Major Missions in DANGER? What JPL Layoffs Mean for NASA

well here I am outside again uh we're back to my uh green screen Forest background uh and I'm doing this because my power's out um my power company decided that today was a good day for maintenance for the power system and my backup batteries ran out and so now I am just rolling with various random gear that I can put together so I figure why not I'll record in the forest now this is sort of breaking news and we thought we wanted to get this out immediately and this is a conversation that I'm having with Casey dryer who is with the planetary Society Casey is a policy specialist he learns how various NASA budgets plans come together all of the funding agencies helps advocate for science within the US and today is a very special day because a huge chunk of NASA's jet propulsion lab employees were laid off today there are also implications with other programs within NASA we've got the delay to the Artemis Mission what's going on with the Mars sample return Mission there's a lot of stuff that I wanted to talk to Casey about so here is my interview with Casey drer hey Casey it's good to see you again uh you too wish I could be here under happier circumstances but always happy to be here well it's kind of funny because we scheduled this like a week ago and there were other things we were going to talk about that were changing and you know new issues and then suddenly it turned into to a much uh more interesting and kind of Darker story and so we decided to make this happen immediately so okay so the big news the thing is breaking right now today is that NASA JPL announced last night that and with the most understated press release title ever was like note about jobs at JPL or something but the reality is they're laying off a whole bunch of people at nasy GPL yeah about 8% of of its Workforce plus and this is I think an important rle hundreds of contractors on top of that uh that have short-term contracts but still contribute a lot to a various number of missions and of course Mar sample return and the functioning of the lab so a good number of people very rapidly right this is all happening in a single day uh layoffs are happening pretty much as we are recording this right now yeah and so like like last night when we got the press release they didn't know who was getting laid off they just knew that big axe was falling now we're starting to get a sense of who's actually getting laid off and who's sticking around yeah we will We I think the JPL employees are learning this right now too I'm sure the management knows and yeah I mean how do you how do you clean out 8% of your Workforce overnight and you know this hasn't been comp I guess there are degrees of surprise right it's when it happens of course it's a shock this hasn't been unprecedented this has been stirring for a while JPL started laying off contractors last month uh jpl's been under a hiring freeze since September uh they've been pulling back on expenses such as travel and and major purchases things have been hemorrhaging and and been very tight for months all basically tied back to significant uncertainty over Mar sample return budget of which JPL is the major NASA uh facility servicing that and all of the uncertainty around the future of the mission political UNC cty and and really though at the end of the day a stalemate between two chambers of Congress that is driving why we're getting layoffs right you know very sudden layoffs rather than kind of a more orderly windown and and so I mean you have been reporting positive news year after year and you've been like genuinely surprised at how the funding for NASA has not just been what NASA was expecting but in in fact a little more like a little like why don't you had a couple couple more goals when did that funding tap change uh well this year really changed and yes you're right NASA's been on a bull run in terms of its budget it's I think longest the longest sustained duration of regular budget growth you know not huge you know we didn't see Apollo level increases in NASA but we've seen steady 3 4% growth year after year since 2014 know so almost 10 years and that has you know that adds up you know NASA has about5 billion more dollars in its budget now than it did 10 years ago and you do a lot more with that obviously right you're spending it on things you're sending people back to the Moon you're doing this huge science portfolio you're building a new Space Telescope you're doing earth science observations you know all the thing and private and commercial space flight public private Partnerships Clips yes so we're doing a lot more and it has been only in the last year so the the first warning sign was last year when NASA it still grew but just less than the president had proposed and prior to that NASA had been growing more than the White House had proposed every year just by a little bit but still notable last year was the first time that that didn't happen a while it still grew relative to the previous year but just not as fast this year and this is all traces back to Republicans took back the House of Representatives uh in 2022 they had in 2023 a big b so the Democrats run the US Senate house is run by the Republicans so they all got to have you know the the much more political posturing and fighting and and in reaction also to of course inflation and things you know economic changing conditions there was a very strong motivation to basically pull back on federal spending and the deal was in order to extend the US debt Li we won't go into a whole detail of this but the deal was to extend the debt limit they were basically put a freeze on domestic uh non-military spending which is the portion of the pie that NASA's budget comes from so the pie shrink and so everyone's slices has got smaller on top of that this has been a perfect storm for NASA in a way uh a number of stalwart longtime and very influential supporters in Congress retired so you had a huge turnover almost a complete turnover of the leadership of the Appropriations committees in both Senate and the house and subcommittees that fund NASA specifically and of the people who came in none of them have a NASA Center in their state or District so that's a huge it used to be you know like the head of you know senator of Alabama right senator of Florida senator of you know what whatever California right that had big JPL in it that's not the case now we have senators from New Hampshire and Washington State and Kentucky and places that don't have the strong NASA connection so the parochialism right that local Pol political connection has shifted substantially in terms of where NASA's political support comes from and they'll add that all up together it's it's tough yeah and like historically like I think you know people from various political affiliations are you know their their hackles are going to be raised at this point but I mean space everybody loves space space is bipartisan everybody from you know you have proponents who may battle one another for all kinds of various legal issues who will join hands and vote for various space Appropriations it it felt like like the one final non-political thing in in the US you know it is and it still is and and that's thanks for for highlighting this because this is an important distinction this isn't the function of a sustained political attack on NASA this is the consequence of larger political trends that impact things like NASA and so no no one's out to get NASA and as you point out the the the political Dynamics are far more complex than your standard right and left issues in the United States uh Republicans tend to be very generous to NASA over the years the exact areas right depend it tends to be more human space flight exploration stuff rather than things like Earth Science Democrats are more earth science but in in you know RIT large they're both very supportive the problem is is that it's not so much an anti NASA or anti-space it is a it's low on the priority list of the people in charge and that's the shift so very few people are willing to go to bat for NASA when the overall pie shrinks everyone starts chasing their piece and again at this point it comes down to at the end of the day a lot of NASA T's like is it in my district is it in my state do my constituents depend on it because that's how you get reelected and if that's not the case then it becomes harder you know the the the politics change and that's what's driving a lot of what we're seeing so NASA announced that they're cutting 8% of their Workforce plus all of the contractors do