yes. It was written into, and this is at the time, it was very important that this be a peaceful expression of the United States, that it not be connected to Department of Defense because it wasn't supposed to be, you didn't want to incite the Soviets, you didn't want to make it a war.

33:52There's fundamental things. Yes, rocket development technology will inform missile development technology, right? But generally, I think the intuition is, you know, NASA's the nice thing. And NASA benefits from those types of investments backwards as well. So, I mean, that's the thing. A lot of people think NASA is the same thing or represents the same military industrial complex. It really doesn't. It's National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And that is what it's doing. It's administering science. It's administering space. No, that's not at all what it's doing. It's a funny name is when you think about it.

34:25It's a terrible name. Yeah, it's like administration. Why is it a NASA administrator? It's a good acronym and a bad name. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think at the, you know, 1958 is when they were putting this together. I guess they thought it sounded like a, they actually took all the, there was all these like aviation research centers across the country They just kind of, you're part of NASA. That's the first day in NASA, right? Aeronautics. And then they kind of grabbed some other rocket centers and they pulled some things out of army bases that were developing rockets and they just all called that NASA.

34:53Okay. So part of the debate over the NASA budget this year was about this tension between space science and human space flight or space exploration. Are those euphemisms, human space flight? No, they're not actually. because the International Space Station doesn't explore anywhere. It just goes around Earth. So that's what's called space operations, the least exciting section of NASA. But I think the point, NASA's broken up into chunks. And so what NASA does in science, science is all the stuff you do with robots and space telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope. We love the Hubble Space Telescope.

35:30I love the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope. And Earth science and climate observations, that's all in NASA science as well. And then the human space, flight, again, anything with people involved in it. And that involves being - That's Katy Perry going to the moon. Just kidding. That's our new commercial and private space sector going - Into eight minutes into outer space and coming right back. You know, Captain Kirk himself, William who's name is, flew on the Blue Origin flight, right? And he saw space and basically lost his mind temporarily. Did you ever see that? No. He went into space and saw how dark the blackness was and how blue and pristine the earth was and he really you know for playing star trek character right and going into space he's like space sucks i don't want to you live on earth he came back with this really intense emotionally driven response um coming back william shatner i should and that experience can be really transformative for a lot of people right when you go up into space because again space is like where you're supposed to live the least right right the space wants to kill you all the time yeah you do one wrong thing and you will die in space right and no energy, hard to get some water.

36:39Yeah, and you bring up a bubble of Earth with you. And when you see exactly how harsh and unpleasant, you realize what a comparative Eden we have here on Earth. Okay, so stack rank them. Going to Mars, going to the moon, taking photos. What do you think is important? This is your perspective. I think science is the most important thing because it goes further. The universe is really big. Humans could probably only ever go to moon and Mars because the universe is just too big to go anywhere else. So understanding how the universe works and where we're coming and where we came from and where we're going, that if you really want to test out if a theory of the world is correct, is universal, test it somewhere else out in the universe, right?

37:23You can't just assume everything you measure on earth is correct. You have to go somewhere else to validate it. And that process of figuring things out and forcing ourselves to change our understanding of the world and how things work by going out in the space specifically for curiosity and looking for things is really, really important for us. Then I put, you know, human spaceflight's important too. And then I'd put, you know, aeronautics is good too. Aeronautics is good too. The A in NASA. So, but yet we spend all this money trying to get people into the moon and less money on science. You know, what are some of the things that would be cut in the budget if the not 25 % cut, but even the haircut?

38:0050%, yeah. Even the haircut happened. Even the haircut. Even the haircut to science happened. Like, would we lose some of these telescopes we love so much? Yeah, we'd lose some of the—so Hubble, they would reduce the amount of science they do on the Hubble Space Telescope. They'd reduce the amount of science they do on James Webb. They would literally cancel some of the— When you say reduce the amount of science, you mean less— What scientists do, they apply what's called for time. Okay. And so they say, oh, I want to study this thing in the universe with a Hubble Space Telescope. And if it's good enough, it's very competitive, they'll say, okay, you'll get however many days it takes to observe this.

38:31And here's some money to research the data when you get it back. Science doesn't mean anything unless you have scientists to figure out what the data says. And so when they have less money, you just pay fewer scientists. You just do less science. I know. Do more people want to be scientists now than like 10, 15, 20 years ago? I hope so. Is that going down? Like doctors are going down a bit. Yeah. Is there a similar question? I think a lot of people are questioning right now whether they want to. Also, there's a lot of people who might want to do that, but then not be scientists in the academic sector, but go instead to work on, say, Elon Musk's SpaceX mission.

39:06Yeah, or just go into any tech or just whatever, right? I think that would be sad. I think not everyone needs to do it, and even people who go and get these degrees can also then go work for these places, right? Google always used to snatch up the people who would design rover software because it cannot fail. You're designing the most reliable space software, so that'll look great for infrastructure for Google or something like that, and you can make a lot of money that way. And so, again, it's like you're picking out these hyper-performant equivalent of athletes, right? But at the end of the day, I think this is why you need exciting things to do because it inspires people to come and do them.

