NASA keeps moon-base funding flexible by building in stages

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:05:33

   You know, when you look at how you try and manage a government department, every time a new cycle comes through, you're trying to negotiate and juggle budgeting, right? How do you make long-term commitments when the budgeting cycle goes up and down like a yo-yo with the political cycles? Is there a way of solving for that? Because I know previous projects have been really hampered by that lack of budgeting capability.

2. 1:05:58

   How do you preserve the budget over the next five years to get the base built? And can we help you increase it? Yeah. Can we donate? You know, it's an interesting thing. I mean, people have talked about when I came in that, you know, the continuity between administrations and the availability in the budget cycle is what forced us into certain situations like creating programs that are too big to fail.

3. 1:06:23

   But in my opinion, they become too costly to succeed. Like, you know, NASA gets $25 billion a year, right? Like, it's a lot of money. Like, when people start saying, we don't have enough money to do the job, it's like, really? I mean, I know some of the most, you know, extraordinary companies in the world were founded for far less, and have built some pretty impressive capabilities. If that's not the right number, you know, what is?

4. 1:06:46

   What I think is important is preserving flexibility between administrations. So, you talk about phase one of the moon base. If I had come out and said, all right, here's the vision. It's going to be glass, and it's going to have this amazing closed-loop ecosystem in it and a Ferris wheel, and we're going to have big crop farms on the surface. And it's only going to cost $100 billion, but we'll be able to pay it off as a service to these three companies over time.

5. 1:07:09

   It's going to get canceled. It's going to be under assault constantly. But what did we do with phase one? We said, look, we're going to do low-cost landers every month, and we're going to start learning. And now, if a new administration comes in and says, you know what, once a month, it's too much, we can dial it back to eight, and we still feel like... Like, we can get where we want to go. That's fine.

6. 1:07:33

   Or you have somebody, you know, very forwardly, we're going to go 15. We want to pick up the pace in this. Great. That is much better. Same with our nuclear program going from SR-1 to SR-2. You know, we're not jumping right to Battlestar Galactica here. We want to start with the Nautilus. And maybe we'll do a nuclear mission to, I don't know, Enceladus or Uranus. That's another good one. any of the outer solar system missions would be nice, and start testing out high-temperature materials and better power conversion. A lot better than saying, we're going to just build the Battlestar Galactica or something, and then that gets canceled.

7. 1:08:10

   This is just smart capital allocation, guys, is really what it is. It's focus. $25 billion is a lot of money every year. A lot of money. The entire Manhattan Project, over four years, adjusted for inflation was $33 billion. We can do a lot every year with a reload of $25 billion, and just focus it on the needle-moving objectives and design the programs, the architecture in such a way, not too big to fail, that keeps on the chopping block. Do it in a logical, evolutionary way to get to where you want to go. Alex, over to you about life in the universe of science.