you get a sense like how many people is 8% of their Workforce and how many contractors are I don't know like like it feels like that part's being kind of swept under the rug but that's probably a large group of people too well that from what they've said publicly and I'll just emphasize I don't have any secret information I'm going by by public stuff too uh uh they're laying off approximately 500 30 people today so that's about 8% uh and then you the number of contractors they've they've mentioned again in these public statements adds up to about 140 150 so you're looking at in in RIT large roughly 10% of what seems to be the you know if you add up contractors but it's hard to say and contractors are on shorter time scales it's not exactly clear you know what uh how long their contracts were originally but I mean these people it's like the day of oh yeah you're no longer working for us sorry you no longer have access you know that's you have very little protection and that's just you know you're a contractor that's how how you work but it is yeah it's a substantial part and this is you know without precedent in recent memory uh in terms of what's happening at JPL and I think just to to clarify here this is very much right now A JPL situation it's distinct because JPL is not like a standard NASA Center they have more like their their what's called an ffrdc a federally funded research and development center it's kind of a unique uh organization that is it's owned by the government but it's managed by Caltech the university in California so JPL employees are actually Caltech employees there's more flexibility to ramp up and down hiring um but they have less protections uh so you don't see this happening at other NASA centers because NASA centers otherwise are civil servants protected by a variety of federal statutes unions and all these a variety of other issues much harder to reduce the force uh Workforce n centers that does not mean though that other NASA centers are not feeling the pinch I think they're just feeling it in different ways it's just not as public um we just have less to say because this is obviously the big newsy thing but you look at a place like Goddard which had until recently as part of mar sample return a billion level plus component of it the ccrs the containment capture system that was going to fly in the European uh Orbiter that was functionally ramped down to nothing and so there was a lot of people working on that that now need to be absorbed into other parts of Gard uh we know we've heard from people this has not been stated publicly that I've seen but we've heard from people at GD that contractors are being laid off there too um and so this is you know we're seeing it at JP it's likely happening to some degree at other NASA centers as well because of MSR but also broadly this broader Congressional stalemate in terms of NASA funding now do we have a sense if whether there is like a a shaving and of of all the different missions and groups and all of the capabilities or are various missions being paused and entire teams are being laid off we don't know that at at at this point we'll find out probably by the end of the day yeah my the if you read between the lines the implication of the JPL announcement was that this is a a JPL wide layoff they're absorbing because again what happened I mean we're still haven't quite got to what happened here was right which was that last year Mars sample returns budget was $822 Million that was funded that was approved that's a huge you know that's a huge amount of money this year we don't have a budget from our sample return but we have two competing budgets one from the Senate that says you are going to we we provide you only 300 million we don't like the direction this is going so that's a relative cut of half a billion dollars the house did a completely opposite track so no you get your full funding however because there's no resolution to these two potential outcomes NASA and the White House actually will throttle spending down to the lowest of all possible budgets and so even though the Senate budget of 300 million this half a billion dollar cut has not passed into law hasn't even passed the Senate and the house is sitting here saying no we're going to give you close to a billion dollars do not do this the risk posture of NASA is that we will not spend money that we might not have later and so they are purposely throttling this down even if it's unlikely to happen and so it's the very uncertainty of it if they had resolved anything if that we had a budget b or four months into the fiscal year with no budget if you know so this these layoffs are a the suddenness of them the the breadth of them um and the troubles happening at other places it's a direct you can trace this directly back to Congress being unable to find any path forward on a budget you know so even if they came somewhere in the middle right the ideal compromise situation you still you wouldn't see this level of difficulty this is because they're they're going from 800 million to 300 million throttling that down to almost nothing they've also mentioned that we're seeing cutbacks in all the subcontracts to private companies that were contributing to this as well so you're probably seeing Workforce issues there that just aren't being publicized it's again huge mess and completely self-imposed I mean we've seen this in the past uh I forget what it was it was about 10 years ago maybe seven years ago I forget exactly when we saw a bunch of cuts and we saw the cuts were in very anciliary parts of the organization we saw education spending go down to zero we saw public relations dramatically reduced I mean I guess they were saying like let's keep engineers and then anyone who is not an engineer working on some specific project let's trim that back and then a couple of years later that all came roaring back with those increased budgeting I mean you've been you've seen how this all works is is that your expectation that it's going to be all of the non Central activities are going to get or where the the cuts are going to come from again I just don't know that seems to that intuitively makes sense but you know you you just really don't know yeah um it a lot of people seem pretty worried through just anecdotally what I've heard from friends and contacts uh at JPL and again it's you you it reminds you though I mean there's it takes a lot of takes a village to run a space program and a lot of people uh do a lot of different aspects of keeping a lab like JPL up and running again I think you talk about this in 2013 we had sequestration this basically across theboard 10% cut really impacted outside impact of planetary science which is jpl's kind of main area of focus and you know that was you had you didn't have quite the similar rapid decline in that sense you know you you it was more telegraphed it was actually the political outcome it wasn't due to uncertainty you didn't go from 800 to 300 million in a year right that's a this the this that's a 62% cut in a single year so this is much more this is why I think this is more visible but yes to your point this is not the end of the story right and we do see anyone who studied NASA's budget history um which is what I do professionally essentially there there are good and bad periods we we are coming out of a wonderful period and I think in a sense it's almost a shock because we've been in a good period for so long that we're learning to accommodate this and deal with this and to see remind ourselves oh bad thing you know there are consequences for not spending money this is not just these don't just go away people's lives are impacted by this and missions are impacted by this there's a couple other I'll just add a couple additional pieces of context here in addition to MSR JPL is particularly exposed I think financially because it has a number of major missions that are wrapping up Europa Clipper that's a $5 billion Flagship mission that is launching this year a lot of Engineers and other project folks are going to roll off that mission as it goes into operations and is no longer being built they need to find a job somewhere you're reaching the end of uh nysar which is a collaboration uh Mission with with ISRO uh that's going to be launching that rolls off a lot of Engineers you're having and very little new work coming in you're seeing because very this mission to Venus that was a JPL Mission uh last year was basically put on indefinite delay due to other budget problems there's just been a ton and ton and ton of problems and there are few missions