39:42And the fewer exciting things we do, the fewer people are going to come out and do them. And I like the four-time explanation because I didn't get that. Like, basically what you need for science to happen is like a bunch of nerdy guys and gals to go to a library and rent a book, but not really a book. Not a book in this case, but it's the access to the technology. It comes with a stipend. And then you basically go out and you figure some stuff out. And you come back home with more pictures, more knowledge, more advancement of the actual infrastructure itself. Like you could make the telescope better even.

40:11Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of these projects start with a single scientist or a group of scientists. Like, okay, we pushed the limits of our one tool. How can we even do better? What's the biggest question that we know right now that we don't know the answer to? How can we solve that? And that's actually how a lot of decisions get made on the science side. This we don't know. We all think this is important. here's how we figure it out. We make this mission to do it. And that's actually to me like a really inspiring thing that we can just say, oh, what's curious? Let's figure it out. Let's go figure it out.

40:38So right now, sitting here, you were alarmed before. How do you feel right now? Are you optimistic? Slightly less alarmed, but still alarmed. Because every year, even if you win this fight this year, in 2025, it'll come back. Because the thinking now is we'd rather send dudes into space than invest in the science that enables. They're specifically deprioritized. They're saying science is just not what NASA does anymore. There's things in some of these budgets that says, nope, NASA's job is to send humans to moon and Mars. But who's supposed to do science if NASA isn't doing science and if universities are losing budgets to do science?

41:12That's the outcome, right? Commercial industry will not do science for you. There's no money in it, right, by definition. It's a fundamental inquisition. Some corporations have science teams. They do applied science. Yeah, they do applied science. I mean, there's no market incentive to go to Europa. Isn't there so much of our research in health? It would become like healthcare, which is a crazy analogy, but one of the things we worry about in our health system, and you hear people in the kind of Maha movement worried about this, is that so many of the studies are paid by private enterprise to discover things.

41:45I mean, even that, I don't even think they would bother to do. So we have all these examples, right, of private space companies sending people into space you were talking about, commercial spaceflight. but there's zero, zero examples of any private company or any commercial company launching a spacecraft to do any kind of science. And so there's materials tests that they can do, but it's all very, very practical stuff, which isn't bad. There's nothing inherently bad with it. But if you want to address these bigger, more fundamental, more profound questions, there's no immediate, that's like why we have a public space agency is to do these things that have no other avenue by which to do them and has some of these bigger benefits and is done in a way that's intentionally meant to kind of bring the whole nation along with it.

42:26You guys have how many thousands of members, tens of thousands? Over 50 ,000 paying members and then millions of people who follow us. This is at Planetary Society? At Planetary Society. We don't get any benefit from achieving these policies, right? We're beyond enjoying the pictures and the data and the excitement of it, right? And it's nice because we're one of the few organizations that cares about just the science aspect of it. And it's a real pleasure to be able to do that because it is so exciting. When you look at someone like Elon Musk, who's been invested more in the commercial aspects of space than the science of it, would you say?

42:57Yeah, absolutely. But has he contributed to science? No. No? No. He's launched, I mean, SpaceX rockets will launch science missions, but NASA buys them, right? Got it. So it's helped lower the cost to launch some things. I mean, that kind of goes to my entire point, right? That there's, SpaceX will not replace any of these things. SpaceX will not make a Hubble Space Telescope. Yeah. I mean, they theoretically could, but they've shown no intention or desire to do so, right? Right. And there's no incentive. Even though they could pay for it themselves, that's just not what they believe in doing.

43:27Do you think that, like, you used the word techno-optimism earlier in our conversation. Do you think that there's been a replacement of the word science in our culture with technology? Yes. Like, we're going to invest in technology. We're not going to invest in science. You know, the thing that drove me the craziest about the Avengers movies was that Tony Stark, like at the last one, like solve some like quantum equation for time travel or something. He's an engineer. He's not a scientist. He's not just gonna like, that's exactly the thing. Some wealthy engineer will not suddenly develop an old new theory of science beneath it, right?

43:59They're distinct skills and distinct capabilities. And the ability to assert that anyone who is smart in one area can also do something as equally well in a completely different field is folly. And I think we're seeing that to some degree. There's no universal intelligence. And so that ability to do science, it is very distinct. It's related, but engineering is a very different discipline. Science is about fundamental conceptions of how things work that will enable us to use engineering or to apply and utilize that new knowledge. But it doesn't necessarily tell us fundamental truths. And Bill Nye, who runs the organization, is an engineer by training.

44:42How ironic. He is an engineer by training, but a science communicator and a science guy by vocation. It's not that you can't talk about science, right? And I think you have a science mindset. Is that kind of the skepticism, the idea that your priors can be changed, that data should modify your thinking as it comes in, right? The scientific method. The scientific method is at the heart of it. And the engineering is usually about solving a specific problem. Yeah, move fast and break things sometimes. Yeah, which they're creating problems. But science itself is about addressing, again, the fundamental truths.

