Podcast: The End Of NASA As We Know It?

Joe Anselmo

Welcome to this week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Joe Anselmo, Aviation Week's editorial director and editor in chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.

Is this the end of NASA as we know it?

The Trump administration has proposed cutting the U.S. space agency's budget to levels not seen since 1961, when President John F. Kennedy launched the race to the moon. And the White House last weekend withdrew the nomination of entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to run NASA, just days before the Senate was set to approve his nomination as administrator with bipartisan support. Isaacman's nomination had been championed by SpaceX's Elon Musk, who suddenly seems to be on the outs with the President.

Trump's budget proposal would cut NASA planetary earth and space science by nearly half, phase out the agency's costly Space Launch System (SLS), scale back operations on the International Space Station, and sharply reduce funding for aeronautics research. It would fund just a single area of new growth: technology development to reach Mars. The Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization, is calling the White House's plan "an extinction level event for science."

But will Congress go along? Trump so far has largely gotten his way with the Republican majority in his second term, but NASA has deftly spread its work across districts all over the country. Lawmakers overseeing NASA funding historically have not been shy about pushing back on presidential proposals they feel threaten their parochial interests.

Joining me to make sense of all of this is Irene Klotz, Aviation Week's senior space editor, who is based at Cape Canaveral. And rounding out the discussion is Aviation Week's Chief Technology Editor, Graham Warwick. Irene, I started covering NASA as a junior reporter back in 1992. I've seen a lot of proposals to reform the agency, but nothing quite like this. This is an earthquake.

Irene Klotz

It sure is, Joe. Something you said in your opening comments about the parochial interests of Congress is really the reason why NASA is up on creek as far as the SLS and Orion, which traditionally has been one of the two programs that there's been widespread support in Congress for, partially for the reason you mentioned about having business in their districts.

It was Congress that decided to make the SLS not new technology, but really rolling over the shuttle contracts to the point where -- I didn't even realize this, but I learned this when I was doing the research for the cover story I wrote recently -- that the contracts for the SLS to Boeing, they actually still mentioned the Ares program from Constellation. They literally just rolled the contracting vehicles from one to the next.

Clearly, it's a program that's been over budget and administration after administration has been seemingly unable to bring the program into a manageable item. So, this mess is largely of congressional making and it's really unclear how far Congress will let the Trump administration go in reforming NASA. And as we've learned, the Trump administration is not a patient one and expects people to really follow the marching orders, which may have been a reason for the falling out or the seemingly falling out with Elon Musk.

And science is a little bit of an outlier in this because rarely is there a congressional advocate like John Culbertson was for the Europa Clipper mission, which wasn't even in his district. And Barbara Mikulski in Maryland of course, was a huge advocate for Hubble. Those affiliations of congressional representation for particular science missions so far doesn't really seem to have surfaced. So it's an easier target, though certainly groups like Planetary Society and other industry and public education and outreach organizations are making it well known the disappointment with the way things are.

Joe Anselmo:

And you had written, there's something like 19 missions that are already underway that would be canceled under this proposal, science missions?

Irene Klotz

There's several of the science missions including those underway. Fortunately, the Trump administration did not decide to recall the Europa Clipper mission from its trajectory to come back and end it. It said that would be ongoing. Apparently, the Vera Rubin telescope is going to be cleared to go.  

I think among the biggest concerns in the science community is the tabling of the Mars sample return effort, which is the culmination of decades of work dating back really to the Mars Pathfinder mission in '97, which was the first mission to resume Mars exploration since Viking 20 years before. And NASA had followed this very careful strategy to follow the water and characterize the environment and then look for places where life could have evolved and places where that if there were signs of life, it could have been preserved in various strata and rocks, environmental conditions, sending the rovers to characterize, caching them and getting them prepped.