coming down the pike for planetary science again there's a lot of piling up of the issues here and I think this is where we don't know how long this will last and at the same time you have people in the House Representatives Judy Chu who represents JPL who had a letter to the White House just last week with 43 other members of Congress all from California saying do not do this we we are going to come through with the money don't do this and of course they did and so there's the story isn't done yet what it does causes just hideous amounts of disruption even if JPL hires everyone back even if they you know you don't just turn off the lights and flip a project back into being you have you know ironically in a sense the Senate will give them the intense benefit of a doubt here that they wanted what's best for sample return they wanted NASA to do this correctly which they should they and they they were losing control of the project in a budget uh budget system had more than doubled its estimates had been delayed but by ramping it down like this they are all but ensuring it will cost more money because of this rapid uh unpredictability uncertainty and disruption that they're imposing on the project unless it's canceled altogether which no one once right right I want to spend some more time talking about MSR uh later on in this in this interview um but so what we didn't see with this announcement was the impact on any missions it was just cuts to the workforce and no consequences to anything at all that we know of at the time that we're recording yeah I mean so the way that it generally works at JPL as an ffrdc is that a large number of staff are funded by a particular mission right so one you're assigning full-time staff salary to the project budget of a mission this is called full cost accounting NASA went into this mode back in 2004 and so you know the Europa Clipper mission is paying for the salaries of a bunch of otherwise full-time JPL employees and so JPL has all of this staff and it's like okay we have to have missions to keep them all funded because we just don't have pots of money sitting around to pay people and that's what's essentially happening I think with JP with MSR is that the money ramp down they don't want to the m the project is not canceled yet right it it is very much not cancelled so they say we've staffed up all these people that were otherwise being paid by MSR the money's gone how do we spread this around the lab to accommodate this cost how do we carry this standing army of MSR employees and this is where again it theoretically you can't just cancel a mission in order to roll staff off of it right because that has to be a headquarters decision that becomes a bigger political decision JPL can't be respons for a single you know Mission living or dying without some kind of larger decision being made but will it have impact sure I mean no one's working today at JPL literally the Mars rover perseverance is not running today because they are laying off people at JPL there we have a a robot on Mars that is sitting doing nothing because JPL employees are getting laid off right and that's a symbolic situation at 5 ever seen one right the that it's waiting for a driver to be decided to return to the driver's seat yeah exactly all right so I want to shift gears then and I want to talk about aremis so um we got the announcement couple of weeks ago that they were pushing back the Artemis program Artemis 2 was getting shifted from 2024 to 2025 emis 3 is getting shifted back what was the sort of major reason for shifting emis tuac uh the reasons they stated were particularly related to information they got related to the uh heat shield on kind of degrading faster than they expected on Aion coming back to Earth after Artemis one so they're reconfiguring the the heat shield there's delays they're taking components out of the first Artemis one Orion and sticking it into reusing it in Artemis 2 that's taking longer than expected to refurbish those there's a variety of just and there's a I think a mechanical flaw that they had to fix in a variety of circuits and Orion I mean none of these are unexpected right these the the number just think is statistically the number of components involved in the SLS and or Orion stack 0.02% of them will have problems you have dozens and dozens of problems because there's probably hundreds of thousands not millions of individual components and so and you're learn you're learning how to do this again you haven't done this in 50 years uh so yeah there's going to be issues whether that requires a year delay seems a lot to me but at the same time I was there for the first sln launch at least attempted launch I went for the first couple nights it did not launch I had to leave and and I missed the actual launch and oh I so many times I experienced that right but I mean I just was struck by SLS it's it's such a finicky rocket because of this huge amount of hydrogen that it has to load into it it's always it kind of struck me that moment it's like this is always going to be a really finicky system you're launching it once once a year that means every launch is kind of like the first launch right because how many times can you really test all the components of the system when you're launching it once a year you have to be so cautious hydrogen is so tricky to work with because they're just tiny tiny little atoms right they can leak really easily and you think about then the the decision tree to allow that to launch with humans on top of it it's going to be very conservative and I can see this continuing to slip and this is the easy mission right of just looping around the moon of course then Artemis 3 depends on the ex existence of a at best wildly ambitious new launch vehicle like of a Mad fever dream of the like Von Brown almost could not have fantasized so much of this type of system that is being put online by SpaceX um that has to work right it has to be shown to work and it does I'm not saying it can't but it's we got to get there um that's not happening next year and so there's a number of these major Miracles that have to happen on top of you know even figuring out how to use the SLS in a r which they're still GNA be very much in the process of yeah and I mean that that like we discovered some problems with the heat shield we want to work on the ventilation system there's some power problems we want to upgrade some components we're going to shift it from 2024 to 2025 that all makes sense you know like so many delays let's get it right let's be safe sounds good but then they they said they were going to push back emus 3 from originally 2025 to 2026 now is that right or 27 or 27 yeah I forget I mean the point is like be prepared for more delays like the chances that this is the last time they're going to announce a delay feels vanishingly small to me and as you said it is you know you were going from you take this giant rocket that's kind of finicky with hydrogen you send it out around the moon and then it comes back and then you know it's essentially Artemis one except it's got a an easier flight path but this time it's got humans on board um you know a few learnings are going to happen but emis 3 is just so much more complicated um where are we at all of the pieces coming together for emus 3 to happen well again it's it's really up to SpaceX that's the big one and obviously they're they're making by any objective measure incredible progress but they just have so many things to do and it's and you we could just look historically how long it took for commercial crew to finally get going I think that was a three or four year beyond what their original expectation was of course Boeing still hasn't launched commercial crew um Starship is just doing so many that you have to prove out in orbit refueling uh you have to prove out 24-hour functional turnaround of of landing and launch uh of Starship you have to prove out landing on the moon with Starship uh which I think a good healthy reminder what we've seen from uh chreon 2 and uh the The barishi Landing attempts and even with slim the Japanese Lander like landing on the moon is is really tough uh even with a little thing so it's a weird line to walk right as a space Advocate and I love this stuff so much um but we do need to be I just don't think we serve anybody by having completely unrealistic expectation we need to acknowledge how insanely difficult this is going to be um and because we need to sustain the political momentum and right now I think they have the incredible thing to me is that NASA delayed all of this by years for