45:20Okay. Penultimate question here. Is space too capitalist? I think there has been a shift in the last 10 years that, yes, the way that we talk about it, particularly in this country, that space has become something to extract value from rather than say, what can it give us by going out and looking? It's not that we shouldn't be a part of that, But I think seeing it only as a way to enrich ourselves or to take stuff from to enable our existence, we've become too utilitarian with it. And I do think there is a truth. Again, we're starting with this religiosity of space. There is something fundamental to it.

45:56Going into space does make you feel something. Seeing a rocket launch does make you feel something. Looking at a Hubble deep field of where every point of light is a galaxy, not a star, and seeing how big things are and how small you are, that makes you feel something. There are very few things that the government does that evoke that within you and that we do as a society that's secular and fully welcoming to everybody. No one has to have any special training to see this, right? And so to completely ignore that part for the idea that we can just take, take, take is, I think, diminishes the opportunity we have here and diminishes something really, really valuable that it provides us.

46:34And so I think the way that we've talked about it, again, as a pure way to give us something else is becoming too narrow-minded in it. So I hope we shift back a little bit. All right. I end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking my guest something that they are dumb about or don't know, a question that they have that they haven't yet figured out. Ideally, not one in your domain. What do you got? Lots of things I don't know. I wish I did. But I have a toddler right now, and I'm particularly interested in witnessing the development of consciousness and the development of awareness. And I was just wondering the other day, when does a human, as they're growing up, start to differentiate between now and the past?

47:17Time. Or now and the future, right? Wow. Because you think about it, it's pretty abstract. When does a little kid start to realize that there are things that will happen but haven't happened yet, and things that have happened and are impossible to change? So interesting, because I also think that's kind of like what you said about the universal language of math. Like, we all kind of agree that yesterday was yesterday, and tomorrow is tomorrow, and today is today. We all agree. Yeah, we all agree. That's a shared consciousness. The temporal, yeah, reality exists. Yeah. And so there must be something really fundamental.

47:44But it's interesting. At what point does that awareness develop? How old is your child now? Two years and two months. And yes, she started to use the words yesterday and tomorrow in the last couple of weeks. Oh, wow. And so it's like, at what point did she figure that out? Because how do you, you can't teach it. Yeah. You don't have the words to teach it. And she uses yesterday for anything that's happened before. I was going to say, that's the thing. Like with my God kids, it's very funny because I will sometimes try to implement a sense of time. like when they're upset about something, I'll say, if you're still upset in 10 minutes, let me know.

48:13And like invariably 30 seconds or like 10 minutes later, I'm still upset. I'm like, it's only been 30, you know, watch the clock. But that's what's kind of, I mean, so it must start as this very broad delineation before and after. Right. And now. And then, so yesterday, then you can start adding refinement. Yesterday means after the sun has set and come back up or something like that. And, but there must be some fundamental intuition about before and after. And a lot of, I don't think, animals tend not to have a sense of the future, right, in planning. So I'd love to know more about that. Well, I also am like, wait, is time a scam?

48:45I actually had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Like, what is time? How does it work? How do we know it's real? And I've read a lot of Carlo Rovelli. So I know I understand time. But it also still baffles me. And I'm always over time, as we are with you. We've got to get you out of here. Today, you sat down with me. Thank you so much for doing that. tomorrow if people listening or watching want to find you what is the best way to find you Casey? Planetary.org also my podcast if you love talking about if you're curious about space policy Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition is my monthly podcast I think it's pretty interesting but it's a fun thing for me to do to explore things at very deep levels but accessible I've listened to a few episodes in preparation for this I loved it I particularly liked the view of space energy space vision It was blowing my mind.

49:34And yeah, I really recommend it. So check out. Thank you very much. Space Policy Edition of Planetary Diaries. Notes to self after that interview, I definitely need to go watch a rocket launch because it seemed like a very spiritual experience. I loved speaking to Casey. I actually love having subject matter experts on my show and just going really deep with them into one core area of the world. I did enter this conversation a little bit skeptical about space, not like a don't fund it at all, shut down NASA girl. But I left it thinking, oh my God, We cannot lose any of this telescope imagery, and we have to keep this library open for the nerds in our world to come and do more science.

50:09And speaking of science, you cannot miss my episode with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, which is coming up next on Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Make sure you hit follow or subscribe to this feed so that you do not miss the next episode. Bill is my childhood hero. He's Casey's colleague at the Planetary Society, and we dig deep into what happened to science. And that's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. If you liked today's episode, you're going to love my third ever episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he answered all my dumb questions about the cosmos. You can scroll down and check that out wherever you're watching or listening to the show.

50:40And also, please leave us a review, a comment, and share this show with your friends. Make it a curiosity party. You and they can search for Smart Girl Dumb Questions and hit follow or subscribe on Spotify or on Apple, on YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. Today's episode was produced with Annalisa Cochran. It was recorded and edited by Desta from Wander Studios. Our on-site mixer was Jared Saldiviera. I'm your host, Naima Raza, who is lucky to have such an awesome team. See you next week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

51:31you