And now they're literally sitting on the surface of Mars and on the Perseverance rover and who knows if and when they're going to come back. But that's truly disappointing since that is science that really has the fundamental ability to change perspectives of really our place in the universe. As far as whether those samples do contain any evidence of life. Personally, I would feel really disappointed if I died before learning, if that is possible. And the fact that the technology exists to answer that question in my lifetime, I find amazing, and to have them just be sitting there on the surface of Mars seems cruel.

Joe Anselmo:

So Irene, I want to get to Graham, but I have one more for you. I’ve got to ask you about Isaacman. President Trump has made a lot of controversial nominations, but this wasn't one of them. He was respected. He wasn't a lawmaker or a government bureaucrat. He was a breath of fresh air, bipartisan support. So why pull his nomination when it's just about to go through?

Irene Klotz:

Well, that probably was the problem. Trump and the administration really seemed to almost have a loyalty oath, and there's been a lot of controversial picks for cabinet members and so forth and questioning their credentials to be in the positions that they're in, all kinds of issues. And Jared Isaacman did not have those. In fact, the one area that he was pinged on in the hearing, the Senate Commerce hearing, was about his affiliation with Elon Musk and he, I think, handled that really, really well.

He actually did a podcast with a business and investment group called All In Yesterday. It was quite interesting, and basically he said there's this misconception that he and Elon are best friends. He characterized it very differently. Elon is a business associate. He bought two rides from SpaceX for missions. And it didn't seem, from the way Jared characterized it, that this was a, “I want my guy in at the head of NASA,” although I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the one area of growth, as you mentioned in your comments at the start of the podcast is Mars.

And one of the things the budget calls for is $200 million initially for a demonstration to land a human class lander on Mars, uncrewed. And coincidentally, Elon had outlined plans to do just that at an employee webcast a day before to send Starship to Mars in '26 the next time the planets are aligned for optimal flight. So, it's a mess.

Joe Anselmo:

Okay. Graham Warwick, a lot of people forget that the first A in NASA stands for aeronautics. In fact, NASA's predecessor was NACA, which was founded 110 years ago to help the U.S. stay on the cutting edge of aeronautical technology. What would this budget do to aeronautical research?

Graham Warwick:

Well, I think it has the potential to be an existential threat. Basically, they're cutting the budget, the money, by about 37% to just under $590 million, which still sounds like a lot of money, but that's a big cut. I think even more worrying for me is the accompanying personnel cut. The plan is to cut the personnel in aeronautics from just under 1,600 to just under 900, which means that the government's contribution to maintaining leadership in U.S. aeronautics is in the hands of less than 900 people by the time this is over. And the charter that they've given them in the budget is to ensure U.S. leadership in aeronautics.

So they gut aeronautics and then they give them the job of making sure that the US continues to lead in aeronautics. So, the cuts fell where we thought they would. Basically, the Trump administration has said, get rid of all the programs we don't like, i.e., if they have green anything to be green, get rid of them, whether they're good or bad, just get rid of them. The green.

And then the other cuts are spread out over other things. The biggest bit that gets hit -- NASA aeronautics is divided into about five or six major program groups. So there's thing called Advanced Air Vehicles program, which is doing the next generations of aircraft. So that took the biggest hit and it's been cut from six programs down to three.

The Sustainable Flight Demonstrator is gone, things like that. And then what they call IOSP, or IASP, I can't remember exactly what it's called, but it's a bit that does the flight research that's been cut takes a big cut as well. And that loses a lot of the flight research that was planned. They keep the X-59 low boom flight demonstrator.

It's kind of a schizophrenic budget document. And I feel for the NASA folks inside NASA, they had to look at the cut and say, how do we come up with a coherent plan when we've been cut by this much? And it isn't really coherent to be frank. It's schizophrenic.

So it says that NASA, once all of its existing programs are finished, the ones that they don't cut. Once the ones run their term, then NASA will focus on revolutionary propulsion for civil aeronautics. But at the same time, they cut all of the current propulsion programs like the small core engine, that's going. And then they give you no idea what this revolutionary propulsion will be.

So it's a nonsense budget. I feel strongly for the people that had to try and pull something together. But it is not a strategy. It is a triage and what's left doesn't really hold together as an integrated plan that would ensure U.S. leadership.