Artemis with not just no political repercussions whatsoever they it's it's really honestly astonishing how strong how successfully NASA has made the case around emis over the last 5 years and it it it has retained the political support and I think will and eventually that may be tested um but it really is succeeding in its political design unlike all other parts of NASA particularly NASA science right now like from the NASA side emis 3 is roughly equivalent to Artemis 2 maybe even a little easier because I mean you take dock with it I guess you take the same giant rocket you fly it to the moon you detach the Orion capsule and then you dock and then you dock again and then you come home and so from NASA's perspective there's not a lot of additional things that need to be developed for them to be able to go to transition from Maris 2 to Maris 3 but from as you said from the SpaceX side you've got to have this skyscraper take off detach correctly go to orbit transfer fuel in space probably High Teens 15 to 20 times in space it's got to fly to the moon it's got to demonstrate that it can land on the moon it's got to be able to return to orbit it's got to demonstrate they can hold on to propellant for long periods of time at the at the moon and be ready to dock with Orion and and and as you said I mean it's like on the one hand that is Bonkers and exciting and amazing and it's complicated and we should not be surprised and I and I it feels to me like there are all these basic fans that are just like so mad that everything is taking longer that nasta is so slow and so on buckle up your favorite rocket is going to need some time to do this amazing job yeah I mean it's again it's simultaneously incredible progress and it's going to take longer than they think it it it just always has and everything SpaceX has done has taken longer um just historically that's not a the the level of discourse on this as you know is not the most uh mature or uh nuanced but it is it's just going to you have to have patience because it's the it's always too when humans get involved the consequences of failure are so immense and visible and symbolic not to mention you don't want people to die uh and space as you know is the most unforgiving environment to to robots and humans and so just you have to you know you don't to space Access Credit you they figure it out by doing it and that's you really see that distinction compared to SLS which they figure out by modeling endlessly and testing endlessly first because they just can't they don't have the production line and it's two very interesting dichotomies being presented that we what we're witnessing and it's interesting that they kind of are both filling their political portions uh you know generating their various constituencies needed to keep this forward and it's been very successful uh I've had this pet theory for a while that I keep meaning to write down which is that NASA's been basically pursuing a policy of by outli um with SpaceX because SpaceX has just been so wildly successful but SpaceX is uniquely successful and we have not yet seen other commercial companies uh achieve the type of success and outcome that SpaceX has however NASA in America I mean you're starting I mean it hasn't happened yet but China is going well there's a lot of yets in all this right so that's I mean and launch is obviously a distinct thing that has a huge commercial Market but we're talking about space so I mean my point is that NASA's policy has been that every company will be a SpaceX and so commercial lunar payload Services commercial uh to the surface of the Moon commercial whatever right you're they're they're deploying it and fixed price contracts too for a lot of emis they're deploying this in a lot of different places which I think is a worthy I just to be clear worthy experiment uh we know how Cost Plus contract works or doesn't um We've ran that experiment many many times s to Great frustration um but I think it's just it's a reminder we don't necessarily expect just because something becomes commercial that it will succeed uh we actually don't know we're running a huge test on it right now SpaceX has Still Remains I think this a like a three sigma outlier company compared to every other Aerospace company out there and we it has done amazing things we're depending on them utterly dependent on them to succeed in this uh as the American people are anyone in the whole Coalition of emis Coalition is dependent on SpaceX um and blue origin obviously to their degree um but the we don't know we just don't know and so it's it is an incredible it's a very exciting time but yes we should not be surprised or disappointed uh if it takes longer because it almost certainly will this stuff is really hard you know which is everyone says that face all the time but again it's just it's just unforgiving um but if if anyone can do it I guess they can because they have created that uh culture and built that talent pool for this type of thing um which I very good at and I think fundamentally it's a different Paradigm that that we are ship like like if all you wanted to do was put boots on the ground one more time then that could that could have been supplied and but the but the goal is to come up with over the long term a more sustainable presence in the lunar environment that you're going to have the lunar Gateway where astronut spend time you're going to have a reusable rocket that takes you to and from the lunar Gateway down to the surface of the Moon and eventually if Starship gets flight proven then you can imagine a reusable rocket that takes you from the surface of the Earth to the lunar Gateway and now all of the pieces of this chain are reusable and so now we're going to and from the Moon in a way that is a completely different way than we did it back in the Apollo era and hopefully then it becomes permanent because yeah you know there's there's a whole group of this audience that remembers the Apollo era 50 plus years ago and we're wondering like we should have been back to the moon but it was never we were never meant to go back to the Moon in that in that one-off way so yeah I mean certainly and I think it's also telling and important to remember I think in context that no literally no other nation has even tried to do that either to send people to the you could say now that China's probably trying in in a long methodical approach but know I mean and Soviet Union had their brief flirtation with it but not super serious um yeah no I mean but since Apollo era uh yeah no one's even tried and I think that speaks to the difficulty of the of the effort and the ongoing expense and complexity of it and yeah there's we have one I'm fond of saying we have one data point of a successful way to send humans to the moon and as you know anyone who was drawn a a plot you can say you can draw any extrapolatory line you want from one data point you can have it Go in this direction that direction whatever it doesn't tell you that much it's a it's a oneoff strange thing so we're running this new experiment and you know we've tried this in a sense a few times before uh in the late 80s on the 20th anniversary of Apollo and then after the Columbia disaster both of those were notable failures um based on in a sense the old way of doing business and this is so far the most successful return to the Moon program already since Apollo the fact that we have and again it kind of took a a bit of everything to do it I think notably there's the the big context here is that just the shuttle ended and the ISS is ending and that opens up the room in the budget to really do this um and again this is a whole other discussion that's kind of interesting like you you could say the the the story you put out I think is very accurate and and could very well lead to a sustained lunar presence um but we've had the ISS for 30 years and that's the old way of you know the old way of doing business that it's not a requirement necessarily like I think the ISS model which is basically build a giant political Coalition International Coalition and then have no money to do anything else so you got to hold on to the thing that you have and build in a sense very firm and resilient bureaucratic structures around maintaining it um as a way of maintaining sustainability too um it's just you can kind of do one of those at a time in the system we have in the US and post ISS if the if we get a lunar base or some sort of lunar presence uh you could theoretically have something sustained because it's the one thing you got um that's maybe not the most romantic way of putting