Bonus: GTDS: NASA and the Commercialization of Space

History That Doesn't Suck

This episode explores the historical and political evolution of NASA, tracing its trajectory from the government-led Apollo era to the modern era of

Key takeaways

• NASA's total historical budget, adjusted for inflation, is remarkably small compared to US annual deficits or social spending like Social Security.
• The 'von Braun paradigm' envisioned a stepwise progression from the Moon to a space station and eventually Mars, which was disrupted by budget cuts.

Main topics

• NASA History
• Commercialization of Space

Notable quotes

NASA is less than one third of 1% of our annual expenditures.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that while private companies are revolutioniz

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Hello, my friends. It's Professor Jackson, and I'm happy to share an episode of our new spinoff show, Government That Doesn't Suck. This new podcast has its own feed, which you can find on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. New episodes will be released every other Monday between new episodes of History That Doesn't Suck. This show is not a love letter to government. No, it's part history telling and part conversation about how things work or don't and why. So give a listen to this episode and then search for and follow Government That Doesn't Suck in your favorite podcast app or go to htbspodcast.com. Speaker 4 (0:40) It's 325 in the afternoon, January 14th, 2004. We're in the nine-story, glass-encased exterior NASA headquarters at 300 East Street Southwest, Washington, D.C. Outside, there's an arctic chill in the air as temperatures hover just above 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But here, inside NASA headquarters, the reception for President George W. Bush is warm and inviting. It's a big day for the folks he commander-in-chief. One that will define how the United States approaches the future of space exploration. After getting to the moon at the behest of John F. Kennedy, the American space program has made some incredible achievements and endured unspeakable tragedy. Most notably, the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster and in 2003, less than a year before this day at NASA headquarters, the explosion of the Columbia shuttle. With that in mind, the government wants to bring renewed focus and energy. in our missions to the heavens. And today's presidential speech on January 14th, 2004, is the first step on that journey. George Bush walks on stage to a thunderous applause, arriving to join NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe at the podium. W, as the son of a former president, is affectionately called to distinguish him from his father, is smartly dressed in a crisp, dark suit with an American flag pinned on his lapel. After Sean delivers some opening remarks, he hands things over to the president. With Americans watching live on TV at home, George starts things off by telling everyone in the room how honored he is to be here and how they exemplify the country's greatest values. Speaker 1 (2:16) Daring, discipline, ingenuity, and unity in the pursuit of great goals. America is proud of our space program. The risk-takers and visionaries of this agency have expanded human knowledge. have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and produced technological advances that have benefited all of humanity. Speaker 4 (2:46) And now, inspired by all that's come before, the president lays out his vision for the future. Speaker 1 (2:52) We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own. Speaker 4 (3:06) To achieve this, W lays out three specific goals. Speaker 1 (3:10) Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started. We will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project. We will focus our future research aboard the station on the long-term effects of space travel on human biology. Speaker 4 (3:32) I can only imagine what everyone listening to the live broadcast must be thinking. A whole new world of possibilities for scientific experiments and pushing human boundaries. But before we let our minds wander too much, the 43rd president has another step to tell us about. Speaker 1 (3:47) Our second goal. is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008 and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle will be capable of ferrying astronauts and scientists to the space station after the shuttle is retired. But the main purpose of this spacecraft will be to carry astronauts beyond our orbit to other worlds. Speaker 4 (4:17) Once those are in place, NASA will move on to the final piece of the puzzle. Speaker 1 (4:22) Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008. We will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the crew exploration vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015. with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time. Speaker 4 (4:57) Now, that last mark won't quite get hit, though Artemis IV is scheduled to land astronauts back on the moon sometime in 2028. But in the immediate aftermath of George W. Bush's rousing speech, Congress approves the $16.2 billion he asked for to kickstart that vision. Speaker 4 (5:16) Without a doubt, space exploration has grown and changed since President George W. Bush gave that speech 22 years ago. And not all of that change is how or what we expected. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, it was clear that the government needed to rethink its approach to the stars. The president's goals of completing the International Space Station, or the ISS for short, creating the Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Artemis mission have all been achieved. but our present contains one major development not projected by W, the privatization of space. In 2006, NASA introduced commercial orbital transportation services, described by NASA as, quote, a new era in spaceflight, close quote. $500 million were allocated from NASA's budget for, to quote again, stimulating commercial enterprise in space by asking American entrepreneurs to provide innovative, cost-effective, commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the International Space Station. And six years later, in May 2012, the SpaceX Dragon made history as the first commercial spacecraft to bring a shipment to the ISS. Since that flight, private companies have become ubiquitous beyond our atmosphere. SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, the list goes on. From taking William Shatner into zero-g to bringing internet access to people across the globe, space is becoming commercialized in ways that might have seemed impossible to George W. Bush and his contemporaries back at that 2004 Vision for Space Exploration speech. And none of it could have happened without a little or a lot of help from the government. Speaker 4 (7:02) Welcome to Government That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson. Speaker 3 (7:06) And I'm your professor, Lindsay Cormack. Today, I am so excited. We are talking to Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. And something that I'm excited about to talk about with Casey is the idea that we have gone from a NASA that is predominantly run by the government, funded by the government, operated by the government. to a space program that has some overlap with commercial space entities that are doing some of the heavy lifting for us. I'm also excited to talk to Casey because, Casey, you have an approach that appreciates that government can do good things, and oftentimes you bring people along in that. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what you do at the Planetary Society and how you see those interactions with government? Speaker 2 (7:49) There are aspects of government. When it comes to space, that is absolutely essential that the private sector or philanthropy will just never do and historically has never been able to do. Primarily, this is scientific space exploration. This is sending the Hubble Space Telescope up, right? There's long-term exploratory science with uncertain returns. Perfect role for public investment. Speaker 3 (8:11) When you say we're sending the Hubble Space Telescope up. You're saying that's something only government can do because no one commercial entity would be able to bear the costs up front. Or why is that a thing that government can do? Speaker 2 (8:22) It comes down to the returns, right? In terms of this is fundamental scientific research. This is the predicate of our post-World War II era. of the role of public investment in science, fundamental research enabled by the public sector that may have spinoffs, that may have hardware value, there may be workforce benefits, but fundamentally the outcomes, no one is going to pay on a commercial sector for what's the atmosphere of Jupiter looking like today. Where is the origins of the cosmos? This is fundamental curiosity-driven exploration science, and there's just no commercial market for that. We had a great test case of this in the United States before World War II. Ground-based telescopes and space exploration, you know, you can call it in those days, lagged behind Europe and other parts of the world that had royal astronomies. There was long-term efforts to try to build a U.S. infrastructure for astronomy that never panned out. And so we were left with private sector or philanthropists building ground-based space telescopes. And they built a number of them, some of them pretty big and grand. There's Hubble himself. Keck Observatory, these kind of wealthy titans of their time spending equivalents of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they would build these great instruments, but then they would never pay for anyone to use them. And that's also kind of the fundamental aspect of this is that the aspect of building something as an individual tends to be as a monument or putting your name on it, and then you're less interested in running it, doing the actual day in and day out science. And this is what has been revolutionized by public investment in science. basically, again, since this post-war era. Speaker 3 (9:55) Who do you credit giving the shift to for that? Like who in the United States does finally get that kickstarted into, hey, we're lagging behind to, okay, now we're going to be leaders in this? Speaker 2 (10:05) Yeah, I mean, I think that really goes back to the whole World War II experience, right? Where technology basically helped to win the war. And the Vannevar Bush, who wrote Science, the Endless Frontier, one of my favorite, you know, founding documents of fundamental science policy, saying that Fundamental science, exploratory science, uncertain outcome science, not applied science, is actually critical to the long-term health and survival of a nation, security of a nation, not just for public health, but also for, you know, they just come out of, if the Nazis had gotten the atom bomb, World War II would have gone very differently, right? Inventions of radar, other fundamental technologies, even things like penicillin in terms of treating troops. All of these types of fundamental investments fundamentally changed. the U.S. relationship and this idea of this kind of growing and active federal government. He wrote this report to Roosevelt. Five years later, they created the National Science Foundation and then this kind of big flow of public funding into fundamental research that then led to NASA and National Institutes of Health and other agencies came from that. Speaker 3 (11:10) So in the National Science Foundation, that's the topic that we're getting to later on in this season. In the way that this kickstarts space, is it something where money then goes to universities or is money going to some other sort of industry