Irene Klotz:

Graham, can I play devil's advocate for a minute? So one of the points that Isaacman made is that basically, the NASA organization that exists today is what was designed to get to the moon more than 50 years ago and to have a government funded program, work on projects that have or should be in the commercial sector, is not the best use of a government of taxpayer funding and the standing army of NASA workers.

He's a pilot long before he got interested in space. One of the points he was making is that the aviation industry is quite mature in the United States and why would the government agency be working on research that other commercial companies can work on?

Graham Warwick:

So that's a perfectly acceptable argument, except that's not how the aerospace industry works, right? The aerospace industry works with the government across the world helping with the early-stage research.

The way NASA's aerospace research is structured now is kind of a response to what Europe did with a thing called Clean Aviation, which is a very large long-term, public-private partnership to develop technologies for the next generation of commercial aircraft. So that's what shaped what we have or what we had at NASA before these cuts. And it was a response to the way that the industry works.

One of the things that it says in the budget documents is to make NASA aeronautics more cost-effective. NASA aeronautics leverages industry's investment like no other part of NASA does. Every single program that they do of any sort of size is cost shared with industry. They do not go off and spend money developing things that industry doesn't want or that industry isn't prepared to put some skin in the game for. They've had many programs they've stopped because industry said, okay, “No, we don't want to pick that up.” So they've just stopped a program when industry said, “We're not interested.”

But when industry continues to put money in, they continue to put the program. And the argument is that early stage research is risky and expensive and that the companies that in the U.S., the U.S. companies we're talking about are by and large not willing to spend that money. The returns only come 20 years later. So they don't come at any time close. So if you don't invest or help the companies invest or help bear the burden of investing, you won't get the technologies that you need 20 years later.

So almost every technology in any turbine engine flying today started somewhere inside NASA, increasingly as a cost shared endeavor. T

he problem I think that NASA aeronautics has had is the downsizing or the consolidation of the U.S. industry so that you end up serving one, you appear to serve one company, i.e., Boeing. The fact is, as we currently stand, there are multiple companies that are being helped by NASA to try and get to a point where they may be able to springboard off to become like JetZero, a competitor to Boeing, or enter the business aviation market or some other market to try and build the industry up from its narrow focus that we have at the moment.

But I will agree, you can look at NASA's research and say, but a low boom flight demonstrates the classic example. I mean, why are we spending money, $900 million to do low boom when we don't even know if we really want to bring supersonic flying back? When the low boom started, there was a very strong signal from industry that if they could remove the restriction to supersonic flight over land, they would invest.

Gulfstream has always said, “We'll do a supersonic business yet as soon as you allow me to fly supersonic over land,” which means changing the rules. And the only way to change the rules is you have data to base it on. So that's where it came from. So it is industry driven, but sometimes that sort of connection doesn't look so obvious.

Irene Klotz

Well, in the space domain, I think what's happened is NASA has not been leading edge technology in launch. Certainly, SpaceX leapfrogged the agency as far as putting money in. And basically, parlaying the investment it got from NASA. In some ways, NASA did cede the reusability of launch vehicles by backing SpaceX early on.

But then it didn't stop where half its budget was going to as far as like SLS, Orion. And those programs were not managed in a cost-effective way. And I think that what Isaacman's goal was, if he had gotten to be NASA administrator, was to really go through program by program and see what was cutting edge, what has the potential to breed the next SpaceXs and the new Boeings and table the rest of it. And whether the U.S. government needs a 17,000 plus members civil service agency to accomplish that. That's a whole other question.

I guess if everybody was working on nuclear electric propulsion or some of the other technologies that are needed in space and aeronautics, maybe it is, but that really hasn't been the case.

So there's an opportunity, obviously, when the apple cart has been upset to build something new. Jared is a builder, and I think that's why he was very, even the Democrats who didn't vote for him, and more than a handful did enough to clear the nomination easier than his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine. Well not his predecessor, but Jim Bridenstine under the first Trump administration, which was a strictly partisan vote, is because he is respected as someone that started building companies when he was quite young and has followed through. He's got a performance record.