this but it's not and my point is is that it doesn't I mean it kind of ISS doesn't require commercial it actually fostered the commercial industry it was kind of leveraged to do it actually probably one of the best legacies of the ISS um but it's there there's a number of ways to sustain things and again I just to make it clear I'm very excited and curious to see if this experiment works because again it's a bigger pool um what I would like not to see is have basically one Monopoly company replaced by another Monopoly company and I think the big question is are we going to have an actual Marketplace of of products and services or are we going to have one or maybe two that are paid for exclusively by the government and I think the jury is really still out on that at least for CIS lunar as successful as SpaceX has been having a genuine proper competitor everybody should be celebrating that like you you may like SpaceX but you want blue origin to succeed because you don't want it to be a monopoly you want multiple providers to be able to do this this kind of work all right I want to shift gears for the third time uh and this is for us to talk about Mar sample return and it's kind of tied together with the first part story that we talked about it's very much yeah it's absolutely tied to it yeah but but I mean already this mission was having trouble so before February 7th what was the story about what was going to happen with the Mars sample return mission where were we at yeah so Mars sample return last year underwent an independent review the second independent review and that independent review view committee uh led by Orlando Figaroa who had longtime Mars manager and worked at JPL and Mars engineer found some serious problems basically said the the project as designed as unexecuted that they were trying to go for so that's a bad sign when no amount of money you could throw at something would solve it they found I think some rather serious management uh errors and issues right that the fundamental structure and bureaucracy was was inefficient uh lacking clear Authority uh was not leading towards success um and was having some serious problems trying to organize the vast array of inputs into the program right so it was JPL was making the Lander uh Marshall space flight center is managing the Mars Ascent vehicle the rocket uh Goddard was building this containment capture device to capture the samples in orbit European space agency was building it committed a major one and a half billion dollar investment to build a Mars Orbiter to capture those and bring them back to Earth you're probably going to have to build a giant sample containment facility probably in Houston right at Johnson Space Center uh you Mars sample return had been designed on purpose like emis with the idea that you would have a political Coalition everyone would have a piece of it in order to buy into this major Endeavor because you're talking about a three mission ish uh campaign with the first Auto you know robotic launch off the surface of another planet uh in human history and not to mention autod docking in orbit and then the incredible amount of planetary protection um issues at hand maintaining those samples so yeah the the independent review said this is a project serious problem um at the stage Mars sample return was in there had been no formal cost projection so this is a bit of a distinction because this has come out um as an issue NASA the way that NASA works with these projects is that they basically spend tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars on a major project before you know how much it's going to cost because you have to design and figure out can we can we make this how's it going to look what's it going to do here's the contractors that going to be involved we lock in the design and then we can say how much it's going to take to actually build it and launch it and operate it that process to figure this out is called formulation rather than implementation but just formulation was still happening so this was still a why nothing had been committed to and fixed however uh in the decadal survey which is the big scientific uh communities you know formal recommendations for priority which has prioritized Mar sample return for this decade as the top mission to do they put in a number uh saying about 5.3 billion is what they were expecting this to cost the independent review however said this project is likely to cost between 9 to 11 billion um more than web yeah basically on the order of web um web was I think with all the bells and whistles and operations about 10 point something billion um yes a lot of money um and uh you know at this early stage easily could see that going higher right it's when the rubber hits the road and you're building the thing um and why is that happening I mean in addition to the management problems I mean the problem is is that you're have this highly integrated not you know system you're having multiple connections between you know the launching vehicle the perseverance Rover the european-made Orbiter they all have to connect and fit perfectly together and design and and a change in one right if you change the the diameter of the sample container that holds your samples to Launch to space you're changing the volume on the spacecraft of the ISA Rover Orbiter and you're changing the sample containment system made by Godard so anytime A Change Is Made anywhere else it has these Rippling impacts throughout it you're also launching on this as you most listeners know a unforgivable Celestial clock of your launch Windows of when you can launch to Mars right a couple weeks every 26 months and if you miss a launch window you are stuck waiting for that next 26-month launch window and so you all these things have to happen precisely together to get something on a pad ready to go to launch to Mars at a certain time and to come back to earth at a certain time so it's intensely complex add to this too that the samples that are being collected by the perseverance Rover are bespoke right there you don't have any more of them um and so it has to work and this is where I think the discussion about how we approach this in the future this is always the rub of it right you don't for something this precious and this much work and when you have so many single points of failure that rocket has to launch that those sample containers have to be integrated have you know you have to be able to stick them into your launch vehicle you have to be able to capture them in orbit if you don't the entire project fails and you get nothing you get nothing from it right you only get science when everything comes back successfully and so you're trying to design these systems to work you know 99.9999 99 however many nines you right and every time you add like another nine of assurance in this type of business you're you know rapidly escalating the cost of that level of mission Assurance you want to do it cheaper you will reduce your number of n right reduce your certainty but then if it explodes you've spent six billion and you got nothing right so this is the rub this is the problem of mar sample return um so again so the problem so this review comes out all these issues raised very legitimate issues I don't think anyone disagrees with them NASA basically hits paw on the entire project and this is what has been the kind of the the I wouldn't even say frustrating well yeah it's frustrating that was in September um and NASA said they would convene what is it called an independent Review Committee response team or something like they they had NASA instituted a committee to review this other committee's recommendations um but what has been happening has not been public it has been all closed door and has been going on a surprisingly long time and so all that we know in a sense is that Mar samp was in major trouble and NASA is thinking about what to do but has not said what it's going to do and that lack of path forward from NASA has made it I think has basically made the project appear very vulnerable politically because Advocates and so it's the planetary Society we support Mar sampler return as a concept right we're not wedded to any particular implementation or even any particular NASA Center doing it it's like Mar sampler return scientifically is incredibly important really exciting potentially transformative and we should do it but we don't know what we're advocating for because NASA hasn't come out and said yet what they want this to look like and as a consequence this bloods in the water and this this is where the Senate came