partner? Or how does it get started? Speaker 2 (11:23) So space gets kind of this is great. I love this story because it's this weird mix because space, particularly again, we're talking about mid-century. The U.S. through Operation Paperclip got the. Wernher von Braun and the German rocket scientists that had created the V2 rocket. And they just let them play with it in the White Sands Desert facility for a couple of years in the late 1940s. Scientists from various parts of the country heard about this and realized you're sending rockets up, kind of glancing. They're not going into orbit, but they're kind of touching the edge of space. Maybe we should put something on those. What happens up there? What does it look like up there? And it was this kind of very organic, realization that from pretty kind of modern, a lot of scientists not coming from big established universities, but state universities, flight centers, NASA didn't exist at this time. So this was, you know, kind of inheritance of aeronautics research and information that they had been starting to do through the war. And they started to put, what if we put a UV spectrometer that goes up on the top of a rocket and can look at the sun and without having the atmosphere in the way. This was all kind of happenstance. And then it wasn't really until the late 1950s where you had this intersection of kind of this Cold War growing paranoia, the invention of the atomic bomb by the Soviets, paired with the existence of ballistic missile or intercontinental ballistic missiles. Suddenly, the U.S.'s oceans weren't so big and protective anymore. And when Sputnik went up, And it was, you know, a proxy for, hey, the Soviets could place any sort of heavy object over the United States at any moment within minutes. That's what kickstarted this. And so it was fundamentally a government-driven initiative through a national security lens that really started the space program. And because of that hardware requirements, it's very difficult to go into space, right? A rocket is a controlled explosion that's pointing down. Anything goes wrong, even a little bit, you don't have a rocket anymore. You have pieces everywhere. Space itself was so unknown. There was no viable and no pathway, really viable pathway at all for private sector individuals to go into space or to support that program at the beginning. It was fundamentally a government driven initiative. Speaker 3 (13:40) And then also, it seems like it's really costly. Like it seems like at the start, it takes a lot of money to get any of this off the ground, literally. Speaker 2 (13:48) Well, it depends what you mean by costly. So this is where I always like to, I mean. The entire Apollo program. So one of the things that I've done, I've published research on is building out, rebuilding the cost of Apollo using, you know, very detailed analyses and inflation adjustment. Today's dollars, it cost about 350 billion to do Apollo, right? And that was from the start of Apollo in 1961 through the end of Apollo in 1973. $350 billion is about what the United States spent in 1969 in Vietnam. Right. So in terms of what we're spending, it's a lot of money to you and me. But in terms of what the government is spending elsewhere, modest. Apollo is not I'm not saying Apollo is cheap, but it's also we have to see that in context. Eisenhower, when he started NASA, when he signed the legislation to law and the agency kind of came into existence in 1958, he was very hesitant to go for a big moon program. He wanted a more modest program. And this is where they really started to push. What about the uncrewed, the robotic? scientific missions. Those are comparatively cheaper. You don't have to bring them back. You don't have to bring a bubble of Earth with you out into space. You can do actual science with them. There's a huge, at its core, and has continued through the history of NASA, this tension and discussion between how much should we invest in human spaceflight, which is more expensive because you have those higher requirements, and robotic stuff, which have much more practical things but tend to kind of... trigger the national geopolitical aspects less, right? They engage in that a little less effectively. And so Eisenhower wanted a very modest space program. He didn't approve a big human spaceflight effort. He just had a little test program with Mercury. It was John F. Kennedy kind of coming in after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, needing a big turnaround in U.S. policy and his domestic policy. Yuri Gagarin had just gone into space looking for, and they have memos of this, like, can we do something in space to show up the Soviets? Going to the moon was kind of the only way to do that, to start both from zero. And that's really set this expectation of what NASA does. And it was, you know, again, expensive compared to doing basic rocketry or scientific activities. But again, in the scope of what government spends, it's pretty modest. Speaker 3 (15:57) And I think something else that you pointed out is like, if we compare this to military sort of spending at the time, it also is surprising to me that Eisenhower specifically didn't make NASA some sort of military agency. Didn't say like, you know, anyone who's ever fought in a war knows that you want to have the high ground. What higher ground than space? And instead, it seems like for most of our history of space exploration, it's been under the idea that it's going to be peaceful, internationally oriented, and something that's going to benefit all of humanity. Do you feel like that has stayed the same? same or are there changes that appear in sort of that ethos? Speaker 2 (16:30) I think for NASA, it's largely stayed the same. And that's a really core insight that I think is really important that there's this and I think there's a broader public maybe misconception that there's this tight integration or that