So it will be really interesting to see who else they choose and whether the status quo at NASA can continue. It doesn't quite seem possible in this administration.

Joe Anselmo:

Irene, we're just about out of time, but I wanted to bring this all full circle. It seems like you're saying NASA does need to change. The big reduction we've seen in launch costs was driven by private industry, which sort of made SLS obsolete. The massive increases we see in launches at Cape Canaveral driven by private industry. SpaceX is doing things that would take NASA decades to do, if ever. So, NASA needs to reform, right? Change?

Irene Klotz:

Well, NASA is going to be 67 years old this year. And it's always hard as we get older to stop doing what we've been doing and prepare for the next chapter. And bureaucracies are even... It's institutionalized to continue to perpetuate. It's hard enough doing that as an individual to say, well, I want to do this now instead of this and be forward-looking. And I think that NASA has, and at least in the space domain has confused what is groundbreaking.

Groundbreaking is not to parlay off what SpaceX is doing and say, “Wow, it's so cool. Look at this rocket land,” as opposed to what they've done traditionally. And really how I became a space reporter is by learning about the technology and the science. It doesn't have that, at least in the public outreach and things, it doesn't have that expertise anymore. And they haven't really figured out how to get their mojo back.

Culturally, it's a lovely organization. They really value teamwork, they value politeness. And it's been a mismatch with the harshness, which the way things have been unveiled. And we'll see. I had an interview with a member of Senator (Ted) Cruz's staff the other day, and he was just pointing out that it's in the short term, everything's very dramatic and it seems extreme. And then the point of the slow process of politics and politicking in the United States is it evolves over a much longer period of time.

So, Jared was very gracious and completely says this wasn't Trump's fault that he's out. He did say that it was as far as Trump had made a comment that came under his attention that a review of, I forgot what these exact words were, but basically, a review of past affiliations, which we all have Google and others use AI. It takes about a quarter of a second to see that Jared Isaacman donated to Democratic candidates long before all of this.

So that's very disingenuous to presume that that is the reason why. And the timing of it. He was dismissed the same day that Elon Musk left his special service. So I don't know. We will see, I've covered space through beginning with the Reagan administration, and I've never experienced anything this dramatic and potentially jarring, but certainly things weren't going to be able to continue the way they were indefinitely.

Joe Anselmo:

I personally am not buying that donation story. Donald Trump himself has donated to Democratic candidates in the past. I don't buy that. Graham Warwick, let's give you the final word.

Graham Warwick:

Going on what Irene is saying about that NASA needs to change, and I completely get that. And I know that also applies to aeronautics. And if a strategy comes out of this that focuses NASA more closely on doing that breakthrough and enabling U.S. industry to build on that, I'm fine. But you have to do that in an open-minded way. You cannot say anything green, we don't want. Because efficiency is reducing fuel burn, reducing fuel burn is reducing emissions, reducing fuel burn is reducing airline operating costs.

You have to stop being dictatorial about this and say, “What do we need to be the leader?” It's efficiency, it's safety, and they've cut funding for safety research in this thing. You need to focus on the things the industry needs and wants to be competitive and to lead. And for that, you have to put the political messaging to the side and sit down and say, okay, we've got this amount of money, we've got this number of people. How do we best use it?

I don't think the atmosphere at the moment is right for that to happen, but I'm hoping that when Congress gets stuck in on this budget, that aeronautics doesn't get forgotten while they're focused on space and that they drive that need for an actual strategy for competitive leadership.

Joe Anselmo:

And on that note, we're going to wrap things up, but we will certainly be back to talk about this more, I suspect, Irene and Graham. But for now, that is a wrap for this week's Check 6 podcast.

A special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check Six so you never miss an episode. If you find today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review. Better yet, share this episode with a friend or colleague. That's all the time we have for now. Thank you for your time and have a great week.

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