in in this context of budgets are shrinking this Project's now going to cost 11 billion people start getting those PTSD from the web era of saying this is going to eat my mission this is going to stop our stuff my thing is more important screw those Mars guys and we're gonna we need to protect our own um this is happening I think at the at the scientific level of of inter science in science competition this happening intanet science right because people are seeing delays in their like Venus missions and missions to Titan that they are blaming on Mars sample return for for that happening and then also happening with intra center right we're seeing a letter came out from uh members of Congress in Maryland and Virginia saying that we want to protect Goddard and we want science at Goddard and we're here to do what Goddard needs and if it's not a Goddard we don't care about paraphrasing but basically what they said um and that's you know so Goddard want really wants the habitable world's Observatory the big Flagship Observatory for uh astrophysics as do we all well yeah I mean that's the thing like they really want that but it's being pitched as and in this it it's very sad in a sense to see as soon as the budget goes down a little a lot of tension is coming coming out like this is easy to say we're going to do everything when the budgets were going up and now that things are shrinking people are getting a little freaked out um and the politics around this are becoming a little you know sharp elbowed and so as a consequence then the Senate puts out this budget number for Mar sample return which says you either keep this what the language said is you're going NASA you tell us how you're going to do this for that $5 billion do number and if you can't you are cancelled and then what I think is an important reminder to the science Community they said and should that happen if NASA can't do this of the 300 million that we would give to Mar sample return next year it's all going to go to emis if you can't do this it just leaves science altogether and goes to emis so I think the scientific Community who thinks oh if they just cancel Mar sample return then my science Mission can happen we have an example from the Senate it's like no it's just going to go to emis it's just kind of go into the human space flight bucket um and so you you have this dichotomy set up and so but again it's all happening it's an again it's this perfect storm of where NASA has lost political support the budgets are shrinking you're having unclear leadership on the project from NASA itself that we don't know what NASA wants to do and I think too the cost is chilling to a lot of people and it's a highrisk mission where all of the science is backloaded at the end of it and then ironically at the end of the day the planetary science community that said they wanted this Mission has very little to gain from a practical standpoint while it's happening right it's not funding scientists because it has no science Mission uh instruments on it uh it's it's it's not going to give so James web why did James web succeed being 1010 billion because every astronomer can use web for something you can write a proposal you can get funded which is what you know the life of doing science it helps to be able to eat and pay your mortgage and you know buy clothes for your kids and all the other things you do you can get funded to study things on web for years right Web launched you can use it to I'll point out a planet I'll point out a Galaxy I'll pointed at whatever as long as you're collecting photons web is pertinent to you Mars sample return will have these huge repercussions in terms of scientific understanding but only in a sense through how we interpret things going forward so you have a community of returned sample scientists or meteoritics it just tends to be much smaller they will do a lot of the studying of the samples when they get back right nothing happens after launch for for years if not a decade after after launch and that just so the scientific Community is actually not a huge constituency of support for Mar sample return in a very practical sense um because of the fundamental difference in how these missions work right and that's one of the big I think problems that we're seeing and so Mars sample return had enjoyed while the budgets were going up huge amounts of political support had been getting the money um was you know and then as soon as it hit this road bump I think it collapsed relatively fast considering how supported it had been and we're seeing this is a huge uncertainty now and I think again if if it doesn't go forward it's a huge loss um not just for science we'll have to do this eventually so we're just pushing the problem down the line um but also implication is we went through this big formal process through the national academies to say this is the top priority if we just say oh we just don't do that anymore then anyone who goes through this proc process in the future whether it's Mar sample return or admission to Uranus or have a worlds it's like oh well who cares if you say it's the top priority we didn't care last time you said that why should we honor that and it starts weakening the entire uh system that we've developed to create through however you know these formalized processes to assert priority back into in a sense the battle days where it's just people jockeying for who has the ear of so and so who has the center support who has the political support to get their placed first right so the whole point of the decal survey then is to have this conversation hash it out agree as a scientific Community yeah and then that sets priorities for the next 10 years and and you know immediately that you don't have to go into politics mode you can just start going into working on your science mode and or preparing yourself for that next decadal survey 10 years from now exactly but if if the priorities defined by the scientist don't turn into actual missions then there are no rules and we're back to Thunderdome yes well put yeah it's and the phrase they used to Bandy but like the decal survey is the sword and shield of the science right and so it's the sword to kind of push forward your agenda and also to defend the community and cuts and if it turns out that it's it's not that yeah then it every other decadal is functionally weakened by not honoring the process of this one and I think a lot of scientists Main and people you may not like the conclusion of that uh kind of logical progress there but I think that is in a sense the political lesson that will be learned and will be deployed by others going forward um whether it's in astronomy or heliophysics or earth science which is notably the more partisan area unfortunately right of of NASA that this starts to become oh who cares if you have a decal survey or not it didn't matter with Mars um why should it matter to you and this is where I think the scientific Community needs to think in a bigger picture about as long-term support and stability even if uh people aren't super excited personally about Mar sample return because of all in a sense the Practical things that I outlined earlier right and and I think like at at the same time we've got this I don't know if it's a sort of damic but the Chinese as with the Artemis program there is is a timeline that the Chinese are planning to send humans to the Moon by 2029 and for all of their pieces are coming together new Lander new Orbiter uh two new you know massive rocket all the pieces are in place that and plus all of the precursor missions that have demonstrated all the fundamental technology it feels like they are on track to meet their goal 2029 2030 we should see them land on the moon and so if Starship is delayed if Artemis takes more time maybe we don't see the US land 2030 maybe it's 2031 and they can always say well we did it 50 years ago 60 years ago so it doesn't really matter you know we already were the first on the moon but you've got this same scenario happening with Mars sample return which is that the Chinese are planting their own version of the Mars sample return Mission probably launching 2028 probably returning 2031 and that's on schedule T was a demonstration of the technology to show that they can land on on Mars safely deploy a Rover deploy a Lander and now next and and then all the technology with the with the lunar missions is demonstrating that they can build Ascent Vehicles bring samples back to Earth they're doing 1012 is going to be an asteroid sample return Mission which is one step again you're seeing this stepbystep