it's all one big aerospace industry. And part of it is, you know, it's not completely false. You have big contractors like Boeing or Lockheed Martin that do both. But NASA is chartered and was intended to be. And I think this really came out of that Cold War era activity, which was we don't want space. You know, we can go into space, we can develop big rockets, which we could put, you know, nuclear weapons on, but we're not, right? So it's both simultaneously, it's a symbol and a proxy for capability. But they didn't want it to be provocative at the same time. You don't want to make the Cold War worse. And so you explicitly make NASA distinct from the Defense Department. and make it its own civilian run, civilian managed. This was very important to Eisenhower and others at the time in order to make NASA, in a sense, also a projection of U.S. values, right? This openness that NASA explicitly will do its tests in the open compared to Soviets who would only announce a success after it had succeeded and not mention the failures, that it would share information. openly with the world. Scientific information, you know, from the probes that the United States pays for is shared freely with anyone else in the world once the data comes back. And it was designed to kind of, again, you have to see it in this Cold War context that set these values. But again, those values have stayed. And I think it's actually one of the reasons that NASA has remained popular up to a certain point within the political class and members of Congress and others that see it as this American symbol that can then be presented forward to the rest of the world. Speaker 3 (18:15) Something that I did in preparing to talk to you about this is I looked at how members of Congress were talking about space exploration. And what I found is that within the Republican conference, there's actually far more chatter about space exploration than in the Democratic caucus. And my sort of guess on this is that when we think about where bases and production facilities are for these, they tend to be represented by Republicans. Is that something that you have any insights on or thoughts on? Speaker 2 (18:39) Indeed it is. I actually just did an article about this for our magazine, The Planetary Report, and it's some analysis I've been working on that I hope to publish later this year. If you look at the actual representation, NASA's spread out into 10 different centers across the country. When NASA was created, they kind of just pulled a variety of like the, oh, the Redstone Missile Arsenal from Alabama. No, now that's the NASA center. They pulled some aeronautics and flight. research areas. Okay, that's part of NASA too, right? The first day in NASA aeronautics. Then they also, as Apollo happened, they said, well, we need to build rocket testing facilities. We need to build a, at the time they called it a manned space flight center, but now it's called Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. Where would they build those? Well, at the time it was Southern Democrats dominating the appropriations chairs in the U.S. Senate. And that kind of Southern Democrat through and with also Democratic leadership in the White House kind of mixed with their Southern strategy to build up infrastructure and lift up the economic fortunes of the U.S. South kind of dovetailed together. And so all the new the new NASA base centers that existed that were built for Apollo, they're all in the U.S. South, Texas, expanding out in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, so forth. And so. We've had this political inversion during that time, right from the 1960s to now, that functionally flipped the control of those, representation of those areas from Democrat to Republican, I should say, to your point. And at the same time, the two science centers, so the NASA centers that really do a lot of science, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, for people really paying attention, it's an FFRDC, a federal fund. funded Research and Development Center, not a full NASA center, but we'll call it that one for now, and Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Those became more democratic. And so there's actually been the ideology of the representation of these NASA centers by science and the ones that do human spaceflight have diverged over time, or actually the most divergent that they have ever been right now. And so I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing, so space isn't inherently partisan as an issue, but it's becoming parochially partisan. Sure. In the sense that it's like you Speaker 3 (20:55) can bring dollars back to your sort of base investment in your community jobs for people who live there. That makes sense to me. Yeah, Speaker 2 (21:03) it's old school. It's like it's a throwback politics because it's not hyper partisan. You can still have the old this kind of what you said, just like it's dollars and cents into our districts. And that has been a great help, a hindrance sometime for what NASA has done. But that's the defining political. issues is that parochialism still. And just because the larger sorting of our political system, it has become, particularly with human spaceflight, much more of a Republican parochial issue than a Democratic one. Speaker 3 (21:32) This is something that I'm really glad to chat with you because you do have a handle not only on like the technical history and the how to of space exploration, but you also have a really close handle on the like what the politics are behind the scenes, how you can influence policy yourself. But I want to put a pin in that and go back to sort of working through a timeline, which is we have Apollo. We decide to do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. We succeed. We get on the moon. And then there's sort of this moment of like, OK, what next? And in a simple read of it, it's like, well, we're going