incremental approach to solving this problem there is is nowhere near as complicated as as Mar sample return mission is going to be but I feel pretty confident that they're going to pull it off they're going to move through the steps and launch their rocket in 2028 and have samples back on Earth by 2031 and that is something that that nobody has ever done before do you do you feel it feels to me that that this is going to be delayed it's going to sort of sit in a quagmire for a couple of years and then people are going to panic when it's when they realize that they're not going to get their samples back back in time to beat the Chinese yeah it's that whole it's going to be really interesting to see how this moves forward because yes and and I believe that the Chinese uh space uh programs approach to sample return is essentially a grab and go yeah much simpler they they land they grab whatever is there and then they come back and it's it's not helicopter yeah it's not as Rich a a scientific so I mean the it it's distinct in the sense that so you know the scientific community in the US and Europe that is behind this effort can say like look our samples are better right they they've been very carefully and painstakingly collected they did all this context analysis I mean this was an important part of it defined by the scientific Community it's like if you want this to be the biggest bang for your buck you know you're going to a Delta you're looking for where Organics concentrate you're picking up those samples and preparing them and Sealing drilling beneath the surface you're grabbing samples of air in situ you're yeah exactly it's very careful however none of that means anything if you don't bring him back right and bird in the hand versus Bush right yeah and I think the the Chinese approach is simpler it's like we'll get something back and we'll learn something kind of it's similar in a way to Apollo samples right like at least at the beginning you just grab whatever you land on in the safest spot in the moon and you're just happy to have moon rocks um turns out they were statistically skewed to one particular s sample right it's just like you you wished you could go back and do it again but again you still have something um the interest so we saw Bill Nelson NASA administrator has not been shy to draw China as a competitive threat and using space as a means to to offset that um the problem is in terms of I think an actual practicality and I'm just I'm stepping back from like whether or not one accepts that as a valid thing because I think it's debatable but it's clearly at least gets some Traction in the US political system but the problem in a sense in terms of just a practical implementation of that is that you he does that for emis too and people do it for Artemis too as as you point out and I think there's only really room for that to work in one program so and in a sense and this is another interesting strategic problem for Mar sample return is that Artemis ticks off basically all the boxes that you use to argue from Mar sample return right it's a big International contribution right you has a huge Coalition of like-minded us allies and and partners it serves as a very powerful symbol it is very hard to do you are trying to beat out or show up you know the power of your Allied system over a competing uh philos opical political system um with China and its alignment with with Russia and a few other countries in terms of what they're doing at the moon and you say that with Mar samp and people go great well but didn't we just figure that out with art that's why we're funding Artemis right so we get all that stuff there too and it's more Frank Frankly it is probably more powerfully symbolic to see humans on the moon again rather than Rocks come back from Mars just in terms of of just regular folks but there may things out of their control I guess I just feel like with emis we talked about this before there's stuff that's out of NASA's control right there's the big question mark question mark question mark SpaceX rocket that is entirely a black box at this point yeah I I yes I think that's all true however the leadership of NASA particularly right now is not going to prioritize a robotic program over a human space flight and NASA just generally no leadership generally does but Bill Nelson in particular yeah he's a human space fight guy flew in space right he's he's he's not technically an astronaut like other astronauts have been but he flew in space and he represented Florida he's human space like guy and Artemis is his thing and he is if there's one thing he's gonna support it's going to be that and when your back is against the wall and the budgets are going down you don't get the luxury of supporting everything and this is the problem and I think we've seen you know in the two draft budgets we've seen from the Congress uh that I mentioned earlier within those aremis does grow so even in a flat or shrinking NASA budget within that diminishing NASA budget in both House and Senate Artemis gets bigger and that difference what makes up that difference is coming from NASA science and this is why the pressures on Mars sample return to say oh if we just excise Mars sample return that's I said it goes into Artemis and that helps then emis move forward that's where the I think if you were to Corner Bill Nelson and to say what is the one priority NASA doing right now he will say Artemis over anything else and you've seen this reflected politically and that's again one of the huge problems Mar sample return is facing right now is that you just don't have the luxury of being number two it doesn't get you very far and it it always makes me really unsettled to to think that people who are fans of human space flight or you know people work on human space flight and people who working on science even have to compete in the first place that that there should be some Division and maybe as there is more commercial activity more you know that you can go down the folks at JBL can just go down to the SpaceX rocket shop and and pick the launcher for their mission that they will have separate budgets and there won't be this because I like I feel like it's an arbitrary distinction that has been imposed on people that they that they have to have these Battlegrounds and they're it's totally unnecessary you know yes I mean it's but it's also it's hard when you do have the problem is we're back to a zero some budgeting game so what again what what what made this all Kumbaya and supportive in the last 10 years is that the budgets were just getting bigger and so everyone could win and we don't have a situation now where everyone can win and we are seeing a reassertion of in a sense hierarch political hierarchy um I agree with you though it is much it it yes it's sad and it shouldn't be and and I don't even necessarily think within NASA it's pitched that way I'm just saying it's like if the leadership has to support one thing they're going to support the big thing right which is the the human space flight project um but you have it's a little more Nuance I I think with Mars sample return because it actually fits really really well into human space fight plans of going to Mars right you want to go to Mars it helps to know how to launch off the surface of Mars right that's like let's test that out um and we have now a congressionally mandated Moon to Mars direct division within the human space flight directorate uh that I think should probably be kicking in that to me a good path forward would be for the human directorate to jointly fund Mars sample return to take some of the pressure off of science um in order to validate and demonstrate key key Technologies of how to get humans back from Mars safely uh what's the dust environment like how does that impact a rocket what's the performance of a rocket like taking off from the surface that's been sitting in Sub-Zero temperatures for two years you know how do we manage and launch things safely what kind of redundancies do we need what problems and difficulties are there in orbit to to dock around a planet and around a separate planet um with 30 you know 15 to 30 minute light communication distance from from Earth all these things would be really wonderful to know and we have an opportunity to test them that then also serves a profound scientific interest um and so that's how the CH and and I think back to our conversation that's how the Chinese are seeing this right they're seeing the Mars sample return the or the moon sample return Mission as part of this larger demonstration of technology to bring humans back from the Moon that that their first part of the the timn 3 is going to be this Mars sample return Mission but as you said this is testing the technology to then later on bring humans you know they are also expecting to start sending humans to Mars in the mid 2030s maybe early 2040s so you're exactly right that that I I never even thought of it but I think you're you're exactly 100% right that that Mars sample return is actually a precursor technology to sending humans to Mars and if you can't nail that down and at least know within an order of magnitude how complicated and what this is going to cost you're never going to bring humans back from Mars yeah again it just it makes a ton you'd have to do something like this anyway yep right um and so we might as well do this now and do it with the scientific support and impetus and potential again the benefit is is just enormous Casey what is the planetary Society doing now what's the plan so I mean we we have our principles kind of what I mentioned earlier that we support Mars it's frankly a bit tough because again we need to know what NASA wants to do we can't dictate that to them we're not Engineers you know they need to know how to solve this they have to solve their management problems and we need they need to provide a a viable path to doing this in a sustainable way so we talk about sustainability the easiest way I think and this is what we mention in our principles um that we're sharing around so first we're we're communicating we're building support for and it's not just Mar s return NASA I was more hoping like just in general like like with the what happened today what's going on with emis what's going on with marle how you know the planetary society's role is to promote and encourage space flight of all forms and science so what so what are you guys working on yeah so we're we're working on getting this support for NASA science so the first thing we have to do I think is show that NASA science is not the piggy bank for emis right and it's we when we cut things there are consequences that we're seeing these right these aren't abstract IDE ideas and we have truly important and epical kind of scientific discoveries waiting for us in astrophysics and planetary science and elsewhere that we can just do and this is where so we've been out on the ground really hard pushing this that we need a broad commitment to science that we cannot step away right now we've got this momentum we've got the policies we've got the buying from the scientific community and we need to get through this constriction this tight moment and need to do that smartly and I think so we're pushing you know we want NASA to come forward what we've suggested is that if we can ramp down spending annual spending in Mar sample return to an acceptable like a balance a level that you can maintain balance within planetary science astrophysics it will push out the the mission I think we need I in a sense you have to kind of seed whatever competition or assume that the Chinese Mars Rover probably S turn probably will take longer themselves too that's a hard thing to do but the motivation for sampler return can't just be a race you know the fundamentals are so strong we just need to do it right and we need to do it now but we can do it with balance and I think that's where we can ramp down that annual spending just accept that it's going to be later that's okay right the samples will survive as long as we are pushing forward to get them um and then build this tight interaction between human space flight long-term planning and Mar sample return um we have our day of action coming up in April at the end of uh April 2th and 29th uh where we're you can register with us we will we're going to do in-person visits with members of Congress to promote these scientific priorities including More Sample return anyone uh with a Us address is welcome to join us for that uh in person yes sorry there's only so much in the US political system uh you can do outside of that but if you do live in the US um you can meet us in Washington DC we'll schedule your meetings we'll give you training uh you'll go with groups of people it's super fun it's also really valuable one of the most valuable things you can do uh we do have things online as of today that you can write in support of um NASA and NASA science to help reverse these cuts that we're seeing to JPL and again it's a it's advocacy is something that just you have to build momentum over time and we're seeing in a sense uh a lot of I think directionless Panic is maybe too strong of a word but a lot of people are just not we haven't been in the situation as you said in 10 years and we need to learn how to come together and what we're really trying to push and is like how do we come together as a broad space science Community to say to stop infighting and work together to kind of push our agenda forward and you know at end of the day money is a huge part of that but it can't just be money we have to have and expect higher standards of performance and management from NASA and its centers and partners to execute these missions not everything you know we've all gone through inflation that is the reality the things are just going to cost more but that only goes up to a point and I think if we lose this momentum 30 years of investment in Mars that's going to be a very sad ending to this whole story to just leave those samples slowly collecting dust for eons on the surface of another planet Casey thank you so much for your time of course you know you could find your work at the planetary Society you blog regularly you are a regular guest on the on my podcast well I I'm not just a guest I host a monthly version called the space policy Edition uh which you can just catch on our normal planetary radio feed or you can subscribe directly to it just search for space policy Edition and it is one of my favorites because it is a part of this whole field that I barely understand and barely think about I think about the outcomes in the science and you're very much on the let's make this stuff happen I get to report on the results but you're very much you know on on how it all comes together and uh and I think if you if you're interested in like just how space policy works I think you'll find the podcast absolutely fascinating so again thank you Casey always a pleasure to catch up with you and good luck uh I guess bringing samples home from Mars yeah all of us uh all of us can help with that so thank you Fraser always uh always a pleasure to be here all right we'll see you next time I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Casey dryer and definitely go and sign up to Casey's podcast or just planetary radio in general it's an amazing podcast now I'm going to talk some more about my thoughts about this but here is me from a previous video thanking our patrons thanks to Paul roorbach Abe Kingston hey twiler douge Stewart Steven Kaki David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio lilara Dustin cable Vlad chiplet moo George David Gilton and Andro gross Jeremy M Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon well this is kind of a tricky time in space exploration I think as as Casey said we've gone through like a decade of the Good Times where budgets kept going up and everybody kind of got what they wanted and things were good and suddenly through because of political reasons just because of budgeting issues things are tightening up a little and we're starting to see that this is these lean times where hard decisions have to get made people may lose their jobs it's going to be tough and I think the next couple of years you're going to see more of this sort of belt tightening and various missions we're going to see what things are going to be stripped back hopefully it won't be as bad and hopefully the budgets will return and things will grow and science policies will be fulfilled but just like prepare yourself emotionally for uh what it's going to probably be a tricky couple of years all right uh we've got lots of interviews and information about space EXP ation in general including some of the interesting missions that might be on the cutting block uh so I'm going to link to a couple randomly here all right thanks a lot we'll see you next time

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 29,743

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, exoplanets, James Webb, jwst, James Webb space telescope, tess, Ariel space telescope

Id: yFuHdZNZ6-Y

Length: 71min 4sec (4264 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024